T-Minus Six Hours

So, school is done.

The children have left.

I'll be leaving for my next adventure in a few hours.

Gah.

This is all incredibly bittersweet.

I'll be heading out to catch an 18 hour sleeper train that will take us to Xi'an, where the infamous Terra Cotta warriors are. After that we're catching another billion hour train ride to Lanzhou, the home place of pulled noodles where there is the most incredibly precise and specific technique to making them. It's insane. And delicious.

After a day or two there, we'll be hitting up the province of Xinjiang. The most western province of China, it borders 8 other countries, most of which are middle eastern, there is a major influence of said countries and in many places one can expect to forget they're even in China: the language is different, the food is different, the writing style is different, the religion is predominantly Muslim, it should be awesome! We'll be touring the Silk Road and the Gobi desert before eventually flying back to Shanghai.

At that point I will be leaving the rest of my fellow travellers and making my way up to Beijing for about a week before I fly home to CANADA on July 22nd.

I plan on taking approximately 38, 000, 002 pictures and then posting them along with my adventures (of which I'm sure there will be many) when I get back to Canada and to the land of non-dial-up and crappy connections.

Until then...

Apples vs Watermelon

Let me explain to you the Chinese education system as it was explained to me:

You go to the supermarket where there are apples and watermelons. Apples are university and watermelons are high school. Apples are 9RMB and watermelons are 8RMB. You can afford apples, and you can afford watermelons. You may want both, but your mother told you to get apples. What happens if you only have 7RMB? Too bad, you can't have either, go back to work and make more money.

For all you non-metaphorically inclined people: if you have good enough grades you can go straight into university after middle school if that's the direction your intended career path is heading.

Apples = university.
Watermelons = high school.
Money = grades.
Mother = career path.

This may seem crazy until you consider how different the age and grades are:

Kindergarten - age 5/6
Primary School, grades 1 to 6 - age 7-12
Middle School, grades 7 to 9 - age 13-16
High School, grades 10 to 12 - age 17-20

So there ya go, bit of random edumacational trivia for you.

Right Now!

I'm on TV right now!

WJTV - I speak (mumble) a bit of Chinese, I welcome the viewer to the school (in English, with lots of enthusiasm), I teach one of my lessons, I play games with my students and I talk (pretend to - there's a massive language barrier) with the other teachers.

Such fun!

It'll be on again in a couple hours, so if you're skilled at time travel, are in the area and have a television nearby you can check it out!

Canadian

You know you're Canadian when...

You make a slide show for your grade 7 students about different food in Canada and how it's usually quite international, and then devote two entire slides just to Tim Horton's.

Beast

Last night at around 9:00, one of the teachers came knocking on my door. She came to deliver some of these funky fruits for me to try.



It's some kind of a berry with a pit in the middle.

I don't know what it is about the teachers here, but they'll never fully enter my room, but nor will they stay outside. Instead they stand just inside the doorframe so I can never actually close the door.

9:00 in the evening is a bad time of day to keep the front door open. Check out the absolute beast she let in. Scared the crap out of me when I went to turn out my light and the creature flew into my peripheral vision.



Speaking of bugs and creepy crawly things, I found this huge dragonfly in the stairwell today.

Smelly

I wish this blog could post smells.

There are a lot of things in China I wish you could smell.

Like the sweet-flavoured popcorn I just made to absolute perfection (for once).

Or the deoderant I bought yesterday (yay!).

Or the smell of bus exhaust mixed with cigarette smoke mixed with chow mien mixed with raw meat.

Ok, maybe not the last one. Unless I was in a particularly bad mood and felt that misery deserved company...

Oh Happy Day!

I FOUND DEODERANT!

Seriously, there were several days and several moments where I felt like posting about my lack of deoderant and subsequent fear of BO, but there's a reason it's called "personal hygiene".

I felt that this was a cause for celebration though, and since a celebration is always merrier with more people, I figured, "meh, presumably my readers are all human, of course they'd understand, so why shouldn't I share this fantabulous news?!"

I FOUND DEODERANT!

I found three sticks in the supermarket, snuggled between the condoms and the hair removal products.

China doesn't really have deoderant, I'm not sure what they use - if anything - to make themselves smell pretty, but honestly, I've never noticed an intense BO smell, so I never really thought anything of it.

Until I ran out of my own personal stash of deoderant.

I had read before I moved out here that deoderant hardly existed, so I stocked up on what I doubted would be enough but figured I could easily have some sent over. The thing about this logic, is that it's best to ask for some more before you run out.

Or it's best not to rely on the Chinese post when you choose to ask for more.

The post is extraordinarily late in sending me my deoderant. I don't even wanna tell you how late, because it's not a pretty number. Of course, now that I've found some here, I can guarantee it'll show up tomorrow or the day after.

You know how you don't realize how much you love something until it's gone? Deoderant is a perfect example.

I got really paranoid about how I smelled: I showered two or three times a day, focusing especially on my armpits, which just gave me a rash; I changed my clothes constantly; I minimized my movements as best as I could, standing at the front of the class, stiff as a board, with my arms at my side. I was like one of those meerkats with their nose always in the air, sniffing away, and the second I smelled something funky I'd freak out that it might be me. In the meantime, in the back of my head, there was always that bit of trivia that you can never really smell yourself, and that made me freak out even more, because if that smell I smell is actually me, good lord, I feel sorry for everyone else.

It was a vicious circle because I'm pretty sure all this paranoia and worry about how I smelled just made matters worse.

But it's all good now, because...

I FOUND DEODERANT!

Storm

We had the most awesome storm last week. It was so incredibly intense that there's honestly nothing I can compare it to in Canada - well Southern Ontario, anyway.

Naturally I left my window open, because it really couldn't work out any other way, could it? All my clean clothes that were hanging to dry were soaked and muddied because the screen was so dirty, there's water damage on the walls and around the windows, and the front door leaked enough water to flood a quarter of my room. The field was basically just a giant puddle by the time it was all finally finished.

I had a couple classes during the storm, which was actually a great educational experience for the kids: at the beginning of the semester I taught them about weather and "storm" was one of the words, but because we never had storms at the right time of day they only knew the English words through the photos I showed. So now they can say "it is stormy." Isn't that exciting?

It was so adorable though, because they were so terrified of the thunder and lightning, they'd jump in their chairs and their eyes would go super wide, and they'd run up and hug me for protection from the storm - I felt like Maria from The Sound of Music. Again. Except I didn't "sing" this time.