Adventures in Guangzhou!

Several people have asked me to touch on some of the smaller differences I have noticed, so I will do my best to touch on a few:

Basketball- As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been playing after school with both faculty and students. It's a really nice way to get some exercise, meet new people, and brush up on my two handed reverse dunks. There are a few things that have struck me about playing though. First, when playing pick-up games, they never check the ball after a point is scored. It always goes right back into play from the top of the key. Second, they do not play "win by two" which was one of the sacred commandments from my high school days. Third, they never congratulate teammates after making a basket. Now I'm not saying that you need to stop the show and go nuts after every basket, but there have been a few times when someone has made a really nice drive or a long three and I go to slap him five and I get a weird look. Why is that? I do not know.

Public Transportation- I used to complain about the inefficient nature of the T (the Boston subway system) all the time over the past 2 years. Now I have to say, the Guangzhou metro is pretty incredible and puts the T to shame even more. It's clean, safe, fast, and cheap (usually around ~$0.50-0.75). Unfortunately there are only two different lines in the city right now and I'm not on a line so I have to take a bus to get to the closest stop. No big deal, except for the fact that there is a constant traffic jam on city streets. Sidenote- it seems as if there are approximately 2.6 billion bus lines here and I have yet to master more than 2. Anyhow, last night I went to take the bus up to the metro and what should have taken 5-10 minutes in light traffic took all of 45 minutes. I felt like I was trapped in the opening scene of "Office Space" where the old man in the walker was blowing us by. We would advance 3 ft and come to an abrupt stop. A few minutes later, 2 ft and then another stop. I really think I could have gotten there faster if I had walked backwards with a blindfold on.

Taxis- So maybe if the buses are so slow, taxis are the way to go, right? Wrong. At first I thought that cab drivers would be able to weave in and out NYC-style and circumvent a lot of the congestion. Unfortunately that is just not the case. As it stands, driving itself is pretty chaotic here and taxis are more or less in the middle of the driving hierarchy. So far as I can tell, the buses actually rule the roads since they are bigger than everyone else. The idea of lanes on the road is much more of a fluid concept over here and drivers seem to go in and out all the time, without so much as a signal, arm motion, or look. I used to think that I had a near-death experience driving to and from work everyday in Boston two years ago, but being on the road here puts those experiences to shame. There's really no way to describe the chaos and really give it justice so I'll just leave it at that. A word to the wise--don't drive in Guangzhou.

Food- As I mentioned before, supermarkets are already a bit different over here, but buying food can be slightly overwhelming. I think markets are the equivelant of bacteria-disneyland over here because there are so many ridiculous animals and vegetables all sort of hanging out together. Nothing is really refrigerated, milk, juice, eggs, and produce included. When you go to get meat the butcher is just hacking away at the carcass right in front of you. When you go to get fish you pretty much walk up to a big tank and point at whichever one has the best crawl-stroke. Sidenote- it appears to be virtually impossible to be a vegetarian over here. I have yet to see a single all-vegetable dish at any restaurant or store. Wow.

The Language Barrier- Well, some days are better than others. I try to use my 14 words of mandarin as much as I can, but I still feel self conscious about my accent and pronunciation. Guangzhou is definitely tough for those who don't speak chinese and today was a good example. Steven and I decided to head out and meet up with a buddy of his who is teaching at a teacher's college in the city. He got the name and address over the phone, wrote it down, and we headed out to take a taxi. After hailing a cab, Steven went to work showing the piece of paper with the characters to the driver and asking if they knew were it was. The driver gave a nod of acknowledgement and away we went. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the ride should have been about 20 rmb and taken maybe 15 minutes. Well 35 minutes later and 44 yuan in the hole, we pull up to the gate of a college. As we get out, Steven says that we are definitely in the wrong place. Huh. Okay, so we go over and try to ask people how to get to this place and what buses we might be able to take but we pretty much draw blank stares from people. About 3 hours and 4 buses later we made it back to our school, having never made it to his friend's place. Oh well. That being said, I have also had several positive experiences transcending the language barrier. Eating lunch with the other teachers everyday has been an entertaining experience. One of the two heads of the English Dept has been nice enough to sit and talk with me everyday and his English is great. A few other random teachers have also joined us and they generally struggle a lot more, which I can obviously relate to. Sometimes it takes while to communicate but it always ends with a laugh. I even made plans to go out for spicy food and beers sometime next week with a couple of the guys. What more could I ask for?

Social Life- Without speaking mandarin or cantonese, it has been difficult to expand my social life outside the walls of the school to this point. I am itching to start studying the language as soon as possible for this reason (amongst many others). I have looked through the "That's Guangzhou" magazine and sent out a couple of emails regarding various ex-pat sports clubs and social events, but haven't heard back from anyone yet. However, thanks to some contact info from one of the PiA-ers who was here last year, I got in touch with one of the Yale-in-China fellows who teaches English at Sun Yat Sen University. I met up with her and her roommate last night and headed over to their place for noodles and a movie. While I would never recommend the movie "House of Wax" to anybody unless they needed to thoroughly waste two hours, I had fun hanging out and venture to say that I made a couple of new friends.

Random School Story- After I finished teaching on Friday, Steven and I walked out of the building together. As we passed by the last classroom before the stairs, we both happened to glance in to the room and stop dead in our tracks. Up on the screen, projected in 4 ft x 6ft glory, was the old email forward I received years ago of George W. Bush pictures next to comparable photos of an ape. We were both a little shocked but we started laughing pretty hard, apparently loud enough for a few students to hear us. They recognized the humor of the situation and within seconds the entire classroom was in a raucous uproar of laughter. The teacher immediately ran to the door, asked us to come in, and explained in slightly broken English that this was not a class about politics and that they were in no way making any judgements on the leader of the free world. On the contrary, they were actually just doing a scientific analysis of the phenotypical differences between humans and animals. Suuuuuuuuure. I can't imagine that there were *any* subtle messages there at all! I thought it was pretty funny though and we managed to make a big joke out of it before leaving the class. Moral of the story? Vote for a democrat in 2008.