Shanghaied

Today, I got back to Wuhan from my trip to Shanghai.  My colleague Nicholas and I blitzed the city in 2 days, 3 nights.  Places we went to include:

• Jin'an Temple
• The French Concession
• People's Square
•  Nanjing East Road
• The Bund
• Pudong and the Oriental Pearl Tower
• Old Town

That was just day one...for Nick.  After getting back to the hotel, I went to see my friend Stephanie and her friends in a posh area near her hostel.

The next day, Nicholas and I went to:

• The Jade Buddha Temple 
• Propaganda Poster Museum (one of my highlights of China so far)
• The 2010 Shanghai World Expo

The Expo itself was epic. More on that later.
Right now, I'm procrastinating.  I should sleep.  Tomorrow, I leave Wuhan for Wudang Shan.

Parungao Tongzhi (Comrade Parungao) on Shanghai's Huangpu River, World Expo 2010

Hankou and the Guiyuan Temple (of HELL!)

Wuhan is really, really big.  It is 3 cities merged into one.  Yesterday, I went to Hankou - the main "city" in Wuhan.  I went to a Buddhist temple, the old colonial district, and a street that is just called "Pedestrian Street."  Lo and behold, it was a street for pedestrians.

The Buddhist temple was really neat.  It was called the Guiyuan Temple.  There were hundreds of statues depicting various deities and Buddhas (people who have reached enlightenment).  After the initial "wow" of seeing so many statues, I realized that this place was actually really small. It only took us an hour to see everything.

            

My favorite part was a room filled with lacquered carvings depicting Hell.  People were being tortured by little demons.  Every single carving was filled with blood, guts, and gore.  One showed a naked women hanging  upside-down being sawed in half vertically (my colleagues figured that was the punishment for promiscuous sin).  Another carving depicted people being disemboweled, quartered, and thrown into a grinder (not sure what those people did to deserve that...maybe gluttony or greed?).  Or my favorite: little demons throwing people onto spikes and impaling them through the face.  Fun.

Sadly, I wasn't allowed pictures, and my school's teacher-librarian got in trouble by taking a few.

There were also a few stray cats at the temple, which one of my colleagues took as pets.  I wouldn't touch them...might have fleas and such.  I'll wait until she cleans them up and trains them a bit.

                  

After the temple, my comrades and I went to walk along the Yangzi River and through the old colonial district.  It was 36 Celsius outside.  It was madness.  We walked to the pedestrian-only street, which was past the colonial structures which were built after the First Sino-Japanese War.  Ended up having lunch at a restaurant serving a mish mash of cuisines: pizza, curry, seafood hotpots...I got a mushroom and chicken curry on rice.  It was a bit salty.  

We went shopping shortly after lunch.  The rest of the day was pretty unremarkable except for the fact that the cashier at a bakery we went to totally screwed my friend Em out of 30 yuan.  My buddy Nicholas paid for it to quicken our visit time.

 

White people shi hen hao!

One thing I'll probably never understand about Chinese is their infatuation with white people and white skin.  I remember my first visit here was with a lot of white girls from Delta.  Every Chinese guy I saw was looking at them wide-eyed!

On Saturday, some of the staff went to Mo Mountain near East Lake.  I think every white person in our group was asked by a Chinese person to be in a picture.  Below you see my buddy Dave getting "celeb status" treatment by 2 Chinese youth. They took photos of him as if he were a zoo animal. It was like reverse Orientalism. It was kind strange to see.

Some Chinese guys being really friendly to my buddy Dave because he's white.

Well, things white don't really end there.  Today, during my ICT 11/12 class, a girl was presenting her Photoshop project to the class.  She said that Chinese like white skin, so she photoshoped a thin layer of white on a famous Chinese pop singer's face to "beautify" her even more. Now things went from just ridiculous to plain f--king weird.

But then I remembered good ol' Professor Henry Yu talking about this phenomena in his courses at UBC during my undergrad. It's got to do with modern Chinese ideas of beauty and health.  A really quick internet search shows that there's a fear against getting a tan here in East Asia, especially amongst girls.

But, just as fast, another quick internet search shows that many dermatologists and doctors warn against being scared of tanning and the glorification of attaining pale-white skin.  Hmm...

On another completely separate note, my buddy Mitch had a boy's night.  Poker and beer night to be exact. I lost 100 kwai.

Teacher Day

Yesterday was Teacher's Day at my school.  All the teachers got to stand outside near the flagpole and received roses.  I got two because my buddy Jason didn't want his.

My classes were very respectful.  Even my communications class, which is more or less an inner-city class full of ESL students...but in private school uniform, were very well behaved.  Good on them.

Publish Post

Glitzy Teacher Day Party, on the left.

In the evening, there was a staff party at a new housing development nearby. I swear the housing area was straight out of North America!  And the party was glitzy.  It was like something out of the OC.  It was really, really weird walking in. The houses were blocked from the main road by a run-down, half constructed commercial block, but going through a gate, there was a super-clean housing area (probably for rich people).

Anyways, the party was at the community building.  It had a pool next to a workout area, restaurant, indoor bar and pool.  My buddy Nick and I walked in late, and half our colleagues were tanked already (there were free drinks...with hard bar).  I didn't eat since I thought there was dinner.  There was dinner...if you consider various assortments of white flower pastries dinner.  I decided to clear the scotch bottle of Chivas Regal 18 years, to the chagrin of my colleague Mitch. But there wasn't much. Once I emptied it, the bartender brought out a whole swath of new drinks...

Before my colleagues got their serious drink on, Nick and I decided to leave to get some real food.  We took a bus to a local night market, where we had fried noodles.  The cook was masterful with the wok.  He got the wok to flambe! The noodles were bloody hot! But they were excellent! HAO CHI!!!

Street noodles! Yum!

Xiao Chi

Forgot my camera...again.  Went out with a group of 10 this time.  Took the bus to a big night market.  My buddies Nick, Em, and I went to eat some street meat, while the rest of them went into some restaurant and got special treatment since they're white.

Anyways, "shao chi" (small eats or street snacks) are more or less Chinese tapas.  We chose our raw meat skewers, skewered veggies and skewered mushrooms, and the lady fried them up on a long barbeque line filled with hot coals.  I got chicken feet to the interest (or disgust) of my comrades (wode tongshi).  Fun times, good food, and dirt cheap.

After eating, Em, Nick and I played pool outside in an area with 30 outdoor pool tables.  Surrounded by Chinese university students.  Chinese university-aged men = chain smokers. Happy day.

Craziness has ensued!

First week.  My students have very low English language understanding.  They don't participate or answer questions.  When I check for understanding, I realize they don't understand.  They sometimes do understand, but they cannot express that they understand.  Some won't stop talking in Mandarin.  Others have talked to me in Mandarin straight up, assuming I could understand them. Some students in my English Foundations class are really disruptive.  I have my work cut out for me

All in all, my first week was great.  The first two days were Hell, but yesterday was awesome. I got my grade 10 students using the computers to access the school network.  My grade 11/12's started on Microsoft Word and Excel, and my ESL class have already written something and have all posed questions and formulated answers in speech!

Today, my friends and I went to a mall and a Wal Mart.  We decided to eat at a Pizza Hut.  In any other instance, I would disagree with that choice of restaurant.  But I was really hungry and needed to ask a worker "ce suo zai nali?"

Forgot to take pictures.  The Pizza Hut proved to be an interesting experience.  They had a WAY better and more extensive menu than Pizza Huts back home in Vancity.  We got the Chicago pizza and the beef steak pizza (which didn't taste a thing like a beef pizza back home. Very strange, but it was good!  We also had smoothies.  Mine was a mango smoothie with some sort of really great tasting green fruit on the top. I only had one, but probably should have gotten 3.