Friday, June 28, 2002

 
August is going to be great. I'm going to sleep and read and teach english and explore the city teach myself how to read all of the food vocab so i can finally order at restaurants. I can't wait for August. I'm going to relax. I haven't had a rest since spring break. I went straight from finals to Beijing with only a week to deal with the transition, and it's just been nonstop. August is going to be great.
posted by sarah 12:32 AM

Thursday, June 27, 2002

 
Tomorrow we move in with our host families. Tomorrow I also have to open a bank account and send a package. I'm afraid of tomorrow.
posted by sarah 3:05 AM

Tuesday, June 25, 2002

 
[Online Friend]: so what sort of stuff you doing over there?
Aranyamei [Me]: being chinese, writing chinese, buying chinese, eating chinese, thinking chinese, and teaching english.
posted by sarah 9:56 PM

 
Wow, it's been a big day. Let me tell you about the two highlights. First off, I went to a small primary school with an american friend i've met here. He's been teaching english in small shifts at this school for a semester, and is now going back to America, so he asked me to replace him. The school is a kindergarten, and consists of about 3 attached rooms in the middle of an apartment complex. The teachers there were really nice and the kids were adorable! All about 4 or 5 years old I think. We stayed for about half an hour and taught them family words--mother, father, sister, brother, grandmother, grandfather, me. Mostly just focused on mother and father, though, and taught it through having them draw their families.

Afterwards, the teachers took us to a brand new school they just opened, that looks like a McDonalds/Chuck E. Cheese Playland. Apparently it's a new kind of school, aimed at 4-6 year olds, where the parents come with their children and they "teach their parents how to teach their children". It's a once a week class, and then the facilities are open for playing the rest of the days. And they want to start a once-a-week English class, and they want me to be the teacher. So apparently now I'm teaching an English class this Sunday, to which parents will bring their kids to "try out the school" and see how it goes--sort of a lot of pressure for someone who's never taught english to little chinese kids before. Basically, though, i think their expecting some kind of game and some small amount of basic vocabulary. These kids know no english at all.

So all in all, it's going to be an hour a week at this new school, and two half-hour shifts a week at the first school, all at 100 kuai an hour, which is about $12. Two hours a week isn't much, but I can totally live cheaply off of 200 kuai a week, and i'll find more work tutoring once i'm back here for august. I'm really excited about this job--and a little overwhelmed by what feels like a lot of responsibility.

The other incredible part of today was dinner. We had seen a sign on campus for a place called "Luigi's Pizza" and thought we'd give it a shot. Someone said it was in the middle of nowhere, someone said it was in a quarry, and the sign had a very vague map to try to get us there. We ended up on a very poor, broken down street leading to a dead end. Unsure of where we were going, we asked some people on the street if their was an italian restaurant on it, and they all laughed at us and said no way. we asked like 5 different people. finally, though, we ignored them and kept walking. the pavement ended and we were walking on trash-covered dirt and rock, past broken down shacks, around walls of trash, and finally ended up at "Luigi's".

It was a small brick structure with a brick woodstove, and tables and comfy chairs outside. Set back from the trash, it had this amazing view of the quarry and the city, with a cliff above it. We were of course the only people there. They just opened last Friday. It was run by two Chinese guys, and there was a five-year-old white kid running around speaking chinese. We never really got a straight story on the deal with these guys--somehow we understood that an Italian guy taught these guys how to cook, and the kid was the owner's friends... we couldn't establish if he was German, Moroccan, Danish, Russian, Italian, or Swiss--somehow all of those nationalities came up. But we ordered about 6 pizzas and 2 lasagnas and it was INCREDIBLE!!!! It tasted so good. Seriously, we have not had good italian food since we've come here, let alone good cheese. This was just the absolute coolest place I've ever been too.

Picture seven Americans and their Chinese friend, sitting at a table at the edge of the quarry on a beautiful night, at an Italian restaurant in China, being served the best Hawaiian pizza ever by two Chinese guys who specialize in Italian food, all splitting a bottle of Great Wall red wine, and talking to a multi-ethnic white kid who's speaking fluent chinese.
posted by sarah 8:16 AM

Monday, June 24, 2002

 
i bought a handbag. a fake suede, fake leather, way stylish handbag with buckles on the straps. cause all the girls have handbags. then i bought a dkny wallet to go in it. i never would have done this in america. no sir. never.
posted by sarah 8:33 PM

Sunday, June 23, 2002

 
on shopping...

I'm not a small girl. Chinese girls are small girls. In America I'm a Large. In China I'm an XL-XXXL. I don't have a problem with this, except that I can't buy clothes. I have no problem wearing men's clothing, but here it seems like shopping in the men's section is a social taboo. I have found a solution, though--oh yes. You know how all of your clothing tags say "Made In China" on them? Well, there is a plaza of stores in Qingdao that sells only the export clothes. They're all American and European sizes, designer brands, and dirt cheap. I've bought a Liz Clairborn skirt and a pair of Dickies cargo pants thus far. And even though I'm paying a fraction of what I'd pay in America, they're still making more profit than they would through the export deal.

Groceries have been fun. I have a thing for trying the canned and bottled juices. The coconut juice and the thick strawberry-juice-with-seeds-floating-in-it were both good really yummy, but the peanut-cocoa-milk-tea-with-chunks, the aloe vera juice, the thick-rice-juice-with-rice-floating-in-it, and the fruit-flavored-milk-drink were god-awful. regular milk comes in bags and funny-looking containers and isn't really real (although the chinese thinks it's great), cheese doesn't exist, and yogurt is best in liquid drinkable form. All the bread tastes vaguely sweet and comes in weirdly-designed buns and loaves--sliced bread is less common and comes in small packages. Sandwiches just haven't caught on here. In fact, eating anything with your hands is barbaric, except whole fruits. We went out to an american pizza restaurant and were expected to eat it with a knife and fork.
posted by sarah 10:33 PM

 
a note on dinner tonight: we went to an expensive buffet and the Grand Regency Hotel, which is totally set up for westerners. it was amazing. we had real orange juice and real grapefruit juice and cheeeeeeeese! and we even got to scoop real ice cream at the end and eat french pastries! my tummy is happy and all nice and american-feeling tonight.
posted by sarah 7:32 AM

 
alright, i just got back from confucious's hometown. it was neat. we saw the temple, his family's home, and his family's cemetary (one of the oldest cemetaries in the world).

the coolest part, though, was walking around last night in search of something to do. we walked out in the misty rain towards a street with bright lights. it turned out that it had big street-light-setups that looked like fireworks. all the way down the street there were these big spiny lightposts that flashed lights around in exciting patterns. i don't really know how to explain it beyond that, except that it looked like fireworks. and we walked over a bridge that had colored lights all along it that changed colors in pretty patterns. we screamed "we're in disney world!!" and started skipping around with wizard-of-oz-meets-the-monkees-style group skipping. the street was blocked off because there was some big chinese pop concert going on in the castle-style theatre, so we walked around, and listened to it, and skipped some more in the warm rain.

our ultimate search was for a club--at least something that had beer and perhaps music. the place looked pretty dry of night life, though. we sniffed around for awhile on this psychadelic street and finally found a hole-in-the-wall karaoke bar. the only people in it was the bartender, his buddy, and a 6-year-old girl. we ordered a round and listened to the bartender sing some chinese karaoke. then we explored the book and found it had a surprising selection of english songs. after ciprian sang "honky tonk woman," i belted out alanis's "ironic". annie sang "don't worry be happy" mighty finely, and sean blew us all away with a wonderful rendition of the spice girls' "wannabe". actually, we sang a total of 12 or so songs and ended with a group version of "ice ice baby".

it was awesome. we owned that bar that night... and the bartender was so appreciative, too. he kept giving us good cigarettes and free bottles of beer to keep us there longer. we think it might be the most business he's had in a long time. and then dancing back, a little drunk, the lights were off but the rain was still warm, and we were still skipping. cause china's fun, man. china's fun.
posted by sarah 7:23 AM

Friday, June 21, 2002

 
oh man, i just wrote a long post about grocery shopping and the experience of buying pants. and then i accidently hit a button and it all went away. i hate keyboards. anyway, i'm not retyping it because it's midnight, and i'm leaving at 7 in the morning for a weekend trip to confucious's hometown, and all of my clothes are still in the washer, and i think i need to go address this matter. because i'm going to wear the same smelly red shirt all weekend if i can't come up with a solution.

living off of three days worth of clothes really sucks. i'm going to start buying more stuff.
posted by sarah 8:56 AM

Thursday, June 20, 2002

 
so there's this professional nigerian soccer player hanging out in qingdao for a month and our group has adopted him as our friend, and we take him out almost every night. last night we went out to dinner with a bunch of teachers as a party to welcome chen laoshi (my tutor) back to china and got really really drunk. this whole empty-your-glass toast system is pretty harsh. well anyway, by the end we were singing to each other and getting into karaoke, and the nigerian guy kept bursting out with different love songs and putting his arm around me. then at the very end, he turned to me and started throwing "i love you" lines at me. "i've loved you from the first moment i laid eyes on you. what's you're name? sarah? sarah, this isn't just the alcohol, this is real. i love you. i love you." and i just started cracking up and calling him drunk and laughing in his face. and then i grabbed my friend ciprean and he got me out of there and held me up as i stumbled back to the dorm.

posted by sarah 10:14 PM

Wednesday, June 19, 2002

 
This just in: my snail-mail address.
Sarah Dopp
International Program
Qingdao University
308 Ningxia Rd.
Qingdao, Shandong Province 266071
P.R China

keep in mind that i won't be here for most of july (roughly the 6th through the 25th). apparently things do get here when the address is written in english, so don't worry too much about that.
posted by sarah 11:44 PM

 
Hi, here goes an experiment. It's goals: to simultaneously satisfy my need for web creativity and keep a log of what's going on in my world--which is probably a childhood dig in the sand away from your world. Send all feedback for said experiment to sadopp@hotmail.com. And have a nice day. Wherever you are.
posted by sarah 11:16 PM