Things I Miss the Most

It’s been a hard week for ol’ Gypsy Feet. I’ve had a lot of those “2 months down, 8 more to go…” moments. I think part of the reason is because the cold I couldn’t seem to shake became worse and I was stuck in my room having a pitty party for myself and wanting to be home with my mom. I’ve been low on energy and enthusiasm, and that mixed with a classroom full of 50 screaming 6 year olds….you get the picture. But I’m stickin in there and hoping the best is yet to come. One of the times I was moping around I started making a mental list of all the things I miss the most from home. Oddly enough, it actually made me feel more blessed than depressed. Being here and without so many of the little comforts of home has made me appreciate them so much more! Anyways, here’s the list I came up with. I also made a list of things I like about China, because I thought it was a good little reminder for me when I’m feeling down. Oh and I have to mention that these are all the “things” I miss the most, not people. Obviously I miss my family, my boyfriend, and my friends more than anything!

Things I miss the most:
• A dryer
• Mexican food
• My car
• Morning radio shows
• Yoga classes at Lifetime Fitness
• Seeing houses
• Blue skies
• Church
• Real coffee
• A soft bed
• Baked goods
• Good wine
• Public restrooms with TP and soap

Things I like about China
• Public transportation
• Cheap massages
• Food/street snacks
• My work schedule
• Adorable Chinese kids
• Learning Chinese
• Traveling/Planning vacations
• Tea
• Meeting and defeating new challenges
• Market shopping
• Learning something new everyday
• Learning how to teach

As many of you know, this is not my first time living abroad. I was an exchange student in the Philippines my junior year of high school. That experience definitely gave leeway to this one, and helped prepare me for this A LOT. I sort of knew what to expect as far as some of the challenges I’d face when I came here because of that year. However, this experience is different than that one in a lot of ways. For one, I’m quite a bit older, more independent and more confident in myself. When I was in the Philippines, I would try so hard to fit in and be as “Filipino” as I could. And I was constantly disappointing myself because I could never BE Filipino, I’m American. But here, I understand that a lot better. I know that I look different, act different, and speak different than the Chinese do. And as much as I do want to learn their culture and their ways, I know that I am different and I’m not trying as hard to fit in. Another thing that’s different about this experience is that I’m not as engulfed in the culture as I was in the Philippines. In the Philippines I was living with a family, going to school, and surrounded constantly with the culture. Here, I’m a bit sheltered from it. I live and spend most of my time with foreign teachers. We sort of create our own little “home” culture within China. And as natural as this is, I am hoping to find new ways of experiencing Chinese culture and making Chinese friends. But I think the biggest reason that this year is different than my year in the Philippines is that I left my heart back in the U.S. this time. My boyfriend, Zach, is finishing up film school this year and was amazing enough to encourage me to follow my dream and do this. It hasn’t been easy in the least bit being away from him…in fact it’s been harder than I ever expected. I miss like crazy, and its tough having to experience all these new things alone when I want to share them with him so badly. Love is powerful and I think I’m just coming to realize that. But we are making it work and I just feel so blessed to have him...even an ocean away! I also miss my good friends from California terribly! I am lucky enough to have 3 of them working/studying in China this year, and we will all be meeting up in Hong Kong for Christmas. I feel like I’ll never have as close of friends as I did the last 4 years at Biola, and it’s hard to transition from that environment to this one. But again, I’m doing my best to make it work!

All the Tea in China

I’ve already gotten a few colds since I’ve been here, which isn’t surprising seeing the environment. My apartment is old, and because of the humidity everything molds. My room isn’t as bad as some of the others, but it’s still not helping my health. Also the pollution is bound to take a toll on anyone. I told one of my co-teachers about being sick, and she brought me to the pharmacy to get some Chinese tea. It was really cool going with her because she was able to tell me what each type of tea (all loose tea) was for and which ones I should get. I got a chrysanthemum flower tea, one that looks like a red seed and is good for your immune system, another one that looks like small pieces of straw and is good for your throat, and some dried lemon slices. And I swear it really did help my throat and my cold instantly! Most people drink the loose tea just in a normal mug, and somehow manage to strain it through their teeth. But I was getting so annoyed by pieces going into my mouth that I went out and bought a really cool glass mug with a strainer a the top. It also has a lid so I can bring it around with me just like the Chinese do!

I’ve picked up a couple of extra teaching jobs on the side to fill my time and make some extra cash. I find it so ironic that this summer in the states it was an absolute nightmare just trying to find a temp job even with a bachelors degree, and here I am literally being offered teachings jobs left and right just for being an English speaker. I’ve found that its easy to get a little greedy here, because we (foreigners) are such a rare commodity and we know that people are willing to pay just about anything to hire us. I took a job 1 day a week (40 mins of teaching a day) at a kindergarten, and it makes me almost $100 extra a month! I teach the youngest kindergarteners, and they are…get this…2 and 3 years old! The first day I walked in I couldn’t believe it, they were babies staring up at me and I was supposed to teach them how to speak English. They can barely speak Chinese! But boy are they adorable! The classes are 20 minutes each, and they can sit still for about 5 of those. They sort of just look up at me blankly and mimic the sounds I’m making. But sure enough, they are learning and remembering the words I’m teaching them! The learning center they go to is very nice and they each have their own crib or race-car bed that they take naps in, with a made that changes the sheets, etc. I enjoy the class a lot because its small, less than 10 kids, as opposed to my usual classes of 45 or more. I have another private job in the lurks for a friend of a friend’s child and her friends children, all around 3 as well. They start ‘em early here!


I began Chinese lessons last week. The Wuhan government is offering them free to foreign teachers for the first time this year. Score! They’re held at a learning center, and our teacher is really good. The first 2 classes we spent the time just practicing making sounds used in Mandarin words. It was actually really helpful and makes it easier to know how to pronounce a word I see written in pinyin (Chinese spelled out in letters instead of characters). The frustrating thing, though, is that no matter how efficient I become in spoken Mandarin, I’ll still never be able to read a menu, a sign, or anything else written in characters. But I just have to take it one step at a time, and it’s my goal to be able to learn as much spoken Mandarin as possible in the next 8 ½ months!

Fun Fact: Not only are most children in China only children, but only grandchildren as well, on BOTH sides! This was my co-teachers explanation of why my 1st graders get a little rambunctious in class...and who can blame them :)

Beijing

I just returned from a week trip to Beijing. We had a holiday break because it was the People’s Republic of China’s 60^th anniversary. I went with 7 other foreign teachers. All in all it was a great trip! Beijing is a beautiful city and a breath of fresh western air from Wuhan. Here’s my trip day by day:

Train Ride:

Pip (one of the other girls) and I went a day before everyone else because our schedules permitted it. We left at 3pm on Wednesday afternoon and took an overnight train to Beijing। The train had somehow mysteriously sold out before tickets even went on sale, so we were only able to buy standing tickets. When we got on the train, we headed strait for the dining car so we could sit down. After about 2 hours of sitting and not ordering any food, they tried kicking us out, but we played the confused foreigner card and it bought us some time. Then one of the staff who happened to speak English came up and asked to see our tickets. He asked us if we wanted to buy a bed, which we immediately agreed to. It didn’t cost us any extra money than it would have originally, and we slept like babies the rest of the way knowing that we could have very well been sitting for 17 hours on the cold hard floor.

Day 1:

Pip and I arrived in Beijing on Thursday morning, and went to our hostel. It was the day of the official anniversary, so we were hoping to drop our stuff off and head strait downtown to see the big parade. We found out when we got there, though, that people weren’t actually allowed to watch the parade, unless you were an invited dignitary or member of the government. They had blocked off most of downtown too. Since our hostel was right downtown, they had e-mailed us a few days before saying they had to move our reservation to a sister hostel more on the outskirts of town for the first night. So we had to watch the parade “for the people” on a TV, since no “people” were allowed to watch. It was still pretty amazing though! Pip and I spent the rest of the day exploring Beijing. I instantly fell in love with the blue skies, clean air and cleanliness of the city (very different from Wuhan)! I found it odd that the sky was so blue, because I had heard that Beijing is actually quite polluted. But then I found out that they had sent rockets up into the sky with dry ice a few days before the anniversary celebration, which made it rain and then cleared up the air for a week. And sure enough, a week later it was grey again!

Waiving the Chinese flag!

Day 2:

We moved from our first hostel to our second hostel, as the downtown area had opened up. Our second hostel was great! Right downtown Beijing, just a walk to Tiananmen Square, great rooms, staff, restaurant full of western food options! I found out how fun hostel stays really are. You meet young travelers from all over the world! We met a girl from Wisconsin, boys from Texas and England, and a girl from Denmark who had the most insane stories from her travels all over the world! She was currently at the beginning of a 4 month trip through SE Asia and S America! After we checked in, we went to Behai Park. It’s a park with a temple, a big lake and paddle boats that you can rent. We then went out for Peaking duck which is a Beijing specialty। I liked the duck alright, but don’t think I prefer it over other dishes.

Behai Park

Day 3:

The Great Wall day! We arranged a tour with our hostel to hike 12 kilometers of the Great Wall. We were driven 3 hours out of the city to the Jinshanling part, and then hiked to Simatai. I chose this one because it’s the oldest part of the wall you can see, and I wanted a challenging hike in a non-touristy area. And boy did I get it! There were some parts that were so steep and uneven I didn’t think I could make it. An unfortunate part of the hike was that there were still crowds. Not a lot, but enough to have a hard time getting pictures without people in them. But there was one point about the middle of our hike when we had broken away from the crowd, and there was a cool breeze and I just though “wow, this is amazing!” I loved it. I felt like I was a part of ancient history being on the wall. By the end of the hike, I was exhausted!

Day 4:

I took a solo day to go see the Olympic stadium. It felt good to cut away from the group for a day, and show myself that I could do it on my own. The Beijing subway made getting around amazingly easy! I loved the Olympic Stadium. I’ve probably never seen so many Chinese people in one place before in my life, but it was still great. I think I was more of a novelty as a white person in Beijing than I am in Wuhan. Everywhere we went we had people coming up to us wanting their picture with us. There were a few time I was admiring a cute baby, and the next thing I knew the baby was in my arms and parents and grandparents were snapping pictures left and right. After the Olympic stadium I went to a temple. It wasn’t really anything special, but not crowded which was nice.

Olympic Stadium

Day 5:

We went to a Tibetan Buddhist temple called the Llama Temple. It was beautiful and so colorful! Visiting temples in China is sort of like visiting Cathedrals in Europe, they’re amazing but sort of all blur together after a while. This one was great though because we got to see the monks walking around, and there was a 3 story tall Buddha! Most evenings we spent back at our hostel restaurant/bar. It had so many western food options I felt like I was in heaven! Real coffee, eggs and hash browns, pizza, sandwiches! I had been having such strong food cravings back in Wuhan that they were keeping me up at night sometimes! Most of the group went back to Wuhan the night of day 5, but Allison and I stayed for a couple extra days. We went out to night snacks that night at this famous night market just down the street form our hostel. Normally in Wuhan, night snacks (street food) are dirt cheap, but here it was obviously very touristy and much more expensive. It was still really delicious though, and I tried little octopus on a stick! We also went and walked around Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, which was beautiful at night.

Llama Temple

Day 6:

Allison and I meant to wake up early to try and beat the crowds at the Forbidden City, but the week of sightseeing had caught up with us and we slept through our alarm. We decided to go to the Summer PalaceSummer Palace is a lake with beautiful bridges and few buildings. It was a 60^th birthday present from one of the late emperors to his mother, and a definite status symbol to say the least. It is a nice place to go if you want a romantic, long walk around a lake, but not a good place to go at the end of a long week. It took us 3 hours to just walk halfway around the lake (the bridges cut it in half, thank goodness!) and we didn’t opt to pay to be able to get into the main building, what I believe is the “palace”. It wasn’t the highlight of my trip, but what I did enjoy about being there was imagining living there in the ancient time and just how beautiful and spectacular it must have been. instead, in hopes of the crowds not being as bad. But we were wrong. There were people EVERYWHERE and a million snack shops and souvenir stores. The

The Summer Palace

Day 7:

Once again, we slept through our alarm. But this time we really didn’t care, because we were exhausted. Neither of us really cared much to see the Forbidden City, the last sight on our agenda, but we knew we “should” so we did. We both ended up really liking it! The Forbidden City is so huge that the crowds really didn’t seem that bad. It’s just a huge, walled in city that the Emperor used to live and rule from. It’s just incredible how big it was for one person! And there were a lot of little museums showcasing Chinese art and calligraphy that I enjoyed a lot. After the Forbidden City, we rushed over to a famous shopping market to shop before we had to catch our train. It was incredible! I was in heaven. 5 floors

of clothes, shoes, bags, jewelry, anything you could possibly want at dirt cheap prices! I only had a little bit I could spend, so I haggled like crazy. This one lady screamed at me “nooo” when I told her the price I wanted to pay for a sweatshirt. I started to walk away and she grabbed my arm and pulled me back. I went up a bit higher, and she screamed again, so once again I walked away and she pulled me back again. This went on for a while, until she finally agreed bitterly. I loved it, it was so fun! Then we caught our train and slept soundly the whole way back to Wuhan.

Tianamen Square

Little Tidbits about Wuhan

Very little English is spoken in Wuhan. And from what I’ve heard, it’s like that most every where else in China as well. Every once in a while I’ll run upon a shopkeeper or a salesman who know some very basic English, but it’s pretty rare. My co-teachers speak English pretty well, but you can tell it’s a struggle for them. The best English I’ve heard since I’ve been here is actually from some of my 4^th graders. I have a few that absolutely blow me away with how easily they speak and understand it, and others that can barely say hello.

For those of you that are wondering, I do feel very safe here. The area I live in is a nice gated community, and school is gated within that as well. The salespeople and taxi drivers have all be surprisingly upstanding. There were so many times when I first got here that they could have easily ripped me off or taken the "long route" but did not. IN fact, the only time that I’ve felt unsafe since I’ve been here is when I’m in a car or crossing the street. The driving is INSANE and I fear for my life and the lives of everyone else on the road. One thing that did surprise me when I got here was the fact that the one child policy is still very much in effect. Families that fall under the policies stipulations but have more than one child are fined heavily. Sometimes wealthy couples will just pay the fine to the government prior to having a second child. However, they’ve recently lightened up on it, and now if you’re a Chinese minority or if you and your husband and your parents are all only children, then you can have two children.

Most things here are much cheaper than in the states. Groceries, transportation, and eating out are all much cheaper. But things like electronics, clothes and imported items are about the same if not more expensive.

Fun fact: I’m leaving for Beijing today for the holiday break. It’s China’s 60^th anniversary, and the trains were absolutely sold out. The only thing I could purchase was a "standing ticket" (aka sit on the ground if there’s room)….the train ride is 15 hours….wish me luck!