Interesting sights and culture learnings!
Well it’s been 2 years since I left my job and began this little adventure of mine. I arrived in China on May 10, 2007, and it’s been quite a ride. I’m still having fun but working harder than I care too. If not for the economic crisis wiping out more than 40% of my net worth I’d probably find an easier job even if it didn’t really pay enough to support me. Originally I thought I’d do this for 4 or 5 years then fully retire but now it looks like I’ll need to keep going a bit longer. Because of the economic crisis it seems there are more people coming here looking for jobs which creates a more competitive job market for the foreign teachers. My school recently fired a teacher due to student complaints and I heard that the Dean made the comment that it’s easy to find new teachers now because of the economic crisis. My student evaluation scores were good so hopefully I won’t have any problems.
A while back we had the Tomb Sweeping holiday and May 1 was the Labor Day holiday. One of the customs for the Tomb Sweeping holiday (like Memorial Day) is that people go to their ancestors’ graves, clean them off and leave food for the ancestors to eat. After leaving the food at the tomb for a short time, they take it back with them and eat it.
I’ve seen on tv recently talk about intellectual property rights and they have shown local authorities destroying hundreds of illegal copies of dvd’s, etc. Of course you can still buy whatever you want. At the small dvd stall next to the fruit juice stall where I often buy watermelon juice, I saw MS Office software for sale. I asked the lady how much and she told me 8 yuan which is about $1.20 U.S. Amazing! One thing I forgot to mention about buying my toaster oven at Wal-mart is that it’s common practice that anytime you buy something electrical here that they take it out of the box, plug it in and turn it on to show you that it really works. Obviously, the Chinese don’t have a lot of confidence in the quality of their own products. My last shopping story is about my visit to an upscale shopping plaza here. I went into the BMW store (goods with the BMW car company logo) and looked at the prices on a couple things. The polo shirts were priced at more than $175 U.S. I was shocked since not many people in the U.S. would pay that much for a polo shirt no matter what logo it has on it. There were no customers in the store so they probably don’t sell much and what they do sell is probably to people who buy it just so they can brag about how expensive it was.
I saw an interesting demo on the street a couple weeks ago by a guy that was apparently selling some sort of miracle powder. He was putting wooden skewers straight through the head of a live chicken. After putting about 5 of them through he then took them out, poured some powder into the holes in the chickens head, then folded the head under the body and put the chicken in a basket which he covered. Then he ate some of the powder. After talking for a few minutes he began to pull the chicken out of the basket but teased us a few times before he actually pulled out. After he pulled it out, he hit the chicken on the head a few times before it started walking around. I didn’t stay to see if anyone purchased any of his miracle powder.
A recent lesson was about food and the chapter in the book had a page talking about strange foods eaten in different places around the world. I asked my students what was the strangest thing they had eaten. One of the students told me that she had eaten human placenta. They make a soup out with it and consider it to be like medicine to make you stronger. You can only get it if you know someone at the hospital that can obtain it for you. I was told by a friend that it was common years ago when you had a baby to ask them to give you the placenta from your own birth. I’ve been pretty brave about trying the different foods here but I’m not sure if I could try this one. I did a quick Internet search and found that there were references to eating this on the net.
I have one last comment on the topic of babies. I may have mentioned this before but I was reminded of it recently when talking to a couple of the ladies that work in the office that are pregnant. It is illegal here for a doctor to tell parents the sex of their baby before birth. This is because of the one child policy and the strong preference for sons. Well that’s enough for now.
Tags: Travel
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