Random Facts About China Part 2

Yes, another list.

10. Green Oranges.  During the summer, the only oranges you can find are green.  Orange oranges have now come in, but for a while it looked like you could only buy limes.  If I only could have been so lucky, they don't have limes in China. 

9. All of China turns their heat on on November 15.  There is no heat in my building until then.  I could use it now....

8.  There are no personal ovens in China.  People don't bake things.  There are bakeries, but no one bakes cakes or baked goods on their own.  I have seen one oven in China and it was in a foreigner's appartment.  There are toaster ovens, but they just aren't the same...

7. There are also no dryers.  Everyone line dries their clothes.  In the dorms there are lines outsidein the hallway and on the roof and they are always lined with clothes.  I wonder how they get their clothes to dry in the winter when it's snowing, maybe they just hang everything up inside where it's warmer.

6. Pretty much every phone in China is a pay-as-you-go phone.  I don't think I have met anyone here with a phone plan.  There are no hidden fees or over usage penalties, when you run out of minutes on your phone, it stops working.  I kind of like that.  But I found out that I couldn't put money on my phone in a different provience, I couldn't put money on my phone in Beijing because I had a Zheng Zhou area code.  But aside from that I like my plan-free existence.

5. My campus plays music or talk radio in the morning in the dorms to make sure everyone is up.  For example, this morning I awoke at 7 to "In the Arms of an Angel" by Sarah Mclaughlan.  Some times it is the national anthem, or a woman talking in Chinese.  Ole said he's heard a woman speaking in English and it's the worst because her acccent is not very good and you know that most of the students can't understand what she's saying anyway.  Might as well put on some Lady Gaga or "My Heart Will Go On" or something.

4.  I think the most popular American movie in China is Titanic.  Almost everyone has seen it.  Everyone can sing "My Heart Will Go On." 

3. There are not take out boxes in China, expect at foreign food resteraunts in big cities like Beijing.  Everyone takes their food to go in a double layered plastic bag.  Sitting in Italian Square at lunch or dinner time you can always watch students walking by their their bags of noodles or egg and tomato with rice, or dumplings, or whatever.  When Dad was here, he couldn't get over 'food in a bag'.

2.  The Chinese language doesn't have 'he' or 'she' differentiation.  So my students often use the wrong gender pronoun when talking about other people.  So when I talk to my students I need to keep track of the original name of the person and ignore the pronouns after that.

1. There are no movie rental store here.  I really miss walking into Video Isle on Queen Anne and browsing through all the movies and renting one.  Here there are some DVD stores but you just buy them, and granted it's for about a $1 but there is something I miss about renting.  Or maybe it was just the popcorn I got from Video Isle.  All of the popcorn here is sweet.

Culture Week

There is a Sias tradition called Culture Week.  All of the foreign teachers do a presentation each day of the week on different regions. Except for Monday, which is China day and the whole school goes crazy and Chinese.

We split into groups based on regions and I chose the day Latin/South America and Africa.  There is also Asia Day, Europe Day, and North America and Austrailia Day. 

Culture week is awesome, but also infamous.  It is certainly a high stress week for everyone and for some more than others.  Each groups has many big tasks they have to accomplish, and no one really knows if it's going to all come together until five mintues before show time.  It actually reminds me of all the Girl Scout camps I did, only on some serious steroids and minus all the little girls running around.

Each group has two parts: day time booths and a night time performance.  Our booths look pretty awesome, there are a lot of informational boards about different countries and cultural traditions.  We are also going to hand out food samples and mini passports to get stamped with some different countries' stamps.  We have a huge grass hut that people last year made, as well as a huge velvet (don't ask me why) crocodile and anaconda.  Vernon and Ashley also repainted these huge murals of a hippo, zebra, giraffe and water buffalo.  Needless to say, Italian Square looks pretty bomb.

Jess dressed up as an African lady (hiding her blonde hair of course) and was outside for basically the entire afternoon.  She estimates that she has at least one thousand pictures of her now on Chinese cameras and phones.  I love the little girl frowning at me in the picture.

We served some sort of orange drink (I've forgotten the name already), which tasted pretty good. 

We also had a soccer shoot out, which was crazy difficult (for me, anyway).  You had to move the ball through the cones and then hit the smilie face.  I couldn't get enough lift to actually hit the smilie face, but they gave me a peice of candy anway.  (Holly and Danielle, you would have been pro).  Side note: I ironed and hung all of those latin American flags you see in the background hanging off of the balcony.

This was really cute, we had a huge sandbox and toys in front of our Carribean Islands poster board and all the little babies came to play in it.  They are SO adorable. 

I don't think I could find a better example or picture of split pants if I tried.  I feel like I talk about split pants and people can't really imagine what that would even look like, it's so far against our culture and sense of hygine.  However, every baby looks like this and all of them pee on the street.  And you thought that cats peeing in a sandbox was bad, it only gets worse with a baby.... (Note: this baby didn't actually pee in the sandbox but it could have and that is my point.)

Here is our velvet crocodile. There was also a pink dophin (apparently they are only found in the amazon) but it was in really rough shape so we decided not to use him this year.

Our grass hut was a big hit, and now I wonder how many Chinese people it can fit.  It always had a lot of people in it hanging out the sides for pictures.

I love this painting of the Mayan ruins, the bottom three steps are 3D so you can take a picture on them. 

We also had pinatas that we had students hit at every hour.  This one was decorated as Sponge Bob Square Pants (I have no idea why) but there were also traditional style ones too.  I watched this pinata get taken down by really enthusiastic Chinese students, after the first couple solid whacks one of the taller boys actually grabbed hold of it and tore it in half.  It was really effective.

Faith (in the plaid) and Jess decided to compete in soccer and it was really close.  Though, Jess did have the handicap of being in a dress and in cowboy boots but she did pretty awesome.

I don't have any pictures from the night performance (since I was in it) and I'll post some as soon as I get them.  In brief, there was a lot of latin style dancing, soccer, a fashion show, and boxing.

I will post another section about this, probably, but I want to get this one up.  Check out my facebook if you want to see me as Hermione Granger with Harry Potter.