In my last post, I wrote December 10th. I meant November 10th. My mistake. I'd edit the post, but I cannot since the blog is blocked in China.
As I said earlier, it's a really good thing that I have a bike that is in fairly good working condition. A couple of days after my bike was repaired, I decided to bike to work. It's a good thing that I did because, overnight, the city had torn up a certain length of one of the two lanes of the street between me and my workplace. At the time, I was really amazed with the astonishing efficiency of Chinese workers. Unfortunately, this street happens to be an extremely busy stretch of road, particularly during morning rush hour. It also eliminated the option of taking the bus.
This being China, commuters were undeterred by the reduced space and treated the narrow single lane as a two-way street. In Canada, this would be unthinkable. There would be detours for cars and bicycles who wanted to go in the lane that had been torn up. Not so here. Cars and bikes and scooters all crammed into the single lane, horns, scooter tooters and bike bells blaring. Somehow, with several detours onto the sidewalk, I managed to get through the mess and to my classes only slightly later than I had intended (I was still early for class).
Since then, I'd gotten used to the mess and so I wasn't fazed when they tore up the entirety of that same lane from end to end (I've got a picture of it here). Traffic became even worse, but the workers have been pretty good about keeping the dust down by periodically dousing the street in light water to keep the earth wet.
Today, however, my opinion of the efficiency and, to be honest, the intelligence of these workers took a sharp nosedive. You see, today they tore up the second lane of the street. At least they have made it flat and grated it fairly well. When they first tore it up, they had mountains of broken pavement strewn about. Anyway, they've torn up the entire street and, of course, they've left it entirely open to traffic. They can't close the street to traffic because it's an important city artery and everyone needs to access it. The street is now a really busy dirt road in the centre of town.
You'd think they would tear up one lane, repave it, then start on the other lane for a street that is as busy as this. You'd be thinking wrong. As of today, my poor little street bicycle is doing mountain bike duty. At least I don't have an electric bike. The clatter those things make while driving on the road makes me expect to see metal parts flying every which way. Hopefully the road gets paved over fairly soon.
I can say one thing about the work crews here: they are singularly obsessed with getting their work done quickly and efficiently (something our work crews in Canada could learn from). However, from a larger viewpoint, their total disregard for common sense in terms of minimal disruption to civic life makes the entire project actually seem rather inefficient compared with Canadian roadwork.
The latest addition to this saga: the workers have broken through the shallow sewers under the street and now half the road is flooded. They've created small mud dikes dividing the street into two to maintain a passable roadway. As I was riding to work today, I saw a small van embedded in the mud in the middle of an intersection , slowly sinking deeper into the muck. The water had already reached within a couple of inches of the top of the wheel well. As I was looking at this poor, lonely little van, another larger van drove by it and one wheel fell into an open manhole. I just shook my head and kept riding, as I was nearly late for class.
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A few days ago, I became really sick. First, I woke up in the middle of the night and relinquished the contents of my stomach into the cold embrace of the sink. Then, to make matters worse, I spent the next three days or so in close union with the seat of my toilet. On the second day I barely ate and, since I had thrown everything up the previous night, I nearly fainted in class. I resolved to eat more even though I wasn't feeling too hungry.
I am not sure of where I actually got the sickness, but it's definitely from one of two restaurants. For lunch that day, I had eaten some meat patties from a chain restaurant near my classes - it was a sort of lunch-to-go type of thing. The meat from there could have been undercooked, and I vaguely remember not feeling too good after having eaten there one previous time (though I like the taste of their food). The second possibility was an egg-fried rice dinner from a small noodle shop across from the northern gate of the university. I had eaten a different dish there previously and not gotten sick, but it was this dinner that ended up gracing my bathroom sink. I later learned that the water in that building may have been contaminated as that whole block had previously been the site of a chemical factory.
I'm not going to eat at either of those restaurants again.
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This past Friday, after arriving back at my apartment from my class (the one where I was sick and nearly collapsed from being tired and hungry) and telling my student I would help her buy a bike on another day (since I was so weak), I fell asleep exhausted after eating some fruits, but was woken up after only an hour by the persistent ringing of my phone.
It was Vincent on the line, asking me to go meet Susie (Xu Xin) over at the eastern gate for a trip down to see the friendly folks at the Public Security Bureau. They needed my presence in order to take some official photos to finalize my residence permit. I met them over at the eastern gate (the opposite side of the campus from me) and was happy to see Bissah there too (the guy from Ghana).
Xu Xin, Bissah and I miraculously hailed a cab immediately and piled in. This was my first taxi ride in Zhengzhou. Previously, the taxis never pulled over for me or my friends who were with me. It's usually extremely difficult to get a taxi here. Strangely, inside the all the cabs in the city the seats are entirely covered in white sheets, which I suppose are laundered daily. I guess this must be either by popular demand or that the cabbies take a dim view of the cleanliness of their fellow citizens. This seems to be yet another example of the bipolar extremes of outdoor filthiness and indoor OCD-like cleanliness habits of the people here.
During the ride, Bissah and I had a lively discussion about life in China and our goals in life. He told me he was studying Chinese so that he could try to get an engineering degree in China. I recommended he try to get a degree from Canada. He said Canada was too expensive, which is why he had come to China rather than a western nation, so I told him the annual Canadian tuition rates (especially if he becomes a permanent resident) and he became very enthusiastic.
He confided to me that he wants to be an engineer because Ghana is on the brink of new oil wealth. He said, with a big grin: "There's money in Africa!" I agreed that his prospects looked good and he said to me: "You could do well there yourself. I've got business contacts through my father that could get you a great consultant gig for the government at six to seven thousand US dollars a month." Next stop, Ghana?
The taxi driver got lost, so we stopped and asked a bunch of people for directions. We finally managed to get there, but the cabbie let us off two blocks away on the wrong side of a busy highway. Having learned about Zhengzhou traffic, I braved what would have been certain death in Canada and walked confidently out into the road with Bissah and Xu Xin at my side. Xu Xin said: "Are you crazy?" However, as my previous experience had taught me, the traffic neatly wove around us and everything was fine. Drivers here are a lot more cautious because no one follows the rules, so they routinely avoid errant pedestrians and bikes. No one, not bike, pedestrian, car nor bus stops for any reason. The idea is to flow around everything in continuous motion. If there is ever a traffic jam, the Chinese get incredibly impatient. Whoever invented the traffic horn should not have allowed this invention to be shown to the Chinese.
Inside the PSB, the building is really clean with modern architecture (which is not surprising as it is in the east side of town, which is being built into a modern metropolis by the government). For a fleeting moment, I felt like I was back in a western country. Then I saw the lineup for "Reception of Visitors from Outside the Mainland" and the usual mess of people milling in a press of bodies, crying for the attention of the overworked staff.
There was another white guy there who was pretty close to my age and a second white guy who was there with his much-younger Chinese girlfriend/wife. I tried to give the guy my age a friendly hello, but he ignored me.
When it was our turn to speak with the staff-lady, she perused our documents, then told us we needed to go get some photos taken at a nearby store. I took a look at the webcam she had at her desk that was faced towards us (and which she actually later used to take another photo of us), then went to get the photos without saying anything. Later, we came back and she looked at our documents some more. She then told Bissah that he needed to go get some photocopies of his passport. Once again I took a look at the scanner and the printer sitting right next to her and once again I said nothing. When Xu Xin and Bissah left to go get photocopies, the girl took a nice ten minute break to chat with her friend on the phone. When the two of them returned ten minutes later, I tapped Xu Xin on the arm and surreptitiously pointed to the scanner and the printer. "Wow! She's so mean!" Xu Xin said.
Eventually, I got my residence permit processed. The cost was 400rmb - the single most expensive item I might have had to pay thusfar had it not been covered by the university. Bissah, as a student, wasn't so lucky. "There goes my budget for the month," he grumbled.
Xu Xin gave me my foreign expert license and my medical checkup booklet (which she had not previously given to me as she had needed them to apply for the residence permit). I didn't think too much about them until the next day when one of my students took a look at them and noticed a couple of errors. Apparently, I'm about 7cm shorter (or nearly three inches shorter) than my actual height and I am listed as an American even though I traveled under a Canadian passport.
The height thing is not such a big deal, but the nationality discrepancy might have caused me trouble, so I had to get that changed.
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About a week ago, I was asked to watch some of my students participate in an English speaking competition. I accepted the invitation and so sat through some forty-odd speeches before all my students had gone through (there were something like 80 students in total). I was sitting about two-thirds of the way towards the back of the room. That is about 20 metres from the dais at the front of the room.
I could barely hear a single word of any of the students' speeches. The pronunciation of words that I could hear was mostly not great, but it wouldn't have killed the speeches. The lack of volume, however, turned the whole thing into a snooze fest.
In the middle of the contest, however, one of the officials came over to have a word with me. It turns out he is the chairman of the university's English club and he wanted to know if I would like to be the judge of the quarterfinals for the competition. I accepted.
That's how I found myself rousting myself out of exhausted slumber at 7am on a Sunday morning to head on over to judge the people who had passed the first test. When I got there, the first floor of the building just completely reeked of a foul stinking mix of cigarette smoke and an open sewer. Fortunately, the competition was taking place on the fourth floor of the building. My nostrils were relieved.
Entering the classroom, I was handed the score sheet by an effusively thankful chairman, and promptly surrounded by eager and friendly judges who all wanted to learn more about me. One of the judges even pulled rank on another one so he could sit next to me. It was nice talking to all of them.
I took a look at the scorecard and had to smile a bit ruefully. This was an English speaking competition, but just three points out of ten were devoted to ability in English (including one point for pronunciation). The rest were devoted to content of the speech (1 pt), style, confidence and personality (3 pts) and ability to improvise in a second, shorter speech with a randomly assigned topic (3 pts). I wasn't impressed with the scoring system, but I agreed to abide by it.
Most of the students did a repeat performance of the first time around. They spoke quietly, they flitted their eyes nervously around the room and at the ceiling (never making eye-contact) and they spoke too quickly. Nevertheless, most students' actual English fluency was pretty impressive. Their pronunciation may have been heavily accented, and sometimes outright wrong, but they spoke without much hesitation. All in all, I thought most students did a pretty decent job.
One girl, however, completely blew away the competition. She was the only sophomore in the competition (all the others being freshmen) and it really showed. Her English was fluent, well-pronounced and confident. She will win the final prize. No one else came close. I must have left before hearing her during the first round, because her abilities are exceptional.
After the competition, the members of the English speaking club asked me to give a speech to the students to give some advice on how to improve. I used the speech to model good speaking tactics such as looking at one person directly in the eyes for each clause of a sentence, speaking slowly and clearly, and speaking loudly. The students seemed fairly appreciative. After that, the chairman was pushed to the front to also make a speech, but he spoke in Chinese. He perhaps thought I wouldn't understand what he was saying, but the first words out of his mouth were that he would give his speech in Chinese because he was embarrassed to speak in English after listening to me. I told him after that he needn't be embarrassed, but he just smiled and waved it off.
Today, as I left my class, a random girl stopped me on the stairs and asked me to be the judge of the English contest for her department on December 10th (this time I am correct in saying December 10th, heh). I accepted. Her department is the Foreign Languages department, and her English is pretty good, so it is possible that I will be hearing a difference calibre of contestant when that time comes.
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Speaking of languages, I signed up for Chinese courses today. The courses come free with being a teacher at the school and I intend to take full advantage. They have given me a book to help me learn basic writing and I will have to buy another textbook later for about 30-50rmb (they aren't sure), but that will be the extent of what I have to pay. I'm hoping I can learn to have conversations by the time I am done here. Right now I can communicate my needs, but I don't have the confidence to speak full sentences or engage in true conversation. 加油！ (jia you; a type of cheer)
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