Hello all,

So much for my resolve to write frequent short updates instead of infrequent, long ones. It is already in the second half of January and I haven’t sent out an update since September.  Aaacck, how time does fly. I will recap these last few months and dip into some details when the stories seem interesting.

Bike Blues

My bike got stolen the second week of September, but that was okay because I had already grown to really loath that bike in just the short time I had had it (I have never disliked a bike before -- I didn't know it was possible) and so perhaps I wished it away. David was also not fond of (an understatement) the bike he bought on our first weekend here. So the afternoon after my bike went walkabout we went bike shopping. This time we headed downtown to find some higher quality bikes and also potentially ones that were bigger to handle our
long legs.
 
Getting Home is Half the Fun

We did get new bikes, and I was amazed at how nice it felt to ride my new bike compared to my missing bike. Then we faced an unexpected problem, how to get the two bikes home. The university is at the edge of the city and we didn't know the lay of the land yet and had no city map even, so riding home wasn't a realistic option. We had thought we could just hail a taxi and put the bikes in the trunk riding with them hanging out the back. But, as it turns out, Wuxi police don't like that and so the cabs wouldn't take us (at least during the late afternoon when the police were out in full force). Fortunately for us we were with our friend and official liaison, Jeremy, and he made calls to some friends and arranged a ride for us in a friend's van. The only catch was the vehicle wouldn't be available until 8pm. So we hung out with Jeremy and took him and his friend, Kevin (whose fiancée was going to be supplying the van) out to dinner. Jeremy had a date after dinner and had to go, but Kevin hung out with us and helped us buy a couple of Wuxi maps. Then his girlfriend came with a van and, with much arranging, we got both bikes in the van. There were no back seats free for sitting with the odd angles the bikes were at, but David and I managed to maneuver ourselves into the back around the front end of one of the bikes. I think we amused our new friends with this. I was looking out the back window through the spokes of a front wheel. But you know, I have had much less comfortable bus rides in China than this half hour ride was.

Suzhou Excursion

In October had a weekend trip to Suzhou, which is only a 30 minute train ride from here. It is famous for its traditional gardens, and given that it is just an hour or so from Shanghai, it gets lots of tour groups through it. We had a nice weekend away from home. We travelled with our across the hall neighbours, Gary and HanHan, and met up with a half dozen of their friends in Suzhou. We took GouGou with us and had to trouble at all taking her on the train to go to Suzhou. We had a cloth bag that we carried her in and, even though we had to stand the whole way there, we had no troubles. It turns out that the gardens themselves wouldn't let a dog in, bag or no, but as David wasn't that interested in going into the gardens anyhow, that wasn't a big problem. He walked around with the dog through the vendors outside the garden while I went in and took pictures.

GouGou Run and Pizza

We did find a nice stretch of park along a canal where we could run GouGou off leash for a while. That was fun for all. On Saturday night we left GouGou in the hotel while we went out for dinner. She was so tired from a day of walking that I don't even think she noticed us leaving. It was pizza for dinner -- and I must say, the best pizza I have had in China. I am told that Papa John's imports all of the ingredients (and charges accordingly) so it's not surprising they get it to taste like pizza.

The Fine Art of Ducking

After dinner David and I went on a canal cruise. We arrived at the cruise office at 8:30, and except for a couple of staff who completely ignored us, the place was deserted. It didn't bode well. However, it turns out that a tour had just left, so all of the customers were on the boat. Within five minutes others had begun to arrive so it didn't seem so twilight zone abandoned. There was a fellow who took out a Pipa (Chinese, lute-like stringed instrument) and played in the waiting room which was an unexpected delight. The cruise itself was very nice. Lots of buildings on the canal shores were nicely lit, as were the bridges. Our boat had an upper deck where you could sit in the open air. That was very nice. Until we approached a bridge and then the staff were all in a frenzy to make sure that everyone ducked. You just had to make sure to get your head down below the railing when going under a few of the bridges. I swear there was no more than six inches of clearance above the rails. It was duck or die, literally. Kind of added an element of danger to the tour.

Bag ‘o Dog

On Sunday we bought a gym bag to carry GouGou in. It was a better shape than the cloth bag for her to lie down, sit or stand in. She looks very cute with just her head poking through the zippered opening at the top. She settled into the bag very nicely.

No Dogs Allowed

At the train station to go back to Wuxi I had three different train station staff try to keep me from bringing GouGou into the train station, saying (in Chinese) no dogs allowed. There were no posted signs to this effect though and we just played the dumb foreigner card and ignored them. In the line at the ticket gate David was a little concerned that they may have put guards there to catch our puppy, so we pushed GouGou's head down into the bag and zipped it up. Other than a bit of independent movement in the bag you couldn't tell we were bringing contraband dog onto the train. We unzipped again on the train where she was a hit with the other passengers. A surly food vendor tried to tell us to take her to the washrooms for travelling but again we played dumb and didn't move. It's not like she was going to pee on the train car floor (while in her bag, yeah right) like a Chinese child might, or spit on the floor, or smoke, or throw sunflower seed shells all over. I don't see how she was even half as messy as some human train passengers. Ah, well, there is no logic to most bureaucratic rules.

We had a nice weekend overall and were pleased with how well GouGou traveled. And the Doggie Gym bag has worked out great.

Directing the Bus

One day I had a laugh at David's boldness. There is always a push to get on the buses in front of the University as there are so many students. So David and I were in the clump with the students as the bus was approaching -- there were about fifty students stretched out over 20 meters, no one quite sure where the
bus would stop. So David took a half step into the road and waved at the driver, then held out his arm to show the driver where he wanted the bus to stop. The bus was still 50 m away when David did this and as soon as the driver saw him he gunned the motor to get to David's spot faster and pulled up right in front of us. We were in the first 4 people onto the bus. Gotta love David's sense of fun

No Puppies for Our Puppy

At the end of October last year we took GouGou in to be spayed. It was hard to see her go unconscious with her eyes open -- too much like death. She survived the operation fine though and even survived the indignity of having one of those granny collars oh her to keep her from going at the stitches. We had to take her back to the vet for the 2 days after the operation so that they could run an IV drip on her for an hour each day. I have a picture of her getting IV’d up on my flickr site (http://www.flickr.com/photos/canadiandragon/)   though you will have to go back a couple of pages to get to it now). We even had to make little makeshift booties for her to keep her from scratching the stitches too. She was so excited to be free of the collar and booties and able to run and jump and play fetch again when things were all healed up.
 
Boat Tour

We had a wonderful school sponsored outing one Sunday in November -- a boat tour of Tai Hu Lake. It was a bit smoggy that day so we didn't see that much on the lake, but the canals we took to get to and from the lake were very interesting. There is a huge amount of barge traffic here and it was very interesting to get closer to the barges at work. They certainly fill them up. Some were right on the water line, with water slopping up onto the deck. Almost all of the foreign teachers and many of the Chinese foreign language teachers were on the trip so we got in lots of visiting on the boat, and David played a whole raft of xiang qi games against many different opponents. He was a happy camper.

You Are What You Eat

Sometime in November David and I began to get serious about eating a leaner diet (everything is cooked in a ton of oil here it seems) and so we started doing all of our own cooking from Sunday to Friday (Saturday is still a cheater day). We are sharing the cooking duties. Mondays were my days off and David's busiest day with three 2 hour classes, so I cooked both lunch and dinner that day. Wednesday was the reverse with David having the day off and me in 6 hours of teaching so he cooked that day. Tuesday's I had no morning classes so I made lunch, and David made dinner as I had a class until 5pm. The other days were more up for grabs, but it has been working out great. Whoever doesn’t cook does the dishes. We’ve been eating really tasty and healthy dishes now -- lots of vegetables (fresh from the farmer's market mostly), lean meats, and whole grains (we have found some brown rice which is great and our rice cooker handles it just fine). I think we have both been losing weight, and we are certainly feeling better with this diet.
 
Close Encounters

We have been adopted by a small on-campus DVD rental/cafe company. We call it the Flying Club (The actual name is the United Flying Organization -- UFO). They asked us if we could hang out there as they felt it would increase their business to have foreigners around. They offered enticements like free coffee/tea and no charge on movie rentals. We were a bit dubious at first, but we have found it a great place to hang out. They are all university age, students or former student, and great folks. They have been very friendly and we feel at home there. We play xiang qi and visit, and more important, have a chance to practice our Chinese when our new friends are around. Though some of them speak fairly good English (and want to practice it) they are very willing to talk to us in Chinese and help us in our learning. They also talk to each other in Chinese when we are around and that is also very helpful. What started as a business arrangement on their part seems to have developed into friendships.

Judge, Jury and Elocutioners

David and I were judges at a speech contest on campus back in November. I never feel good about judging, I don't feel I am really able to be fair. Some contestants I could hear better than others due to the sound system and people talking in the audience. Fortunately, we were just 2 of 8 judges. What was interesting was that the students didn't have preset speeches. It was really an improve speech contest. The first round had two of the contestants acting out a scenario that they had had 5 minutes to prepare. The second round (between the survivors of the first round) had each contestant shown a tongue twister for 2 minutes before they had to recite it (not from memory at least). Some of these were much harder than others which hardly seemed fair to the contestants. The last round was a individual speech about a topic the student had had 4 or 5 minutes to prepare followed by a couple of questions from 'question masters' among the judges. And as 'honoured foreign teacher judges' you can bet that we got to be question masters whether we wanted to or not.

Entertaining Chaos

It was a bit chaotic. Initially there were no numbers on the contestants so we had trouble knowing who was who in the first section when they worked in pairs. Then they pinned number on the contestants, but usually the number was faced away from the judges once the contestants were on stage, and the numbers weren't very dark so were hard to read even from the front row where we were. We got it all sorted out eventually. The organizers had done a good job of setting up filler bits of entertainment during breaks when they needed to add up scores or let contestants prepare. I was impressed with the overall quality of the singing, accordion playing, yoga demo that filled those times.

Cornering English Learning

We went to a lot of English Corner this past term. These are events designed to give interested students a chance to practice their English. Usually there is a topic for discussion and the event goes for 1.5 to 2 hours. There seem to be at least 4 different groups who are hosting these on this campus so some weekends we have participated in as many as three different ones. It is a nice way to get to know students.

Big Buddha

I saw the biggest Buddha in the world back in November. There was a conference her about small and medium sized businesses and the Monday after the conference there was a tour day organized for the conference participants. As we had been invited to the conference we were also welcome on the tour. And lucky, me, I have no classes on Mondays. So while David was teaching I got to go on a tour of a solar panel factory and the industrial section of Wuxi in the morning and a tour out to the Lingshan Buddha – at 250 feet it stands 100 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty according to its press – in the afternoon. This Lingshan Buddha is part of a fairly new and growing phenomenon in China, tourist destinations. As there is a rising middle and upper class, people with money who want to travel and see things within their own country, things are being built specifically as tourist attractions. This Lingshan Buddha complex was only completed in the late 1990s and includes many displays and a fountain show that goes 4 times daily – in addition to the big man himself – all built around a Buddha theme. If you want to see for yourself check my flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/canadiandragon/


Nanxun and Mudu

This school has been treating us really, really well. The last weekend in November we went on a school-sponsored trip to Nanxun (an ancient Chinese city that is part of Huzhou in Zhejiang province just south of here), Mudu (a part of Suzhou), and Tianping mountain (also in Suzhou). It was a great weekend. Particularly nice as the school paid for everything, the bus, the hotel Saturday night, all of the meals and the entrance fees for the sights. There were about a dozen people on the trip so there was lots of room on the bus too. We brought GouGou along and she was a hit with everyone. By Sunday morning people were taking turns walking her. I think that her favourite part was the mountain -- she is quite the climber. We went on a canal boat tour of Nanxun which was very nice too. That was probably David's favorite part. I think I enjoyed taking photos of everything (and some of these can be seen on my flickr site http://www.flickr.com/photos/canadiandragon/)

Sheng Dan Kuai Le

Which translates as Christmas Happy (Literally "Born God Happy" DJS). We had a much more active Christmas than I had been expecting. We had had to pass on an invitation to join Gary and HanHan in visiting their friends for the holidays due to our teaching schedules so we had thought we would have a quiet time at home around Christmas. Well we had close to week of Christmas celebrations beginning the Wednesday before Christmas when Al and Alice (a couple of Canadians working for Lambden College) hosted a Christmas party that most of the foreign teachers came to.

Christmas Friday

Then we had Gary and Hanhan drop by for a Christmas visit Thursday night. On Friday afternoon we went to the Christmas party that the Foreign Affairs department sponsored for the foreign teachers. This included a show full of Beijing Opera performances and David and I close to the end performing a Huron Carol (the only Canadian Christmas carol I know of). Friday evening we joined Gary and Hanhan at a dinner and Christmas party put on by some of Gary’s students at a hotel downtown.

Christmas Saturday

Then Saturday night we went to the Christmas party of one of the English Corners we frequent. We had to duck out of that early though to attend the Christmas party of the Foreign Languages Department wherein many of our students were performing.

Christmas Sunday

We opened out Christmas presents Sunday morning (as Christmas day David had 6 hours of teaching) and had our Christmas dinner for lunch (mashed potatoes and gravy, Caesar salad, veggies, buns and a chicken stuffed with rice dressing – yum, yum). Then, on Sunday night we had a Christmas eve dinner at TGIFridays downtown, treated by the foreign affairs department – we had very Western style ribs. Whew. And Christmas spread out as well due to the postal service and we got to open presents all over again when a package arrived for us from my family in Canada. There was even a present for GouGou. It was a wonderful holiday season.

TV Judging

The first Friday afternoon in January David and I were judges at another English speaking contest. This one was televised so we had to go down to a TV studio for the judging. It is pretty amazing how well these high school students speak English! We even got a stipend for our work and they took all of the judges (there were seven or eight altogether, though we were the only native English speaking judges) out for a wonderful feast afterwards. We had a good time and met some very interesting Chinese English educators.

Shanghaied

The first weekend of the new year we went to Shanghai for the weekend. We left on Saturday morning. It is less than 2 hours by train so we were into our hotel before noon. We walked around a lot, checking out Nanjing Road (a large shopping street which becomes a pedestrian mall), the Bund (the boardwalk waterfront
area) and a street which had lots of music stores on it. David has a couple of new toys now -- a large Pipa (he has been dying to learn to play one since that player in Suzhou), and an electric violin. I was more restrained in my purchases and just got a DVD on playing the mandolin (which I have even begun to use -- I already have too many instruments I am learning to play and don't need yet more. Besides, with David getting so many I have no lack of things to play with.

Einstein’s Hotel

In Shanghai we stayed in Albert Einstein’s hotel, well, at least the hotel where he had stayed in 1922. Pretty cool, eh? Ulysses S. Grant, Bertrand Russell and Charlie Chaplin had also stayed at this hotel (the Astor Hotel). I wonder if we were in the same room as any of them had slept in?

Cirque de Chine

On Saturday night we went to a permanent acrobatics show called ERA. It was a wonderful mix of Chinese acrobatics, magic and show with lots of great lighting and sound effects. The staging was quite wonderful and we had great (albeit not cheap) seats in the centre. There were acrobats tumbling through stacked hoops, trampoline artists, a number of aerial acts, a group of five contortionist balancers who did amazing things stacked on each other and the most remarkable fellow who managed to use his foot to toss porcelain bowls onto his head -- up to four bowls at a time, while balanced on a board rolling on a cylinder. There was lots of nice staging and lighting effects inspired by Cirque de Soliel, but many had a Chinese feel to them.

Gerbils on Speed

The show ended with a motor cycle in a globe cage act – the motorcycle drives in a circle around the inside of the globe in all directions, parallel to the ground and doing loop de loops. Then they added a second motor cycle to the mix inside the globe. They chased each other about and I was most amused at the addition of honks in the music (those honks never got old for me). Then they added a third motorcycle, and a fourth and a fifth!! Now this was not a huge globe; there couldn't have been more than a foot or two between each of the
motorcycles as they were whizzing around the globe parallel to the ground. Then they let in three more motorcycles and had two parallel circles of cycles whizzing around parallel to each other and the ground. What a way to earn a living.

Cruising

On Sunday we spent the afternoon on the river, cruising up the Huangpu to where it meets the mouth of the Chang Jiang (or Yangtze river). There certainly is a lot of sea trade going out of Shanghai. We saw a lot of sea worthy ships docked in various stages of loading and unloading. It was a very nice and relaxing way to see a bit more of the city.

We left GouGou at home for this trip and had Gary and HanHan looking after her. She was pretty glad to see us when we got in Sunday night.

Classes

My classes this term went well. We turned down an offer of extra teaching work and I am glad not to have had the extra time crunch. I am enjoyed the fairly relaxed pace we had. I really enjoyed the classes I taught. In my News Publication Reading course I introduced the students to interesting concepts like bias and assessing the reliability of information and reading critically. I love getting students thinking. The Writing and Speaking/Listening classes also went well. This past week was dominated by marking exams, but now that that is over we can get on with our Spring Festival holiday.

City of Eternal Spring

This Tuesday (Jan 23) we leave for four and a half weeks in Kunming which is known as the city of eternal spring. We are going to be taking 4 weeks of Chinese lessons there (4hrs/day, for 5 days/week). Hopefully this will kick start our conversational ability in Chinese. We are taking GouGou with us so had had to make many preparations to travel with her. We now have a travel crate and she is getting accustomed to sleeping in it. We are certainly looking forward to this break and I think that the time will fly by.

For anyone who wants to send snail mail, I am told my address here is:

My mailing address here is:
Ruth Anderson
Rm. 202, No. 4, Teacher's Apartment
Lihu Campus, Southern Yangtze University
1800 Lihu Road, Wuxi, Jiangsu
China      214122

And yet another reminder that I have photos on the web. You can see them at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/canadiandragon/ 
I love comments, so don’t be shy.

Thanks for travelling with me. Many hugs,
Ruth
 

Ruth's China Report April/2007

Ruth's China Report June/2007

Ruth's China Report July/2007

Ruth's China Report September/2007

Ruth's China Report November/2007

Ruth's China Report January/2008

Ruth's China Report February/2008

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