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!
