Two Chopsticks in Shanghai

Well, now that it's been nearly a year since we went on this trip to Shanghai and Xi'an, we've decided to finally post about it! I apologize if the writing is long and boring, but mostly it's for our own sakes (remember, this blog is acting as our journal for our time in China). So feel free to just look at the pictures!

So the school gave us an awesome few day heads up that we had a week off of work for the (western) new year. This was clearly a situation to take advantage of! So we quickly got to planning, and by that Sunday, we were off!

We took the high-speed railway to Shanghai. It was about a 4 hour ride, and was quite scenic and lovely. And fast. Very fast. This wasn't a surprise, because we'd ridden the high-speed railway to and from Beijing a couple of times, but nifty nonetheless.

It just so happened that our American friends who had come to China with China Horizons were in Shanghai for a couple of nights on their way out of the country! So once we got there we went straight to meet up with them. They showed us around the city a bit (they'd been there before) and we had a grand old time. We wandered around the center of the city for a while, trying to make our way to the museum. We eventually found it, but, alas, it was closed by the time we got there. While walking through the park to get to the museum, they showed us the "meet market" where single twenty-something's parents and grandparents go to find potential partners for them. It was hilarious. These people had posters with pictures of their children and all of their personal information like medical background, salary, and weight. I guess that's one way to get the job done.

Fortunately, the Erbs were in Shanghai early enough to make it to church there (those righteous Erbs), and had so kindly been invited to have dinner at a member's apartment! So we, of course, joined them. This family was so very nice to us. They invited us into their home, fed us delicious American food (including home-baked goods!), and treated us as though we'd known them for years. I'll actually put a plug in for them here. When we were there (things may have changed since then), they were starting up a business out of their home selling home-baked cinnamon rolls (which I can guarantee are delicious). So, if you ever find yourself living in Shanghai and hankering for a bit of home, her website is here: http://www.cinnaswirlchina.com/



There were other church members there for dinner, and we ended up speaking to a hispanic woman who was in Shanghai on vacation from Cambodia, where she teaches Spanish. Unfortunately, I can't remember her name, but she knew my uncle and his family! My Uncle Matt and all (or at least some) of my Ellsworth cousins lived in Cambodia for a time and my uncle was the branch president there, so I suppose he was well-known in the church. Strangely enough, this was the second person I've met who knew him and his family there. Small world!

After getting nice and full of good food, we set off for The Bund. The bund is an area of Shanghai on the edge of the river that's full of old and new buildings with interesting architecture and all sorts of fancy things to see.







This nifty bull is modeled after the one in Chicago (from what I understand).



By the time we were done at the bund, we were mighty chilly and mighty tired. We made our way back toward our hotel through the vast (and quite impressive) subway system,


 and by the time we were into the neighborhood, we were hungry. So we stopped at a familiar little hole-in-the-wall jiaozi shop and had ourselves some delicious dumplings. Kindly, they cleared the table for us.
 
This adorable girl acted as our cashier.


On Monday (New year's eve), we went to a couple of buddhist temples. The first was Jing'an Temple. It was big and beautiful and awesome. We saw monks come out and sing a song in front of an alter where they then burnt some offerings. The grounds were quite extensive for being in the middle of a huge city, and we wandered and wandered. The juxtaposition of peaceful buddhist decor with a background of towering skyscrapers looming over the courtyard was interesting, to say the least. It reminded me that no matter what chaos surrounds you, you can always find peace if you are looking for it.


After the Jing'an Temple, we went to the Jade Buddha Temple. Meaning, we took a long subway ride and walked for what seemed like miles, and then decided to just look at the outside, buy a souvenir, and then head to our next destination.

Fortunately, our friends the Cleggs had lent us a guidebook for the city of Shanghai which pretty much dictated our whole trip. It suggested a guided walk around the "Old City" - which led us to see all sorts of fun things and interesting people. The fellow in the top left corner of the picture below is a man that we met whilst we were taking a little nap in a park, soaking up some sun rays (it was mighty cold, and the sun felt oh-so-nice). He was from Singapore and spoke English excellently. We got the feeling that he spends his days finding foreigners in the park and practicing speaking with them. Super cute nice old guy.
 

We saw these people on two separate occasions - just enjoying some time around the city in their pj's.


These fancy people, just getting their modeling on.


In another park, we saw this woman who came along with a shopping cart full of cat food and individual dishes for all of the cats living in these bushes. I can't be sure, but I think she was calling them by name.


We enjoyed some la mien for dinner. Yum. I love this stuff. Every time we ate on this trip we found ourselves in small restaurants, amongst natives only. I was so glad that by the time we went on this trip we were well acquainted with Chinese food and knew how to find what we like.


We did some shopping, of course. We saw many a shop with loads of little figurines. In this shop, every thing cost 10 RMB (~$1.50 USD).  Below the Chinese sign, it says, in English, "Entire audience 10 yuan."



It was so cold that we bought a couple of matching scarves and added them on top of the scarves we were already wearing. I only looked slightly ridiculous.


The "Old City Walk" led us to this final destination: The Yu Gardens Bazaar. It was beautiful. Unfortunately, by the time we got there most shops were closed, but it was still so fun to see all of the lights on the buildings.





This building is in the middle of a little pond. The bridge to get to it is in a zig-zag pattern because bad spirits can't turn, so they can't cross this bridge.


Since it was New Year's Eve, everyone (particularly all of the tourists) was on their way to big parties for the evening. However, we were afraid we'd get stuck somewhere after the subway system closed for the night. So we caught the last subway back to our hotel and celebrated in our hotel room with some western treats and a noise-maker we'd bought earlier that day.

On Tuesday we followed the other guided walk in our guidebook, the "French Concession Walk." Walking around the French Concession was so much fun and I would definitely suggest it to anyone visiting Shanghai. Perhaps it was because we'd been in China for 4 months at that point, but it was just lovely to see so much western influence in the architecture and general feel of the area. It was like being in a whole different world. Shanghai is just a super diverse place.

One of the highlights was Fuxing Park. Most people had the day off of work since it was New Year's Day, so the park was full of people enjoying time with family, playing music, flying kites, and dancing.







We thought we'd try one more time to make it to the museum before leaving Shanghai. Once again, our plans were thwarted, and it closed just as we got there. But it was a beautiful (albeit a tad chilly) day, and we enjoyed being out in the courtyard in front of the museum with other people.

Another highlight of our day was meeting this fellow (shown below, with Tom) in front of the museum. He was another man from Singapore with an incredible mastery of English, who seemed to spend his time wandering the city and befriending foreigners. He was so cute, and very elderly. He told us about how he remembers when Shanghai was a flat city and you couldn't see any skyscrapers on the horizon. He told us how much had changed in China and in the world in his lifetime. He was so kind and wonderful, we just had to get a picture of him. He was a very interesting man, not only intellectually, but physically: he had some sort of moley thing growing out from under his eye that appeared to have tentacles. I won't forget him (or that growth) anytime soon.


Tired Tom.


In the park surrounding the museum, we saw this sheep. This sheep (I wish I knew its name!) is super famous in China. It's a character in a cartoon, and we saw it plastered all over everything. I'm not sure at all what was going on, but soon after we took this picture, some authorities showed up and there was some sort of confrontation involving the sheep. He was then escorted out of the park.


Here are a few other interesting things we saw in Shanghai:

This guy, selling cleaning supplies from his cart.


Gangnam style.


Even in a big gorgeous city like Shanghai, it's still easy to find piles of garbage on the sidewalks, with its aromatic juices flowing into the gutters. The smell is something I just don't miss about China.


Fancy dog took off his glasses for his meal.


A store called "hotwind."


Everywhere we went in China, we saw "skeleton buildings;" Shanghai was no exception.
 

Just drying some laundry...


...next to the meat.


The Chinese know how to keep their babies bundled and warm.

Christmas

So Christmas came and went this year, probably just as fast as it would have back at home, but the culture of Christmas is not at all the same here. So far, the kindergarten where we work has done a decent job at remembering the important American holidays like Halloween and Thanksgiving. When we got to the middle of December and there was no sign of Christmas yet, we were beginning to worry.

We didn't worry for too long though, because a week before Christmas day, the decorations finally came out. We were informed of 3 separate Christmas parties in the kindergarten, and 1 for the primary school, in which we performed musical numbers. They asked us to come to the practice a few days before the first party and we had a great time watching the kids perform their dances. But we were still yet to hear a song that had anything to do with Christmas (unless Gangnam Style has taken over Christmas). Alicia and I performed a duet with my ukulele singing "Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer". It didn't really fit into the rest of the music styles, but we wanted to hold up our end of a western-culture Christmas.

Now before I launch into the details of the Christmas parties, I want to mention that my selfless wife Alicia wanted to make sure we had some good Christmas spirit this year so she carried out a well-planned "12 Days of Christmas" with a different gift for me every day leading up to Christmas. I loved every single gift. I don't know how she got all the gifts so sneakily because we are always together. Here they are in a carefully remembered list:

12 - A bag of twelve snickers candy bars (they are pretty expensive here, but a fabulous treat)
11 - Eleven sticky notes hidden around the apartment with love notes written on them
10 - One pedicure for ten toes
9 - Blogpost titled "9 Things I love about Tom"
8 - Eight Homemade chocolate turtles
7 - Seven days of not having to wash the dishes
6 - Six Love Poems
5 - A 5 meter measuring tape
4 - Four 10-Yuan bills for buying any treats I want at the store
3 - Three Love emails from Alicia's secret email address
2 - Two new knives, one for my keychain, and one for my utility drawer
1 - A bag of Alpenliebe candy, like cream savers

So many gifts. Thanks Alicia for bringing the Christmas spirit home. In addition to the giftage, we decided that since we couldn't find any cheap trees at the store, we would make a tree out of paper and tape it on the wall. We even found a short strand of lights to put on it. Here's a pic.

Now the kindergarten parties were a force of cuteness to be reckoned with. We've got way too many videos of cute children that don't belong to us and we can only post a fraction of what we have here, so I'll try to keep it brief. Keep in mind that we attended 3 of these parties and they were all basically the same, so it will be hard to differentiate all the different videos with "Gangnam Style" playing in the background.

This is a small clip of the Happy Babies doing a fashion show with homemade designer clothing.

This is one of Alicia's favorite Small Babies. He's got the perfect hair for rockin' out and this is a little sneak peak of what we get everytime we sing a fun song with him.

This is the Happy Babies doing Gangnam Style.

They have a guy who teaches the little babies Kung Fu. Our city (Cangzhou) is one of the original cities and founders of Kung Fu (supposedly).

This is the Smile Babies doing a cute little dance.

This is the Super Babies reciting a poem that was written by Mao Zedong about winter. I just think it's interesting that he is such an honored leader here.

This is Linda, one of my smartest Super Babies, putting decorations on the Christmas trees outside the school.

This is Xi Xi (English name: Ace) and his mom. They are having fun helping decorate the trees.

Okay this picture is important. This kid is named Erba, but who else can see the resemblance to Tim Madsen as a little kid? Please let me know what you think.

Alicia is helping Erba with the decorations.

This is a group picture of all the kindy teachers, students, parents, and more!

The primary school had over three hours of performances up their sleeve as well. We got front row seats in the lunchroom as honorary guests to watch performance after performance of non-Christmas themed dances and music. It was still very neat though. We got to sing TWO songs at this party, so we included "Santa Claus is Coming To Town". I'll try to keep it brief with the pictures and videos below.

This was a good little intro to show the one Christmas song they all knew how to sing.

This may be one of our favorite performances of the event. The sixth grade boys put on a great shuffle.

This is another dance by the 6th grade students. We mostly put this clip in to show the awesome special effects. Watch carefully.

This is the 1st grade putting on some sort of skit. Not sure what the story is about, but it was entertaining. The kid who runs in wearing black is named Spencer. He loves us, but the only English words he's ever spoken are "Hello Teacher", and "I like ALL THE COLORS!!". Whenever he sees us, he runs up, points to himself, and says "S-pentherrrrr" with a very strong lisp.

Here you get to see a special clip of our Christmas performance. Before watching this video, make sure the volume is up. The teacher we asked to take the video handed the camera off to another teacher, and they speak some sort of alien language (it's just Chinese) to each other. So crazy sounding.

After the performance, the lunch lady, who speaks no English, wanted to make us a special dinner of tomato and egg and some other dish. We gratefully accepted. As we were walking out of the lunchroom doors, Kyle called and said he would be there to pick us up in 20 minutes to take us to a Christmas party with some college students at his hospital. He made sure that we brought the ukulele to sing songs for everyone. I guess Christmas is all about performances here.

We walked into a classroom full of college age students studying at the hospital and to our surprise, we were instant celebrities. We were sat down on the front row with a pile of oddly-flavored sunflower seeds and peanuts heaped on the desks. We were given oranges and apples like crazy, and they were constantly asking us if we wanted to participate, although the entire program was being given in Chinese. Although the communication barrier was still there, we felt much more comfortable with a crowd of people that were close to our age.

We played a game where we had to draw a backpack with a blindfold on.

Then we had to guess which picture was our own. If you got it right, you got a new pen and some glowstick candy. Saweet.

The party was a lot of fun and they all loved our Christmas song performance. When we stood up to leave, Kyle took the microphone and explained in Chinese that we believe in God. Everyone made a oohhh sound and we went on our way. It was very interesting that out of anything, he chose to tell them that. As we were walking out of the classroom, a girl came running in excitement to tell us that she was from Tianjin, and that she also believed in God. We had a short bonding moment, and went our separate ways.

If this Christmas Eve doesn't sound long enough yet, then let's tack on another couple hours of hanging out with Kyle and Lily at KFC. To tell the truth, those couple hours were probably the most interesting we had out of the whole season. Apparently word got out that a couple of foreigners were eating dinner at KFC on Christmas Eve because all of the sudden, there were two photographers taking pictures of us. Keep in mind, I was wearing a yellow bow tie, a santa hat, and was carrying around a peculiar instrument called a ukulele, and eating ice cream. There was one photographer taking pictures from 30 feet away using a huge telescopic lens. In my usual practice, I awkwardly waved at her until she aknowledged me. She waved back, but didn't miss a beat and kept taking pictures. Soon, the guy on the very next table, about as close as he could possibly be to me, whipped out this huge camera and was taking pictures of me paleting my ice cream, bite by bite. In addition to the paparazzi, I was told by two different people at that KFC that I look like the President of Russia, and also a frenchmen. I blame it on the bowtie. But the most mindblowing thing that happened that evening at KFC was when Kyle leaned accross the table and asked us an alarming question: "So do you know the meaning of Christmas?" I guess it shouldn't suprise me coming from a man who lives in a country full of atheists, but we had to explain to him who Christ was and what the Bible was, and how Christmas is spelled with His name in it. Mind blowing. We kept it all very brief, of course, to avoid proselyting.

Before we knew it, it was 10:30 and we were ready to go home. Unfortunately, we still had to work on Christmas, and go to our last kindy Christmas party. On Christmas, we left straight from the party to go to dinner with Kyle and friends. They wanted to take us somewhere special for Christmas dinner so we went to this sichuan style food place. There was an above average amount of delicous Chinese food there, and we were very happy to have it. I included a bunch of the pictures from that dinner in our Kyle and friends post a few days ago, but there are a couple of dishes that should be noted. The spicy duck head was unbelievable spicy. You should avoid that at all costs. And the fish bathed in oil should also be mentioned. So delicious. And finally, there were ribs of some sort that had been cooked with apricots and brown sugar and they were soooo good. Before we left the restaurant, Kyle strongly encouraged us to sing a song on the stage at the restaurant. Luckily, we had a couple of recently practiced Christmas songs under our belt so we did it. I know that no one in the restuarant understood the words to Rudolph, so I pretended it was a love song and gave Alicia a kiss at the end. It was a Christmas to remember.

First foreigners in Cangzhou: A Namibian friend

Way back in November, we were parousing the shopping mall in downtown Cangzhou, when accross the discount sweater bin, I saw an unusually colored hand under the sign on the other side of the bin. Upon further inspection, I quickly whispered (said outloud because that's how we whisper here, not worried about somebody understanding) to Alicia, "Alicia. There is a black guy over there!" One second later, I realized that there is a pretty good chance that he also speaks English. I scooted out from behind the sign and slowly moved towards the two black guys, and one asian that were standing there together. I asked the standard question: "Do you speak English?"

They did, and long story short, The two black guys were from Namibia, and the other guy was from Myanmar. They barely spoke any Chinese, and have been living in Cangzhou for almost a year for a special military pilot training program. They said we were the first foreigners that they'd seen in the city. This confirmed our suspicion that we are definitely one of the few foreigners in Cangzhou City. (of about 7 million people) They were very friendly and we exchanged numbers to try and arrange dinner sometime.

A couple weeks later, we met up with one of the Namibians that was especially friendly. His name is Samora. We had a very good time eating lunch with him and talking about Namibia and other random things about cultural differences. It was fun to relate with someone from Namibia about the challenges that come with living in China. He told us all about his hometown, and how the dude from "The Gods Must Be Crazy" was from a village very close to his home.

After lunch, we took him with us to meet up with Susan, our former liaison at the People's Park so we could see the Cangzhou Zoo. While we were waiting, we bought some Tonghulu to show Samora. At this point, we were feeling pretty good about our Chinese skills, so we were trying to find ways to show them off. He didn't like sweet things very much, just like the Chinese, so I don't think he liked the Tonghulu. Anyways, Susan showed up and we headed to the zoo entrance for a multi-cultural zoo field trip. We ran into some hard core kite flyers at the park that wanted each of us to try flying the kites. Take a look.

Samora, the kite owner, and Susan (in the pink).

Alicia got a chance to try and I guess her kite-flying experience was more euphoric than most.

This picture is to show you how friendly Samora is. He approached this Chinese baby and made him cry.

This was a cool bridge in the park. That is Alicia and Susan.

The zoo in Cangzhou was definitely not as interesting as the one in Baoding that we saw the week earlier, but you still can't beat the entrance fee of a buck fifty. As we walked past many of the animal cages, including the lion, Samora was telling  us about how lions, elephants, zebras, and other exotic animals just roamed free in his home country. They are often a concern when it comes to animals crossing the road in Namibia. He told us that no one drives on the roads at night for fear of hitting an elephant. He also said that it's pretty rare for someone to survive hitting an elephant with their car. Kinda crazy stuff.

Anyway, here are a few highlights from the zoo.

Turns out, all the deer in China are friendly!

Caaaaaaaaaamelllllllll.

Petting zoo with rabbits! Probably my favorite part of the zoo.

They were not afraid to get right in your face. They were hungry for some snacks!

Samora climbed in there with me too.

You can see that both Susan and Samora were laughing at my child-like nature.

This is the funniest little ball-of-a-bird that I've ever seen. Unfortunately, the picture doesn't do it justice.

This bear looks like he's loving life right?

They chained this tiger down to the table and let people pay to take pictures with it.

The entrance to the zoo was a mini-great wall of China. Doesn't Alicia look good?

Here's our group picture. Samora and Susan on the left.

We took a stroll through the park afterwards, and we came across a very proud pet owner. We have a few of these type of pictures, but I think this one is my favorite. It's a great example of what some people put their dogs through here. Yes, that stroller is made for a dog, not a baby.

As usual, I had to jump in on some weekend hacky with the locals. They are seriously so good.

We said our goodbyes to Samora and Susan and headed home. We are proud to say that we have a fun friend from Namibia now. Unfortunately, we didn't get to hang out with him again before he left home to Namibia a couple weeks later. 

This is a random picture we took that same night of the canal that runs through the center of the city. This canal is over 1,000 years old. The lights make it look very beautiful.