Laying Low

The early part of this week has been somewhat low key for us. We have stayed close to campus deciding to invest serious time on our coursework by completing syllabi and Powerpoint presentations for upcoming classes. Some of the rooms we teach in have access to computers and projectors while others leave more to be desired. For this reason we must plan a variety of activities that incorporate both technology and traditional teaching methods.

The weather here has been interesting to say the least. At the end of last week it was pretty cold. Temperatures dipped to -7C(about 19F) and barely reached 0C(32F). Then out of nowhere the next few days that followed were fabulous. We're talking highs near 16C(roughly 61F). On top of this the warm weather came with clear blue skies. We asked our students if it was common to see such beautiful days and they told us no. Due to heavy pollution Beijing is lucky to get a handful of days per month with crisp clean air. We were fortunate enough to get two days of it in a row!

With the change in weather the campus life has begun to transform. Students in China regularly partake in extracurricular activities for leisure. The basketball, vollyeball, badminton, and tennis courts are beginning to see tons of action until dusk. The soccer fields and track are also getting lots of attention. The funny thing is that these areas (referred to as the "playground") are only open from around 3pm until 9pm. The rest of the time they are kept locked. We plan on buying tennis racquets and a basketball this upcoming weekend so that we can join in the fun. Interesting note, even though students pay tution they do not get free access to the tennis courts. Due to upkeep and demand, the university charges 10 yuan (about $1.50) to rent a court for one hour.

Also, we are regularly going to our local street market. They have great fresh vegetables and fruit at a fraction of the cost compared to the supermarkets. We often buy the staples like potatoes, onions, peppers, tomatoes, squash, apples, oranges,pears, and kiwi. But we're also experimenting with local foods like lychees. They are a sweet cherry/strawberry looking fruit. The vendors are extremely friendly and help us with our slow developing Chinese.

Speaking of Chinese, we took our first lesson on Wednesday. Ren Jie, a student in Adán's Newspaper Reading Skills class, offered to tutor us. We met for about an hour and a half. She is training to become a CFL (Chinese as a foreign language) teacher. Her skills are quite good. She spent the first half hour teaching us the sounds of Chinese initials (beginnings of words) and finals (endings). It took us some time but we slowly began to catch subtle differences in sounds of the letters by having a true native Chinese speaker talk to us slowly.
We spent the rest of the session practicing pronounciations and learning basic greetings and goodbyes. Ren Jie made the learning enjoyable and had us laughing at the close of class when she said, "Now you guys have lots of practicing to do." We found a great website at www.nciku.com that translates English into both Pinyin (romanized form of Chinese) and Chinese characters. Best of all the website has a feature where a native speaker will say the word for you. It's a tremendous help for improving our pronounciation.

We'll make sure that our next post is much more eventful. :)

Never a Dull Moment

The rest of our first week of teaching went by very smoothly. Adán's Newspaper Reading classes really impressed him. Many of the students are serious about language learning. In fact, four students stayed after class to ask for supplementary work because they will be taking the TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) Examination in the upcoming weeks and desperately would like to better prepare. Another student in a different Newspaper Reading class offered to tutor us in the Chinese language. We eagerly agreed and have our first session scheduled for Tuesday. We feel it would be to our benefit to take advantage of this opportunity.

Pazi's classes have gone extremely well too. She's getting a good feel for the students and their abilities. Working with students that are International Trade majors allows her the freedom to teach subject matters that she really enjoys such as economics, business, commerce, and foreign relations. The classes are also interested in entrepreneurialism so she is developing profiles and case studies about some of America's most famous moguls like Warren Buffet, Donald Trump, Sam Walton, and Oprah.

Many differences exist in the educational systems between the United States and China. For starters just making it to college is an achievement in itself here. In a country of well over a billion people, roughly 15 million individuals are able to attend a university. That means just over 1% of the entire population receives higher education. Wow! We aren't afraid to share this with our students either. Letting them know that gracing us with their presence is our honor not the other way around. Many of them blush and become embarassed but we know it helps their self-esteem which for many seems to waver. Also, it's amazing to see that for some students taking up to fifteen individual classes in a school week is the norm. In conversations with us some students said that they have semesters that require them to take classes from 8 to 5 everyday. That blows our mind to think how much work these individuals must endure.

We don't know yet if it is common amongst the universities in Beijing, but BISU seems to run on a tight budget (it could be that the school is just really frugal). Getting supplies like whiteboard markers, printing paper and other teaching aides are not readily available. We must first seek permission from our department and then supplies are rationed out. This is extremely inconvenient but we realize that things are often done differently here in China. Thus, we do our best to roll with the punches.


Books Galore
On Friday night we decided to venture out and see what we were told by another instructor to be the largest book store she had ever seen. It's called the Beijing Book Building (we know, what a unique name) near Xidan. So we hopped on the subway and in 30 minutes we arrived. There, we entered into a massive ten story bookstore! We were in awe as we saw row after row of books.

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it), seven of the floors were completely in Chinese so we were only able to really mingle the other three. We looked at books, CDs, movies, and electronic items. At the basement level is all foreign books in original text and you pay for it being that way. The mark up is easily 50% for these products as it's assumed that foreign dollars will pay for them. We ended up purchasing some excellent material for teaching our classes about American culture and business. For three good books the total cost was 80 yuan or roughly 11 bucks. Try spending that at Barnes and Noble next time you go.

Unfortunately, we forgot our camera for this execursion. We will go back again and take photos of the Beijing Book Building to share with you soon.


Extrañamos la comida mexicana

We cannot tell you enough how much we miss home cooked food, especially our Mexican food. We yearn for frijoles (beans), arroz (rice), and chile (salsa). We are so thankful now to Pazi's mother for having us make tamales, mole, and chiles rellenos the week before we arrived. Please do not take us sharing this to mean that we are starving here. Actually we eat three square meals a day but they are just not the same. And we are being bold, trying something new everyday whether it be at a restaurant or something we purchase at the market.
From these experiments we have become fond of Chinese dumplings, wontons, and congee (porridge, yes they use this word here more than you would imagine, but we call it "atole"). Dairy products are hard to find here so when we went to Wal-Mart near Da Wang Lu and found some we went nuts. Ya, that's right I said we went to Wal-Mart here in Beijing. What a trip that was! We had to take the subway to get there but it really isn't that far at all. It's about 20 minutes from "home." Once we got to our metro stop we had to locate this place. We don't know about you, but for us the image of a Wal-Mart Shopping Center brings to mind a store that vastly streches out over a large chunk of land. Well, this is not the case here. The Wal-Mart we went to occupies the basement of a fancy business complex named Wanda Plaza.

You enter through doors that barely even advertise the Wal-Mart name and logo to a steep set of escalators that take you down a couple stories to an enoromous warehouse-like basement. There we spent the next 4 plus hours scouring over every aisle hoping to find useful and practical necessities. It was wild to see the cultural differences here. The seafood area was incredible. For us we almost took out our camera to take pictures like it was some sort of tourist attraction. They had live turtles, eels, crabs, clams, prawns, and tons of other different types of fish. Right next door was the meat section. Here we saw people grabbing slabs of meat and wrapping it themselves. Talk about rolling up your sleeves and getting dirty. We are very selective about what types of meat we buy and we pretty much avoided it all together here. Health standards and regulations appear to be much more laxed in China.

As we said earlier, dairy products seem to be Wal-Mart's forte for Westerners. They have all types of "real" milk, cheese, yogurt, butter, etc. "Real" milk meaning whole milk, 2%, or skim, not the boxed milk that doesn't require refrigeration found at every other store. We began to stock up on items of all types but realized that we had to carry all this stuff back home on the subway. Your critical thinking skills really improve while in China because of stuff like this! No longer exists the luxury of just throwing everything into the back of the car. Ultimately, we found a mix of Chinese products and Western goods that met our needs and headed home. It was an exhausting day!

Let the Teaching Begin

Before we knew it our first day of class was here. The first classes had us teaching Oral English to college freshman, Pazi with International Business majors, and Adán with Chinese and Education majors. The first thing we noticed was that the university's classrooms are predominantly in poor to average condition as compared to the U.S. It's interesting to see that the actual buildings themselves are freezing because they have no heating system. Luckily each individual classroom has an old school furnace. We learned quickly how important it is to keep the doors closed while in session. Our classes are mostly broken up into two-one hour blocks. We teach from 8am-10am and then 10am-12pm. The students also get 10 minute breaks each hour so classes work out to be 50 minutes at a time.

Our objective for the first day of class really was to just get a feel for the classroom dynamics in China and to gauge the English ability levels of our students. Honestly we had not idea what to expect going in, but were pleasantly suprised coming out. The students here are very respectful, almost too respectful. What I mean by this is that traditional Chinese classrooms are set up to allow little student input so it was hard at first to have them volunteer comments. Couple this with the fact that many of the students are shy or reserved and it was tricky to get dialogue sparked. However, after much probing they began to open up. They showed an eagerness and desire to learn that was truly infectious. Many of our students were intrigued by us knowing second and third languages and when we told them about our ethnic background they became curious. In fact, they even asked us to provide them with possible lessons on Latinos.

All in all, it ending up being a good first day for us. We were pleased with the immediate rapport we were able to build with students and our ability to capture their interest. Pazi even had one group not want to leave when the last bell rang for class to dismiss! Later after visiting with Michael, a foreign instructor who has taught at three other Chinese universities, we learned that bar none the students at BISU are the most courteous and polite. So far so good. Next up for Adán will be reading skills classes for juniors and Pazi will continue her schedule with freshman.

Sandy Shows Us the Ropes
On Tuesday we had lunch with Sandy, a foreign instructor from Austin, Texas. It turned out to be heaven-sent. Sandy is an extremely down to earth person but with a fiery, opinionated side you can't help but love. She took us to The Cat's Eye. Little did we know that this whole-in-the-wall restaurant would quickly become a favorite. Interestingly enough, The Cat's Eye is maybe 150 meters past the supermarket we shop at. You would never guess that this joint could make pizza that rivals any kind from Idaho. As we devoured our food, Sandy began to tell us about her journey from Austin to Brazil, back to Austin, and then to China. To make a long story short, she has her grandchildren here and because of it has chosen to make Beijing her home for the past 4 years.

After lunch, Sandy graciously took us on a tour of the local farmer's market, shops, restaurants, and other locales she frequents. It was great to get firsthand tips and advise from a seasoned pro who not only knows the area pretty well but speaks decent Chinese too. She even went out of her way to show us the post office, cafeteria, and several other buildings on campus that Li was not able to describe to us well. At the close of our afternoon we could not thank Sandy enough for taking the time to help us. She insisted that it was her pleasure. Sandy is definitely someone that we will get to know much better as the semester goes on.

Sizzler???

On Sunday we decided to hit the ground running. Enough of taking care of the small things, we were ready to get a taste of real China. We decided to go to Tian'an Men Square. We did not really know anyone and we had no idea how the subway system worked in Beijing but we were up for the challenge. Besides, how tough could it be?

To get to the nearest subway station we needed to exit out the main entrance of the BISU campus. The locals call it the "South Gate." It was only a five minute walk until we ran into the Communications University of China subway station. From there we were able to use what little Chinese we knew to purchase 2 tickets and head toward city center. We were suprised that the subway was not extremely congested. Tian'an Men Square was a different story. Since it was still the weekend, the tourist attraction was so busy that we practically could not enter the gates and because of this we decided not to. Besides we were starving. We only had a very small breakfast so we went in search of food. We figured since the subway trip was only 15-20 minutes from our apartment that it would be best to visit again on a weekday after classes.

Having no idea where restaurants would be located we took a Chinese man's broken English suggestion to go east past the traffic lights. Thirty minutes passed and we still had no luck finding food. Then almost out of nowhere a gentleman passed us with a bucket of KFC chicken. Seeing that KFC logo made our mouths water and put us back on the trail. Within a couple of minutes we were surrounded by fancy hotels and then a block of shopping heaven. Nike billboards, McDonald's Arches, and store after store lined the streets. It happened to be the Oriental Plaza, one of Asia's largest commercial complexes.


Oriental Plaza with hotels, condos, offices, & mall stretching eight city blocks!


We made our way to The Malls at Oriental Plaza. A massive 4 stories of upscale shopping. We are talking Givenchy, DKNY, Burberry, Hilfiger, etc. There is also a BMW and Volkswagen store inside. Tens and tens of chic stores and well-known restaurants make this place seem like being back in the U.S. Prices are very high though, meaning brand name purchases are only for China's elite upper class. Stores like Sears and JCPenney's have no place here. Thus, simply walking out of the mall with shopping bags is a sign of extreme status.

After browsing the mall a bit we decided it was time to eat. We agreed to play it safe with dining, especially since classes were to start the next day. The last thing we wanted was to get sick our first day on the job. Many Chinese food chains filled one long corridor, while another had American restaurants. After carefully deciding we selected Sizzler. Yes, there are Sizzlers in China. It's funny because we really dislike places like KFC, Sizzlers, etc. in the U.S. but when you are desperate in China, anything will do. We really do want to be adventurous with exotic foods but we still need to find a good guide to help us. Our meals consisted of Teriyaki Chicken, french fries, baked potatoes, and all-you-can-eat salad bar. Everything tasted kind of bland but we could not complain. The baked potato was more like a yam or sweet potato. Each meal was less than 40 yuan or $5-6 dollars. This same meal in the States would run double that easy.

We decided to call it a day and head back home so we could prepare for our first day teaching. We were very excited to see what our classes had in store for us. What would our students be like? How would we be received in the classroom? Would they find our Western teaching style to be too unorthodox? In less than 24 hours we would find out.

This has been a recap of our first weekend in China. Now, we will add blog posts twice a week. Most likely updates will occur on Wednesdays and Sundays.

Ouch $@*&!

Boy are Chinese mattresses hard. We thought we were sleeping on box springs. However, it seems that the Chinese like stiff, hard beds. It will take a few more nights to get adjusted to that. Our first real day in Beijing was to set up shop in our apartment, meet Ding Li (professor at BISU) for a campus tour, and venture out to the local store and buy essentials. It's our understanding that our school has extremely nice rooms for instructors. We agree. They provide us with everything that we really need. They are very warm, good sized for just the two of us, and we get our own bathroom!

Nihao China

We arrived in Beijing at 6PM local time on Friday, February 15th. This meant that our bodies thought it was 3AM Mountain Standard Time. Add to this that our flight lasted roughly 13 hours and it ended up being one exhausting day. Nevertheless, as we got off the plan we were eager to find our host coordinator from our school--Beijing International Studies University. Her name is Zhou Jian Ping. She was waiting at the gate with another hundred some odd people but holding a sign that read, "Adan De La Paz, Maria De La Paz, BISU." We would not be lost on our first night in Beijing.

Soon after, we left the Peking International Airport. Jian Ping introduced us to "Mr. Chang," our driver. We rode in a early 2000s model blue Chevy van. As we took to the streets it was easy to fear for your life. In a 40 minute ride from the airport to our school we made amazingly only two stops at lights. Now, we actually went through half a dozen other lights but it appeared that Mr. Chang did not notice that they were RED LIGHTS. It seems customary for drivers to use the motto, "It's everyone for his or herself." We also found out very quickly that car horns take on a whole new language here for motorists. It makes sense considering that everywhere you look there are bicycles and motorcycles crowding the streets.

Finally we arrived at what is called the "North Gate." It is the back entrance to the school. Since it was night time we did not get a good view of much. Before we knew it we made it to the "Foreign Experts Apartments." Inside we checked in at the front desk with the help of Jian Ping because the attendants only spoke Chinese. Then she handed us our class schedules for Monday, the first day of the new semester. At about this time we also met Sandy, an instructor from Texas, and later Scott, an instructor from Washington state. Shortly after we said our goodbyes with Jian Ping and made our way to our apartment. Once inside, we were so exhausted that we only half-awakenly noticed a neat and quaint apartment with tile floors, low flowing water, and below average flush strength for the toilets. As we stumbled to bed we couldn't help but think of our first taste of China as being strikingly similar to living in Mexico.