Summer Travel Highlights (Part 1: Qingdao, Xian, Yangtze Cruise)

I once had a teacher in high school who said the best thing about being a teacher is June, July and August. Although the Chinese school system only has a six week break during the summer (mid-July through August), I must say that I agree. Megan and I wrapped up our teaching responsibilities in the in the first few weeks of July an eagerly awaited the arrival of my family to start our summer travels. Our plan was as follows:

•        July 15: Arrival of my family in Qingdao.
  
•        July 15-17: Spend in Qingdao/Huangdao (smaller town where we live) to show my family the sights.
  
•        July 17-19: Go to Xian to see the terra cotta warriors and other sights.
  
•        July 20-23: Yangtze River Cruise, the Yangtze being one of the best spots to see the total eclipse of the sun on July 21.
  
•        July 23-27: In Shanghai, see the parents off on July 24 and explore the city ourselves for a few days.
  
•        July 28-August 5: Singapore to see our old stomping grounds.
  
•        August 5 - ???: We weren’t sure where we wanted to go, how much flights would be, and how far our money would take us, so we decided to wing it. Options: Chengdu (see pandas), Kunming, and/or Hong Kong.
  

With that itinerary to look forward to we had trouble focusing during our last few days of exams and grading. Finally, July 15 arrived and brought with it my parents, sister Rachel, and sister’s friend Paulina.

Here are some highlights from the summer.

Qingdao/Huangdao 青岛／黄岛 (July 15-17)

The highlight of the few days in Qingdao/Huangdao was the day Megan and I showed my family around Huangdao, the place we've called home for the past 5 months. It was great to show off our classrooms, eat at the places where we typically eat, and spend some time with them in our apartment. In the morning all the girls had a local foot massage while my dad and I hit some golf balls at the nearby driving range.  Even though a day was plenty of time to see the highlights of the area, I'm really glad they made the trip to China to see it.

The girls getting ready to enjoy their Chinese foot massage in Huangdao.

Eating in our own private room (read: cubicle) at one of our favorite restaurants on campus.

Dinner at our apartment.

The time spent in Qingdao was good also, however as it was peak tourism season the city was about twice as busy as usual. This put a damper on a few things, but we were still able to hit the highlights, including beer in a bag.

After polishing off a seafood lunch on Beer Street in Qingdao.

Posing in front of the famous pavilion that is on all Tsingtao beer bottles.

Xian 西安 (July 17-19)

With the maximum "Five-A" tourist attraction rating by the Chinese government, the highlight of any trip to Xian are the world-famous terra cotta warriors. Built over 2000 years ago, each of the roughly 8,000 warriors has a unique face modeled on the real faces of warriors in the Qin emperor's personal army. The scope of the project is awe inspiring, with rows and rows of warriors in formation.

The warriors were discovered in 1974 by a local farmer who was digging a well and found a terra cotta head. After reporting the discovery to the government the farmer was awarded with 20,000 RMB, roughly US$3,000, or 10 years earnings for the farmer. The farmer is still alive and every Saturday and Sunday visits the site and signs souvenir books about the warriors. We were fortunate enough to be there on a Sunday and my dad got a book signed by the guy. Very cool. I snuck a photo of the guy while he was signing it. He seems like he's enjoying himself, at the time we saw him he was enjoying a cigar at the end of a long pipe.

Xian has tons of interesting history and we saw and did a lot of other cool things. The second highlight was biking around the old city wall which surrounds the city, a must if you visit Xian.

Yangtze River Cruise 长江 (July 20-23)

If you want to enjoy the spectacular sights of the Yangtze River and the 3 gorges, the best way to do so is in a "floating, air-conditioned bubble," as my dad described our ship, the Century Sky. In a country obsessed with star ratings, the Century Sky was truly 5-star, complete with HBO in the cabins and a guys-want-to-be-him-girls-want-to-be-with-him cruise director, Leo. 

The first highlight of the cruise was the total eclipse of the sun, which we were fortunate enough to be in a perfect spot to see. On our second morning on the boat we went with the other cruise passengers to the White Emperor Palace, a pretty cool old palace on an island in the Yangtze. From there, equipped with our safety glasses to avoid "eye suicide", we were able to observe the moon slowly covering the sun. As the eclipse neared total, everything gradually grew darker, as if a giant dimmer switch on the sun was slowly being turned. The phenomenon was surreal. When the sun was finally fully covered a spontaneous cheer rang out from the crowd around us and we removed our safety glasses and for a bit over 4 minutes observed a once in a lifetime sight. Just awesome. 

The second highlight of the cruise was in the afternoon on the same day of the eclipse. We had an excursion into the "Little Three Gorges" on a side stream off the Yangtze. Not sure what to expect we set out on a ferry from main cruise ship down a smaller river. After an hour on the ferry we arrived at a dock with lots of small wooden boats that were rowed by local boatsmen. The boatsmen ranged from 20 to 80 in age and were all shirtless (until about 10 years ago they were completely naked). A crew of 3 or 4 boatmen would steer a boat of a dozen or so tourists through narrow streams with impressive cliff faces on either side. At a few points the water level would be too shallow and the boatsmen would pull the boat over the rocky stream bed until we reached deeper water. During the trip the boatsmen sang a local song for us, which we returned by singing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat". 

Lowlight of the trip: The Three Gorges Dam. If you are going to "flood the Grand Canyon" as my mom described the flooding of the Three Gorges caused by the dam, you should at least have a cooler looking dam. I had images in my mind of the Hoover Dam (though I've never been there), which looks pretty impressive with it's towering rounded face. While the Three Gorges Dam is undoubtedly a massive engineering project, it doesn't look cool. It was pretty boring to visit in fact. On the plus side, I touched it while our ship was going through the locks.

Photos aren't cooperating now. I'll try to get some up soon though. In the meantime check out Megan's photos on Facebook.

The Joys of Grading

With the conclusion of Megan and my first semester of teaching rapidly approaching, we've been spending a lot of time grading the final exams of our students. With over 120 students taking writing and oral exams, this is a fairly time consuming process. I graded roughly 1,100 pages of final exams, though about half of it was just multiple choice and fill in the blank stuff. Nevertheless, this is a fairly tedious task.

Every once in a while, however, a student writes something that makes me crack up (<-- an idiom I taught my students). I thought I'd share some of those times with you.

Grading the first part of the exam while students take the second part.

The first example occurred during the paragraph writing section of the test. The question my students had to answer was, "Who is an example of a hero? What personal qualities make this person a hero?" I was pleased to see that the topic sentence of one of my students paragraphs read:

"Jordan is an example of a hero."

W0w! You know what? I am a hero! I have been underestimating my the influence of my own teaching! I suspected that I had been making an impression, but based solely on the fact that most of the students are older than me I figured that they did not look up to me as a hero. Well, I suppose they do! At this point I was feeling pretty good about myself, but I continued reading. The following sentence:

"Tough and pliable make Jordan a hero."

Okay...I suppose I'm tough and pliable, though those seem like contradicting qualities for a person to have. I marked that one down as an ESL error and continued:

"For instance, on one night, Jordan had loose bowels..."

What?!? I can't recall once discussing the specifics of my bowel movements with my students, though perhaps he's aware of the effects some Chinese food can have on a foreigner. Maybe he's just assuming I've had loose bowels. I'm still holding out hope that my loose bowels are just one of my many heroic qualities. I continued:

"...but he had a very important match on the next day. In order to pursue victory, Jordan didn't give up. He persisted playing the whole game and his team got the victory. As the example shows, Jordan is an example of a hero."

At this point, gravely disappointed, I realized that my student was making the common mistake of referring to someone famous by just their first or last name, in this case Michael Jordan. As an avid sports fan, I even remember the game he's referring to, when Michael Jordan famously had one of his best games while sick with the flu during a game of the 1997 NBA Finals against the Utah Jazz. Oh well, maybe next semester I'll be someone's hero.

The real Jordan with loose bowels.

A few other funny lines from my exams:

• "I am an example of a hero. Honesty, kindness, and stupid make the person a hero." There was no explanation of what he meant by "stupid" being a heroic quality.
• "It is usually more difficult for evil people than kind people to make friends because almost no one prefer evil people." Good to know.
• In a section about customs, I had students finish this sentence, "When you greet an old friend..." My favorite response was "...its acceptable to touch his body."
• In a paragraph about the benefits vs. the costs of the Beijing Olympics, a student wrote "Firstly, history have told us every great event must come from money."

With that the first semester of teaching has come to a conclusion. I have learned a lot and perhaps will post on some specific reflections at some point. Next up: traveling for 4-6 weeks!

Qingdao Weekend

Sorry for the delay in posting about this. The semester is coming to an end in the next 2-3 weeks so we've been busy with schoolwork.

Thursday, May 28 was a public holiday in China for the Dragon Boat Festival and since Megan and I do not have class on Wednesday (until recently, my new class is on Wednesday afternoon), we decided to take Friday off and have a long weekend vacation. We had been planning for weeks to travel to Sanya, a popular beach destination in Hainan Province, with our friends and colleagues Kerstan and Karen but in the end we decided the cost of the flights were more than we wanted to pay (we got flights to Singapore this summer for even cheaper! Thank you Tiger Airways!). Instead, we decided to make the short trip to Qingdao and get to know the city that we technically live in.

Armed with our Lonely Planet China guide and the excitement for a long weekend, we headed into town on Wednesday morning. Naturally, our first stop was our hotel, the Beach Castle Hotel, which was some sort of repurposed old German colonial building. The rooms were great and the location was perfect, right on the water in the old part of the town.

The sign right next to our hotel, how welcoming!

Right inside the main gate, you can see the prison to the right (which we think might also have rooms now) along with the main part of the hotel to the left.

Megan standing outside of the lovely Beach Castle Hotel

Wednesday afternoon was spent wandering along the coast of Qingdao, through pleasant parks and to the nearby beach: Qingdao No. 1 Bathing Beach (not because it is the best, just because there are 6, and who needs names anyway?). We were amused to see the beach attire reversed by gender from what we're used to in the States. The men all wore Speedoes, while the women, terrified by the prospect of a tan, were fully clothed or even layered. In China, as a status symbol of sorts, women try to stay as pale as possible. Physical laborers and peasants are tan because they spend their days working outside in the summer heat, so being tan has the connotation of being poor. I suspect that I am thought to be one of the wealthiest men in China thanks to my blindingly white complexion.

One of the parks we stumbled upon while walking along the ocean.

Part of the oceanside path near the No. 1 Bathing Beach

No. 1 Bathing Beach

On Wednesday night we went searching for a restaurant recommended by the Lonely Planet, but we fortunately ventured a little further and stumbled upon an even better dinner spot. We wandered through some alleys that, for those who are familiar with Shanghai, reminded us of a cross between the Xin Tian Di and Tiakang Lu areas. Like Xin Tian Di, the area consisted of old buildings that had been renovated and updated into a pleasant walking area. Like Taikang Lu, the alleys weren't as polished as Xin Tian Di and the area wasn't as blatently marketed towards foriegners. We found a great restaurant that overlooked a courtyard where performers played some traditional Chinese instruments, some that I had never seen before. It turned out to be a very pleasant first evening.

This area was quite hidden, we were lucky enough to see this little alleyway from the main street and decided that alleys aren't nearly as creepy in China as they are in the states, so we ventured in.  It was a fortunate find!

There were tons of these statues all over this area, I think this guy was cooking some 串 (the kabob-line things that are all over the streets here).  A little further up was a statue of a man smoking opium along with a few guys playing mahjong.

This was our view of the courtyard and performers from our seats in the restaurant.  There were hardly any people there when we arrived, but by the time we left it was packed.

Thursday morning we set out again full of optimisim, but our mood quickly soured when we arrived at McDonald's for breakfast at 9:45 am only to find that breakfast was no longer being served. The woman at the counter didn't even look apologetic. We ended up settling for coffee.

So, with empty stomachs and a caffine buzz, we headed out to see some of the sights. We opted to check out Xiao Qingdao (小青岛), or Little Qingdao, first. Xiao Qingdao is a pennisula that juts into the bay in Qingdao and has a nice park on it, along with a light tower. We had to pay 15 RMB to get into the park, which was well worth it to get away from the holiday crowds. The park was very green and provided an escape from the noise and bustle of the city. Due to the relative isolation of the park, we decided to relax and sun bathe for a while instead of heading to the beach, which was overrun with Chinese vacationers. Despite choosing a less busy spot, we still got numerous looks from bypassers who couldn't believe that we were, GASP, exposing our skin to direct sunlight!

On our way out to 小青岛

A little closer view of 小青岛 with the real 青岛 in the background.

There are all these awesome old fishing boats that hang out just off the coast.

Jordan at the edge of the peninsula.  

There was a pleasant, uncrowded path that went all the way around the little peninsula.  Every side of 小青岛 had a different and pleasant view, so the walk was quite nice.

The lighthouse in the middle of the peninsula.

There are fishermen on all sides of the peninsula, and they must be quite nimble because Jordan and I tried to walk out a little further to get a better picture, but quickly realized our lives could be jeopardized if we tried to walk too far out on the rocks.

This is near where we sat out.

After a few hours in the sun we started to feel drained, but fortunately on the way back to the hotel we encountered our first opportunity to have beer in a bag. I had heard tell of this wonderful Qingdao phenomenon, so we were glad to try it out. For a measley 5 RMB we bought a massive amount of Tsingtao draft beer from a friendly neighborhood lady with a keg. My initial concern was with how to drink it, but then the lady produced a few straws and we were good to go.

The pijiu (啤酒, beer) break gave us ample enthusiasm to continue our sightseeing. We stopped by both the old German Catholic and Protestant Chruches. We were unable to get inside the Catholic church, but it was an impressive structure nonetheless. Interestingly, in the courtyard in front of the church we counted 7 sets of brides and grooms getting wedding photos taken. It did not appear that any were actually on their wedding day, but rather getting photos taken before the big event to put on large banners at the wedding reception (an opportunity Megan and I missed).

The Protestant Church was also an interesting piece of architecture from the outside, but the Lonely Planet guide was accurate in its description of the interior of the church as "Lutheran". The sanctuary was extremely plain, but I was glad to see that there appeared to be a few locals sitting in some of the pews praying. The most interesting part of the Protestant church was the bell tower, which still had the old bells and clock built by the Germans in 1908.

Thursday night we had a craving for Western food so we searched the internet for good restaurant and settled on Cassani, an Italian restaurant. It was a great choice. The ambiance, food, and service were all great (I had lasagna YUM!). While the dinner was quite a splurge when compared to our meager salaries, we ended up getting a ton of food, including cheesecake, gelato, and a bottle of wine for only US$60. A meal of equal quality in a similar restaurant in the States would easily be double.

Friday we started the day checking out the old German governor's mansion, which was one of the highlights of the trip for me. The mansion had been a vacation spot for Mao in 1957, and many other notable Chinese leaders stayed there with him. The rooms had apparently remained as they were when Mao stayed there, so it was a neat piece of history. The best part, though, was the building itself. A very cool and huge old German building.

Friday afternoon was finally time for us to check out the famous Tsingtao Brewery tour. We arrived on Qingdao Beer Street around 1 pm so we decided to eat at a seafood restaurant across from the brewery. The "menu" was a bunch of tubs filled with water and various ocean creatures. As we were in Qingdao, we had to get the Qingdao specialty gao la, or clams. We also got some sort of prawn/crab hybrid. The choices were great and we enjoyed the food along with some fresh Tsingtao beer that made the trip across the street from the brewery.

The brew tour itself was great. Tsingtao brewery has quite an interesting history, having been established by the Germans and later controlled by the Japanese, the KMT, the Communist Party (you would be amazed by the progress made at the brewery during the glorious 9th 5 Year Plan!), and finally as a publicly traded company. The "Drunken House" was also a highlight, meant to imitate the feeling of drunkenness. The room was actually just very slanted in one direction so you were fighting gravity while walking though. All in all, the Tsingtao Brewery seemed to be a Chinese version of the Heineken Brewery I visited a few years ago in Amsterdam. That is to say: large, interesting, and everything slightly lower quality (except for the beer, which I find quite comparable to Heineken).

We wrapped up our weekend staying at the Intercontinental Hotel, which was AWESOME. We had seen our share of the sights and we're only a few hours away if we ever want to see more, so we took advantage of staying in the nice hotel by laying by the indoor pool and watching movies on an actual TV for once as we only watch movies on our tiny laptop screen here. It was awesome. While looking for a place for dinner on Saturday night we stumbled into some sort of fundraising event for the Qingdao Expat Community that was being held in one of the hotel restaurants. We just thought we were paying for a buffet dinner, but it turned out we were buying tickets to this event (if we were Chinese we probably wouldn't have been able to buy the tickets). The buffet was awesome, they had a GREAT Filipino band (as Filipino bands tend to be), and we got a lot of nice smiles from other westerners. I felt like I was at some event at TAC or the American Club in Singapore. What luck!

We definitely felt like VIP when we turned on the TV at the Intercontinental and found this!  Our daily lives are not very luxurious here, so every little thing excites us!

We forgot beds this soft existed.

Spying on Jordan from the bathroom- only super nice hotels give you that luxury.

Our weekend concluded with a church service (also in the Intercontinental) on Sunday morning for the Qingdao International Christian Fellowship. The community was great and there were a few hundred people in the congregation. The music and the preaching weren't the best I've heard, but effort is what counts and the feeling of being in a church service again was great. We will be sure to attend again if we in the area on a Sunday again.

I'm having trouble uploading photos so for now check out this album on Facebook (you don't need a Facebook account to view them). Hopefully I'll be able to add photos to this later.

Not your Average Spa

For my entire life I've suffered with headaches and migraines.  Over the years I've tried a variety of different techniques to tackle the pain: medicine, yoga, physical therapy, chiropractic treatments, stretches, breathing techniques, special diets, you name it!  While I lived in Singapore my mom and I would religiously visit our local reflexology friends at Causeway Point and get weekly foot and back massages which seemed to be helpful (plus, who doesn't like a good rub down?)  So, when our new friends here in Huangdao told Jordan and I that they'd found an AMAZING place for reflexology we jumped at the opportunity to test it out.  We woke up this morning pretty stoked for a 2 hour, 60RMB massage (less than $10 per person!) However, we were sorely mistaken about what this 'massage' would entail.  

We began with a pleasant foot soak in tea infused water, while our feet were soaking our backs were gently rubbed by two jolly looking Chinese men.  We then sat back in our soft recliners and sighed peacefully while they rubbed oil over our freshly cleaned feet.  Then it began...

While punching our feet and laughing as we tightly gripped the lazy boy arms in pain, the Chinese men proved to be much stronger than their tiny physiques let off.  I remember thinking the first few rounds of foot reflexology in Singapore were painful after not having been in a while, so I decided I needed to toughen up and try to enjoy this 'massage'.

After about 50 minutes of the foot massage, I had begun to unclench.  We were then ushered into the next room and asked to lay face-down on the massage table.  Being spoiled by the Singapore American Club and the Houstonian Spas I was slightly disappointed at the lack of pre-massage dips in the sauna, freshly cleaned long white robes,  lavender and eucalyptus oils, and soothing music to accompany my full body massage, however I decided I could survive getting a back massage in my jeans with my face pressed into a questionably 'clean', mildewy scented towel.  I was determined to enjoy the back massage because my headaches always seem to temporarily subside after a good massage.  

While I did feel completely satisfied with the back massage portion, I became slightly nervous when I thought I was done, and then looked over at Jordan who had somehow lost his shirt and had glass cups stuck to his exposed butt.  I watched for a second as Jordan's masseuse lit a fire under each cup and quickly inverted it on Jordan's back creating some sort of giant hickey.  I asked Jordan how it felt and he seemed perfectly content so I decided if he could handle it, i could too.  

A diagram of how cupping is performed.

The skin gets sucked about an inch into the glasses. There is a feeling of sweet relief when they are removed.

Little did I know that Jordan's circulation is much better than mine and he therefore got to skip the 'scratching' part of the experience.  I was asked to take off my shirt and lay face down on the table while my sadistic masseuse used a tooth-less comb type object to literally scratch my back for 20 minutes.  He smiled and told me this will make my headaches better- yeah we'll see!  After the scratching came my turn for cupping.  While Jordan and most other people say that cupping isn't too painful I'm going to go ahead and liken it to waxing;  After the first 5 times or so it's not that bad, but the first 5 times you want to cry and slap the person inducing such pain on you.  I tried to go to a happy place, and that happy place did in fact look a little bit like the Houstonian Spa, so I was a little bummed to open my eyes and find myself still in a smelly room with 10 glasses fire-sealed to my neck, back, butt and legs.

All in all, we survived and I'm going to try to keep an open mind.  If I miraculously feel brand new tomorrow (which I was promised) then perhaps I'll go back, and after 5 more sessions I will be convincing all of you that scratching and cupping is the wave of the future.  Otherwise, brace yourself if you ever happen upon a Chinese 'Spa'. 

Notice how Jordan's marks are nicely shaped and his back only looks slightly strange?

Now, draw your attention to my back which looks a bit like I was run over by a bus.

Miscellany

Before I post on some of our more recent events, I wanted to give a quick update on what we've been up to the last month or so. 

New Class

For the last 3 weeks I have been teaching a new class because one of the other foreign teachers had a "disagreement" with his class. The class is an oral class and I guess all the previous teacher did was have one student per class give an oral presentation and then a few students would ask questions. The students had complained that they were only getting to practice their oral English one time in the semester, and the rest of the time they spent sitting and listening. Also, the class has a textbook the students had to pay for, but the teacher refused to use it.

After many complaints from students and many requests by the administration to change his teaching practices, the teacher still refused to make any changes. So, the class was given to me. It kind of bums me out that a foreign teacher can be so stubborn and the school can't really do anything about it. The teacher is still getting paid as much as he was before, and he has one less class. His stubbornness and refusal to cooperate actually benefitted him. Unfortunately I see many foreign teachers taking advantage of their "foreigness" in this way. Oftentimes the school will do anything to please the foreigners, even if we're being total jerks.

The students are undergraduate English majors which is quite a contrast to my post-graduate students from various majors. The English majors are significantly better at English and much more enthusiastic. It makes teaching the class a ton of fun and also much easier than my post-grad students. With the post-grad students I feel like I have to struggle to get any sort of response from them, but the English majors happily volunteer answers to questions. I'm hoping next semester I'll be able to teach some more English majors. 

CUBA Game

Since it's founding in 1998, all major Chinese universities have competed in the Chinese University Basketball Association (CUBA). The CUBA is the equivalent the NCAA, but only for basketball, and Shandong University of Science and Technology is the CUBA equivalent of Kansas or Duke. Our school won a CUBA National Championship in either 2001, 2002, or 2004.  When I've asked various students or other teachers I have heard all three answers.  I've even had the opportunity to see the CUBA National Championship trophy, which is an awesome golden backboard and rim (think slightly larger Nerf hoop, but pure gold), but it doesn't even say the year on it.  The CUBA wikipedia site says 2002, for what it's worth.

Regardless of what year they've won, SUST has won one national title (out of only 10 so far) and nearly every year they make it to at least the Elite 8 of the CUBA Tournament, usually the Final Four. They are a powerhouse. I have told my students that if they ever know of a game that I could watch they should let me know.

One evening I received an email that SUST would be playing Hunan Normal University at our school's gymnasium the following afternoon at 2:30 pm.  He said that finding tickets would be difficult but he wanted to let me know anyway.  Fortunately, Megan and I were able to land tickets from our well connected friends Kerstan and Karen, and we headed to the game. When we arrived, we learned from some other spectators that this game was the Quarterfinals for the national tournament, so SUST was in the Elite 8.

The gym was packed with students when we arrived and we found our seats which were in the very front row behind the visiting team's bench. Apparently the tournament is set up in a home and home format, where a game is played at each team's campus and the team with the highest aggregate score continues to the next round.

The game was a blast. The pregame and halftime festivities were half of the show. There were "Basketball Babies" (what they call cheerleaders here), mascots (a panda, a pig, and an inflated basketball-headed creature), drum and singing performances, giant flags, and traditional dancers. Also, the student section was arranged to spell "CUBA" with the colors of their shirts. While the students clearly cheered for our school to win, everything official was completely unbiased. The cheerleaders did not openly support one team or the other, the student section was comprised of students wearing both schools' colors and spelled "CUBA" rather than "SUST" and each team had an equally large flag.

The actual game was a blowout. SUST dominated the game from start to finish, winning 99-71. This was the first leg of the match, so aggregate score counted, and they had incentive to run up the score. The level of play was pretty high. The players rivaled NCAA Division 3 athletes in both physicality and skill, but the coaching left a lot to be desired. With the exception of a few inbounds plays, the game was basically unorganized streetball. There were times that some players did not even pretend to get back on defense, but their coaches did not seem to care. A well coached Division 3 team like Calvin would probably run all over these teams.

Since the game they have had the second game of the match at the other school's campus and SUST is successfully into the Final Four, so there will be another game on campus so I hope to watch it too.

Here are some photos of the game:

Cameraman for CCTV 5 (China's ESPN). This dude was texting on his cellphone before he saw me about to take a picture and pretended to be filming.

Karen, Kerstan, and Megan in our seats before the game.

The student section spelling out "CUBA"

The players from the teams threw some mini-basketballs into the crowd and I caught one!

Halftime drummers.

The inflated basketball-headed mascot with a guy inside it walking around.

Halftime dancers.

Game action from our seats. Our seats were right behind the opponent's bench.

Most of the gym.

Final score: SUST 99 - Hunan Normal University 71

Basketball Team Dinner

My weekend basketball team, Team Bangbang, recently had a team dinner after one of our games a week or so ago. We ate at an outdoor barbeque restaurant in Huangdao and it was great chance to do something social with both the American and Chinese members of the team. Almost every player on the team has a wife or girlfriend too, so all in all our group was about 12 or 14 people. 

The conversation was held half in English and half in Mandarin, with the bilingual among us translating for the less lingually inclined. Those of us who knew very little English or Mandarin tried our best to keep up and pitch in with a few words of our own. Many toasts were attempted in toaster's foreign language with laughter usually following. My Mandarin toast was the embarssingly simple "我们是朋友!” (Women shi pengyou!/We are friends!).

These truly cross-cultural moments are some of my favorites in China, and make me extremely thankful that Megan and I decided to come here.

Here are a few photos:

Our table outdoors at the barbeque. A great evening.

Good food and drink.

Three of our Chinese teammates showing their strength: Jack, Li, and Gao.

An interesting insight into male/female relationships in China: Jack (left) ran home after our game to change and told us not to tell his wife that he was playing basketball because she doesn't want him to play so much. There are things that I do or don't do at Megan's request, but something healthy like basketball isn't one of them.

Team Bangbang: (top L-R) Gao, Hunter, Roland, Li (bottom L-R) Jack, Me, Kyle, Kerstan

The wives and girlfriends.

Back in Business

The lack of posting here for the last month has been caused partly by being busy, partly by lack of motivation, but mostly by China. For reasons unimaginable, they have blocked blogs so I haven't been able to access the blog myself.

Well, thanks to the help of a fellow CIEE Teach in China participant from our orientation group, Peter Youngblood, I was able to get around the block. We are up and running. Expect more posting to come very soon!

Long Weekend Recap

With Friday being Chinese Labor Day, Megan and I were more than happy to have another 3-day weekend to enjoy. After sleeping in on Friday I headed into Huangdao with Kerstan as he had stumbled upon some sort of basketball league with some of his other Western friends in town. Apparently last weekend they were playing at an outdoor court and were invited to play an organized game with some sort of official club team. Of course they accepted and had the chance to play a full court game with officials and a scoreboard and everything.

They were promised another game on Friday but needed more players, so I was happily recruited to play. One of the players on our team also managed to buy us uniforms for wholesale price, though they feature an image of motorcycles on the front with the words "Bangbang - Live Action Live Life" on the front. Nonetheless, we all looked "uniform" so we were ready to play. Our team features 4 American and 3 Chinese players, most of which speak pretty good English.  Team Bangbang was born.

The game on Friday was a full four quarter game which our team won 87-73. It was close at the beginning, but towards the end we wore the other team down as we had 2 subs while they only had 5 guys. Also, their cigarette breaks during time outs and half time couldn't have helped. The whole thing was organized by this 50ish year old Chinese man who rolled up in a shiny new car (a clear status symbol), honked and waved to everyone on the court, and then got out and blew a whistle to signal 5 minutes till tipoff. We immediately dubbed him "the Godfather."

After the game, Kerstan, Kyle (another player and the owner of the Western bar Catch-22), and I went to a driving range nearby. For 40 RMB (US$7) we could hit about as many balls as we wanted. The driving range was placed right at the base of a few small mountains and is quite removed from the city so it was quite pretty and peaceful. Plus, I haven't hit golf balls since I've been here so I was glad to get that chance again. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera, but if I go back I'll be sure to take some photos.

Kyle has recently decided to turn his "Bar & Lounge" into a "Bar & Grill" so he has been experimenting with serving food. As he's just starting this, he offered to bring us back to the bar to have a free meal so his employees could practice serving groups of people. We met up with Megan and Karen and the five of us had a nice Western style meal. I'm pretty sure we all ordered bacon cheeseburgers, which is something I've been craving for a long time. It hit the spot, and it helped that it was on the house. Kerstan was so hungry he ordered a second bacon cheeseburger, which he intended to pay for, but it arrived without the actual burger. Kyle told Kerstan not to pay for and then explained to his cook that the whole point of a burger was to have the beef in it. Apparently it was still a pretty nice BLTish sandwich.

Saturday evening we were invited to the home of a Canadian couple who teach at the local international school (which is about 95% Korean apparently, and only has 6 or 7 kids per grade) for lasagna. This couple had been friends with Kerstan and Karen for a while and Megan and Karen had ran into them the day before which got us the invite. They have two really cute daughters who were about 6 and 8 years old and adopted from China, which is why the couple decided to come to China for a few years to teach. Also, the woman, Bernice, was first generation Dutch-Canadian, so we had quite a bit to talk about. Also, you can't go wrong with lasagna. It was a great evening, and one that made me forget for a while that we are even in China.

This afternoon we had the second game on the schedule for team Bangbang, this time against the Godfather's team. We had heard that his team is the best in Huangdao, so we were eager to play them. The game, while a lot of fun, was pretty rough from the beginning. I had flashbacks to my days playing at SAS with Chinese refs and Chinese opponents who seem to be in cahoots.

With the deck stacked against us (at least from my perspective), the game was pretty close throughout. Towards the end of the third quarter or beginning of the fourth quarter our team had built up a lead of 8 or so. Before long, however, and seemingly without a big run from the other team, the score was tied. We tried to fix the scoreboard but everyone insisted it was correct. So, we kept playing, after being told there were 6 minutes remaining in the game. We had possession and scored to take a two point lead. After a possession for each team without scoring, our opponents scored to tie the game, 53-53. We brought the ball up court like any other possession, but as soon as we crossed half court the refs blew the whistles to signal the end of the game.

Needless to say, we were pretty upset. I was probably the worst offender, shouting at the ref and signaling to the ref that we did not even have someone yell "10, 9, 8...." like at the end of every other quarter. It was so clearly rigged. We were grumbling to ourselves and one of our teammates' wives who is Chinese said "Please don't be angry, this is the way it has to be."  I suppose that is true, this team was the "best" team in the area, and apparently their company sponsors the upkeep for the court that we were playing on, so they just can't lose.

We talked a bit about how in China things are significantly less democratic (obviously) than in America. Megan commented that oftentimes people don't earn things by merit as they would in the States (and how we should have by winning the game), but rather things are given to people based on status. Our opponents were captained by the Godfather and we were playing on their home court. They had the status, so we simply were not allowed to beat them. We had to maintain the natural order by ending the game in a tie. I'd rather lose than tie (still bitter).

Anyway, it was still great fun to play and there is talk of an all-city tournament with eight teams in a few weeks that we'll probably play in.

Warming up before the game. Notice the older guy in the sweater and collared shirt. No one knew who he was, but he went through our layup lines with us and seemed like a nice guy.

Game action (though you can't see me in the picture).