Haven’t spent much time browsing aimlessly for pretty much a month. Here’s an article I am liking: Eat, Pray, Spend. Recommended by my favorite blog of all time, mimi smartypants.

I needed the break. The sightseeing will still be there tomorrow.

*pictures coming some time from Susan’s camera
Today was a lovely day. I tried to sleep in, but couldn’t, so I just lay in bed pretending to be asleep for as long as I could stand it. Several of us had planned to go to the Fairy Lake Botanical Gardens, about an hour bus ride. A group went two weekends ago and had an amazing experience, so we all wanted to go too.

The last few minutes before we left, I was googling to get any extra information I could about how to get there. There was a webpage that had a card to print out that said “Please take me to Fairy Lake.” If only I had any way to print it out. I briefly considered copying the characters, but that would take too long and I would probably get them wrong. I looked at Patti’s papers to the right of my computer and remembered she had a map of Shenzhen. Even though it was only in Chinese characters, I was getting used to the look of the land and thought it might come in useful. If I had to point to our general area to get us home, I could find it on the map.

Under the map was Patti’s brochure from when she had been to the Gardens! Now I had the name of the place where we were going printed in Chinese characters! We were set! Good thing, because we were double-checking the bus route at the hotel desk just a few minutes later, and it wasn’t going well until I showed up with the brochure. Magic! Express bus K113, we’re on our way.

The desk staff told us they thought it would cost 8 Yuan, so we were all ready with exact change as we headed to the bus stop around the corner. The bus pulled up just as we walked up. Instead of a moneybox, there was a ticket lady to pay, with several books of different colored tickets, since the fare depended on the distance. She looked at us like this was going to be difficult. But I pulled out the brochure and pointed! No problem, message received! And it was only 6 Yuan, not 8! On the bus ride, I tried to pay very close attention to where we passed Metro stops. We were hoping to go to Louhu shopping district after the gardens, and I knew I could get us there on the Metro, since it’s at the end of the line.

The ticket lady told us when to get off, and pointed across the street. We had also heard that we could pick up a shuttle there to get up the hill to the gardens. The other group had walked most of the five miles before they were picked up by and English-speaking botanist who had been to Quail Gardens in Encinitas. We were pretty sure we weren’t going to repeat that bit of luck, so we looked for a shuttle. Two very aggressive beggars practically got in the minivan with us as we made arrangements with the driver. We were also approached by a woman with a bag of live turtles. I believe she was selling them for two Yuan apiece. Leah, a florist from Carlsbad and one of our art teachers, wanted to buy some and release them in the botanical gardens. Worried about non-native species contamination, we prodded her to get in the van quickly.

Susan had looked into the layout of the gardens, and had made a plan to go to the Petrified Forest first, then walk down to the Buddhist temple on the grounds, as well as the orchid and butterfly garden. But the driver took us straight to the temple. So we went there first. It was crowded and beautiful and hot. We bought incense and lit it as we had watched the locals do, then stood like we’d observed in front of a large Buddha statue in a gated room, each making offerings in our own way, then tossed the incense into a fire. “There go all of our cares,” said Susan, as they burned to ash. As we walked further into the temple, we realized there were many different Buddha statues in other alcoves, and people make offerings to either all of them or the ones that stand for certain things, I guess.

Susan spotted a small group of people following a saffron-robed monk, so we followed them. We ended up in what seemed like a 3rd story loading dock, looking out over a roof with animals carved on the corners. People were sitting around eating. We walked up to the building, and a woman we had not noticed before handed three Styrofoam bowls of noodles out through the carved screen that made up most of the wall. Susan tried to ask a man standing nearby who to pay by pulling out her wallet. “No money, no money,” he said. Another woman popped out of a door in the wood screen with a to-go box of bundles wrapped in leaves. She put one in each of our bowls. It was a bun wrapped in a leaf, stuffed with pine nuts and vegetables. It was kind of sweet and very delicious. This vegetarian noodle soup was probably the tastiest thing I’ve eaten in China so far!

Our group had been separated, and Leah and Desiree found us and joined us as we finished eating. We showed them where to get the soup, but it was too late. Lunchtime at the temple was over! The screen was closed up tight!

The petrified trees were interspersed with whimsical topiary trees and picnic tables made out of sawed off, polished-top petrified tree trunks, giving the whole area a very fantasyland look. I would not be surprised at all to learn they petrified trees were not in their naturally occurring spots, but had all been moved there and arranged meticulously. As we wandered among the stone trees, we heard a lot of thunder, but it never did rain.

Staff at the paleontological museum at the Petrified Forest helped us determine that number seven on the map was the butterfly garden. Though we were at the top of the lake and it was at the bottom, we decided to start walking. Not long after, we saw our shuttle driver. We decided we didn’t need to have the most tiring day in the world, so we hired him to drives us there and wait for us to drive us back to the bus stop.

There were not many orchids blooming, but there were many butterflies in a large mesh enclosed garden. You could rub your hand on wet sponges located throughout the butterfly enclosure, and the butterflies would land on your hand, attracted to something like sugar water, I assume.

Our driver took us back down to the bottom of the hill, where Leah and Desiree hopped on the bus to return to our hotel. Nikki, Ann, Susan and I took a taxi to the Louhu shopping area. I’m positive I could have gotten us there by public transportation, but the others didn’t want to risk it. It turns out we were quite close, so a taxi worked fine. Our taxi driver spoke some English, as well.

He dropped us off at the Shanghai Hotel, right across the street from the shopping area. We stopped in the hotel to find an ATM, and used their fabulous western-style bathrooms. Not only did they have western-style toilets, they also had toilet paper, which everyone carries around in their purse. On top of that, they had soap and paper towels! The lap of luxury!

We decided to have afternoon tea there as well. It was lovely, and quite a contrast from our lunch at the temple. Two extremes today! We each had a three-tiered platter. We’d ordered the Asian style, so the bottom was shrimp wrapped in crispy noodles and curry samosas. In the middle was a wonderful muffin, a tiny scone, delicious tapioca pudding, and a small dish of slightly spicy but otherwise tasteless black cubes of gelatin. The black stuff is supposed to be very good for you, so I ate it. The top dish was fruit. Yum! It was all very civilized and snooty. The lounge was full of westerners. It was also a very good thing to have a nice rest before getting back on our feet, and it was nice to get to know each other better. The four of us were a very compatible and relaxed traveling group.

Then we went shopping. At Louhu the bargaining was more serious than at Dongmen. They started higher and would go lower, as long as you attempted to leave. I probably did overpay for a few things, but I got some nice gifts for people. One thing I did not buy was a sequined dress with a stand up collar that would have been entirely appropriate for competitive ballroom dancing, and not much else. I could have had one custom fitted or even made, and I have a hard time passing that sort of thing up. Who knows when you might need one? But I did not even go see how much they were selling for. I just eyed them enviously.

We shopped until Susan and I spent all of the money we had brought, and then we hopped on the metro to go home. This was a route I was now familiar with! We switched to good old number 70 bus, now practically routine. About ten minutes into our ride, the bus stalled just before a bus stop. The driver got on the phone for advice and started turning the engine on and off. It seemed he couldn’t get it into gear. My group started to get a little nervous. It was about 10:00 at night. But we had only been there a few minutes, and we had seen a second number 70 bus in the bus station, waiting to pull around after ours left. We wouldn’t have to try to figure out another way to get home. Sure enough, within another five minutes, the next 70 bus pulled up, and everyone on our bus switched over. They didn’t even have to announce anything.

We got off at our Walmart, and walked the short walk home. The day had flowed quite smoothly.

Yesterday was a fun day touring, which I intend to finish writing about quite soon, but today I had the most amazing experience! From school, it was arranged for us to go on a visit to the home of one of our students. Families got to choose which teacher to invite. I have a very quiet student whose English name is Joe, and I got an invitation from his parents.

Some of the American teachers were apprehensive about having to visit a family—what if the family didn’t speak very much English or it was awkward. Patti actually put many concerns to rest by insisting to our Director, Beth, that she tell the families dietary restrictions of each teacher. I myself prefer to eat vegetarian, but I also like to be polite to hosts, and I can try new foods up to a certain point. After several weeks of trying to figure out if a dish was intestines or eggplant without any reliable way to translate, it was very comforting to know that I could just let them know in advance that I would not like to eat meat. As it turns out, Joe’s grandfather was also a vegetarian, so we had a wonderful lunch together.

To start, Joe (his Chinese name is Li Rong Da) and his parents picked me up at the hotel. During last week where we talked about careers, our stories teacher said Joe was writing a book about construction workers, because that was what he wanted to be when he grew up. The day after that, Joe came to school with a note tucked into his name tag that said, “Joe wants to be an architect when he grows up!” In the car, his mom helped him tell me about his favorite tall buildings. He is a very shy child who rarely speaks at school, but he can say “skyscrapers!” He loves the Sears Tower, and the Empire State Building, and the Bank of China building in Hong Kong, and the Taipei 101! I had met Joe’s dad Friday at our performance, and his English was not that clear. His mother speaks English beautifully, it turns out. She works in a bank, and often does projects with English-speaking clients. She told me that his dad is an investor, a stockbroker. He has a Master’s Degree, and apparently has done much studying in English—his reading and writing is excellent, but his spoken English is not so good. He has so few chances to practice speaking in English. Since I have a degree in German, but never get to speak it, I certainly understand that! It is very hard to learn and keep up a language when you live in a place where most people do not speak it.

Their apartment is on the 7th floor of a seven-story building, which is quite short by Shenzhen standards. They apologized for not having an elevator, but I try to take the stairs, rather than the elevator, several times a day to our 5th floor hotel room, so I have been practicing. First, Joe showed me his collection of 3-D puzzles of all of the skyscrapers and some other buildings he loves. In addition to the ones he had mentioned, there was also a hotel in Dubai and a castle from Germany. He still had to punch out the pieces and build his newest, the Pearl Tower from Shanghai. Then he went to work on a special gift for me—it turns out he also loves archeology, so he got a mysterious gift for me. It was a toy that was a block of plaster and a chisel and a small brush. You have to excavate it to find out what is inside! Joe happily chiseled away on the porch while his mother and I talked. When he finished, he proudly brought me the replica artifact that he had “unearthed.” While Joe pantomimed ringing a bell, his mother looked up the Chinese word on the internet so she could tell me it was a chime. It also came with a small book that told more about the history of this sort of chime, in Chinese, of course. She told me it was of the style that is more than 2000 years old. To ring it, you hit it with a stick. Joe’s dad described how they would be lined up by size to make different sounds, like the inside of a piano. The book has a great diagram pointing out the different parts, but unfortunately they were mostly technical terms that Joe’s mom didn’t know the translations for. But, I love it!

Here is my mysterious present after the excavation!

Joe’s dad brought out tea and fruit. We had longan, which to me looks like a small lychee and tastes similar, but they did not think they were very similar. There is a big seed in the middle, and they are also known as “eyes of the dragon,” because the fruit looks a lot like an eyeball. We also ate pitaya, which is beautiful on the outside and white with black seeds on the inside. I had seen it many times in the grocery store, but had no idea what it was like. It does not have a very strong flavor, but it tastes like a very subtle kiwi fruit, I think. We also ate Hami Melon, which is very similar to cantaloupe. Joe’s mom showed me on the globe how it comes from the far northwestern region of China, very close to Kazakhstan. She also showed me a list of words she had translated for the day to make sure she knew how to say them in English. Pitaya and longan, for example, which was interesting because I had never heard of those before anyway, but it was so thoughtful! We also looked at the globe to see where San Diego was.

Hai Yu, Joe’s mother, had many questions for me about teaching Joe to read in English! She had a huge library of English children’s books that she has been collecting. She had many sets of leveled readers, as well as many picture books and chapter books. She was starting to worry that the leveled readers were too boring to want to read, and the other books were too difficult, but she loved the stories so much. Frog and Toad was one of her favorites! From what I could tell at school, the Chinese way to teach is with workbooks and repetition. She seemed to confirm this. We talked about the difference between phonics on a worksheet, phonics in a pattern book, and how to teach phonics by reading great stories or looking at the names of your friends and family. She said that Chinese children also learn a lot about the Chinese language from each other’s names. She said she thought her ideas were very different from most Chinese parents.

She also said she thought it was most important in English class to speak in English, even if it is about everyday things, rather than to learn new things. This is exactly what I have always learned about English Language Development teaching, and what has not been planned for our summer camp. I have been trying to explain about this to our director. I think it would be much more effective. Otherwise, the children are just memorizing vocabulary about biomes, careers and world cultures, the three themes of our camp, instead of really learning to speak. The older students who have been learning English for many years are doing better with this content, but I do not think it is right for the younger students.

Anyway, we had so much fun looking at the books in her collection. She has Dr. Seuss and Calvin and Hobbes too! Joe wanted us to watch the Monkey King cartoon. It is a traditional story from China. But by the time we finished looking at the books, he was watching a live action Monkey King on the computer, and was not interested in the cartoon anymore. We tried to watch both for a few minutes, but that didn’t really work out. Hai Yu brought out Joe’s monkey king crown that his grandfather had made him! I don’t know if I mentioned yet that my camera has stopped working—it was never so disappointing as today! Hai Yu took our picture with Joe in the crown, so I will post it when she sends it to me.

The Monkey King and I

Hai Yu showed me some toys her father had made. They looked like rattles—one was a chopstick with a Christmas ornament on it, and the other was a pencil with a paper polyhedron on the end. They were both painted gold, and Joe showed me how he could twirl them around in his fingers. I showed him how I could juggle with three longans, but I also bumped him in the nose, because I am not a very good juggler. I felt horrible about that. Joe also got a staff and showed off his kung fu moves! Did I mention he is six years old! I told him about my friends who spin staff with fire on the ends of it. Joe also spent quite a bit of time examining a spider on the wall. He really wanted to touch it, he said, but he didn’t dare! He has a great curiosity. He also wanted to show me how he played go, which is like Chinese Chess. He has been playing since he was four years old, and his parents say he is very good at it. Hai Yu said it has helped him become very good at math, which was clear.

She explained how Go is the only game a computer cannot win, because there are so many possible moves. But at the same time, it is exceptionally simple. All of the pieces are equal, unlike the pieces in chess, for example. It also seems you can stop at any time and see who has the most pieces, which is quite different when you compare it to most games that can only end in one specific way.

Hai Yu also showed me some books that gave the history of Chinese Characters. It was so interesting! It gave four historical versions of each character, with a picture of what the character described, as well as some other background information. We flipped through a book about animals and one about nature. It was so interesting to see how the symbol for tiger used to be a picture that looked a lot like a tiger. The one for winter looked like a small house with figures in it sitting around a fire. The one for spring looked like running water. The one for man was based on a figure carrying something heavy, and the one for woman looked like a kneeling figure. However, to my eye, the modern characters don’t have any picture information at all.

The character on the left is the oldest. What do you think this one means?

If you look at the first character sideways, it looks more like a tiger.

She also mentioned that Chinese people think English is very complicated, because there are so many words! (She said about 70,000. This Slate article says more.) She said once you know 2,500 key words in China, you can read just about anything. When she put it that way, it kind of makes sense, though at first I thought, there are only 26 letters, and you have thousands of characters. How could that possibly be easier? I guess it really depends on how you look at it!

This history and cultural lesson was fascinating, but it turned out it was also in preparation for a visit to Hai Yu’s parents. They lived just a short walk away. Her father (I’ll call him grandfather) had been a musical instrument importer. Both of her parents were university educated, which was very unusual for their generation. Now that they are retired, her father has many hobbies. One of them is Chinese calligraphy! He was going to give a demonstration for me! Oh, I wish my camera was not broken, and I wish everyone I know had been there! He showed me brushes of many different sizes. Some are several inches in diameter, for making very large posters. He had a large one on the wall that he had made for the Spring Festival, on gold-flecked red paper. Hai Yu explained that it told about families coming together and eating good food and watching fireworks, having a wonderful time. I think it is like a poem, or maybe a word picture would be more accurate.

Grandfather rolled out a scroll of paper about four feet long on his table. He got out a book and chose a saying to write. Hai Yu said it was from a great Chinese educator, and it sounded like she was talking about Lao Tzu. She translated it something like, “If you want to do something big, you have to do the small steps step by step.” This sounds very similar to the proverbs “Great acts are made up of small deeds,” and “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step,” both of which I found attributed to Lao Tzu with a quick Google search.

The characters are written from right to left in rows. The brush is held straight up and down. It is hard to see how the different widths of the characters are made, but it is lovely to watch! Then, at the end, he wrote the date, the year of the tiger, and his name, all of theses in much smaller characters. Then he got out the box with his chops and the special ink. You don’t just stamp your name carelessly. He carefully considered how the stamp would be placed at the bottom of the row so everything on the page would be arranged just right.

Remember, start on the right and move left.

He took out another chop and stamped it at the beginning of the saying. I think what Hai Yu explained was that this was a stamp that told what was important to the writer, and this one said knowledge.

Then it was my turn! Grandfather got out a blank scroll and made the character for middle. He showed me how to hold the brush, which is nothing like holding a pencil. It’s more similar to me to holding chopsticks, but only a little. Mostly, my hands do not have muscles developed to hold something in that way. So interesting! My inclination was to try to hold it at an angle to the paper, but I was corrected to hold it straight up and down. Hai Yu pointed out the order in which to draw the lines from grandfather’s examples. They said I was quite good at it, but I’m pretty sure they were just being polite. Then Joe tried it. Hai Yu said that really, he is too young to learn the calligraphy, but maybe he will learn when he was older. She was so matter of fact when she said most young people do not learn it and it is a skill that is disappearing. To me, this seems like a cultural tragedy! She did say that some young people are becoming interested and starting to learn.

Joe very much used the point of the brush, so his characters were very thin, and did not have the variation of line size. The three of us also did the characters for sun, big and small. Joe then used the brush to spell the words in English under the Chinese characters. He knew how to spell big, and his mom told him the letters for small and sun. For middle, he drew a diagram—a square with a dot in the middle, with an arrow pointing to the dot! Then he painted a sketch of the sun as well!

Then the family presented me with a special gift that grandfather had taken a whole week to make—a special scroll that had Jennifer spelled out in Chinese characters, above the word teacher. The saying in the center was referred to a saying that teachers are like a garden and students are like trees, but also that I am a teacher who has students all over the world! Wow! Also, it was written in seal script, while my name and the date and grandfather’s script was written in running script. Seal script is the 2,000-year-old version of the characters, while running script I think is more like modern cursive. Wow! (There is also standard script, which is more like printing or the typed version of characters.) I do not think I have ever received a more amazing gift! It is like a piece of history and a work of art!

Wow!

Then we all went out for lunch. In the car, Joe played with a small stuffed bear and a duckling. He taught me how to say little bear (xiao xiong) and little duckling (xiao ya zi). Lunch was very exciting, because I knew where we were! The restaurant was right next to one of the places we have gone for foot massages! Hai Yu explained that it was a Peking restaurant, food in the style of Northern China. It was so nice to go to a place and be able to get some background information about it! That is something we have virtually none of on this trip! Lunch was delicious! Though it has been a little disappointing to find out that almost everywhere else has better food than at our hotel. We started with boiled peanuts and millet congee, which is almost like cream of wheat, but not really creamy. It is very good with soy sauce and pickled something added to it. The tomatoes with sugar and mustard greens were similar dishes to ones I’d eaten at our hotel, but they tasted fresher. We had three types of “Chinese pie.” One was thin layers of dough with leeks. I’ve had it several other places. Another was almost exactly like Navajo fry bread, though with less oil. We had the salty kind (not salty at all) and the sweet kind, which was only a little sweet. Another way to describe it would be like beignets without the powdered sugar. But both were delicious! The third pie was like a fried tortilla wrapped in a very thin cooked egg with something, maybe a little cinnamon, very yummy on the inside.

Another dish was crispy rice with sweet and sour vegetables. There was savory tofu, and dumplings with leeks. There was another sweet dish. I think it was taro, with blueberry sauces. They definitely agreed it was a root vegetable. Joe’s dad tried to find a translation on his phone, but couldn’t. When I suggested taro, he looked that up on his phone to check, but that didn’t come up either. So it was a root vegetable, maybe steamed, as it was not crisp and not mushy either, with a blueberry sauce. As we got up to leave, there was still some left, and Joe slurped it right out of the dish! He was kind of bored at the restaurant, like most six year olds with a bunch of adults.

It seemed like Joe did not think this was the greatest visit in the world, but I had a wonderful time! It is such a unique opportunity to spend the day in the home of people who actually live in the country you are visiting, and this family felt exceptional to me. We have arranged to go hiking up the mountain with 2,000 steps next Saturday morning, and I very much look forward to it. I can’t wait to hear about the visits of the other teachers to other families. Could they all be so culturally and historically rich? They said they were very honored to have me as a guest, but I was truly the lucky one!

Update: Patti got worked over at a two-hour badminton lesson! A fascinating day was had by all!

Foot massages are a social event. And they always turn the TV on for us too.

I feel a little exploitative to not only pay so little, but to also be able to show up with a group of ten people at 9:00 at night and for everyone to get massages with no waiting. But that’s the way it works here, so I have had an average of two massages a week. There are several people in our group who have developed illnesses over the last week, and I think I still feel fine because of my foot massage preventative care. Our school doctor recommended massages for the sick teachers as well.

Almost all of the teachers have tried at least one massage, and not everyone has liked it. Because of the way we show up in a large group, the quality does seem to vary a bit. Last week, one of the women got a very sad foot massage from a massage therapist who wouldn’t touch the bottom of her feet. And since we can’t really communicate in Chinese, it’s tricky to address such a thing.

But I have generally loved them! The reflexology is pretty darn painful, as you’ll know if you’ve ever had it done traditionally. But I had read an article mentioning that before we left, so I was ready. It still hurts enough to make my leg twitch, but I feel like I have new feet when I’m done. Some of the others would rather it did not hurt so much. The shoulder and back work also often include a thai-massage style bending you back over the knees sort of thing that not everyone has been comfortable with as well. Luckily, doing acroyoga has uniquely prepared me for enjoying massages here. I’m used to awkward thai massage positions and to being manhandled.

But tonight’s massage stood out! I have an S-curve in my spine from scoliosis, which I manage with yoga, but at this point it’s really not getting better or worse. I usually like to discuss with massage therapists, but here I just figure they’ll notice. Tonight I felt like my therapist made a serious attempt to straighten it out. Wow. There was a lot of pushing my spine side to side. I even started to get a little nervous. But I felt like, if I went back often enough, she could really make some progress on it.

Then there began much discussion among the therapists. Ann was with us and understood enough that she thought they were talking about the hair on my legs and a string. Maybe they were recommending waxing? My therapist was very insistent. She went and got someone who showed us two sticks that looked like a pencil one inch in diameter, maybe made out of stone. She said in English, “hot” and “good.” It seemed not just like an upsell, but important. I said OK, having no idea what I was agreeing to.

After a while, the therapists disappeared and returned with trays with the sticks, which were now burning, not on fire, but glowing hot at the end. They smelled kind of like sage. Maybe we were going to get our legs smudged. Whatever it was, it was going to be Ann and Patti, too, not just me. They said they were up for it. And, when she smelled the burning sticks, Patti realized she was familiar with this type of energy work. They circled the glowing sticks above our knees, down our legs, and back and forth on the bottom of our feet. Sometimes it was close enough to hurt, but not burn. Whenever I flinched, they moved it away. The smoke in our eyes was a bit uncomfortable, but it seemed nice.

When we got home, Patti did a little googling to come up with the name: moxibustion. It is a bundle of mugwort. It is believed to pre-date acupuncture. Some believe it is more effective than acupuncture for moving energy around without it leaking around the needle holes.

That turned out to be a bit of an adventure, and healthy too! I wonder what my next foot massage will bring. I’m sure I’ll need another one in a few days! (I’ve been told it isn’t a good idea to have one every day. Drat.)

Tonight I ventured out to the gym above the grocery store I like, which, by the way, is not Walmart. (After initially being enchanted by the Chineseness of Walmart, my second visit was overcrowded and miserable, and I will not being going back.)

Anyway, I arrived early for the 7:20 class, having skipped dinner at the hotel, which they are now cracking down on, only to find that they have changed the schedule. It wouldn’t be China for me if the schedule wasn’t changed, though I’m not sure if that’s inherent to China or the organization I’m working for.

I took the 15 minute walk back to the hotel, blogged a bit, and got there just in time for the 8:30 class. It was full, so I got to be on the platform in the front of the room with the teacher. I can’t compare it to any other classes here yet, but in this one we held poses for probably at least three minutes. Whew. That is not usually my favorite way of doing yoga, but I had kind of prepared myself to be ready for anything. (I have been to some great yoga classes while traveling, as well as some truly awful ones. It doesn’t help to fight it.)

No standing poses, though. We started out with half-lotus/half-hero, then on to lizard, downward facing puppy, sphinx, frog, plow, happy baby, side twists, and savasana. It was maybe yin yoga, which I have been meaning to get to a class of for a while at home, but haven’t.

The male teacher had a lovely, deep, calm voice, which was extra nice because people speaking Chinese just normally often sound like they’re yelling when you are not used to hearing the language. I’m pretty sure he counted to twenty at the end of each pose. I thought it might be a good opportunity to learn to count in Chinese, but I couldn’t concentrate past three.

Of course I didn’t have any good guess as to what he was saying the rest of the time. It may have position corrections, but I imagined it could just as well have been lovely Chinese stories, or maybe some wonderful insights like Kristen Watson gives in her class. It wasn’t Mara encouraging me to hold perfectly still for five minutes, though, so I felt pretty free to fidget.

I am really looking forward to a few more classes while I’m here!

One of our Chinese teachers, when asked how Chinese people decide on a career, said that the parents really decide, but they do discuss it with the child. So we are having our students take the Holland Codes Career Inventory, and it is unclear to me whether parents think this is great because there is a shift towards greater personal choice in this generation and this economic level (apparently our camp is kind of expensive), or if the parents think this is a great tool to more effectively guide their children on a career path. I am imagining scenarios lilke, “Remember that test you took when you were ten? It says you are supposed to be a _____! Of course you cannot change!” I’m not sure this will work as well cross-culturally as we hope.

I also am not sure how it will work well because what we are supposed to teach in a week would normally be done over a much longer period of time. And also, as the performance teacher (even though performance is language-based and pictures are critical for teaching second languages), I received a very small set of tremendously useful career pictures to have in the room—six pictures including explosives operative (the dynamite makes this one pretty clear), environmental analyst (a person looking at the dirt they are standing on—that should be easy to explain), and auto mechanic and a conductor. My family is full of excellent auto mechanics, but it seems like it may not be the first choice for striving parents who tend to be managers, doctors, and according to my students, “do computers.”

My roommate Patti, who is the performance teacher for the next level up, received mime and blacksmith in her small set of pictures.

I seem to be making a habit of getting involved in projects that have more vision than effective or even realistic implementation plans. Americorps and my semester in Czechoslovakia, among others, had similar issues. It is making me think that perhaps my next career can be as a professional troubleshooter. You run me through your venture and I will tell you what is wrong with it.

Of course, everyone says, but aren’t the children great! Of course they are cute and great and all. Here is a picture of me and A1, the youngest and least experienced English speakers of the group.

However, individual teachers making up for the dysfunctionalities of any educational system is not a viable long-term plan.

In other news, Ann and Susan and I went for a great walk after dinner. We wandered down a street we had never been down before. We saw groups of men playing cards on the sidewalk and lots of babies. We found the new police station and a lottery storefront. We had cookies at a bakery and found a pharmacy with many things labeled in English, but of course not the things anyone was looking for. We could have gotten ground up starfish or rattlesnake, if we’d wanted it, however.

Where the street dead-ended, there were many people gathered around the entrance to a building. We peered up a very steep flight of stairs into a bright, shiny stall-type mall building! We walked up to poke around. More clothing in the asymmetrical, layered, light-weight style that I am very enamored of here—we had to look more. I tried on a dress that was too small, which is usually the case here. Then I tried on a light jacket that fit! The tag said 128 yuan (about $20), so I reached for my wallet.
“No, no!” said the three store clerks. (Three store clerks in a store about the size of my bed, by the way.) One pulled out the calculator and typed in 100.

“Fine.” I said, pulling a 100 yuan note out of my wallet.

“No, no! Now you!” said one clerk, and pushed the calculator at me. I could not have it for that price. I needed to pay them less, apparently. I typed in 80. These people were too nice—I would have paid the higher price, and I didn’t feel good about trying for half price. Though I guess they could have bargained back up.

“Oh, OK.” 80 it was. It kind of sounded like they were disappointed we weren’t going to bargain more, but they all had the most friendly smiles. It was confusing to me.

I walked down the hallway to find Ann and Susan. They had tried to pay full price for a box of tea, so the clerk insisted they take a free tea steeper.

Puzzling, but fun. As we walked home, we paused at a corner to make sure we were going the right way. As we are becoming used to, an English-speaking person rushed up to us to see if could help in any way. This time it was a man who was not actually Chinese. He sounded like he was probably from France.

Susan was thinking that she will try to be more conscientious at home about helping lost tourists. They probably will be more difficult to identify, though. People are definitely reacting to our confused looks, but we are already sticking out pretty dramatically. Shenzhen is a rather new city, full of transplants from all over China, but it seems that everyone is terribly friendly.

Then, Saturday morning, a large group of us took the bus, then the metro to downtown Shenzhen to the Dongmen Market area. All together, the trip took over an hour. On the bus, we happened to meet a woman who spoke English very well and was going to the same place! This was comforting, since we weren’t exactly sure where we were going, or how the metro ticket machines worked. All of this turned out to be pretty clear, (the bus line we were on ended right at the metro station, for example) but it was nice to have her guide us anyway.

Once we left the metro station, we split up into smaller groups, thank goodness. Trying to navigate anything with a group of 12 people and no leader is pretty difficult, much less crowded, unfamiliar markets when no one really has any idea what is going on and the signs are mostly only in Chinese. My roommate Patti and I went with Susan, a retired teacher and administrator from Carlsbad who travels for much of the year. Susan is not very good with directions, but she’s great about walking up to people and finding out information, whether they speak English or not.

Outside the shops in Dongmen. Yes, I am standing next to a turtle with a dragon's head!

The markets are buildings filled with small stall type shops of similar type things. One area (sometimes a whole building, or a floor, or a hallway) was all clothes, another bags, another electronics, and so on. (And shops is really too strong of a word.) The first thing I bought was an Asian/80’s style tunic shirt with superfluous zippers. I was a little too excited about it, and paid full price—40 yuan, or about six dollars. If the salespeople don’t speak English, they tell you how much things are by showing the numbers on a calculator or their cell phone. When I started to walk away from the next thing I was interested and the lady waved the calculator in my face, saying “How much? How much?” I remembered this was the place to bargain. I typed in half the quoted price, as recommended in the guide books, and we went back and forth.

Then we figured out that some places don’t bargain. The only way I could tell for mostly sure was if I tried to walk away, they either follow, yelling, “It’s beautiful. OK? OK,” or they ignore you. Also, if a price was posted or marked, which it usually wasn’t, then it seemed pretty firm.

As the day went on, we found a few places that let us try things on, though most did not. Even though they stretched out the waistband as far as it could possibly go to show that they can even get big enough for us giants, it became quite clear that I should not buy anything I could not try on, since nearly everyone in China really is smaller than me. (Though, from the looks of some of our students and some people I have seen on the streets, even Chinese people may be trending larger.)

The Hongchi craft center was a very interesting place. It was mostly toys and junk on the first floor, but the second was mostly jade and pearls, which they would string for you. Unfortunately, by this time we were pretty dazed and overwhelmed, so we just wandered past table after table of jade and other beads. Now I wish I had had an interesting piece or two strung. Sorry Mom and Katie. (Susan and I nearly went back on Monday evening, but it’s an hour and a half each way, and we just couldn’t muster the energy.) At the end of this floor, we also stumbled upon a tea tasting at a tea shop. Surrounded by bricks of pressed tea, the proprietor brewed tea, then poured some out on to small statues, stirred the tea, then poured some more out, repeating this many times until it was ready to drink.

After a long day navigating a maze of shops and buildings, we were ready to head back to the metro. As we stood on the corner, trying to triangulate our position based on McDonald’s and KFC, hoping we were looking at the ones marked on the vague map in Patti’s guidebook (there seemed to be more of these fast food places now than when the book was printed), a young Chinese couple saw us looking confused and ran up, asking, “Can we help you?”

The Chinese seem to either not walk anywhere, or they believe that we cannot walk anywhere. We told them we wanted to get to the Metro station. Our conversation was a little awkward:

“Oh. That is not close. Where are you going?”
“We are going to Shekou.” (That is the suburb where we are staying.)
“That is very far.”
“We know. That is why we need to take the metro, and then the bus.”
They eventually sent us in the direction I thought we needed to go anyway (!), but they were quite worried we would not get there, so they wrote in a note in Chinese characters for us that says, “Please tell me how to get to the metro station.” They were so friendly!

We got about a block away from them and saw the first of the most helpful signs I have seen in China yet, green circles with the metro symbol, with an arrow pointing one direction! There was one every block! We didn’t even need to use our note. By the time we got home, I felt like I could get almost anywhere in China! Well, at least back downtown again.

Even though I had to go through customs to get to Macau, it was such a touristy place that this day felt like the first day I was really immersed in China. There are certainly other ways to get to know a country besides shopping, but as a whole day where I spent the majority of it outside our hotel, our chartered bus, and the company of all the rest of the teachers, it felt dramatically different.

I’m not actually sure why they still bring us any rice at all. But it wouldn’t be so funny if they stopped.