The true meaning of Christmas - Brought to you by the country China

I have noticed three main aspects of Christmas.

The first aspect is more than apparent the day after Thanksgiving. The commercialism of Christmas is perhaps the most visible thing we see of Christmas. During this time of year, people who are typically very frugal (like me) and save all their money splurge a bit and do their part to stimulate the economy. Businesses do well and new markets seem to pop up (think Christmas music or movies; also don't forget those sweaters that don't stand a chance of being sold if not for the ugly sweater contests). While all of this is not necessarily a bad thing, it does fall short of being the true meaning of Christmas.

I KTVed and I Liked It

A singing microphone is only one of the many reasons why KTV is incredibly awesome.

At the beginning of this semester, I had all my students introduce themselves. During part of the introductions, I would ask the students what they do for fun here. There were basically three responses: Shopping, surfing the Internet and KTV.

I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike

(First of all... I should mention that I am ironically listening to the song Bicycle by Queen right now with my music player being on random)

When I first got to China (and before I even got here) I debated whether or not I should purchase a nice bike. I could not decide if it would be worth my money to have a bike for only one year even though I might just ride it a handful of times. The traffic here is pretty crazy and I thought buying a bike might be the same as buying cancer. I was able to borrow a bicycle though and after riding it once, I decided that it was liberating enough to be a good investment.

The bike you see above I bought the day after my first paycheck. It cost me almost my entire paycheck. It was 1460 RMB ($230 USD). It is a 21 speed with disc brakes and SRAM gear shifters. I really don't know if it is all that great of a deal (maybe someone who knows anything about bikes can post a comment) but I have liked the bike so far.

This blog post will be a virtual ride in China with me and my bike.

A Engrish Park in China

I went to the park the other day and saw a lot of cool things! I enjoy reading all the great Engrish they have here.

I think this is called Men Qiu. Door ball. Something like that. They have these set up everywhere in China, but I think they have an age limit of 65 and older.

Shopping in China is fun!

National Day in China is a pretty big deal. It is an entire week that people get off of work or school to celebrate. By...  um... not going to work or school. Unless of course you are not a teacher then you still go to work. The only other way I saw that people celebrated was by massing together into one gigantic clump to go shopping!

Notice how the traffic is only going one way. I am pretty sure there is only one place people wanted to shop.

If you're happy and you know it clap your hands

On Wednesday night I got a phone call that went something like this:

Chinese person: "What are you doing tomorrow."
Me: "I have my first day of class."
Chinese person: "We need you to go somewhere. You can cancel your class for the day."
Me: "What will I be doing?" Chinese person: "You will go to a school and introduce yourself to some students there."

Cool beans. I get to cancel a class where I have yet to meet any students to go to a city I don't know, to talk to some mystery students at an unknown school. Aside from obvious communication problems I have here with the Chinese language, I think problems are exacerbated by the fact that sometimes people don't actually want me to know what is going on. At any rate, my class got cancelled and I met at my school at the time and place designated with another American teacher so we could do this mystery task. At this point the only thing we knew we were doing is going to another school and saying hi to students. We took an hour bus ride to the south east of Zhengzhou to a school in the country side. The drive was pleasant enough and it was nice to get out of Zhengzhou for the first time.

It was fun to be in the country and see an area that was not quite so busy.

The Elementary School

How the Walmart in China made me feel at home (Wo Er Ma 沃尔玛!)

You can imagine my excitement when I was standing in a bus in Zhengzhou, China and glanced up to see the words "Walmart." To me, Walmart = Home. Walmart is more American than just about anything I can think of. It is more American than baseball and hot dogs. Hey; it is more American than hot dogs AT a baseball game. So when I saw the Walmart sign and the weird circle logo thing (I feel like I am waiting for my computer to finish loading), I knew that I would be back. If you build it, they will come (Walmart and Americans that is).

I was talking to a friend one day and happened to causally mention Walmart (I happen to mention Walmart a lot whenever I feel casual). She had told me that she really wanted to go to Walmart as well. She had spent a year and a half on an LDS mission in New York but never had the chance to go to Walmart. Basically the equivalent of going to China and not seeing the great wall. For sad. So we both made up our minds that we were going to Walmart!

On a nice sunny Saturday (I know... bad idea to shop on a Saturday in the most populated city, in the most populated province in the most populated country in the world...) we decided to hop on a bus that would take us directly to Walmart. About 200 people and 45 minutes later, we finally showed up at Walmart!

In front of Walmart

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival! Zhong Qiu jie kuai le! 中秋节快乐!

A moon cake with an egg yolk

Well; it is that wonderful time of year where I receive a ton of free food from the foreigner's who don't like the nasty Chinese food given out during holidays. There are certainly benefits of being willing to eat just about anything. In this case, it means I can get fat from eating moon cakes (yue bing 月饼).

Let's Get Physical.

The medical system in America is broken. How do I know this? I know this because when I got a physical a few months ago in America, it was not fun. Not fun at all. First of all, there is a long wait. I had to wait about 30 minutes just to see the doctor. Once the doctor was ready, I followed him to a room where I waited more. Everything was done basically in the same room and everything was rather boring. Who would want to spend money to wait in line to do something boring? Yes; America's medical system is definitely broken.

Living in an all tile apartment is kind of like living in a really bigbathroom.

After my wonderful traveling adventure from the US of A to my city of Zhengzhou, China, I was shown to the apartment I will presumably spend the next year in (not concurrently of course; my apartment certainly isn't like a prison; I don't have a gym, mattress or reliable Internet connection). I live on campus (one of the campuses; supposedly we have a north, south and west campus at different parts of the city). When first entering my apartment, it looked just like any other building; square and old. We walked in and while entering the cement building, Tom (my friend who picked me up from the train station) started walking kind of funny. He would stomp really hard for a few steps. Apparently, to turn on the lights they needs a loud noise. It was at this point that I knew they spoiled the teachers and I was moving into a pretty ritzy place. I mean, I can totally remember the clapper. Nothing says "high class" like "clap on, clap off (or am I thinking The Karate Kid?)." (OK... let's see. Question mark, parenthesis, period, quote and another parenthesis. Yeah. I don't know if I should be an English teacher after all. And what is a single parenthesy?)

My Chinese Walmart

Let's think about Walmart for a minute. Walmart is a super store that sells everything at the lowest possible prices. To do this, they get all of the products from the places that sell them the cheapest. It is pretty safe to say that China is one of the places Walmart gets their products from.

This is great news for me because it basically means that every store here is like Walmart! Low low prices. I went exploring a couple of days ago and found a supermarket fairly similar to Walmart, but noticed some very distict differences.

The Joys of Traveling in China

I am in China! I made it! Lifelong goal checked off. In the first few days here, I have experienced nearly every method of travel possible. One thing is for certain. Traveling in China is different than in America. VERY different.

(Warning; this is a LONG post. I suggest only reading it while eating ice cream)

I am in China! Here is a blog.

Before I left for China, a lot of people mentioned that I should start up a photo blog for all my adventures in China. I thought this was a great idea, so I told people that I would do just that. It should be known however that my intent is for this to me more than just a photo blog. I am hoping for this to be a little more like a public journal. That being said, the purpose of this blog is fourfold:

1. Keep an account of my adventures in China through photography and writing. In the process, I hope to improve both.


2. Share the mysteries, oddities and adventures of China with others.


3. Write personal feelings and observances in general.


4. Allow my family to know I am not dead (or at least let them THINK I am not dead while I am detained in a Chinese prison and have my blog taken over by the Chinese government).

As I have only been in China for less than a week so far, many of my earlier blog posts will not have any photos (sorry about that).