Pics (part one): Places

My neighborhood from the outside. A lot of the construction around here was a bit of a rush job, so a lot of residential areas tend to look ugly, block like and monotonous.

My neighborhood from the inside. It's a little dead in the picture, but when the weather's nice it's usually full of people. Note the Pleasant Goats.

There's my school. Sign reads: "Kid Castle American English, Giving Children Early Experience".

Just down the street from my school. Again, thanks to rapid development and a lack of any discernible zoning laws the crummy parts of China and the nice parts are all pretty much right next to each other. As I understand it, like a little as 10 years ago the whole area looked a lot like this, with the tallest building being maybe like three or four stories high.

There's my desk.

There's our school's second location. You can find it at the back of a mall, between a Tae Kwon Do school and the Lionel Hutz Law Firm and Orange Julius Stand.

Another school I get sent out to. It's a very large, respectable establishment. It hires only the best teachers, and strives to keep the children in the most nurturing environment possible to further their education.

Which, again, is bounded by a church, a couple factories, and a jagged scrap metal yard. I have no idea why people think those things should be right next to each other.

My students dig that crazy bee-bop

A lot of the classes I teach are young children, ages 3-6. I've started incorporating random pieces of culture into my lesson. For example, to teach the "w" sound I tend to do an impression of Richard Nixon or Kyle's Mom from South Park, "y" is Bono and so forth. If i'm using a puppet, the puppet will sound like Louise Armstrong or Skwisgar Squiggles. Of course the kids just think "look, the teacher is making funny noises again", but they enjoy it. Sometimes at the beginning of class I'll just spend like a minute or two having the kids scat, and they really tend to get into that.

New Camera

I bought a new camera today, but I had to go somewhere else to buy the memory card for it. So the people at the store told me to take a certain bus down to the local university. So I went down to the local university, but when I asked a girl at the bookstore where I could find the place that sells memory cards that I was nowhere near where I needed to be, and I had to do something or another to get down to blah blah blah. After I left I pieced together that they she had told me to take the number 83 bus. I asked some people on the bus which stop I needed to get off at and they told me that the bus would actually announce it over the intercom, but they wanted to know why I wanted to go there as it was already closed.


So I guess the first thing that meandering kind of pointless story is supposed to convey is that that kind of stumbling around happens a lot. Usually I just try to figure things out as I go along. In a lot of ways I think this is a good thing because it forces me to rely on the people and environment around me. Most of the time people seem to be very nice and helpful, and things end well. But sometimes it leads to a lot of confusion and wasted time. For some reason, a lot of this confusion tends to happen more frequently at McDonalds more than anyone else. Hell if I know why. It's kind of weird because If I go to a restaurant I can usually take a look at the menus make an educated guess at what I'm getting and end up being more or less right. But not at McDonalds, where the menus have pictures and all the orders have numbers


The second thing is I now have a camera. So sometime in the next week or so I should be able to start posting some long overdue pictures of my school, friends, students and scenery.

Thanks everyone

Thanks everyone whose reading so far. It's good to hear from you, and look forward to hearing everyone's stories again. I'll try to keep it interesting and update regularly. I'm working on trying to get the page to feed to facebook to make it a little more accessible, so if anyone thinks they can help me with that i'd appreciate it (I'm looking at you Melissa).

Thoughts about China

On a per capita basis Americans enjoy about 10x as much income as your typical Chinese person. Even if you figure that most of that income is concentrated in the 300 Million or so people in the cities that’s still a pretty huge difference. With that in mind, the place actually doesn't look so bad on average. China is perceptibly much poorer than the US, but it’s not profoundly poor in the way that India or countries in Africa are poor. For another thing the country is light years ahead of where it was 25 years ago. It fits the picture of a middle income country perfectly. For example, there aren’t giant piles of rubbish in the middle of the sidewalk, only moderately sized piles of rubbish on the side of certain sidewalks. Sometimes you’ll see a donkey on the side of a busy highway and so forth.

By and large people seem to do alright with the money they make through a lot of economizing and corner cutting. For example, buildings aren’t built to last, and anything that’s more than 10 years old is usually falling apart. Every toilet I’ve seen has been broken and jury-rigged. A lot of people still don’t own washing machines and nobody owns dryers. The owners of stores and restaurants usually live in cramped rooms in the back. So if you go into the bathroom in a given family owned restaurant you’ll usually see a lot of exposed wiring, dirty laundry hanging everywhere, washing basins lying around everywhere, a sink that actually just goes straight to a bucket on the floor and a toilet with some sort of ad hoc pulley system attached to it. Then you go out front you’ll see the owners cluster around the brand new computer in the front playing a pirated copy of Grand Theft Auto 4 or something. The poverty is concentrated in the bathroom and the wealth is all concentrated in the store front.

And that’s one of the most notable thing about China. There are nice parts and there are crummy parts and they’re all right next to each other. I think there are quite literally no zoning laws. One of the Kindergartens I work at is right next to a scrap metal yard, a church, a factory, a wheat field and a prison among other things. There are supermarkets with street markets just down the street, and there are nice restaurants with migrant workers grilling kebabs out front. It’s kind of a mess but it also kind of works. For example garbage collection seems to be handled primarily by these people who ride around on bicycles banging pots and pans that buy your garbage and resell it to factories as scrap. So in a way everyone recycles.

It’s kind of made me appreciate the difference between “poor” and “blighted”. Here’s an example to illustrate the difference: China is poor, downtown Detroit is blighted. One is what happens when all the middle class people take their money and leave, leaving a withered dysfunctional husk. The other is what happens when everything’s kind of dirty, bare bones, crowded and jury rigged, but at the same time there’s still a neighborhood association that’s practicing synchronized dancing routines in the park.

Grr, Russians

I was at the bar on Wednesday night with some of the other foreign teachers (because somehow Wednesday night just worked out best for everyone) and we met a couple of guys. Since they looked Chinese and there happen to be a lot of Chinese people around Harbin I thought I might try practicing my Chinese with them Chinese*. But as it turns out they were members of a Russian minority who tend to get really pissed off whenever they're confused with Chinese people. About five minutes into the conversation, still not having figured this out yet, I was told that these guys wanted to fight me.


Harbin has a lot of Russian people, and from everything people have told me they're kind of shitty to be around. To be fair this is probably because most of the Russian people who hang around Harbin are all just there to fuck around, but still as with any people who hang around in groups to beat up people at random they should probably be avoided.


* Extra "Chinese" added to make that sentence more repetitive

Travel

First it's probably necessary to give a little background here. First off, I've been living in China for almost 7 months now. I spend most of my time either at my job as a teacher or studying Chinese, both activities being something I generally enjoy. My living situation is something that I would hope my friends and family are all aware of, but a lot of people still seem to be surprised when I tell them. I guess that's not really surprising. Before I moved to China I was unemployed for about 5 months after I graduate, so I had a lot of spare time which I mostly used volunteering for political campaigns. Before that I had an internship at the Department of Commerce doing research. So in the last few years I'd like to think I've had my fair share of worthwhile experiences.


Before I started moving around a little over a year and a half ago I'd never lived outside of Michigan for more than 2 or 3 weeks. So if I was such a home body before why have I been moving around so much recently?


Well first off it because all the opportunities I was most interested required me to move a lot. Arbitrage can be a beautiful thing, if you're willing to move a lot and are able to take advantage of different things you can really come out ahead.


But at the same time it's also because, like most people I've always had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder about not being able to travel more. I think I was like most people in that I hated third culture kids. You know third culture kids, those people that grew up half way around the world, moved to your hometown, told you about all the interesting experiences that they fell ass backwards into and then pointed out that you've been eating the same sandwich for the last 3 years. To be fair, It's not like they were walking around saying "you suck, and your parochial life is hilarious to me", but that's always the impression you get. It's the same reason you kind of want to smack anyone who tells you about their son in Russia or that time they went to Panama to build houses while you were sitting at home slowly turning from a "Never-Was" to a "Could've-Been".


I'd been meaning to travel around for a little bit now, but it never really seemed to work into the long term plan I had going in my mind. If I was going to relocate it would have to be somewhere where I could be gainfully employed, or where there was a good chance it would produce a better job in the next few years. At the very least I need to be able to do it cheaply. Fortunately I graduate in the middle of the worst job market since the Great Depression, and the prospect of sitting at home working a shit job for the next few years suddenly made relocating look a lot more do-able. I might not be able to get a degree related job working abroad, but at the same time I probably wasn't going to get one back in the United States any time soon either, so I may as well kill some time somewhere where I could learn something new and save up a little money.


I considered doing a few different things, like going into Teach for America or joining the military or something, but my brother's advice about going to China to teach ended up sounding the best. I've wanted to learn Chinese for a while now, and I figure I may yet be able to put my degree to good use if I can find a job with a corporation or the US embassy while i'm out here. Why the hell not.


I was surprised how ridiculously easy the whole process turned out to be. I started looking for jobs in China I had about 10 people offering me jobs after a week. After a whole summer sending out resumes with nothing to show for it this was a welcome change of pace. It altogether it took me less than $1,000 and a month and of half to find a job and complete all the necessary travel arrangements.


So far I'm very happy with how things have been going, but at the same time It's sort of changed my perspective on travelling. Basically it became much less of a big deal after I actually did it. As I said, the whole process turned out to be much easier than I thought it would be. It really made me think maybe I should have started doing it sooner. At the same time it made me realize that moving around a lot in and of itself doesn't really make as much of a difference as I thought it would. In a lot of ways if your changing jobs your going to experience a much bigger cultural shift than if you're changing countries. It's all about the people you surround yourself with and the depth of experience. My life was very different at the end of 2010 from what it had been at the beginning of 2010, but I think that's more because I went from working with government bureaucrats to working with children than anything else. So I guess in a lot of ways setting down the right kind of roots is the most important thing anyone can do.


So, that's my thoughts for now. I've got a backlog of things i'd like to share, so i'll try to update regularly.