Month: June 2013

Packing again!

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If you’ve been reading my blog since we embarked on this adventure, you’ll probably remember that I wrote an entire series about packing back in February. Though I’m getting tired of my limited wardrobe choices, I’m happier than ever that we chose to bring as little as we did to China with us.

We like to travel light. We had originally hoped to leave the bulk of our luggage in Beijing while we travel through China then pick it up and fly home to Canada from there but as we began to plan our trip we realized that that wasn’t going to be an efficient use of time or money. Since we’re going to be picked up and have a driver at each destination along the way, hauling our luggage isn’t going to be as cumbersome as it would be if we had to handle it on our own but the checked baggage limit for each passenger on domestic flights in China is one piece weighing a maximum of 44 pounds. There are also rules pertaining to carry-on baggage but thankfully, the airlines are not strict about enforcing them and ours are likely to be heavier than they’re supposed to be!

Fortunately, though we’ve picked up a few mementoes and been given a few gifts, we were careful not to buy too much while we were here. Donating several of the books that we brought with us to the staff library at school and using up most of the medications and toiletries has given us space and weight for the few extra items that we’ll be taking home with us.

In addition to making sure that we meet the weight requirements, there are other challenges to packing at this end of the journey. Being somewhat anal, I like to be packed well in advance of any departure. At home, that’s easy to accomplish. Once the suitcases are packed, we simply wear clothing that we’re not taking with us. That leaves only a few last minute items to add to the suitcases just before we leave. That doesn’t work when everything you have is going with you though! I am planning on leaving a few badly worn items of clothing behind including a pair of pyjamas. Though it isn’t uncommon here to see adults walking the streets in what are obviously pyjamas, I’m not about to join them! No, a lot of our packing has to be done at the last minute this time. One suitcase is already fully packed with our winter wardrobe and other items that we won’t likely need as we travel but I won’t be able to finish packing the other one or the carry-ons until the morning we leave.

If we were flying straight home from here, I wouldn’t care if the suitcases were full of dirty laundry. In fact, they probably would be but since we’re going to be travelling for a couple of weeks, I want everything to be clean when we leave. Again, that’s more difficult to accomplish than it would be at home in Canada because we don’t have a clothes dryer here. I can’t do a load or two of laundry at the last minute unless I want to travel with wet clothes and just think what that would do to the weight of things!

Because we don’t have enough of the basics to last for the entire trip, I will have to do some hand washing in hotel sinks along the way but that’s not a problem. In fact, that’s one of the tricks to travelling light on any trip.

Graduation day!

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Yesterday was graduation day for our Class A and B kids. The ceremony was short and simple but effective. Richard Guo, founder and president of EIE, was our guest speaker. He commended the students for their hard work this year and challenged them to continue learning and growing as they go abroad to study. Sissi gave an excellent speech on behalf of the students thanking the teachers and her fellow students for a great year. Diplomas were handed out and the students received their yearbooks. Filled with pictures of class times and fun times, these will be treasured mementoes of a very special year.

Following a relaxed time of signing yearbooks and taking lots of pictures, we moved to a nearby hotel for a lovely graduation dinner. It was still early evening when the festivities ended but the students weren’t ready to call it a day so most of us piled into student cars and taxis and headed off to enjoy a couple of hours of karaoke! It was loud and the room was sweltering but it was fun! We knew that several of our girls were excellent singers but some of the others surprised us with hidden talent!

Yesterday was fun but today will be more difficult. Today we say good bye. Yesterday we wondered why the graduation exercises had been scheduled for our second last day instead of the last. Today I’m glad they were. Yesterday there was celebration and laughter. Today there will be tears.

It seems we leave a little bit of our hearts wherever we go, especially when kids are involved. This time though, we may see some of them again as several are going to Canada to study. In fact, we’re almost certain to see one of them.
We’ve laughingly threatened to put someone in our suitcase and take them home with us before but this time we might almost do that! Sheila will be heading off to begin her studies in Windsor, Ontario in January but her college, unlike many others, doesn’t offer its international students a home stay option when they first arrive in Canada so we’ve invited her to come spend some time with us and it looks like she probably will! That’s Sheila in the pink t-shirt under my right arm below.

Okay, I’m off to school now for the very last day and I’m well armed with kleenex for those teary good byes!

Little Street

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According to the signs,the street below our apartment is called Lanqing Jie but to English speakers in the area, it’s known as Little Street. How can I possibly put it into words that will bring it to life for you? Pictures will help but without the sounds and smells, something is missing. Little Street really must be experienced to be fully appreciated but since you can’t all come to visit, I’ll try my best to describe it.

Close your eyes and imagine the sound of a crowd such as you might hear at a sporting event. Now add intermittent horns honking, the occasional rumble of an old truck or the sound of a motorcycle passing by, and if you can hear it, the sizzle of food hitting a hot grill. As darkness falls, add music pouring from the open doors of a nearby restaurant and the sounds of bottles clinking and voices rising as some of the patrons enjoy the open air seating across the street. Little Street is usually quiet for a few hours in the middle of the night!

Then there are the smells, most of them emanating from the various food stands along the street. Barbequing skewers of meat over hot coals is very popular and usually smells pretty tasty but sometimes billows of smoke fill the air. Occasionally the smell of overheated cooking oil forces us to close our windows.

You can buy almost anything on Little Street. In addition to the restaurants and food stalls, there are several fruit and vegetable stands and lots of permanent businesses as well as the vendors who simply set out their wares along the curbs to sell. There’s a pharmacy that’s clean, bright and well organized but most of the shops selling clothing, hardware and other household items are tiny and crowded. The scene is a constantly changing one. Where fast food was being sold a few days ago, a new beverage shop called Miss Milk is now celebrating its grand opening.

Though Little Street seems pretty unique to us, there are thousands of streets just like it in hundreds of cities across this country! It’s just one of the many faces of China.

Gambei!

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Who knew that I would have my very first taste of Canadian ice wine while living in China? Life is full of the unexpected!

I didn’t expect to meet Richard Guo, founder and president of EIE (Education in English), the company that employs us to teach English at Liaoning Normal University while I was here in Dalian either. After all, he makes his home in Mississauga, Ontario.

The day before yesterday, however, while we were relaxing at home the phone rang and we were informed that Mr. Guo was at the school and wanted to meet us. We were asked if we could come right away and, of course, we did. He started by telling us that he wished we weren’t leaving at the end of this term and that we are welcome to return to China and to EIE at any time in the future. We’d been told that already but we didn’t expect to hear it directly from the top dog! He went on to explain that the company is expanding and that he was actually in China to sign an agreement to begin offering English instruction to nurses in training at Dalian Medical University. If plans proceed as expected, nursing students who study English with EIE will be able to take their first three years of training here and then transfer to an affiliated college in Ontario to complete their degree. After explaining all of this, Mr. Guo invited me to join him at the official signing ceremony which was to be held this morning! That was certainly unexpected!

At 8:30 this morning, Mr. Guo (pictured on the left below), our supervising teacher Cliff, and I met at our school gate where we were picked up by a very comfortable van from the medical university and taken to the new campus overlooking the ocean at Lushun which is about an hour from here at the tip of Liaoning Peninsula. It was a bright sunny morning and the drive reminded me of travelling through parts of British Columbia.

When we arrived at our destination, we were greeted by an English speaking staff member who took us on a short tour of the campus before accompanying us to the very formal boardroom where the ceremony would take place. Cliff and I didn’t really know what to expect but we felt a bit like visiting dignitaries as we were ushered about with great decorum. In reality, I think I was only there as the token Canadian and because I had no classes scheduled until late this afternoon!

Cliff and I had no active role in the actual signing ceremony but we were each provided with a translator to explain the key points of the speeches and discussion that took place before the documents were signed and sealed. Our delegation sat across the long boardroom table from the president of the medical university, the director its school of nursing, the head of its foreign languages department, the director of teaching, the president of a separate but affiliated school of nursing and one or two other important individuals. As soon as the ceremony was over, most of them rushed away to other meetings related to the fact that it’s graduation week at the university. We relaxed over tea until most of us reconvened for lunch in a private dining room with an ocean view.

Lunch was a most interesting affair. It was by far the fanciest and most beautifully presented meal that I’ve enjoyed in China. Though there were a wide variety of dishes, seafood was featured prominently. I’m not overly fond of jellyfish but I took a bit to be polite and it was better than any I’ve had before. The abalone soup, scallops on the half shell and sweet and sour prawns were heavenly. Lunch really wasn’t about the food though. Between delicious morsels, we toasted everyone and everything that had anything at all to do with the new agreement! That’s where the ice wine came in. Richard Guo brought it all the way from Canada for the toast that he proposed! We used a lovely red wine for all the others. We were constantly out of our chairs clinking glasses and declaring Gambei! (cheers!) Even Cliff and I got into the action. When my turn came, I congratulated both sides of today’s agreement telling them that in addition to benefiting them, it will also help alleviate Canada’s nursing shortage which is expected to worsen in the next few years as more and more nurses reach retirement age. I told them that, as part of Canada’s aging population, I appreciate the fact that they plan to send well trained young nurses to help take care of me in my old age!

Gambei!

Hidden treasure!

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If you’ve been reading my blog for the past year or more, you may remember that Richard and I are avid geocachers. Geocaching is a high-tech adult treasure hunting game in which participants use GPS devices to search for geocaches, or containers, that have been hidden by other players. Every find is logged on the official caching website at www.geocaching.com. There are presently more than 2 million geocaches and 5 million geocachers worldwide and these numbers are growing all the time.

Between April and November of last year, Richard and I located 221 caches spread across Canada’s four western provinces. When we decided to come to China, I checked the website and discovered that there were only a handful of caches in the Dalian area. Most had been placed here by foreign tourists and I got the impression that they weren’t being maintained so we decided to leave our GPS unit at home.

A couple of days ago, just for a lark, I decided to take another look at the website. Now that we’ve been here for several months and know our way around the city, I wondered where the caches were located. When I read about the one called Dalian 360, I immediately wished that we’d brought the GPS with us. "A beautiful panoramic view awaits," read the description. "A nice but steep hike, paved steps, along the ridge of a hill at Fuguo Park." A quick check using Google Maps told me that Fuguo Park was an easy bus ride from here in an area we were familiar with. When I discovered that the last person to visit the cache had dropped not just one, but two trackables into it, I wondered if there was any chance that we could find it without the GPS!

A trackable is geocaching game piece that is stamped with a unique tracking code. Some of them have travelled thousands of miles thanks to geocachers who move them from cache to cache and record their movements on the website. This is an aspect of the game that we really enjoy. In addition to helping 15 trackables along their way, we’ve launched two of our own by placing one in each of the two caches that we hid near our home in Alberta, Canada. One of them is now in a cache in Colorado and the other is in the Netherlands.

I knew that finding a geocache without using its GPS coordinates was a long shot but I’ve been wanting to hike some of the hills in and around Dalian anyway and I knew that we’d enjoy the outing even if we didn’t find the cache. Immediately after lunch today, I looked up the webpage again and jotted down a few notes:

  • on hill above trail following ridge line
  • views of Dalian skyline and Xinghai Bay
  • under rock near 9 trunked "octopus tree"

I also drew a rough map and made a couple of quick sketches based on photos that had been posted by previous finders. Without those, finding the cache without a GPS would have been virtually impossible.

After exiting the bus, we had no trouble finding the street that took us up a very steep hill to the park’s east entrance. From there, we continued to follow a narrow road and then well maintained trails higher and higher. Each time we came to a V, we took the path that looked like it would take us up to the ridge. Once there, we hadn’t walked very far when I recognized the views I’d seen in the photos online. Glancing to my left, there it was; the very distinctive octopus tree! We were in the right place but could we find the cache? I climbed to the left of the tree while Richard scrambled around to its right and within moments, he made the find!

Before we’d even had a chance to open the container, three muggles (non cachers) arrived on the scene and started picking berries! We moved a short distance away and surreptitiously removed the trackables, replaced them with a keychain for someone else to find and signed the logbook. But how could we put the container back in place with three people watching us? Instead, we took it with us and continued our hike along the ridge to the next peak. By the time we returned, the berry pickers had moved on and we were able to put it back in place for the next cacher to find!

The trackables will go back to Canada with us next month to be placed in geocaches there. One of them started its journey in Finland in October of 2011 while the other was released in Okinawa, Japan in January of this year.

Life’s not fair!

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One of the original goals of communism was to create a classless society where everyone would be equal. That might sound great in principle, but in reality, it doesn’t work. Like anywhere else in the world, China has the filthy rich and the very poor.

Most of our students come from well to do families. Our university students pay approximately $500 per semester over and above their regular tuition for 70 hours of instruction with a native English speaker instead of attending the university’s regular English classes with Chinese teachers. In China, that’s a lot of money; more than one month’s salary for many people. Then there are our full time English immersion students who are preparing to study abroad. Only the wealthy can dream of giving their child that opportunity or afford the more than $8000 that this year of preparation cost.

With a mark of 95% on the final exam, Grace ended the year at the top of one of my university English classes but she won’t be back in this program next year. Her family simply can’t afford it. Grace grew up in the countryside where her parents own a small plot of land. In addition to growing rice and oranges, they both work seven days a week in a factory.

Grace’s birth was a disappointment. She wasn’t born a boy. China’s one child law allows rural families to have a second child if the first one is a girl so her parents tried again and Grace has a younger sister! She says that her father has accepted the fact that he’ll never have a son but as the oldest, responsibility for her family falls squarely on Grace’s shoulders.

Though her parents have very little formal education, Grace excelled as a student and graduated at the top of her high school class. Unfortunately, coming from a rural school, she didn’t do well on the university entrance exam that students across the country write during their final month of high school. Once again, she was a disappointment.

Just like the people, universities in China are not all equal. Students can’t freely choose which one to attend or even which major to study. Those who do best on the entrance exam are admitted to the most prestigious universities while those who don’t do as well end up at lower tier institutions like the one where we teach.

Grace dreams of being a primary school teacher but she’s studying accounting. She’s doing extremely well. Well enough, in fact, that she’s been recommended for an upcoming exam that could win her a place at a better school of finance but her heart isn’t in it. She’s only studying accounting because her parents feel that it will lead to a better job; one that will pay a higher wage and enable her to pay off their debts and take care of them in their old age. It’s normal for Chinese parents to make these decisions for their children so she doesn’t feel that she has a choice in the matter.

How do we advise a girl like Grace? She isn’t the only one of our students who isn’t able to follow her dream. David loves the Chinese language and wanted to train to teach it but his mark on the university entrance exam was too high for that! Instead, he’s studying physics. It doesn’t help to tell these kids that life isn’t like this everywhere. It is like this in China!

What we did tell Grace was that education is never a waste and that being fluent in English will open many doors for her. Sadly, it may not open the door that she most wants to walk through. I also told her that life’s not fair but I think she already knew that. After all, if she’d been born into a wealthy family, her parents could simply buy her a good job! Yes, life’s like that in China too.

A day at the zoo

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After yesterday’s heavy rain, this morning dawned bright and clear; a perfect day to spend at the zoo. We went with Kevin and Derek, 16-year-old twin students of Richard’s who leave for boarding school in Maryland in early August. We met them at the school early this morning expecting to spend half an hour or more on the bus getting to the zoo. Instead, their father drove us there in his BMW. As we headed for the line up at the ticket booth, four zoo passes mysteriously appeared in Derek’s hand. Though he wouldn’t tell us where they came from, I suspect that they were also a gift from his father!

Covering 180 hectares, Dalian Forest Zoo is the largest city zoo in China and home to more than 150 species of animals. We’d heard that it was worth a visit but it far exceeded our expectations. We were amazed by the number of animals in the zoo; not just one or two of each kind, but in many cases, large groups. I feared that we might find them housed in cramped and dirty quarters like the polar bear exhibit that we saw at the Sun Asia Ocean World aquarium awhile ago but instead, most of them had plenty of room to roam in natural looking surroundings. Of course, the price we paid for that was having to walk long distances to see them all but it was well worth it. In spite of the fact that the animal habitats were large, they were set up in such a way that we were able to see most of the animals easily. I was especially impressed with the viewing platform at the giraffe exhibit. Though I’ve seen giraffes in many zoos over the years, I’ve never been able to look at one eye to eye before!

I was able to cross an important item off my unwritten China bucket list early in the day when I came face to face and hand to paw with a giant panda! Of course, there was plexiglass between us but it was an amazing moment! Those of you who know me well know that I love teddy bears and this was a real live one! If that was all I’d seen at the zoo today, I would have gone away happy! Thankfully, we visited the panda exhibit in the morning before the crowds got too thick. The first two pandas that we spotted were relaxing some distance away but the third one was closer. As I stopped to watch him, he walked right up to the glass in front of me, sat up on his haunches and put his paws on the glass! It was love at first sight and I told Richard and the boys that if they wanted to see the rest of the zoo, they might have to drag me away! They waited patiently while I watched my new friend unwrap and eat his Dragon Boat Festival zongzi. Unlike the ones we had for supper on Sunday night, his weren’t filled with glutinous rice though but something more palatable to pandas. We also watched him munch on some bamboo, a panda’s favourite food.

Eventually, I had to leave, of course. There were hundreds of other animals to see including many other kinds of bears. They were housed in the Fierce Beast Area of the zoo but the grizzly pictured below looked anything but fierce!

Springtime has obviously brought many new babies to the zoo. Some of them were on exhibit in the Little Animal Village and Nursery Center but most were with their mothers in the regular exhibits. We saw bear cubs, tiger cubs, and baby monkeys of many varieties just to name a few.

The zoo is divided into two sections. We spent most of the day touring the larger Safari Park on the west side of Bai Yun Mountain. After waiting in line for almost an hour in the middle of the afternoon, we took a cable car 1 200 metres over the mountain to the older Stable Breeding Park area. There was less to see there but the cable car ride was well worth it for the spectacular views of the coastline on the west side and the city on the east.

According to the brochure that guided our steps today, the operation philosophy of Dalian Forest Zoo is to produce happiness. It certainly did that for me today!

Rose gardens and city views

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Located just a few blocks from the downtown train station in the shadow of Lushan Mountain, Labor Park is best known for its enormous red and white soccer ball that commemorates Dalian’s glory days as China’s famed football city. Like Dalian’s current football team, however, the park is a bit lacklustre in comparison to some of the more beautiful ones we’ve seen. It does have some pretty spots though as well as an amusement park and acres of space for relaxation. Though I read about “a game farm full of peacocks, deer, and cranes” we saw only a few beautiful cranes strutting around cramped and bare quarters and an empty pool that might have once housed otters or something of that nature.

What the park does have is beautiful flowers, lots of statues and some great views of the city. When we passed it on the bus earlier in the spring, it was festooned with cherry blossoms but now the roses are in full bloom. We saw several bridal couples having photos taken in and around the rose gardens.

Yesterday afternoon, after strolling the broad avenue up the centre of the park, between the statues of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac (I’m a dragon) to the giant soccer ball, we took a chair lift up the mountain. As we passed over treetops and even a busy highway, I was glad that I’m no longer afraid of heights. I was even happier about that when we took the glassed in elevator to the observation deck high on the communications tower at the mountain’s peak. Though the day was a bit hazy and the ever present smog hung over the city, the views from the top were definitely worth the ride up. I’m glad we waited to do this until we’d been here for awhile and seen much of the city as it was fun to pick out the various places we recognized. Sadly, the smog and the dirty windows (nothing in China stays clean very long) made it virtually impossible to get good pictures.

Today, the second day of our Dragon Boat Festival holiday, was supposed to be a beach day with one of my students but the sky is grey and it’s pouring rain so that plan has been nixed. Instead, it might just be a relax at home day.

Dragon Boat Festival

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Today was the first day of China’s three day Duanwu or Dragon Boat Festival holiday. The festival itself which falls on Wednesday, commemorates ancient China’s patriotic poet, Qu Yuan, who lived from 340 to 278 BC. Though stories vary somewhat, according to legend, Qu was accused of treason and banished from the ancient state of Chu for failing to support the king’s proposed alliance with the increasingly powerful state of Qin. During his years of exile, he wrote many enduring patriotic poems. When the state of Qin later captured the capital of Chu, Qu committed suicide by drowning himself in the Milou River. HIs death occurred on the 5th day of the 5th month of the Chinese lunar calendar which this year falls on June 12. Apparently the festival takes its name from the idea that people rowed their boats out into the river in an unsuccessful attempt to either save their beloved poet or retrieve his body.

At the beginning of the semester, when I saw the Dragon Boat Festival on our school calendar, I had visions of watching colourful boats filled with rowers racing on a local waterway. Sadly, that doesn’t happen in Dalian.

It would seem that the primary way that people here celebrate the festival is by eating zongzi, triangular packets of glutinous rice wrapped in bamboo leaves. The stores and markets have been filled with them for the past few days. It is said that this tradition originated when local people dropped sticky rice packets into the river to feed the fish and keep them from consuming Qu’s body!

We were given several homemade zongzi yesterday. Though the rice tasted okay, having taken on a mild grassy flavour from the bamboo leaves, we weren’t very impressed by its texture. For me, the word glutinous even sounds gluey and that’s exactly what it was!

A second tradition is the wearing of five-coloured silk cords around the wrists. These are being sold everywhere right now by women who have obviously been busy making them by hand. I bought mine for 1 yuan (about 17 cents) each and will wear them on Wednesday. Apparently, when the festival is over, they’re supposed to be cut off and thrown away to get rid of bad luck.

When we went down to the street market to pick up vegetables and meat this morning, we noticed lots of bundles of leaves being sold. We guessed that they too must have something to do with the festival. They didn’t look very edible and we had no idea what their purpose was until I read up on the celebration online and learned that they were mugwort leaves and calamus. Apparently, people put bundles of them over their doors to protect themselves against disease. I wonder if they have any effect on shingles? Perhaps I should have bought some! Actually, the stems and leaves of these plants are said to dispel an aroma that is thought to purify the air and discourage flies and mosquitoes so perhaps there’s something to the tradition.

Although this festival has long been part of Chinese culture, the government of the People’s Republic of China, established in 1949, refused to officially recognize it as a public holiday. It was only reinstated as a national holiday in 2008. Since it falls on a Wednesday this year, many people, including us, worked on Saturday and Sunday so that they could have today and tomorrow off and make it a three day vacation.

Since our tour of China is coming up soon, we decided not to go anywhere this holiday. Instead, we’re staying here in Dalian and being tourists in our own town but I’ll share more about that in future posts.

Shingles… but not the roofing kind!

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The itch came first followed by intense pain that had me pacing the floor at night. A quick online search confirmed what I was beginning to suspect; I had shingles! I was almost relieved last Sunday afternoon when the telltale rash finally appeared. Without it, there was nothing to show a doctor; no way to get a definite diagnosis and the medication I needed.

Within minutes of Wendy, one of our helpful office gals, typing the word shingles into her trusty translator on Monday morning, she and I were in a taxi and on our way to the Second Hospital of the Dalian Medical University. One glance at my rash was all the doctor needed to confirm my self diagnosis. He prescribed an anti viral medication as well as a vile smelling lotion to help with the itch and an antibiotic cream to use at night to prevent infection from setting in.

Shingles, or herpes zoster as it’s more formally known, is a reactivation of the virus that originally causes chicken pox. It had been lying dormant in my body for more than five decades waiting to spring into action again! Fortunately, unlike chicken pox, shingles usually affects only one area of the body, in my case a band extending around the left side of my torso at shoulder blade level.

I don’t actually remember having chicken pox. I was very young at the time but I do recall my mother talking about having three children sick with it at once; my older brother, my sister and I. My younger brother missed the first round of all the childhood diseases to hit our home and instead, made a habit of coming down with them when we were on holiday! I remember him having whooping cough in Dawson City, Yukon and mumps at our grandmother’s house. I believe that it was chicken pox that he had while we were camping on Galiano, one of BC’s beautiful gulf islands. I guess I must be following his example by coming down with shingles in China of all places!

Fortunately, I seem to have had a fairly mild case and I think I’m the mend. The blisters have burst and the rash is beginning to heal. The pain, now worst in the morning, eases off after awhile and is easily managed with Ibuprofen.

Though uncomfortable at times, I’ve been able to continue doing everything I needed to do. The blog’s silence this week has had more to do with the fact that I’ve been busy giving and marking final exams than with the fact that I’ve been suffering from shingles. My university classes came to an end this week and for the remainder of the month I’ll have only my students who are preparing to study abroad; just seven hours of teaching a week! No more classes at 8 o’clock on Saturday mornings and no more climbing the stairs to the sixth storey classroom! Even with shingles, life is good!