Tony's China Blog

China Update #1: Minor Culture Shock
Hello Everyone!

We are writing to you from Ningbo, China. These two months have been a steep learning curve, but we have come out alive and thriving. We have learned much, but our two most important lessons have been: 1) Be pro-active! 2) Put your foot down!

Though these may seem a bit contrary, they have been extremely fitting of our experience and should not be confused with the common Chinese methods of: 1) achingly, slow processes 2) wildly, quick changes of plans (do not expect to be forewarned about anything including new students and your days off).

Ningbo is a city of about a million people. Located just south of Shanghai, the city dates back to 4500 B.C and has been an important port city since the eighth century. Walking around Ningbo today, one would be hard pressed to find evidence this long history. Cranes dot the Ningbo skyline, adding to the numbers of shiny, high-rise apartment buildings going up across the city. A French-owned superstore, Carrefour, sells everything from prepared Chinese foods to DVD players, bathmats, and Camembert cheese. It is a good place to see people, as shopping is a favorite Chinese pastime. Rivers and canals cross-cut the urban area and finely manicured parks dot each neighborhood.

At the ultra-modern Tianyi Square huge video screens play, KFC looms large, and colorfully-lit fountains dance to piped in music (think Sound of Music or Kenny G. among other Chinese favorites).

But, there are other Ningbos to be found besides this gleaming beast. On dirty, narrow back streets people sell vegetables from carts and empty out chamber pots. In our neighborhood, generic six-story apartment buildings are done up in the “concrete-block” style of architecture. We live in one of these structures on a street best described as a school ghetto dotted with “beauty shops” and beauty shops.

We live over the students’ bicycle park in the foreign teachers’ dormitory of one of the two schools at which we teach. This leads to cold floors and early-morning wake-up calls six days a week. We have the best unit in the place (luckily for us we are married!), with our own bedroom, living room, kitchen and bathroom. Actually, have two of each room, except the living room. Not a bad deal, considering that the three other foreign teachers have to share one kitchen down the hall from their dorm rooms.

They tried to have us share our apartment with another new teacher, but we had to put our foot down, as we would not have had any private space (our bedroom being only a few feet larger than our bed) and the orange-and-red skateboarder patterned sheets take up a lot of visual space. We do have a propane-heated bathtub and stove, a heater, and our own refrigerator and washer. We sometimes walk down the hall to use the communal toaster oven and dryer.

Though there are no student boarders, we have a front and back gateman and a gate that closes at 9:00pm. We also have a 9:30 pm curfew! It is often disregarded, but it means that all teachers who live on campus have to jump over the fence after 10pm. One of the other foreign teachers, Joan, is about 55-years-old and also has this curfew. It is so absurd that we just laugh about it.

A brief biography of our other foreign teachers: Joan is from Vancouver and just got an MFA in writing; she is (self-admittedly) quite flaky (she applied to the famous Iowa writing program, but accepted the offer at the wrong Iowa!). Chris is a 22-year-old Australian who came here directly from Japan where he left an English teaching business that he started and a girlfriend. Emily just graduated from Yale. She is thoughtful, but still learning to live on her own (can't cook, has a terrible sense of direction, and doesn't always take care of herself well). Finally, there is Anissa, an Australian chemical engineer who came here with her fiancee, David, who is a metallurgical engineer. She is a little bit quiet and serious. She isn't crazy in any way. She and David live off campus, so we don't see her too much.

Our teaching situation has been a "jump right in" experience. Our classes began four days after we arrived, but things have since settled down. We teach Saturdays at the for-profit Witts Education Centre, the ones who hired us. Witts pays us and volunteers our services to Xiao Shi Middle School, the best school in the area. We teach there Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Xiao Shi is a great place to teach. The students know a fair amount of English. We have focused on improving listening and speaking skills and have been teaching what interests us and them: American music, small talk, St. Patrick’s Day, jokes, and sports. Teachers and students alike have been extremely kind and welcoming. The English teachers have taken us out on day trips and had us over for lunch. Several volunteered to teach us Mandarin, and we have lessons three times a week. It is a welcome change for Tony to have students who do as he says and seem to enjoy learning. Erica is pleased to be working with middle-schoolers again and finds that there are some cross-cultural similarities among 13-year-olds.

Witts is another story and the source of most of our frustrations with China. All of us foreign teachers have adjusted to constantly changing demands and expectations (which are often contradictory) from the management and stakeholders of the organization, all of whom are located in Hong Kong, except for the principal of the school we live at, who may be in charge of us (we are not sure), and he speaks no English. We basically work without supervision and try to do our best without curricular guidance. Unsurprisingly, Witts is not thriving. We only teach 4 hours a week for paying students, but at the moment there are not enough paying students. We wonder how long Witts can continue to remain solvent.

We are learning a bit about how business is conducted in China and it is extremely different from what we are used to in the United States. It involves making a lot of friends/contacts, which can mean (for the men) drinking a lot, and also talking around issues. Our first week in China, our liason, Allan, came to a teachers’ meeting drunk. We suppose he was at a business lunch before hand. Thankfully, that was an isolated incident. The larger differences require a quite a bit of patience on our parts, but we are getting more accustomed to it. We are also finding that we need to be firm about what is unacceptable to keep our lives from spinning out of control with every new cockamamie plan that is presented.

Allan, a retired Hong Kong/Vancouver Chinese businessman (who used to sell sweetened condensed milk in the US), had made contacts and progress on marketing before he learned he had throat cancer and returned to Canada. Despite his one drunken appearance, we really miss him and his wife, Bernadette, who were both very nice and able to occasionally get things done.

An enlightening example of how our office works... Xia Ding, our 22-year-old office manager, speaks just enough English to figure out our questions, but has not had much to do since Allan and Bernadette left. He is very nice and has been instrumental in getting us internet access and getting rid of a rotten cabbage stench emanating from our pipes. Xia Ding is eager to please and will do most everything asked of him (usually with the words: “It would be my pleasure,”) unless he doesn’t think he should or he can’t, in which case he will agree to do it, and then not do anything.

Since February we have run out of printer paper twice and ink once. Xia Ding bought exactly one new ream last time we ran out. Since teachers use a lot of paper, it was not long before we ran out again. All work ground to a halt. We have all begun to accept this type of thing as one of the strange inefficencies of China, but it is difficult to understand how an eager-beaver office assistant who is constantly bored couldn’t be a little more proactive about the office supplies. Joan asked him why he didn’t just buy two reams of paper. “Oh no!” He was truly taken aback by the suggestion. He seemed to believe that if he bought more, we would use more (entirely possible); he also has to pay for these expenses out of pocket and then be reimbursed by the school. Fair enough, but it leaves us to wonder why the school doesn’t just order us paper in the first place. It isn’t like they don’t use paper at our school!

Despite the ridiculousness of some of these situations, we still enjoy teaching at Witts. Tony teaches third graders and Erica teaches first, second, and fifth graders. It has been an interesting challenge to figure out how to teach such young learners for two-hour long classes.

Although we don’t teach much, we spend a fair amount of time planning and in meetings. When we have free time, we are often exploring Ningbo, especially the markets. We have also managed to take trips to Shanghai, Hangzhou, and a few other local sites. There is just so much to tell that these tales will have to wait for another day. It really has been lovely and at times hilarious, but perhaps this gives you a taste of our initial adjustment period. We are excited to have a full year here.

If you’ve made it this far, perhaps your thirst for information on our life is unquenched. In this case, please check out Tony’s blog at www.ningbochina.blogspot.com. We look forward to hearing from all of you, and visitors are always welcome! More stories, and photos will be forthcoming.

Love,
Tony and Erica

Click here for photos

Nothing more than went out in our mass email, but perhaps a more accessible place to find it.

I've got to confess. Last night, we succumbed to peer pressure and joined our fellow teachers at Pizza Hut. Yes, we have one in Ningbo. And yes, it is very popular. It is not as popular as KFC, but it is a classier (and extremely expensive, by local standards) place. They do nod to the local culture a bit and offer escargot on the menu. Ningbo's many canals offer snails, and we even saw Ningbo snails offered on the menu of a nice Shanghai restaurant. But after seeing a snail netter on a canal in Ningbo, I wasn't all that inspired to try them. Especially not at Pizza Hut.

The pizza tasted like, well, pizza from Pizza Hut, or what I remember it tasting the last time I was there, which was probably after a little league baseball game when I was around 10. The five of us ordered two orders of onion rings for an appetizer, somewhat excited about having onion rings for the first time in awhile. It was a good thing we got two orders. For each order arrived exactly eight rings, the same size, and stacked on on top of the other, two high. The four onion rings on eac level were arranged like the four corners of a square. Quite surprising, and a bit upsetting, since we could have bought three entire dinners at the restaurant next door to our school for the cost of each order of onion rings.

It was a big let down. Just pizza. Not that I had high expectations. Cheese is scarce here, but not nonexistent. But we just got paid that afternoon, and our fellow teachers were excited about splurging a bit. Next time, we'll go to, perhaps, the sole Indian restaurant in town or to a Cantonese place. Much more interesting to me.

I wrote this a few weeks ago and just updated it. For the record, we bought our camera from amazon.com and Emily's mother will arrive with it next week.

Shopping:
Our digital camera broke, and we spent much of today looking for it. I woke up very hung over, Erica woke up with a sore throat, so it was a very lazy day for us. We wandered around the shopping centers we know of that may have carried the camera we were looking for: a Canon A70 or A80. At the Digital Market, which is, true to its name, much more similar to a greenmarket than it would need to be, we found one vendor with the A80 and two with the A70. Then we walked to Hy-Mall, the super-super market right off of Tianyi Square that sells almost everything a Chinese person would want to buy, and only lacks in a few imported goods. Strangely, when we attempted to describe Hy-Mall to the Chinese teachers, we initially got blank stares. Eventually, the recognition came, “Le Guo!” they exclaimed. Happy (Happy) Shopper is how it translates. They had a decent selection of digital cameras, but only had the A70. On we went, past a smaller camera shop that carried both, and had the A80 at a pretty good price, 3500 RMB… about $425. But today we were just browsing.

We then took a bus out to the east side of town, where we went to Carrefour, another super-super market, this one with a larger selection of Western-style goods. That is due in part, perhaps, to the fact that it is a French chain. Only the A70, again, but though this was our third time here, it was the first time we could browse it at our own leisure. This time we discovered many things that we were informed were not available anywhere else but Metro, a German warehouse-like store on the far south side of town. For instance, they had bacon. And a wide selection of cheese. And cumin. So we bought those three items and several more, winding up and down the aisles and not leaving anything unturned.

The turtles in the fish tanks are sad. The mud turtles don’t make me feel as bad as the painted turtles. Why is it that the more beautiful things inevitably invite more sympathy? The opposite should be true. We should feel worse for the mud turtles because not only are they destined for the wok they are also ugly. A cruel world we live in. I haven’t ventured to purchase anything from the live-animal aquariums yet aside from a funny story about some eels that I will get to in a moment, because like most of us, I find it so much easier to buy the pre-killed animals. Then I don’t have feel like it was killed for me. Instead, it was already killed, and I just happened to come by and buy it. So as of now, I haven’t had any fish, bull frogs, horseshoe crabs, or even shrimp killed for me. I’ll admit that the middle two don’t inspire me, but the shrimp and fish won’t be spared for much longer.

There is a whole aisle at most supermarkets here full of attractively packaged gift items, foods and alcohols. It is clear that here there is a much more developed gift-giving culture.

About the alcohols… Of course, I have insisted on trying many of them. Beer is cheap and abundant, but it is nearly all low alcohol, 3.2%, and I like that. I can drink a lot of it and not feel that drunk. In addition to the three or four local brands available, our local store stocks Heineken, and of all brands, PBR. I must admit I was floored to come across it at a very Chinese supermarket. How strange. There are several brands of relatively drinkable Chinese wines, with Dynasty commanding an overwhelming market share. We bought an off brand today for less than a dollar and are curious as to how it will taste.

And then there is the high-proof wine liquor, of which I bought a bottle of the cheap stuff (about 3 dollars) to taste. It was the most retched substance I’ve imbibed, and I’ve imbibed some pretty bad stuff. A few drops of it in the bottom of a glass of Coke made the whole glass almost undrinkable. It is clear, and if you smell it you may detect the sickly sweet stench of rotting strawberries. The taste is cloying but not saccharine, and somehow gets stuck in your throat, reminding you of your folly (having decided to sample a wee nip) for several hours. Incredibly, there is a huge wall of this putrid liquid for sale in the market. I can only hope that the more expensive brands are more palatable, for I believe that it might be impossible to get worst than this. I would rather quaff a snifter of cheap grappa than a teaspoon of this.

Much more acceptable liquors that we have discovered include a cheap locally made brandy and some ginseng-infused whisky thing, which I really liked. At Carrefour and Metro you can buy imported liquor like Stoli and Bacardi for less than they are in the states, but their prices seem sky-high when you compare them to everything else you buy in the stores here. We don’t drink much, though, despite my above description. Perhaps every other night we will share a half-liter bottle of beer and maybe go out to one of the few watering holes every fortnight.

For most of our shopping, we stay in the neighborhood, as we have a wide selection of goods almost at our fingertips. On our corner is a typical Chinese supermarket, called, in huge letters, Family Market. Inside is the same eclectic selection as at Hy-Mall, but many few choices. There is a very small electronics selection, a clothing section, office goods, dry goods, small cooked meat and prepared goods section, housewares, and some fruits. The major thing that the wet market is lacking is vegetables and meats. Those are available, however, at the wet market. I’’ describe that another day.

Oh yeah, the eels. So we went to the wet market with our office manager, Xiao Ding. I was excited to have a local with me so he could tell me some tips. Alas, we are cursed here in that of the half-dozen locals who are happy to help us all know nothing about cooking. Xiao Ding falls in this category and was unhelpful. I wanted to buy some fish, and wanted to know what he liked. He said he didn’t like fish much. Eventually, though, we passed a vendor with several wide, shallow tubs filled with slithering, foot-long eels. These were the freshwater type, dark olive-brown and round. He told me that these were his favorite, and healthy (our Chinese medicine book also raves about the health benefits of freshwater eels, I think they have lots of chi or something). We asked the eelmonger how to cook them, and he answered, predictably, “with ginger and scallions.” Very funny. We learned you boil them for ten minutes.

Okay, I’d give it a try. They were extremely expensive, though, by Ningbo standards. Almost $4 a pound. We bought three of the slimy creatures and the eelmonger wasted no time in dispatching them. He picked up his kitchen shears and just started snipping away. First, off went the heads. Then he snipped the remaining, squirming body into two-inch sections and pulled out the guts.

We watched with horror/fascination at his efficiency until we were interrupted by a graceful arc of blood/eel juice. He cut through something that released a lot of pressure, and the ensuing spurt of liquid easily cleared the tubs of the unfortunate eel’s peers and, as though she was its intended target, splattered all over Erica’s light blue shirt. We were certainly surprised. I apologized profusely to Erica, who didn’t find it nearly as funny as me, who didn’t find it nearly as funny as everyone else around us. Oh, and we cooked up the eels after consulting several recipes online. They were pretty good, with nice, light and firm meat, much better than their seagoing cousins.

Hangzhou

I figured I'd better get this out before we go on our next trip!

So this was our first venture out into the great unknown that is China. We were going on our own, and staying overnight! Erica and I focused our Chinese lessons the week before on the simple things, like booking a train ticket and the hotel, and asking if things could be a little bit cheaper.

Finally, the morning arrived, and we took a cab to the train station. Nothing was listed in English nor pinyin, and we wandered around a bit before deciding to just get in a line and order our ticket. Since we didn’t know anything, we just got in the shortest line to try to buy our tickets. Though we had rehearsed our lines many times, Erica just asked in Chinese, “Hangzhou, ticket, two,” and of course they understood her fine. So we had our tickets, and eventually discovered we had bought fancy ones, and were in the ‘soft seat’ section of the train, where we would have had our own private waiting room had we known. But we made it onto the train no problem. I thought I would be cool and order some tea from the woman who had been selling tea and was now carrying a thermos back and forth. So when I tried out my Chinese for ‘tea’ she brought me a train schedule. It could have been a less useful item.

We arrived in Hangzhou with our small backpacks and then hiked around the block before finding a bus that took us to the famous Xi Hu, West Lake. This is one of the most popular places for tourists in China. It has been a tourist attraction for over 1500 years, and thereby, has been molded very slowly by successive generations. And it is a beautiful lake. Originally a bay, this is now an artificial lake, with several artificial islands and causeways. There are lots of things to see, as various bridges, bays, pagodas, ponds, and gardens have been planted around it over the years. There are mountains in the background, and it seems like everything was built with the consideration of how it would improve the view from the other side of the lake.

We spent much of the day wandering around the lake, enjoying the views and people. It was busy. We were feeling hungry, so we bought little shish kebabs with spicy pork on them for about 6 cents each. Sadly, they seemed to be cut from the most inedible parts of the pig, and we wound up spitting out most of the chewiest parts, finding about 10% edible meat and 20% chewable fat, and the rest gristle. Oh well, you always learn something.

We stopped in a park on the northeast corner, and sat and watched with pleasure as dozens of kids and kids at heart flew kites on a small brick pavilion. Most of these kites were little things being sold for a few yuan on the spot, and most were lower than 50 feet in the air.

It was a beautiful day. We noticed that a few of the cherry trees were blossoming, and the willows that seemingly were planted every 30 feet the circumference of the lake were just sending out their first growth—light green, almost glowing. We had to join the multitudes of Chinese tourists in snapping photos with the new growth and blossoms in the foreground and some scenery in the background. At a particular spot, there were several cherry trees in full blossom. There was a line of people, waiting for their turn to pose in front of them. Naturally, we joined it. Postcards of the lake often show it with cherry blossoms and willow blossoms in the foreground. We attempted to mimic that look, but they are a bit fuzzier in our photos.

We walked around a newer section, one dedicated to the wine making and something else, though I can’t remember what. It was new, but only in construction. It had the same angled walkways, arched bridges, and sloping pagodas that have been built up around the lake over the past two millennia. We were happy to wander around it, though despite many English signs, we did not find it particularly informative.

Around sunset, we had dinner. We went into one of the most famous restaurants in Hangzhou, which is on the sole ‘natural’ island in the lake. We ordered off their English menu, and had their specialty, fish cooked in rice vinegar, as well as shrimp with puffed rice, and with an appetizer of dried sardine-sized fish and a silken tofu with preserved eggs on top. It was good, though both of our entrees were served with a rather sweet/sour sauce. We enjoyed the meal with a pitcher of watermelon juice and a beer.

After dinner, we went to the recommended hotel, which was a bit further from the lake than we had expected. But after arriving there, we managed to bargain the price of our hotel room down from 278 to 228 yuan. It was very exciting. And we did have a TV, bathtub, and comfortable living quarters.

After checking in, we went down to the night market, which had been recommended both by our guidebook and our fellow teachers here. We wandered around the location indicated in our Lonely Planet for half an hour before deciding that it must have moved. So we wandered around, staring at our map, until a very nice young man asked us what we were looking for (in English!). He then pointed us in the correct direction and we had no trouble finding it. It had moved about four blocks to the east.

At the market, we decided to do a bit of shopping. Hangzhou is well known for its silk and its fans, and we really needed something for the walls in our apartment. So we started browsing a bit, and of course, every aggressive vendor saw us and saw dollar signs, and really pushed us. I glanced at some silk pajamas and, just curious about the cost, asked how much. “185 yuan,” (about $24) she replied. No way. I started to leave, but they were insistent. “How much?” they asked in English. I pondered. “Um…. 50?” (about $6) “Bah!” (or the Chinese equivalent), she yelled. “80.” That was a lot lower, but I didn’t really even want to pay 50. “No thanks,” I said, and as I walked away, I was grabbed. “Okay, okay,” they said, “50.” Of course I immediately wondered if she would have parted with them for 30. So I now have a slinky pair of royal blue PJs to wear to bed and slide around in my sheets with. In two months it will be too hot to wear such nightwear, but they are fun for now.

Erica, almost concurrently, had the same thing happen for a little wooden fan, for which she regrets having counteroffered 15 after he rejected her offer of 10 to his open of 40. She probably could have gotten it for 10.

We spent some time considering whether to buy a six-foot scroll for the wall, which we were under the impression was original art (it wasn’t, it was a print). Eventually we decided to buy it, but we, naively, made the big mistake of offering to pay more than half of his original price. We paid 75 yuan for it (down from 120). I am a sucker, and hate bargaining with an artist for his work (support the arts!), but had I know that it was merely a water-colored print, I would have been more ruthless. Nevertheless, for less than US$10, we have a nice big piece of art to put on our poured cement walls.

After the market, we watched ping pong on TV in our room. After having watched sports on TV periodically here (it is always on in our library/common room), I am convinced that the Chinese guy/team always wins. In the matches I have paid any attention to—soccer, ping pong, swimming, etc—they haven’t lost yet.

The next morning, despite our grand plans to get up early, rent bikes, and bike to the southwest side of the lake and into the hills to visit a famous tea-growing area, we slept in a bit, and got a slow start. We were still going to rent bikes, but the bike rental place described in the guide did not seem to exist any longer. So we changed plans, and walked south along the eastern part of the lake, admiring the aforementioned pagodas, ponds, bays, walkways, and so forth. We left the lake for a moment to check out the Academy of Arts, a huge building with modern architecture, soaring spaces, and imposing stone and cementwork. It was how, as Erica speculated, Swarthmore will probably look in 50 years if they keep building the way they do.

We then walked around lost a tiny bit, as occasionally here, a street that seems as though it would be a through street just stops in the middle of a housing complex. And usually, you have walked two blocks to arrive at the dead end. But we finally found the old street in Hangzhou that we were looking for, which happened to be thronged with people. It was a restoration of what Hangzhou looked like 150 or so years ago, and inside each of the storefronts was a merchant peddling good to tourists. Goods ranged from incredibly tacky things (the bug with the jiggly legs that is mounted inside a carved walnut that you see all over the world) to nice pottery, silk, and calligraphy.

We walked though the street, sampling some street food that was a sort of fried cake, where watery dough was poured into a mold filled with a shredded cabbage (tasty), and found the old Chinese medicine museum, which is also a working pharmacy. This museum has rows and rows of items animal, mineral and vegetable, and explains their medicinal properties. It left me wondering what wasn’t medicinal in one way or another. Sure, there were the famous potions—tiger bones, ginseng, seahorses—but there were also many obscure things. My favorite was fossilized crab.

I don’t know why I don’t write down more things, for example, why one would take it, but it was there, along with examples of the fossilized crab. Fossilized mammal bones also are useful. I wanted to get a diagnosis and potentially a recommendation for my persistent nasal drip, but not speaking Chinese was a bit of a hindrance. Maybe later.

I am very juvenile. My favorite part of the exhibit was where they were talking about different brands and types of gelatin that have been used to package the medicine. And, clearly translated was “Ass Skin” gelatin. It was then referenced numerous times during the description of the technique for making gelatin.

After the museum, we wandered past the restored strip and into the flower and bird market. Here, we were walked pastcacophony stores selling plants, and a cacauphony of birds, as well as many of the same medicines that were for sale at the museum. We took a walk back to the lake and decided to stop for tea. We didn’t know much about teahouses, only that there was a beautiful view and that this region was well known for tea. So we paid what seemed like a lot for tea (almost $6 each) on the understanding that the tea included a buffet. That was exciting. We were waited on for tea, but the buffet was self-service and I could finally try out some of the dishes that I was curious about but didn’t want to sacrifice an entire purchase/the effort of an interaction on. So I started piling up some fruits I hadn’t tried before, including a good tan shooter-marble-sized one that tasted grape-like with a huge seed inside, and tiny mangos. Of the cold foods, I had pumpkin seeds, pine nuts still in their shells, and toothpick-sized dried fish.

The moment worth mentioning of this meal came after about an hour. The teahouse was dimly lit, the sunset was beautiful, and I was trying a few more items from the buffet. Many places in Ningbo serve eggs boiled in tea. They were at this place, but they looked a little old, though after about six glasses of tea I decided to taste one. After I peeled it the egg was pretty wrinkly. Apparently these eggs are boiled in tea for a long, long time. So, I took a bite of the gray, wrinkled egg, and as I chewed it, the egg crunched. I immediately suspected what was in my mouth and suppressed the very beginnings of a gag reflex as I looked down and saw a mostly-developed chicken. That crunch was the beak. I kept it down and stared at the egg. If I had known that these eggs were like this, I still may have tried them. But the sheer surprise of the discovery took me aback. I took another bite, prepared this time, and didn’t like it that much. It tasted a bit metallic. Erica tried a bite and was similarly unexcited.

I ran this story by Rebecca, our coordinator. She laughed. “My mother likes those!” she said, but she doesn’t like them. You apparently don’t find them around very much, but it confirmed that this wasn’t an inadvertently overdeveloped chicken in a normal egg. We survived, and of course now have the luxury of telling the story afterwards!

The rest of the night was moderately eventful, as we went back to our hotel, took a cab to the bus station, and then were intercepted before we actually found the bus station by a person who wanted to take us to Ningbo. We were whisked away to a parking lot across the street from where we thought the bus station would be, and waited along with a handful of other Chinese travelers before we were loaded onto a bus, which drove us very quickly to Ningbo but dropped us on the outskirts of town. There was a Jackie Chan movie on and the buses here are quite an experience as well but that is for another story. It was a rather expensive taxi home, where it was already curfew. We walked around the school twice waiting for one of the gatemen to leave so we could climb the fence, remarking all the while how ridiculous that whole situation is.

Welcome to my blog! As promised, here it is. I hope you will find it interesting, and not too boring. Of course, if it is boring, you needn't read it. I will try to post interesting/relevant items here from my daily life. I've never done this before, so let's see how it goes.

I keep in touch with the world news via The New York Times and I would use the BBC periodically for a less US-centric view of things, but the Chinese government blocks it.

I m not sure if this is going to work, so right now I will try it on a few friends.