Halloween.

A few photos from my school's Halloween party, words to follow soon enough.

No where will you feel cooler than in Zhengzhou as a foreigner teaching English at a college in the middle of China.

As you can probably see, it means a lot of camera phone pictures (those are indeed our students) and more compliments on your beauty and white skin than are healthy for anyone's self-esteem. Though, I also think I could stop showering, create raccoon-esqe eyes, and wear fashion of questionable sense and it would be the same.

8 weeks.

8 weeks of classes until the semester's end

& then...8 weeks of paid vacay.


Rather than turn on the heat, the school is cutting two weeks of school for extended leave from the frigid tundra Zhengzhou is about to become (to my Iowa friends, I'll let you know which is worst). This means more class hours now, but luckily we talked our way out of Saturday morning work (we are only contracted to work Monday-Friday). Tuesday office hours have turned into real class time, I'll sacrifice that for two more weeks of island time. Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand...here I come. I'm going to begin my scheming plans soon. If only tickets to Australia weren't soo expensive.

The ZZ life. Part One.

If you give a mouse a cookie, it'll probably want a glass of milk...

Unless you're in China, where people don't like milk, then you're shit out of luck.



What am I talking about?

Let me try to explain...

Maarten Troost authored a book titled, "Lost on Planet China." A name, at times, that is all too appropriate. I can't try to make sense for you all the strangeness of my day-to-day life here in China. However, I can write random disjointed tidbits. So that's what this post will be. Enjoy.

To begin, of the roughly 240 students I teach each week, in 6 different classes of Speaking and Listening Freshmen English, I have a few favorites and a few favorite names. It starts with Number One, then of course, there's Pull, Egypt, Cinderella, Pander, Smelily, Youngel, Fancy and Lady Gaga. I gave up trying to pronounce their Chinese names when my attendance roll call ended in giggles every time.

If you want to a see a smell (as the Chinese will pronounce the word smile in the worst habit possible) break across a Chinese student's face, attempt Chinese. They love to laugh at you, as a result, I've given up on learning to speak. I am a shibai (Or in other words, a Mandarin language failure.)

As so, apparently, Mao means cat in pinyin. I, however, didn't realize this until after I wrote Mao on a piece of paper over one student's forehead for her to guess based from her classmates' descriptions. I listened as the class described Mao, the former Communist leader of China, with whispered meows and pretend kitty cat ears. I didn't realize why until two days later. Wrongly I wrote on the board, Mao = Zedong, Meow=Cat.

One of Joe's students turned in his "creative" writing essay, he titled it, A Story about Two Friends, Tom and Jerry. Then he preceded to write, "This story is about a cartoon cat and mouse. It was added to Wikipedia in 1997. Feel free to add anything to the story to make it better..."

"You're alive. Congratulations! You're a hero now." Words spoken after climbing a military-esque wall at the ostrich farm, wearing a matching military jacket. Then of course there was the actual riding of the ostrich...

During "sports day," all the professors, foreign and Chinese, gathered together for an afternoon of friendly competition. I prepared with tennies, assuming sports meant some kind of showing of athletic abilities, after all, there were official timers. Instead, the afternoon brought a three part series of oddity, part one, suspending a drum in the air, jointly held by 8 people attempting to bounce a volleyball multiple times in a row. Part two is what I will call the human-hamster ribbon wheel, basically this feat required us to quickly march 50 meters inside a ribbon circle. Lastly, part three, we balanced iron rods in an ever-rotating circle. I pinched myself as the other professors yelled the Chinese words of encouragement, Jia You, which literally means add oil!

If you walk the road Jingliu Lu that connects old campus to Zhengzhou's expat bar hotspot anytime after 2 a.m. you'll see pig carcasses lining the street and occupying the trunks of vans, alleys and backpacks. Just pigs, every night, it smells as foul as it sounds. I've accidentally stepped in a questionable dark red puddle twice.

You can rent Lady Gaga-esque Halloween costumes for less than $8 USD, I'll post a picture of the atrocity after the 31st.

Foreigners are almost always described as those with very long noses.

Our school decided to cancel the final two weeks of school this term, cutting class during the coldest time of the year, rather than turn on the heat. This, they decided, 12 hours before our newly installed Saturday work day. I'm not trying to complain, but this was a swift change from our day trip to Kaifeng, the ancient capital of old China for the Chrysanthemum festival. Everyone woke up at 6 a.m. for work a little angry, to say the least.

This is an excerpt from a note I received in one of my classes, "Dear Anna: My name is Amy. I love you very much, because you are very beautiful. Do you know? I admire you. When I know you are only two years senior to I, I feel I am tiny.....In a word, we all like your class. Can we have a request? Please speak slowly when you teach our. Please slowly, it is our thinking. Anna, can you help us? In the end, I hope Anna is happy every day!" I found it sweet, where as when I told my sister Ingrid, she responded with the word creepy.

The Chinese love to inflict punishment whenever they deem it slightly appropriate. This usually involves song and/or dance. During the first office hours, one of the crowds convinced Wes to sing jingle bells. "Since we are all here, it would be okay for you to sing for us." Oh, really?

During our first school banquet, the Party Secretary toasted us to baijou, the much dreaded rice vinegar. His wise words,"Drink alcohol because it makes you pleasing and pretty." This he repeated to each teacher in varying words until his face turned a rosy red and I had what they call the baijou burps. An experience, I can tell you that I never want to happen again.

Two months gone, the journey continues. Until I remember to add more, here's a video about my travels in Guangxi. There's some oddness involved, of course.

At the end of the day, most days, I do love China, quirkiness in all.

Big noses.

He Dan asked us the inevitable question during our first Chinese language lesson. "Where are you from?" Since we had just learned the Chinese equivalent of mother and father, simply said, ma ma and pa pa, she wanted to know where our parents were from also.

"Tamen shi meiguoren," I replied in mangled tones, but with an air that didn't suppress my over-achieving high school self. Nick scowled, he still didn't understand the definition of the word meiguoren, which I quickly explained meant beautiful (mei) + country (guo) + person (ren). Then I went silent, the Chinese classroom was not a place to show off, as I've learned, you will pay the consequences later on with confused looks as a result of assumed understanding. It was no accident that I also knew the phrase ting bu dong, or simply, I don't understand.

He Dan smiled. Ah yes, American. The first assumption of the Chinese. Stressed as the U.S. Chinese relations may increasingly be at the moment, Americans still dominate the foreign work force. Like it or leave it (USA no. 1? Maybe...not) As so, today after class, a timid student who I didn't know approached me asking, "Are you America?" Well, technically, I smiled and said yes, I am an American. Apparently I had a teacher voice and it was currently set to the on mode. "Wow," she exclaimed. Then I heard the ever common phrase again, I was the first foreigner she had ever talked to and I felt a little bad. Then she gestured to me, big noses. Was it a compliment or criticism? I needed a mirror to inspect the comparison.

After 2 months in Zhengzhou, my perspective had become skewed wildly. After all, today's reality revealed that a clean Western toilet was the opposite equivalent of finding bean paste hiding in your dumpling. You exalted the first and feared the second to equal extremes. Bean paste was the worst that could happen, like falling into a dirty pool of Chinese water at an ostrich farm or botching an American culture lecture about Harry Potter, some could say. As I exclaimed to Gillian at lunch, "Did you use the bathrooms on the speed train? You didn't?! They were so nice!" I continued silently to myself, I even used it twice. Then I paused. This was a bathroom I was talking about.

Perspective. Perspective. Perspective. Like Beetle Juice, I tried to repeat this word while we practiced our tones and syllables, zzzzz, szzzzz, czzzz, but it all sounded the same to me. More over, we just sounded ridiculous, like a hive of buzzing, deaf-toned bees about to meet their death. Again, our teacher intoned.

He Dan turned to Nick.

"Ni na?" (And you?)

"Well, I'd like to think my parents were from Hell," he said only somewhat jokingly. He Dan looked blankly, she didn't understand and Nick smiled in an apprehensive 'it's complicated' way. I'm from no where, he offered, trying to explain that he was retired, but had just ended a 25 year stint working the oil fields of Saudi Arabia as an engineer for Saudi ArabiCo.

"Meiguoren?" she asked, looking for simplicity. Born in Italy and raised there until his high school years, Nick only moved to America late in his teenage years. Sort of, he said.

Satisfied, she turned to Joe, the third and last student in our beginner's class.

"Meiguoren," he replied simply and succinctly.

"But," she raised a hand signaling her protest. "She is from America," pointing sharply at me. "You can't be from America also."

She persisted in English, "Where are your parents from?"

"Meiguo," Joe repeated, hinting at his growing annoyance.

We may not understand the rapid fire of Mandarin on the streets and especially not the Zhengzhou drawl, but we did know the word for our home country, after all, walking through the streets of Zhengzhou we usually overheard people muttering meiguoren, meiguoren. As for the other thousands of words, they were still tonal jibberish.

However, in He Dan's critical eye, Joe with his dark contrasting skin and long dreads looked nothing like me. So, compared to the Chinese standard of homogonity, how could we be from the same country? It was preposterous.

We tried to explain, that's the thing about America, we are very diverse, but stating "we're a melting pot of cultures" doesn't really translate.

She blinked twice. "China is diverse." I inferred from her lack of continuation that she was stating that America, in comparison, was not.

If America was a melting pot then China was the next best thing, a spicy hot pot brewing with variety. She pointed for us to reread the previous paragraph. Yes, we nodded in acknowledgment, China has 56 minorities, the official Chinese government line to feed the world with the idea that China is diverse, perhaps even more so than any other country, even if 95 percent of its population was Han Chinese, just like He Dan happened to be.

Very diverse, she repeated. "How many Indians does America have?"

We twitched. "American Indians or people from India?" Joe bit back as Nick started rattling off tribes, "Well, Cherokee, Blackfoot, the Sioux..."

Again, this was going nowhere.

He Dan turned back to Joe, asking relentlessly, "Where are your parents from?" She refused to accept Meiguo as an answer.

Joe finally lamented after a rambling struggle, my dad's dad, dad, dad is from Africa, I think?

Perspective. We were each learning from each other, our flat tones signaled to her just like her ignorance of America's diversity that we each had a distance to go before we could begin to understand the other.

Ni hao ma?

I start my Chinese language classes tonight, 2 hours of tonal slaughter.

I'm terrible at learning languages. I think there's a Great Wall barrier in my brain.

Zaijian!

To all those things you never knew existed.

Today's ZZ forecast-- a high of 77 degrees with a current status of SMOKE.

That is according to Yahoo's weather page on its Los Angeles server. Seriously.

As I jogged outside during my daily pavement grind today, I didn't see billowing gray plumes representing a burning building or fields aflame, only the characteristically gray sky of Zhengzhou. I swallowed and imagined a thickening of the tar inevitably coating my lungs. Ah, what a wonderfully ashy day, perfect for an afternoon run, I thought with sarcasm that only seems to grow with each day in China. I may now be able to dip, dodge, duck and dive a honking car or charging e-bike without a feeling of constant terror, but I suspect that China's ever-present smog will never urge me to start up my marathon training.

Smoke means fire, unless you're in the haze of Zhengzhou's urban chamber, then it means you should wear a Hello Kitty mask protecting your inhalations--like far too many do here.

Wonderful.