Stragbasher Moves On
Created | Updated May 30, 2002
The conclusion of Stragbasher's adventures thus far
Well, here I am at home in Haikou. Been here long enough to start making sense of it all now, and have to admit to being more than a little surprised. I think I mentioned that my preconceptions of China focused around hordes of people in identical 'Chairman Mao' suits, riding identical bicycles across drab urban landscapes.
Think again! Dodging the streams of traffic the other day I was almost mowed down by a new model Mercedes and not a small one either. Palm trees and flowers lining wide boulevards, coloured banners strung across the streets advertising CDMA - the latest mobile phone technology - and the roar of traffic almost drowned out by the ringing in people's pockets. Twenty-storey office blocks, some of 'em glass fronted. Shops sell almost everything you can imagine, and a lot of things you'd rather not:
- Ducks, turned inside out (thankfully dead)
- Slinky little black dresses (none of which fit me)
- Crystal glasses (imported from France)
- Live chickens (still the right way out)
- New Nissan minivans (replete with balloons)
- Big bags of monosodium glutamate (yummy!)
- All kinds of electrical and electronic goods (with one of three different types of plug)
- Oreo biscuits (but no Jaffa Cakes or HobNobs yet)
- Fresh fruit and veg by the bucket load (a lot of it unidentifiable)
- Red bean flavoured ice cream (put that in the 'rather not' category)
Everything, in fact, except salt. And onions. Onions I can live without, there being plenty of leeks, spring onions etc. I found a bread shop selling passable croissants, even, but no salt anywhere. It doesn't help that I never seem to have my dictionary with me when I'm shopping, but surely salt should be on display somewhere? Not so, and yesterday I had to resort to stealing the salt pot from an expensive western-style restaurant that we've christened Denny's. (After the US chain it so closely resembles.)
Denny's is in the International Commerce Centre, where our school has a branch office, and (apart from the restaurant) it's pretty bloody posh. We get delivered from home in the company minivan, which is a bit battered but it's chauffeur-driven none the less, and I can't think of a better way to start the day than to stroll up the red carpet and have two uniformed flunkies open the doors for you. (In truth, the day starts as we leave home when the uniformed guard salutes.) Then it's a short trip across the marble to the express elevator, and up to our tenth floor office, where we sit around and do nothing for a few hours until they decide it's safe to let us go home again.
Actually it turns out that the school have been trying to let us find our feet and get comfortable before throwing us in front of students. But they didn't bother to tell us that in the first place, so I've been getting extremely frustrated at the apparent lack of activity. And no teaching equals no pay for all of last week. Things came to a head yesterday when, my confidence bolstered by the theft of a salt-cellar, I raised a small ruckus and won. So now I'm gainfully employed, and have been appeased by an apologetic phone call from the powers that be.
Ooops, one small correction needed. I was thrown in front of a class, very briefly, on the very first day at school. I showed up for my orientation, only to find that the school was 'disoriented' (Can you do that to Chinese people?) by the arrival of several million primary-age kids all wanting to study English at weekends. It happened to be the first day of term and the local TV station was on hand to record the chaos. I suppose it was inevitable that someone would say 'So let's film your foreign experts in action, then,', but it came as a shock to me. Before I knew what was happening I found myself in a classroom full of elevenses, without any of the usual luxuries such as a lesson plan - or even an idea of what level the kids were at.
I think I acquitted myself fairly well, and it's apparently due to my body language. This came up during a meeting this morning, while we were playing 'Judy says.' Judy is the boss, and doesn't seem to be super organised. For instance she came to the wrong hotel to collect us the day we arrived. Many of her pronouncements start with 'Judy this,' or 'Judy that.' e.g. 'Judy likes your body language, very funny!'
I've been teaching her some better English, such as 'Where is my couch?' (another story), and took this opportunity to improve her grasp of colloquial English. My body language, I explained, is due to my being in touch with my inner Elvis.
Blank looks, then the impossible:
'What is Elvis?'
I'm flabbergasted. There are people in the world, maybe billions of people, who have never heard of Elvis. I didn't know how to even start explaining the concept, although I did get up and give them a little demo. It seemed to go down well, so now I'm on an evangelical mission. I intend to turn my entire class into Elvis impersonators, and block the entrance to the school with pink Cadillac’s.
Assuming that I ever get to teach a class, of course. As of yesterday I was scheduled to teach six evening classes - less than half of what I'm contracted for. There is another raft of classes starting next week that I'll also be up for, but in the meantime there has been a change of plan already. Eighteen hours after giving me my schedule half of my classes have been cancelled. This will probably really annoy the guy from the Bank that I was talking to about sending money internationally a few days ago - he's booked onto the course and was delighted to meet his teacher. Oh well.
Still, if the plan survives the next few days, the bonus is that all the teachers will be shipped off for a day in the country some time this week. We're going to visit a rural school that wouldn't ordinarily be able to have luxuries like English practise with real native-speakers. But anything could happen before then.
Tonight, instead of teaching as anticipated, we're going to meet with one hundred (fifty each) hopefuls from a local company that can only afford to send one person on an advanced English course. Each one gets five minutes to make his/her case to the evaluator - moi! Judy says I get the girls and Amanda gets the boys!!
(Just before this was announced I attended the opening ceremony for some of the beginner’s classes. Of the twenty-odd students in the room only one was male. And they expect me to work under conditions like this! They obviously don't know about my inner Elvis.)
I'm not even supposed to start work yet because the school haven't sorted out work visas etc - but they have registered my presence with the police. All the paperwork went in a week ago, and came back this morning because my 'country of residence' (NZ) is different from my nationality as given on my passport. Apparently they have to verify that the passport is real and expect it to be issued by the country in which you live, or vice versa.
I can see me having some fun with this one. I pointed out that my passport was issued in Germany, and tonight I'll take them my old 'anmeldung' - police registration - from Berlin showing that I am definitely legally resident there. Plus I've got US documentation confirming my residence in California. I think that to be on the safe side I'll also contact the British consul tho'. You never know!
They might also be able to help me with another little problem I have. I rely on the BBC online for my news and current affairs, but the Chinese have blocked access to such 'subversive' sites. (CNN too) I guess it's their country and they can do what the like, but what's really pathetic is that I can get the BBC world service on my cable TV. For some reason the world service consists mostly of adverts for programs they showed yesterday, and for their incidental music (which you can buy on CD) so I really miss being able to read the news myself. Amazingly I can get the Guardian newspaper tho'.
Getting onto the internet itself was surprisingly easy - the phone number, username, and password are all the same, 163. You just plug into any phone line and away you go, unless your phone has been wired in by the guy who did mine. Once we had the place to ourselves I had to redo all the phone cabling, then go out and buy all sorts of electrical gubbings just to plug in the appliances. There are three different types of wall socket in China, and ours don't match the ones on the computers, iron etc. It took a day or so of cursing and screwing around, but everything works now.
The only other domestic chore was to buy bedding, something I hadn't thought through when I left mine in NZ. Most shops in China seem to contain more people whose job is helping you find what you want; than they do things you want. And none of them speak English. So we find ourselves in a bed shop, in the middle of a huge crowd of yellow-jacketed store assistants, trying desperately to explain the concept of 'bed sheet'.
What with the variety of sizes, fitted vs non-fitted, pillow slips, something to go on top etc. it took three exhausting hours to do a job that I could probably done in half an hour if I'd been left on my own to rummage around the shelves. On my own I might have found something that I liked as well, but that's by the by. We got there in the end, dripping with sweat but very proud.
So all we now need to perfect our domestic bliss is the return of our couch. On the day we arrived we were taken into this surprisingly spacious apartment (2 bed, 2 bath, office etc) with magnificent, super-comfortable, lounge furniture. One chair (more a small couch) was a bit wobbly though, so 'Judy says must replace,' and gets straight on the phone. An hour after she leaves us the bell goes and the service dude is there to solve all our problems.
First he takes the chair away. Then he comes back with a nasty, uncomfortable, replacement in black fake-leather. Oh well, we still have one chair and a couch that we like. Then he takes the couch away, replacing it with the big brother of the disgusting item he had already brought in. Then he takes away the last good chair, but he doesn't replace it with anything!
So now we have a couch and one chair, neither of which we like. Why he didn't just take away the one damaged chair, leaving us a couch and one chair that we do like, is beyond me. Judy says it's too much trouble to deal with now, but if this is the worst problem in my life then my life is pretty good really.
I still greet her with 'Where is my couch?' tho'.
Maybe it's in a taxi on the way here? I spent half an hour trying to give directions to a taxi driver the other day, going at 25kmh the whole way. As I have a laminated card with my address on it, and the city is no bigger than Wellington, it shouldn't be too hard to find a high-profile property development on a major road. When we eventually got home she didn't have change either, but as neither of us spoke the other's language there didn't seem much point in arguing. Come to think of it, Wellington isn't much different. The taxi drivers there don't know their way around, understand the money, or speak the local lingo either.
Well, that's all from me for the moment.
