Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Like a Can of Sardines

Chongqing province has one of highest population densities in the world (350.1 people per square km) and has a population of about 30 million people.  The city of Chonqing has a population density of about 380 people per square km.  This high density is caused by the fertile (many farmers) and mountainous terrain of the area.  This is a huge difference from the small population density of my home in Ashland County (about 26 people per square km).    

Southwest University is a very large university.  Its’ student population is about fifty thousand undergraduate students and about fifty thousand graduate students and it takes me about forty five minutes to walk from one end of campus to the other.  I teach in a building (teaching building #8) that is near the center of campus and it takes me about thirty minutes to walk there so I ride a campus shuttle every morning to get there.  The shuttles are very convenient because they only cost one Yuan to get on and get to your destination.  However, since the drivers don’t pay much attention to safety, they tend to pack as many people as they can on the shuttle (like a mobilized can of sardines). 

Every morning I walk from my apartment to the bus stop at Gate Six and then wait for the shuttles.  Almost as soon as the shuttles arrive, a large group of grandmothers and grandchildren suddenly appear and jump on to the shuttle before paying.  I always get so frustrated when this happens.  I arrive early and stand in line (what I think is a line) so I can pay and then get on the shuttle.  Lines are kind of a myth in China; more a mob style of organization is used instead of lines.  Sometimes I get so mad I picture myself grabbing some of the grandmothers and grandchildren and then throwing them out of the shuttle so I can sit in a seat that I waited and paid for (don’t worry I said “pictured” myself doing).  Sometimes it doesn’t matter if I get a seat because I will end up having someone sit on my lap anyway.  These shuttles have fourteen seats (driver’s seat included) so there should be no more than thirteen passengers right?  Wrong!  Remember when I said that the drivers don’t pay much attention to safety?  One morning I can remember a very industrious driver packing twenty seven passengers onto the shuttle.  That morning I was sitting on my friend Ryan’s lap (and he is a big guy) and my head was cocked to the side to avoid hitting my head on the roof of the shuttle.  Also I remember seeing many faces of amazement from many passing by students while we rode the shuttle to class that morning.  This is the kind of life I have to get used to.

I am amazed with how people in Chongqing are so accustomed to living in an area with such a high population density.  Heck I am amazed that all of China is accustomed to living like this (not like they have a choice though).  It’s packed like a can of sardines over here.  

Friday, October 7, 2011

National Holiday

Sometimes when you make plans they don’t completely go to plan and sometimes nothing goes to plan.  When I tried going on a trip to Chengdu China to celebrate the National holiday, nothing went to plan.
Our misfortunes began when we tried to book a hotel through Hostel World (which I would not suggest).  We booked two twin suites at the Inn Barsby Hotel in the downtown area of Chengdu and had to pay a ten percent reservation fee of thirty dollars.  The next day we purchased our train tickets in downtown Beibei.  Unfortunately we were not able to buy tickets to arrive on the day that we were supposed to check in at the Inn Barsby Hotel.  This didn’t seem like too big of a problem until I realized that I couldn’t contact the hotel by phone or email.  So we were just going to have to show up and try to explain the situation at the check-in desk.  We left for Chendu on a Monday morning train from Chongqing, so we had to take a bus from Beibei to Chongqing. 
We arrived in Chengdu East Train Station and only had a vague idea on how to get to the hotel, which was all the way over on the west side of the city.  So we just took an hour long bus ride from the train station to the bus station.  When we got there we were lost, other than knowing that we were on the west side of the city.  Fortunately we met some very nice Chinese girls who wanted to take pictures with us and helped us buy a map and flag down a taxi to take us to the Inn Barsby Hotel.  When we arrived to the hotel, the manager at the check in desk told us that they no longer do bookings through Hostel World so we had no reservation.  This is where the stress really set in.  We were in Chengdu and had no place to stay and could speak very limited Chinese.  Two blocks away from the Inn Barsby Hotel we found another hotel that had rooms for us to stay in.  After looking at the rooms (show rooms) we decided that we should stay there because we probably didn’t really have any other choice.  We paid for two rooms (150RMB per person per night). 
When Ryan and I opened the door to our room and the intense smell of sewage hit our nostrils.  When we stepped in the room, we heard the sound of a gush of water draining through a pipe in the wall.  When we began investigating the room we realized what the smell was.  It really was sewage.  We deduced from the smell and the brown stains on the wall paper and the sound from the pipe that the main sewage vain ran through the wall next to our room and that it must have burst sometime in the near past.  We had not choice though, there wasn’t really any other hotels that we could stay at, we just had to endure.  At this point everyone was very stressed out and needed time alone to calm down and think.  We decided that the next day we would take a train back to Beibei. 
Now our trip to Chengdu wasn’t a total loss.  That evening after everyone had calmed down we met up with a Chinese friend of mine and Matt’s to go eat hot pot (famous Sichuan/Chongqing meal) and then go to the bars with her and her friends.  Hot pot was delicious and the bars were a blast.  We went to a bar called SoHo Bar in the southern part of the city.  Immediately after entering the bar we heard the sound of country being sung live by one of the employees of the bar.  He was also playing and acoustic guitar while he sung.  His performance was better than most I have seen in the US.  Also there was a female singer who looked a lot like Lady Gaga and sang just like her.  Things got a little crazy at the club.  At one point I was dragged up on the dance stage by a Chinese girl to dance, though I did jump off after a short while.  Towards the end of our stay I was invited to drink beer with some more Chinese people (I painfully drank the bottle of Budweiser they offered me).  We stayed out at the bars till about 3:30 in the morning. 
The next morning was very ruff waking up.  We quickly ate breakfast and then flagged down a taxi to take us to the East Train Station.  There, we exchanged our old tickets to get new ones so we could leave that day.  Eventually we arrived back to our apartments in Beibei. 
I definitely learned quite a bit from this disastrous trip to Chengdu.  Don’t go traveling during the Chinese National Holiday.

Recording

Once again I have been involved with teaching English to junior high school students.  But this time I did not stand in front of the room and give a lecture.  Remember when I told the story about my “Guanxi” experience when I first arrived in Beibei?  Well because of that little adventure, I was given the opportunity to do some voice recording.  Students at a junior high school in the Beibei will be learning English in their classrooms to Diana’s (another English teacher from CSBSJU) voice and my voice.  The recording took about five hours total and we were able to record forty lessons in total (five tapes worth).

When we arrived at the studio on a Saturday and we pretty much immediately got to work.  I grabbed a cup of hot green tea to keep my mouth from drying out and then sat down in the recording room right in front of a microphone.  Reading in front of the microphone was very easy; I just had to speak slowly, clearly, and with emotion (try to make it sound more natural).  I did make a few mistakes every once and a while but overall I did a pretty good job I think.  At the end of the first day of recording we had finished twenty five of the lessons.  The next day we finished up the recording and experienced nothing new. 
When we finished the recording, I was finally able to listen to my voice; I don’t think anybody likes the sound of their own voice.  My voice sounds completely different when I am listening to it than when I am speaking.  But if the teachers at the junior high school thought that the sound of my voice was good enough that means my voice must be just fine.  Overall I had a very fun time and I was told that I might have the opportunity to do some more recording in future.  I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

A Face of History


Whenever I walk around Beibei I see people of all shapes, sizes, financial back rounds, ages, etc.  You can learn a lot about a person just by looking at their appearance.  There are the simple traits that can tell you a lot about a person’s financial back ground such as how well they dress themselves or how nice their smile is.  Other traits can tell you about a person’s lifestyle such as the types of shoes they wear or how fit they look.  But the traits that I find most fascinating in China are the traits that distinguish a person’s age.  These traits allow you to ask yourself, “When did you come from?”  The Chinese people that are my age all look healthy and tall, they have nice smiles (and white teeth if they don’t smoke), and nice skin.  When you look at the older generations you see a slight decline healthy appearance.  And finally when you look at the old people in the population, you can see that they have come from a completely different era.  Most of them are very short, have many missing teeth (and what teeth they have left aren’t pretty), still wear uniform style clothing (communist issue), and have true grit mentalities.    

One day when I was walking to eat dinner to one of my favorite restaurants I passed a little old woman carrying her sleeping granddaughter. What I saw seemed very odd to me.  The old woman had to be no taller than 4ft 8inches or so and was carrying her granddaughter who was about two thirds her size.  At first I thought to myself, “That child seems to be too old to be carried like that”.  But then after thinking about it a little bit more I realized that the child was still very young and the grandmother was just so small.  Just seeing this simple situation made me start comparing the life of the grandmother to the life of the granddaughter’s.

The old people of China have survived a part of Chinese history that has experienced a lot of war, famine and political hardships. They would not be here today if they were not as tough as nails.  This grandmother looked like she was malnourished during times of her life (her small build) and she was still carrying her granddaughter who was in comparison to size, big (hard working grandmother).  Then I looked at life from the granddaughter’s point of view and saw that she came from a completely new/modern era.  She is a probably a single child and gets spoiled by her family (hence why she is being carried) and malnourishment is certainly not a problem for her because she physically looks very healthy.  I have just compared the old China with the new China.

I enjoy being able to see how the quality of life has rapidly changed in China from generation to generation just by comparing the faces of the old (old China) with the new (new China).  Rapid change has occurred since the Communists came to power in 1949 and even more so since the time of Deng Xiaoping (Chairman of China from 1978-1992).  Where else in the world can you see a picture (such as the one that I am trying to paint for you) that shows you how standard of living has rapidly changed and developed? You have to hand it to China for being able to do that.