Back in the US...A

I'm not sure yet if I'm going to keep up this blog now that I'm not in China... I can't see there being much of an audience out there for reading about my life in the US. I feel like China was the main selling point of the first attempt. Andy wants me to keep it up, but I figure he'd be the only one to read it and I tell him everything anyway, so what's the point?

Aaanyway, I got back wicked late Thursday. My flight from Harbin to Beijing was delayed three hours cause of some wicked thunderstorms on Wednesday night in Harbin. I had about an hour before my flight once I got to Beijing, so I wandered around the airport a while, browsed the duty-free shops that were incredibly expensive. The flight to Newark was not so bad... I watched Ghandi, Leatherheads, The Motorcycle Diaries, three episodes of Friends, three episodes of the Xfiles, and one episode of Flight of the Conchords (great show, you should watch it), and I read 100 pages of my book and played some sudoku. I was able to watch all that cause my seat had an entertainment system, jet-blue style, for freeeee. Made my inability to sleep on planes ok. Flight to Portland from Newark was delayed cause oh yeah, I loathe the state of New Jersey. I finally landed a little after midnight, exhausted and smelly (really smelly), and in need of a nap.

Sleep-wise I'm still not 100%, but I'm going to Salem tomorrow for the weekend, tropical storm and torrential downpours nonwithstanding. I'll eventually be on the right time.

Photos from China:The view from my hotel room (what I saw for two and a half weeks). The strip on the left is where the internet cafe, corner stores, and restaurants I lived out of are. The campus of the university is between the first and second cranes you see above the shops and stuff. There are a lot of cranes in China. The house next door to the hotel was gorgeous, but i never found out who lived there.This was the view straight off my balcony. A nice mud puddle, and an adjacent University's dorms. Straight below me there was construction work on some underground pipe thing that was kind of annoying the first night but I learned to sleep through when they went to work at 5am.


Wednesday night i took all the english teachers out for dinner at a restaurant near the University. From left to right, Candy, Crystal, Tiana, 凯丽, Kelly, Vera, Sun, Jessie, and Betty. As my mom said, I stick out like a sore thumb. I did, as you can see, finally find out the characters for the chinese name they gave me (its pronounced Kai-Li). The plate in the foreground was made of amazing. And by amazing, I mean fried and sugary and buttery pumpkin skins. Amazing. I had a really great last night because all of these guys were so helpful and friendly and did whatever they could to make me feel at home while I was there... It was just that I didn't have the living conditions to actually stay there, friends or none. I definitely won't forget them.

So it's 12:36am and I'm not getting any better at this sleep schedule thing. I'll post another (bigger) round of photos after I get back from Boston, stuff like the apartment and some cool areas of downtown.

I just bought my plane tickets. I'll be home late Thursday night if there are no delays.

lies.

Well its a good thing I decided to leave.

I brought up the point that they broke the contract in not giving me a place to live (and in doing so they owe me $500USD), and they asserted they didn't ever sign a contract.

Which is a blatant lie, since I would need a contract to get my Visa converted to a residency permit, a process they already started.

My bathroom hardcore flooded when i showered this morning. I've been told other people in the building haev leaking ceilings.

I can't wait to get out of here, this University has no idea what's going on.

I'll be on a plane at the earliest tomorrow morning, at the latest Friday morning.

I just got hit in the face with a flying ladybug, and I had squid on a stick for dinner last night. Like, a whole squid. It was awesome. I'm still going to miss China, just not this place.

Pete and Stephanie both brought up a very valid question: do I want to stay in China?

I would be lying if I said I really wanted to leave the country, because that's why I came here to experience. I wanted to learn the language more than anything, and I wanted to see this city in the wintertime and apend the Chinese New Year here, and take my winter break and travel a little bit.

However, this whole situation has reached the point that I'm basically a mess. I spent the better part of the last two days in tears. What it comes down to is that since I got here, I haven't had a place that was really mine. I moved over 7,000 miles from home three weeks ago. What I needed was a place that I could unpack my belongings, decorate with pictures from home and things to confort me when I was feeling homesick... somewhere that was mine. What I got was a hotel room. About as opposite as it could be. I was incredibly excited on Friday to move, and when I did it was an enormous letdown. I am emotionally drained and I still have no place to go to make myself feel at home. I don't think I have it in me to find another job and go through another moving process without going completely crazy. I've already driven my parents phone bill into the stratosphere having them talk some sanity back into me. If I thought I could do it I would consider it but I am physically and mentally exhausted. I like to think I'm usually a very go with the flow, que sera sera type, at least when living in China, but this one has gone too far for me.

I tried to make it work. It didn't, and I just have to get past it and realize its not a failure on my part. That's the hardest part right now, is feeling like I failed miserably. Part of me knows its not true, but the mentally exhausted part of me is like 'fail' and that kinda sucks when I get tired. Also, not having a plan... that's not something I've ever dealt with before. I always kinda knew what I was going to do. First time for everything.

I'm coming home.

I found out on Friday that I'm only scheduled to teach two days of the week. When one of my major problems has been lonliness and too much unstructured free time and all I have had to look forward to was a full work week starting this week, this was a major letdown. That was sort of what got me thinking about whether or not this job was right for me, and the conditions in my apartment have deteriorated so much that I just can't stay here.

The fact of the matter is, the University knew I was coming at the end of August; I signed my contract at the end of April. That contract said that the University would be responsible for providing me with a living space complete with appliances and furniture. Since I got here three weeks ago I have spent 16 nights in a hotel after being told I would be moving into my apartment "in a few days". I finally moved into my apartment, which I was very excited to do since I would be able to unpack and make the space somewhere I would like to be instead of a white hotel room... and it is not a livable space. There is no shower ("in a few days" they tell me. sounds familiar). My bedroom door and my bathroom door do not fit in their frames and don't close, and my front door will not stay closed unless I lock it. Last night I got home to find that my toilet leaks. When I flush it there is barely any water flow, and there is water leaking onto the floor from around the toilet.

The major issue that I can't forgive them for is that because they knew I was coming they should have either made sure the building was finished (it is brand new), or at the very least warned me that I wouldn't have anywhere to live for a while. Kelly told me that the problem is a lack of communication between the people running the university and the people in charge of the construction. I told her that I can't live like this, with 'wait a few days and maybe you'll have [insert appliance of choice]' being a common phrase. As it stands right now if I want to shower I'm out of luck; today they took me back to the hotel since its a holiday weekend and the public shower next door was closed. If I need to go to the bathroom I have to go to the office building next door. Not okay when I have to go in the middle of the night. I know that I could wait all this out but I don't trust the ability of the University to provide what I need from here on out, if it takes two weeks to find out when my furniture would be delivered.

Anyway, the way I see it is that they have broken the contract twice; in failing to give me a living space of my own (after nearly a month), and in only giving me 10 hours of teaching time (the contract specified 18-20). I'm hoping to get some help in buying my flight home for late this week but I don't know what I'll be able to do.

I have major mixed feelings about this... on the one hand this was something I really wanted to do, spend the year here. It was difficult getting through the homesickness of the first few nights in the hotel, but I did it. I thought that was the hard part. I really wanted to take my chinese up a notch. I've met some very helpful and friendly people here, and I feel like I am letting them down in leaving. But, it would not be good for my mental health to stay, without a place to live for the time being, and without a full-time schedule of work. Two days a week... what would I do the other five days? I know I could find some activities, meet some people... but five days worth? In a part of the city where I haven't yet seen another westerner? And what if my radiator starts leaking on a saturday morning in the dead of winter... am I going to get "wait a few days and maybe it will be fixed"? I'm going to miss the ice festival, and I won't get to go to Shanghai and visit Stephanie or show mom and Kelli around Beijing and Xi'an or take the train to Tibet or carry out any of my other wild (and probably impossible) plans. But I will get to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas at home, and not all alone in a broken, leaky apartment driving myself crazy with boredom.

If anyone wants any DVDs or anything else from China let me know, tomorrow I'm going downtown to pass the time until Tuesday... tomorrow's still a holiday so I can't talk to the real director of the program until Tuesday (I talked to another foreign affairs person today).

Maybe someday I'll come back to China older and wiser and make sure these things are very clear ahead of time.

mmgh

So like I said yesterday, I moved into my apartment. I've been wanting to move into my apartment since the day I got here. I was, and am, very excited to be out of the hotel and into a space that I can make my own. However, last night I had a quasi-relapse of the homesickness I was feeling my first nights in the hotel. My apartment is huge for just me, and the walls are blindingly white and bare and there's not enough furniture to make it feel roomy it just feels empty and lonely. I know that I can make it look nicer but I feel like unless I spend way more money than I intend to on decorating, its going to stay wicked white and scarily empty.

Today I went downtown to meet two of the teachers I work with to go shopping. I thought they understood when I said I needed to shop for my apartment, but they took me to this upscale huge underground mall place where everything I looked at was too expensive. And by everything I looked at, I mean we were looking for a blanket and they were three times the price of the ones I see around the school. And the rest of the mall was clothes, which was what they really wanted to shop for. Not good for me, since I'm a giant. I played along, and went with it, but I didn't have a good time. Did I mention it was an hours busride from where I got off the bus downtown? That's a good hour and a half minimum from school. It was at the southern end of the city, I live north of it. When we got back Jessie suggested we eat at a place we did last week, but they got the order wrong (Jessie actually ordered something different than what I had told her) and mine was spicy, so I had next to no dinner. Now I'm just cranky and I have a headache and its too early to go to bed.

Sorry for the rant, I'm just wicked homesick and nine and a half months is a long time.

apartment!

Quick update... I moved today! At lunch we happened to sit next to the director of the foreign affairs dept and he was like 'Oh, btw, a car is coming to pick up all the teachers at the hotel at 230' only more in chinese and less btw. So after lunch I went back with Kelly and I packed while she watched Ghostbusters (she wanted to watch an American movie...). We watched the end of the movie and then it was time to moveeee

For starters, my apartment is huuuge for just me living there. Its comparable to the size of Lya's and my apartments in Wendel, for any of you who saw that. I have leather couches! Not sure they're 100% real leather but theyre brand new and they feel nice. I have a desk, and a bed, and a couple end tables, and a dresser. I have a freakin balcony, all windowed in (helpful in winter) but the windows open to let in the fresh air (which is good, cause it still smells a little like paint). Two things are still works in progress... a shower, and internet access. I have been told that next week they will be putting in the showers (nobody in my part of the building has one, we have to being our stuff to the building across the street for a few days but I'm so happy to be out of the hotel I don't really care). I'm getting the same 'wait a few days' on the internet thing, so it may end up beinga couple weeks, but eventually (I use that word so much here) I will have internets for my lappy.

I also promise that once I do get the internet I will post some pictures of my building and my apartment after I unpack and decorate.

Tonight I'm going to Kelly's house (to have dumplings?)... this weekend is the three-day Mid-Autumn Festival when Chinese people eat yummy moon cake and celebrate the season... I think it has to do with the moon being full but I should really know more about it. Perhaps tonight I will learn :) Kelly's mother is here visiting, and her husband's parents, so it should be interesting to say the least.

Moral of the story is, the Chinese don't like to set definite dates. On anything. The answer is always 'wait a few days' or 'I'm not really sure' when you ask about the timing of anything. Lil but frustrating but hey, it could be worse.

Teaching, day two

So even though I've been here for two weeks (!), today was only my second day of teaching. I had the same two classes today that I had last Wednesday, which meant I had something familiar, but it also meant I had to come up with more stuff to do in class (makes sense, I am the teacher after all).

Today is China's National Teacher's Day, so all the students brought flowers and gifts for their teachers. Pretty nice it fell on a Wednesday, the only day of the week I teach right now :) I got a mug with a chinese design on it from my first class, and a necklace with a couple red crystal-ish bells on it from the second class. The second class also gave me a notebook that they had all written nice things about me in... It was very thoughtful of them, they've only known me a week! It made me feel a lil bit loved, even if most of it wasn't based on anything they actually know about me:)

Teaching-wise, the class actually went well. I a tongue twister I got online (Betty bought a bit of butter...) as the basis for the first 45 minutes. It was actually a really good exercise for them, since the different vowel sounds kinda tended to all sound the same when they started. By the end it sounded much better. The second half of class I went off some suggestions they had for words that sound weird, and wht happens when you put two words together and the sounds change ('won't you' actually sounds like 'won'tchyou', etc.). One girl took a nap. I figure, in a class of 35 students, only one taking a nap isn't terrible.

Earlier I talked to Stephanie about how many times a day we both kinda stop and realize 'oh man, i'm a teacher...what?!' Its somewhere around 6 or 7 times we figure. It is kinda scary, that their education is in my hands. Sometime down the road when they meet an english-speaking person or travel somewhere, their ability to be understood will partially be of my influence. Weeird. Did I mention the only class I ever failed in high school or college was that one quarter of english in 10th grade? Aren't I the one who made andy that sign that said 'Get gooder soon!' when he was in the hospital? I know most of what I know about teaching english comes from my having taken so many foreign language classes... from Senora Leavitt in high school spanish all the way through Bai Di's chinese, I have enough experience learning it that teaching it is a lot easier. Like when I taught swimming... I had to work so hard to learn it, it made it easier to teach.

The previous paragraph is there for myself to be able to talk reason back into myself when I get scared that I don't know what I'm doing... because some part of me knows I do know what I'm doing :)

I'm starting to learn some more chinese words, most of them revolve around food....

sniffles

sooo i have a cold. im pretty grouchy about it. i kinda expected to get sick eventually, considering i moved halfway across the world. viruses are different over here. i just cant figure out how to explain that to the women i work with, who insist that i have a very bad cold and its because i went swimming on sunday and because i wear flipflops. number one, i have proven you cant get sick from wearing flipflops. number two, i was already feeling it coming on before i went swimming, so it wasnt the pool (plus swimming is the opposite of bad for kellie). number three, its not that bad a cold on the scale of one to wicked bad colds. i mean yeah, im all sniffly and such, but i still have a voice and i can function. so poo.

im gonna go watch a movie or read or take some benadryl and sleep.

*sniff*

They call me Dumpling Master

...except its actually really hard to make dumplings well, and I did not master the art (and it is an art) just yet.

Today the weater was gorgeous and there were no floods to keep me from the dumplings (though I hear at home things are a little soggy...). The power came back yesterday after about three and a half hours, and the flood had pretty much receeded by 3pm. This morning I got on the bus around 1015 and headed downtown to meet one of the other english teachers, Candy (they all have english names to make it easier, I will eventually get all their chinese names but it may take a while... and to them, I have become ke li- I need to check on which characters those should be). she took me on a different bus for a little over a half hour to get to her mother's house, near where the provincial government building is. Her mom lives on the first floor in an apartment with one bedroom, a kitchen, a dining room, a bathroom, and a small porch. When we went inside we took off our shoes and used the sandals next to the door for walking around inside. She was very welcoming, it's nice to finally have some friends here and I was really excited when Candy offered to share her family :)

Then it was dumpling timeeeee

So you take the dough, which is just flour and water (cold water, not hot water!) and roll it out. You break off little pieces of juuust the right size, and flatten them so they're about a half-dollar size. That's the easy part. Then you take a dowel and roll them out, little by little, while you turn them, so you get a thin round piece of dough that's a little thicker in the middle, thinner on the edges. Her mom had already made up the filling, she used chives, little shrimp, and little scallops, among other things, and it smelled delicious. So you take one of the flattened dough thingers and put the filling in the middle. Now, Candy's mom could take it and pinch it at the top, and with one quick squeeze of the thumbs have a perfcet looking dumpling. I took one, pinched it at the top, squeezed with my thumbs... and had dumpling guts all over my hands. I don't know if it is just that I haven't done it nearly as many times as I have, or because my hands are sliiightly larger than hers, but I had a rough time with that move. It's something I'll have to work on before I come home :)

We boiled the dumplings (apparently you know they're done when they float, then you give it a couple extra minutes), and got ready to eat. Her mom had also cooked a fish for us, except she made it of the wicked spicy variety... I felt really bad that I couldn't eat a lot of it but Candy knew I don't eat spicy things and we figured out a way to get to the non-spicy part of the fish so I could at least eat a little. Along with the fish and the dumplings (which were amaaaazingly delicious if I do say so myself) we had some boiled peanuts and something else that I didn't recognize. I've stopped asking questions other than "这是蜡的吗?" ("Is this spicy?") While we were eating, Candy kept pointing out which dumplings I made... it was obvious cause mine were more often than not a lil bit misshapen...

We sat around and talked a while after lunch, and then headed back to where the bus back here was. I got on the bus and got a phone call from another friend of mine, Jessie, who wanted to know if I wanted to go swimming... whiiich I obviously did :) Dumplings and swimming in one day? Definitely a win. So I made it back to the hotel and met Jessie to go to the pool, which is on the campus of another university nearby. From my university it is three stops on the bus and a ten minute walk on the campus of the university. It does cost a little less than $2 USD to swim, which relative to everything else I do here is a little expensive, but hey... its a pool, and I will swim in it. As an added bonus... it's olympic size! For those who don't know the difference, I have swum in three olympic-size pools in my life, this being the fourth... there isn't a 50-meter pool in the state of Maine. This pool is twice the length of any pool in the state back home :) I got in about 2000 meters, and I am now a happy panda. The water wasn't too sketchy either. I used a little chinese while I was there, a couple people tried to ask me questions like where I'm from, if I was a student, etc... two people asked me if I could teach them to swim...

I'm still lacking confidence in my speaking ability, but I think I'm doing a good job listening. Listening and understanding is really difficult, since most Chinese speak really fast. If I can pick up on the subject of a conversation, that's a plus. The girls I work with are helping me out a lot too... Kelly and I will have a conversation where she speaks english and I answer her in chinese. I've still got a loooot of work to do there though...

Hey look! I wrote a book of a post.

the rain in china...

this will be a quick one, maybe i'll have time for a longer post tomorrow...

this morning i was supposed to go to one of the teacher's house downtown to learn to make dumplings with her and her mother (!). then i was awoken at 6am to the sound of some rather loud thunder. i went back to sleep, woke up two hours later to more of the same loud thunder. it rained, and hailed, and winded for a good five hours... and the underpass next to my hotel flooded with a truck stalled in the middle of it, the water was up to its windshield. i spent a good amount of time this morning watching the city busses trying to go through it. i felt bad for the people on the busses, they must have been getting soaking wet. for the most part traffic wasn't moving, so i didn't get to go downtown.

BUT

i did walk to the grocery store at lunchtime when the rain and hail and lightnings had ceased... and i found peanut butter :)

this is getting old

So all week I've been looking forward to tomorrow, which is when the university told me I would be able to move into my own apartment. Today they tell me that I can't. Nobody seems to have an exact date as to when I can move, and I'm starting to get really upset about it. Apparently they're waiting for the furtiture to arrive, which is a really important thing I understand, but come on. They've known I was coming for months, and I still don't have a place to live. It's a brand new building, which is nice, but they should have had this taken care of either before I got here or at least within a few days. All I want is a space that is really mine, not a stupid hotel room where I can't unpack my bags. Its already going to be hard enough to shove everything abck into those two bags to move. That and I have been putting off going to the grocery store all week thinking it would be smarter to go after I move (whatever I buy I'll have to carry with me when I move....)

AAARGH

Busses galore

So over the summer I ran into Sarah Clark, a girl I went to HS with, on a boat back from Chebeague. To make a long story short, we did the obligatory 'so what are you doing' conversation you have with everyone you see from high school you're not close friends with, and it turned out she had a friend who was also moving to Harbin, China to teach english. We found each other's email through facebook, and said we'd meet up once we got here. So last night I called Charlie and this morning I headed downtown again to meet up with him for lunch.

First of all, the busses here are so cheap. It costs me less than fifty cents go get all the way downtown, about a 20 minute ride. Inside the city, or if I stay in this district, its only 1 yuan, like 14 cents. So I am determined to use the busses and not cabs whenever I can (cabs have a starting fare of a little over a dollar US... sounds like not much but when you're here that's a lot). I got a map of the city at a bookstore last week, but it has a street map on one side and a bus map on the other. The street map doesn't show the busses, and the bus map doesn't reall show the streets. I was supposed to meet Charlie at HaGongDa, the Harbin Institute of Technology. He did a summer program there last year and kinda knows the area.

Before i left the hotel I figured out which bus should get me there, and it only required one transfer, wight when I got into the city. Problem was, I watched that bus drive past me twice, without stopping where i was standing beneath its number. The third time it went by I decided this was going to take a while, and I caved and grabbed a cab to meet Charlie before the sun went down.

We went to a place I had read about online as being a hangout for westerners, a place that had actual sandwiches. This is a big deal. Chinese people don't eat sandwiches. Harbin is one of the few places you can really find good bread, and thst's only cause of Russia. I had a BLT, and it was grrreat. Even after a week, I was really craving a sammich. And I had an iced lemonade, also dericious. These are the things that now make me wicked excited. Bread and lemonade. Oh dear.

After we ate and discussed how many 'Oh my god,I'm in China' moments we have every day, we walked around the hagongda campus, which is really pretty with willow trees lining the streets and such. Now I know where there is a big grocery store (something like a French Walmart Charlie said, I can't remember the name though), and I've been told there is in fact peanut butter in the city. Also exciting.

I was dead set on finding the bus back to where I came from. I had my map, and Charlie wandered a bit with me while we tried to fnid number 84. There were about 6 other numbers going by in different directions, but we couldn't find it. Once we realized we had the wrong street, I finally found it sort of on a strip of sidewalk in the middle of the road... I obviously should've checked the middle of the road first. I got on the bus (right direction!) and eventually made it back to my hotel. Good job me.

Also, the season of Lost I bought the other day didn't work on my laptop (a small risk you run but it cost me a dollar so no big deal), so Charlie took me back to the DVD place I went the other day. However, he took me past where I had been buying the DVDs and into a room covered wall to wall in DVD heaven. I found lost on a better quality disc, slightly more expensive but worth it. Then on the way out I had a little deja vu, and on the way down a hallway to the cash register I realized, this was the awesome DVD store we had been to two years ago! So for Kim and anyone else who was on that trip, I did in fact find it again :)

Tomorrow I have to go for my health exam so I can get my residence permit so I don't get kicked out of China and into Mongolia or whatnot. I had a health exam in the states but apparently that wasn't good enough for the communists. Ah well. Silly China.

Ta ta!

First day of class!

I did it! I successfully (I think) made it through my first classes. It wasn't without panic though...

When I walked into the first class, everyone stood up and clapped. I was a lil intimidated... but I recovered. Sure does make you feel good about yourself when you get applauded for entering a room the day after multiple people tell you look like Jennifer Aniston ('You look like Rachel!! From Friends!!... I kid you not. Is that like all white people thinking asians look the same?)...

So I had icebreakers for the students to do, both introducing themselves and introducing their classmates, stuff for me to get to know their names and for them to become comfortable speaking in fromt of the class. Some of them were pretty shy but I got them all to do it. Their english is good in that they can read and write, but in general speaking is the hardest part for Chinese people studying english. After about 35 minutes I was looking good to end the class in ten minutes like I planned, and I was having them ask me questions about Amercia and 'my hometown' and such. Then the bell rang, and I told them I would see them next week, and they kindly informed me that no, this was actually a five-minute halfway break in the class.

I wasn't quiiite expecting that.

So I stalled for 45 minutes. It actually went pretty well, considering. I asked them to tell me words that they knew they had trouble pronouncing ('orange' among them...) and we practiced making the sounds. They actually catch on pretty quickly, I was excited. I managed to keep that interesting for the whole of the 45 minutes, even though sometimes I had to stare back at them like they were staring at me (It was really funny, they were all really nervous and just sat there grinning at me).

The second class I was waaay more prepared for the whole hour and a half thing, and stretched the icrbreakers out a little more and had some examples of hard stuff to say. In both classes, they asked me to sing. I was mortified, as anyone who has ever asked me to sing knows. I told them I didn't want to, and that I wouldn't know what to sing even if I did, and they told me I should sing 'My Heart Will Go On'. Like, from Titanic. I was afraid of rebellion the way they were clapping and yelling... so I did it. Definitely one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. and it happened TWICE. Independently. Nobody from the first class was in the second, and they both came up with the same song. You all are lucky I even chose to write that part down.

Anyway, I lived. It was fun. The students are really nice and once they get over being shy, I can understand most of them. These were sophomores, so I didn't have to give anyone an english name, but with the freshmen i probably will. So, its entirely possble that I may name a chinese student after you if you are reading this. Consider yourself warned. That being said, one of the sophomores told me her english name was Jelly. I had to ask her to spell it cause I thought I herd her wrong. Nope, J-e-l-l-y she said. Fair enough.

I'm going to go study me some Chinese methinks. I'm pretty sure I don't have class again until next Wednesday, since most of my classesare freshmen and they don't start until the 15th of September. Yay free time.

uncalled for

i just saw a guy in a jeter jersey. is there no escape?!

ADDRESSES

I haven't moved yet, but I do have my mailing address for anyone who wants to send stuff. I would recommend printing out the chinese version and sticking it on the envelope since it will get here faster... but make sure you write 'china' on it so it makes it out of the US...

中国人民共和国
黑龙江省
哈尔滨市利民开发区 150025
学院路时代大街1号
Kellie Joyce

The romanized version:

No. 1 Shidai Street, Xueyuan Road
LiMin Development Zone
Harbin City 150025
People's Republic of China

The Chinese do things backwards... the character version actually goes from the biggest descriptor to the smellest... the first line is China, the second is Heilongjiang province, then Harbin city, and the road I'm on. Kinda the opposite of what we do, where we put the person first, then the address, city, state, country, universe, etc. I'm not sure how well the romanized version would work, it may be better to just print out that first one.

In case anyone is feeling really ambitious, my chinese cellphone number is 011-86-15084676147. Thats a lot of numbers. That's how it would be dialed from the US, it inclused the country code. I don't recommend calling me unless you have a reeeally good reason though, since its a lil bit costly to call China. Unless you're in China. Which you're not, unless you're Sproffee :)

Also, my new non-drew email is kejoyce19@yahoo.com. Feel free to say 'lo, sometimes I get homesick.

Tomorrow I have my first four classes... it's going to be an interesting time, that I can guarantee...

PS the low temperature for tonight is supposed to be 46F... I think I've found heaven!

I saw white people!

So I'm at the university in one of the english department offices. Outside it's about 75 degrees out and there are people EVERYWHERE. Today is the first day all the students are on campus. It is like going to college in ths US, most people have their parents with them and are moving all sorts of stuff into the dorms. It's a madhouse. In the last ten minutes I've heard a chinese pop song, n'sync's bye bye bye, backstreet boys' larger than life, and that annoying song about a tattoo, all played over the loudspeakers outside. Apparently China never left the boyband scene behind...

Yesterday I ventured out on my own to downtown Harbin. It was overcast and sprinkly when I left but I had high hopes it wouldn't rain on me. I took the local bus to its final destination, about a half an hour away in the downtown area. Downtown Harbin is pretty big, there really isn't one major central point. On the way we went through a more rural area once we turned off university street (where my school is). I need to find a map of the city because I'm still not sure geographically where I am in relation to the city I know I'm to the north, because we crossed the river, but that's about it.

There's a big river that runs along the northern part of downtown, the Songhua river. Last time I was in Harbin, June of 2006, there was juuust a trickle of water running through, and there were people selling stuff and flying kites all ove rthe riverbed. August is generally wetter, and this time there was plenty of water. In November of 2005 there was an explosion of a chemical plant that sent a slick of benzene down the river, including the center of Harbin. Benzene isn't good to drink. Ever. Since the city gets a lot of its water from the Songhua, they had to shut down the water to the city for four days. Eew. Yesterday I saw a couple people using nets to fish in the river. Thaaat makes me mildly uncomfortable.

So I made it on the bis downtown, and luckily remembered to note the name of the bus stop so I might have some chance of getting back there. I took a cab to Heilongjiang Institute of Technology, pretty much the biggest university in the city. I was going off a tip from my friend Charlie that there was a big place to buy DVDs in the basement of an electronics place across the street. I found it and bought some lost and the office. Score one for me. The cab driver on the way there kept talking to me. I understood very little of what he said, but I tried really hard. I answered a few of his questions, but the rest of the time just smiled and nodded. I've got a lot of work to do with this language thing.

Then I took a cab to Zhongyang Dajie, which is the major touristy-esque street in Harbin. In 2006 the DIS stayed at a hotel on that street, and I was excited to recognize where I was even a little bit. I was even more excited to eat stuff on a stick outside the hotel, since that's pretty much how we lived while we were here. I think mine was chicken on the stick. I saw some squid on a stick, but I wasnt feeling quiiite that adventurous just yet. I saw five white people there! Just in passing though. And one chinese guy asked me, in russian, if I was russian. I think I answered him with the funny look on my face. Oops. Then I walked down to the river at the end of the street, and where they have a monument to the people who saved the city from flooding a couple times. Then I went for a leisurely stroll along the riverbank in Stalin Park. Enough said.

Then it started to rain. I ducked into a building where the second and third floors are a Walmart (they're everywhere- this is the same Walmart I helped Kim buy a new digital camera at a couple years ago!), and bought a shiny purple umbrella. I had been told the bus number that would take me back to the bus I needed from Zhongyang Dajie, and after wandering up and down the street a bit I found the right one, and the right direction. It was raining a lot harder when I got off at the stop where my bus was, and I couldn't find the stop to get on it. Since it was the end of the line, the place to get on wasn't exactly where I got off. Not even just across the street. Then the skies opened, the intersections flooded, and I was a wet panda. I stepped in a puddle up to my ankles, I'll probably get SARS. Oh well. I eventually spied one of the busses and followed it until it stopped for people to get on, and I made it safely back to the hotel just in time to get my bag! Now I have my cellphone charger and my pants and my sneakers and I'm wicked happy about that.

Today I have to go pick out a book for my classes. I thought they had one for me, as did Kelly, unti today when we went to get it and they told us I had to find one. So we're going back downtown to a bookstore to find a book. This time I won't be alone, and it's not raining. Huzzah. Maybe I'll try that squid on a stick...