中秋節－ Mid-Autumn Festival

The Mid-Autumn Festival is a 3,000-year-old tradition that is celebrated on the 15^th day of the 8^th moon, the same day as the autumnal equinox.  I have 3 days of vacation, though only one day is the official holiday and the other two are borrowed from the weekend.  I have to work the Sunday before and the Sunday after to make it up.  I don’t see much around the city in terms of decorations or festivities.  People celebrate by going home to spend time with their families and by eating mooncake, which is made up of a pastry shell, a sweet bean paste filling, and an egg yolk in the center.

Lafayette 148, the clothing company that funds the school, had a celebration at their office.  They set out a buffet of snack-type food.  And students from the school performed.

 

Lunch

Everyday at about 11:30, the central area erupts with noise.  The teachers take stacks of little plastic chairs and tables and drop them into rows.  The classes get dismissed one at a time, the students wash their hands in the bathroom, and then race to their designated rows.  The food is rolled out on a two-tiered cart in big metal bowls.  There’s rice, a couple of dishes, and soup.  The adults serve out the food into smaller metal bowls, while a few students from each class distribute the bowls.  It seems like a big production everyday to serve food to the 260 students, but they manage. Throughout all of this, the students are chatty and they are sitting in close quarters, but there is never any fighting.  The kids seem to know the boundaries of acceptable behavior.  As they finish their rice, they can get soup.  When they finish eating, they help to stack the chairs and tables.  A few students get brooms and sweep the area clean.  It all works like clockwork.  By noon, the students are in their classrooms doing work, while the teachers have their lunch.  

The rows of tables and chairs

The adults portion the food into bowls, while a few students distribute the bowls to the others.

A happy pre-schooler,  named Ming Ling, who is the daughter of one of the teachers

Second graders waiting for their food.  You can see their uniforms.  The girls have red plaid and the boys have blue plaid.

Upper graders chowing down

 

The School

Let me tell you about the school that I work at: 

It’s called the School of Dreams.  It’s in an old warehouse, in which they’ve built classrooms along the perimeter of the building, and a stage and a playground in the center.  Each classroom has rows of tables and benches, with 2 students per table.  The classrooms have a blackboard, a projector screen, a stage, and a podium, with fans on the walls for circulation (no A/C). 

The center of the warehouse where there is a basketball hoop and ping pong tables.  People also park their scooters and bikes here.  The car belongs to the headmistress.

The stage

A classroom

The teachers rotate between the classrooms, as opposed to each teacher having his/her own room.  Each teacher has a cubicle space in a central office to do planning and grading.  However the English teacher (me) gets a private office, where I have a computer and internet, so Skype with me please :)  I have a break at work from 8-9pm PST Monday-Friday.

My office

There is a kitchen/dining area, where a cook makes lunch for the 260 kids and 16 adults.  The food is made from scratch, using fresh ingredients. It’s not processed, frozen, and reheated as cafeteria food often is in America.  Lunch is definitely a nice perk to this job.  I just go to the dining area at noon, the food is ready, I eat, and then they wash the dishes. 

The bathroom has one row of toilets for the boys, one row for the girls, and there are two private bathrooms for the adults, one with a squatty potty and one with a western style toilet.  Again, they gave special consideration for the foreign teacher. 

There are about 260 students from Preschool to 6^th grade, with about 40 students in each grade.  The order of the grades is preschool (學 前 斑), grade 1 (一 年 級), grade 2 (二 年 級), grade 3 (三 年 級), etc.  There’s no kindergarten.  At first I thought it was weird for it to go from preschool to 1^st grade, because a preschooler is so much different than a 1^st grader in America.  But I have come to see that the numbering system is quite logical – you have a pre school grade, then you have the 1^st grade, with the 1^st grade being quite basic and foundational.

The principal here is better translated as a headmistress – 校 長 – the first word means school and the second word means the head, so she is the head of the school.

The students have 7 periods each day from 8:10 am to 4:20 pm.  The subjects that they study are Chinese language, math, P.E., music, arts and crafts, and foreign language (English).  I guess they learn some science and history in their Chinese class, but they study this more in middle and high school. 

These are a few of the things that I’ve noticed being different here.  If there is anything else you want to know, just ask :)

Since it is Sunday, my roommate and I went to the market to get groceries for the week.  The market is located in a shell of a building, where vendors set up tables to hawk their goods.  It is similar in concept to the farmer’s markets we have at home, but it’s more raw here. 

There are different sections to the market: fruits, vegetables, noodles, dumplings, tofu, seafood, pork, poultry, eggs, rice, etc.  The first time I went I was overwhelmed by the selection, some of which I didn’t recognize.  I was also daunted by the language barrier.  All I can say is “What is this?” and “How much does it cost?”  That first time, I just hung around the fruits and vegetables, but since my roommate was with me this time, I ventured into more of the interior.

Here are some pictures:

dumplings

seafood

eggs sold in baskets

pink carnage

live poultry

Afterward, we took a rickshaw home with all our goodies, my first rickshaw ride in China. 

Acclimating

I made it to Shantou, China and I’m still alive (in case you were wondering).  Shantou is on the Southeastern coast of China.  Even though it has about 5 million people, this is a small town compared to Beijing or Shanghai’s 22 million.  It is a developed city with paved roads, tall buildings, restaurants, shopping centers, movie theaters.  I found the McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut, and Walmart.  The people here speak mandarin, which is the official language of China.  The local dialect is Chiu Chow, but you can get around with mandarin.  

I have been in Asia for about two weeks now and am still settling in.  One of my biggest concerns in coming to Asia was the weather, coming from Huntington Beach, where it’s always a moderate 75 degrees.  The day we arrived it was 88 F and I felt it, sticky that is.  But it has cooled off since then.  Today it is 81 F, with 89% humidity.  I’m sitting in my room, without the AC on, and it feels like being wrapped in a warm blanket.  I don’t mind because I get cold easily.

It is actually raining outside - a typhoon.  I didn’t have to go to school today, making it my first typhoon day.  Growing up in HB, I never got weather breaks like this.  I took advantage of today to get more settled in.  I just moved to my new apartment yesterday and had no food, so I needed to go to the market.  I asked my roommate if it was cold outside - I associate overcast skies and rain with cold.  She looked at me like I was crazy, of course it’s not cold outside.  I put on my tennis shoes and a rain jacket, however my roommate had on a dress and heels, for her 10-minute walk to work.  I am such a newbie when it comes to rain.  To me, rain is a problem, that you have to prepare yourself for.  To the people here, it’s no big deal.  My roommate must think that I was born yesterday. 

Getting to the market was quite an adventure because the roads here are crazy.  Literally insane. People don’t always drive in the lanes.  There are trucks, cars, scooters, bicycles, rickshaws, pedestrians all competing for the road.  People go the wrong way on the roads.  People run red lights.  People drive in the opposite lane of traffic to get around other cars. People make u-turns anywhere they want, even if there is a sign prohibiting it.  The traffic laws here are more like “guidelines” or “recommendations” and the police do not enforce them.  I would never ever drive in China.  The company has drivers that have chauffeured us around and they are so nonchalant about the whole thing.  I just buckle my seatbelt and trust their skill.  And I must say, that I haven’t seen many accidents, as crazy as the driving is.  People say that uncertainty makes people more cautious.  Anyway, to get to the market I had to cross a 8 lanes of this traffic to go around a traffic circle.  But I made it there and back, and as I said at the beginning of this post, I’m still alive, in case you’re wondering.  I will tell you more about the school and daily life in a later post.  

View of the traffic, while riding a bus. 

High rises

Old Shantou, built in the 1870s.

New Shantou

More old Shantou.  You can see European elements of design.

Mall with the Walmart, McDonalds, and KFC

It's not really like the Walmart in the US.