David's Big Adventure in China

We’re more than halfway through the semester now and I’ve got a pretty easy workload. I started off with a pretty light load this semester and some classes end early. After next week I’ll be down to 7 periods which is about 2 days work per week (each period is 40 minutes of class time). Bonnie has 12 periods. Most students have about 24 periods per week but get very little homework from most of their classes. I teach a class of oral English for students who have English as their second major and in addition to their normal load they have 13 to 17 periods of English on the weekends. All second major classes are scheduled on the weekends so that they don’t interfere with their normal classes. I was very frustrated with my second major students last semester because it seemed few of them did the homework I assigned. Then this semester after I learned that they have 35 to 40 periods a week in total I had a new appreciation for why they didn’t do the homework. I also teach a class of oral English to teachers who are preparing for a test that will determine if their English is good enough to work abroad. For many of them to advance to the title of Professor they need to go abroad for a year for advanced work in their field. I have been surprised by the lack of critical thinking skills demonstrated by this group. These should be the university’s brightest as they are the up and comers with masters and PhD degrees. The education system here doesn’t develop thinkers, it develops memorizers who can regurgitate the material on exams. The elite schools are better but the masses of students here don’t get a very good education. That’s why so many parents of Chinese students want their child to study abroad. The students here don’t really have pride in their schools. You don’t see students wearing clothes with the name of their school.

I’m also working one on one with a PhD in computer science who will be going to Arizona State University for a year to work with a Professor there. He wants to improve his oral English before he goes there this fall. One of the staff in the English department got a scholarship to go to New College which is located right on the bay in Sarasota, Florida. Not a bad place to be sent for a year! It’s a small but elite Liberal Arts college.

We started shopping for decorating our new apartment but we still don’t know when we’ll get the keys. The building looks like it’s pretty much finished but they won’t tell us when it will be completed. The best guess is that we will get the keys in September or October then we will start the decorating process which will take 2 to 3 months since it includes flooring, plumbing fixtures, cabinets, etc. Then we want to let it sit for a couple months to let all the fumes from the new materials to dissipate. So it will be sometime after the first of the year before we can move in. Hopefully June, 2014, at the latest. Thus I plan to teach for one more year in order to keep the apartment we’re in now until we can move into the new apartment. I’m tentatively planning to retire or at least cut back my work schedule even more in July, 2014. Until next time……

We’ve now completed all our Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) travels and started back to work on March 4. We went to the states for about 16 days in late January and early February. We arrived in Jacksonville, FL where we had a great seafood dinner with cousin Craig. The next day, the Bowdish’s picked us up and took us to Savannah, Georgia for my annual Coca-Cola group reunion which was hosted by the Grady’s this year. We had 3 days of great friends and great food while seeing the sites of Savannah. We then went back to Tampa with the Bowdish’s and stayed 1 night with them before heading off to Orlando and Disney World. We went to the Magic Kingdom, EPCOT and the Space Center and Bonnie enjoyed EPCOT the most. We went back to Tampa for a few more days at the Bowdish bed and breakfast and enjoyed visiting old friends and former co-workers, going to the beach at Fort De Soto in St. Pete, and a Superbowl party hosted by the Bowdish’s. We were fortunate to have very nice weather in Georgia and Florida during our time there.

We then left the sunny south and headed to Indiana and snow on the ground. A couple hours after arriving at my parents home in Richmond I helped Bonnie make her first ever snowman. It was pretty ugly but at least you could tell what it was supposed to be. We enjoyed about 5 days with friends and family before heading back to Nanning. On both ends of our trip we had to spend a night in Hong Kong as we couldn’t get connections that would allow us to arrive at the final destination without an overnight stopover. I’ve gotten into the habit of bringing back an extra suitcase filled with stuff that either I can’t buy in Nanning or is very expensive to buy there; mostly canned foods and dessert mixes (no-bake cheesecake, brownies, cookies, etc.). In fact, we took an empty suitcase with us to the states that we used last time to bring stuff back to Nanning.

We arrived back in Nanning just after Chinese New Year day so we were lucky to miss most of the fireworks. We were in Nanning about a week before we packed again and left for Thailand. We flew to Guangzhou then on to Bangkok. We spent a day and a half in Bangkok seeing the sites before going to Chiang Mai in the north. Two days in Bangkok is enough to see the sites such as the Grand Palace and some temples. Bangkok is a bustling city with pollution and high temperatures that can leave you longing for cool nights in a quiet place. Chiang Mai comes close to providing that. It’s a city that’s big enough but not too big with plenty to do and all at an affordable price. We spent about $27 for a pretty decent room in a hostel located within the old city walls. Dinners for two cost between $7 and $15 in most restaurants.

The first day in Chiang Mai we did a tour that included an elephant ride (see pics), a hike to a small hill tribe village, and a rafting trip on bamboo rafts complete with water fights that included our 9 and 10 year old raft guides. I don’t know about labor laws in Thailand but the kids seemed to enjoy their work. The second day we went to a zip line park and enjoying zipping from tree stand to tree stand. The park did a nice job including some other interesting ways to get from one place to another (see pics). The third day we did a tour to Doi Inthanon National Park which was the least exciting of our activities. Then we went to the beach resort area of Phuket where we enjoyed Simon’s Cabaret lady boy show, a snorkeling trip to Phi Phi Island and various kinds of foods. Then we returned to Bangkok for a day before heading back home to Nanning.

There were so many tourists in Thailand. It seemed that most of the tourists we saw in Bangkok were Chinese, Chiang Mai had a mixture of tourists and Phuket seemed to have lots of Russians although our snorkeling trip was with mostly Chinese. Well that’s all for now……….until next time.

It’s been quite a while since my last update mostly because I don’t have very much news to share. I had my last classes for the semester this past week so I’m now on semester break until early March except for 1 special class this week. That special class is for teachers at the university who need to improve their oral English before going abroad for study or research.

It’s been very cold here recently (high 30’s to low 50’s F) and the classrooms don’t have heat so it’s been as cold as high 40’s F in the rooms. None of the dormitories have heat and many of the students leave their windows open. I don’t know how they can take it but I acknowledge that I’m a spoiled American and I’m happy that I have heat in my apartment. I wear my long underwear, multiple layers of shirts, a heavy coat, and a hat in class and drink hot water to stay warm. Some of the student dormitories for men don’t have hot showers and they have to use hot water from a thermos to wash. For the hot water the students use for showering or for filling their thermos bottles they have to pay for it each time using a debit card.

The big news in China over the past few months was the transition to new party leaders. There is a lot of anticipation and hope about potential changes that will be made by the new leadership including things like eliminating the Re-education Through Labor camps where people can be kept for up to 4 years without any due process, more press freedom, improved rule of law, loosening of the 1 child policy, and more rights for migrant workers. During the transition meetings in Beijing the security was incredibly tight; taxis were ordered to remove window handles so objects could not be thrown out (such as ping pong balls with politically incorrect messages), knives were ordered removed from store shelves (yes, ordinary kitchen knives included), and other seemingly bizarre restrictions such as a ban on pigeons (because they might be used to send messages). Here is an article with some of the details: http://news.yahoo.com/no-pigeons-planes-pingpong-balls-china-meet-140336602.html

We will be heading to the U.S. in about 10 days and will be there for just over 2 weeks. We’ll head to Jacksonville, Florida first and then to Savannah, Georgia for a few days for my annual Coca-Cola group reunion. Then we’ll go to central Florida to be tourists and visit friends for about a week, then on to Indiana to see family for a few days before heading back to China. We’ll be back here for about a week celebrating the Chinese New Year before heading out to Thailand for about 10 days. After that it will be time for the spring semester which starts the first week in March. Yes, it’s a rough life…….lol. Until next time…

We arrived back in Nanning on August 30th and I had my first class a few days after that. The first couple weeks we didn’t have a full schedule of classes so it was good to get back to work gradually. This week we’re enjoying the week off as two big holidays joined together this year to give us a total of 11 days off including the weekends and our normal days of no classes. Of course we still have prep work to do. We decided not to try to travel anywhere during this time since so many people in China travel during these holidays that anywhere we’d want to go would be so crowded. The government decided to not charge tolls on the roads during the holiday to take some pressure off the train stations and the end result was massive delays on the highways because of so many cars trying to get on them. Almost all of the intercity highways here are toll roads (for both funding and control). Most of the time the intercity highways are not too crowded and much of the traffic is trucks and buses.

A couple days before we left Nanning in late July for our trip to the states we moved to an apartment on campus which is provided to me as a foreign teacher. Because I am married to a Chinese teacher we were able to get a larger apartment than what I had when I lived on campus before. It’s about 900 square feet and is pretty comfortable except for the traditional Chinese wooden sofa and the very small kitchen. It’s not nearly as nice as the apartment we moved from and has a view of the back of another building but it’s comfortable enough for now. It does have good a/c and heat and we’ll get some cushions to soften up that wooden sofa. It also comes with some western channels on the tv (HBO Asia, CNN International, and National Geographic). When we got back to Nanning it was strange coming back to a place that we had barely moved into because we had trouble remembering where things were.

Last week we went to check out a new shopping mall located near where we used to live on the other side of town. It is a very upscale mall with shops like Coach, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Boss, Gucci, Prada, Versace, Ralph Lauren, Burberry, and Cartier. It also has Nanning’s first Dairy Queen (but no sandwiches) and Starbucks and an ice skating rink. I continue to be amazed at how much upscale shopping there is in the town that’s supposed to be a relatively poor area. There are at least 5 or 6 upscale malls in Nanning. The new mall also had an upscale supermarket (called Ole’) that had a pretty good selection of western goods. Until next time……….

We had a great time on our road trip throughout the Midwest. After spending about 5 days with friends and family in Richmond, Indiana we went to Indianapolis and enjoyed the Parkers’ hospitality before heading on to St. Louis. We went to the top of the arch in St. Louis then went to Branson, Missouri for 4 days. We saw and enjoyed Mickey Gilley and the 3 Redneck Tenor shows. We also saw The Haygoods but didn’t think their show was as good as it was hyped to be. Our next stop was Nashville for 3 days where we enjoyed more country music including the Grand Ole Opry show which included Little Jimmy Dickens, Vince Gill, Wynona, The Band Perry, Jana Kramer, and Brett Eldridge. Next we went to the Gatlinburg, Tennessee area for 5 days where we enjoyed the fantastic view of the Smokey Mountains from the back porch of the house we rented and the company of the Grady’s and the Avery’s. We also enjoyed some great hikes. Our next stop was the NE corner of Georgia for my annual gathering with my former colleagues at Coca-Cola. Thanks to the Bowdish’s for being excellent hosts. We spent 3 days there eating, drinking and being merry. Bonnie got to enjoy her first opportunity to make and eat S’mores as we roasted the marshmallows over an open fire.

We then went to the Boone, North Carolina area to enjoy the Blue Ridge Parkway and its beautiful mountain views. We went to Grandfather Mountain and did a 10 mile hike the next day from the Parkway down the mountain then back up. Our next stop was Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on our way to Niagara Falls. The falls were great and the power of the falls is awe inspiring. Our next stop was Cleveland where we visited the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame. I enjoyed the videos and music at the Hall the most. On our way back to Indiana we stopped near Columbus, Ohio and had dinner with the Downings….it was great to see them again after so long.

Our road trip lasted for 24 days and we drove over 3500 miles. We’re now back in Indiana and will be heading back to China on 8-28. We’ll be back in Nanning on the 30th. Click the link on the right labeled “Pictures” under “My Links” to see a few pictures from our trip. Bonnie has really enjoyed tasting all the different foods here in the states (especially Krispy Kreme donuts) and only had Chinese food 3 times. Classes start the first week of September so we’ll be back to work soon. Until next time……….

I’m currently enjoying a pretty relaxing life as I’m not working much. It appears my life as a Chinese pig farmer is about over and I’ll be transitioning back to teaching. In September I’ll be back teaching at Guangxi University but I’ll be teaching for the Foreign Language College this time instead of Sino Canadian International College. I’ll be working at the same college as Bonnie and the leaders of that college are already lining up joint projects for Bonnie and me to do together. I’m already doing some part time teaching set up by the university for a bunch of hydro-electric engineers who sometimes travel to lesser developed countries to help them develop hydro power. China has a very developed hydro power industry and generates more than twice the hydro power of any other country and more than 20% of their electricity needs.

In late July we’ll be heading to the states for about 5 weeks with a road trip planned to Branson, Missouri; Nashville and Gatlinburg, TN; North Georgia mountains; Blue Ridge Parkway; Niagara Falls; and Cleveland. We’ll spend time in Richmond with the family at the beginning and end of the trip. Bonnie has been to the states once before as part of a special training program for Interpretation and Translation and was able to see NYC, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco and Monterey. This time she’ll get to see the heartland.

Here are my interesting tidbits for this post. I heard a radio report (The World) that said the richest 70 members of China’s legislature (National People’s Congress) have an average net worth per person of 1.2 billion U.S. dollars each! That’s not a typo, it’s really a billion. Chinese are very interested in how much money other people have and how much they make. I was riding down the elevator recently with a security guard for the housing complex and he asked me how much I make each month. That’s a very common question here. Until next time……..

Here is a link to an article you might find interesting about Chinese mistresses referred to here as ernais which directly translated means second breast. Because there is such a gap here between rich and poor it’s easy for a successful business man to support a mistress. http://www.echinacities.com/china-media/all-aboard-the-concubine-express-a-look-inside-shenzhens.html

You almost never see police here issuing speeding or traffic tickets to drivers. They use traffic cameras to issue tickets and apparently they issue a lot of them. They assign the tickets to the registered owner of the car and they don’t send you the tickets. People have to go to the traffic police department or check online to find out about their tickets. You are assigned points against your license similar to in the states based on how many tickets you have. If you have too many points then you can ask family or friends who don’t have too many points to go to the traffic department and tell them that they were driving the car on some of those days thus assigning those tickets to them.

I just renewed my resident/work visa. Apparently the visa office did something wrong last year which made my renewal this year much more difficult. If you remember, last year I was the first foreigner to get that type of visa from that county and that probably contributed to their error. This year I had to get a document from a government office in Dahua where our pig farms are located, then I had to get my medical exam, then I had to go to Macau and get a Z visa which allowed me 1 entry to mainland China, and then I had to go to Hechi to get my resident/work visa. It took many documents and official chops (seals) to get all that done and the whole process took more than a month but I’m glad it’s done.

When we arrived back in Nanning from Hechi it was about 11:00 p.m. and we experienced what often happens at bus stations, train stations and airports in China. There are lots of taxi’s there waiting but none of them want to take you unless you’re going far or agree to pay them much more than the metered price. We had to agree to pay 30 rmb for a trip that would have been less than 20 if we had used the meter. Of course, by western standards that’s not a lot of money but it makes me crazy that the taxi drivers are allowed to do that and we have to fight with them to get them to take you.

I recently had some back trouble so I went to the local traditional Chinese medicine hospital for some treatment. The first doctor I saw suggested an MRI at a cost of about $70 but after doing a little research I decided that wasn’t necessary so I went back and saw a different doctor about getting acupuncture. I had 5 treatments over 6 days and was much better after the treatments. The treatments included cupping, acupuncture and what they call moxibustion which is the burning of some herb near the affected area. The cost was about $70 for all 5 treatments combined. You can see a couple pics by clicking the pictures link on the right.

Until next time….

There’s not much new to write about this time so this will be a short post. I’ve been working a lot as we’re still trying to finish our yearend close and get caught up on the January and February closes. We’ve also been busy answering the auditors’ questions and they’re looking under every pebble as a result of the irregularities I mentioned before.

We went to a reunion of some of Bonnie’s high school classmates. It was interesting because I was the only spouse who attended and there was no discussion about spouses or family. I found that very strange considering how important family is here. Well that’s all for now………..short and sweet!

It’s now the last night of my Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) holiday and I have to go back to work tomorrow (Sunday) after 7 days off. This is the most important holiday here and is the equivalent of Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Eve all rolled into one. We had two family dinners this week, the first on Spring Festival Eve which is the traditional family dinner time and another one a couple days later which we hosted and was our “marriage party” dinner with the family. The custom for Spring Festival is to give red envelopes with money as gifts and there are customs about who gives and gets envelopes. For the dinner we hosted we had to reserve a room in a restaurant several weeks in advance and also pay a deposit and order the dishes a couple weeks in advance.

Except for the family dinners we haven’t done much this week except relax and watch movies. We took Bonnie’s mom with us one day for a boat ride on a couple local lakes. The two lakes (both manmade) are connected by a lock. We also started planning our trip to the states as we plan to be there pretty much the whole month of August. We’re thinking of spending some time in Branson, Missouri and if any of you have been there I’d appreciate your recommendations.

Work is still crazy and we’re still working on finishing the yearend close. There are still changes happening but it seems we’re heading in the right direction. Well that’s all for now.

Well it’s another Christmas in China. It’s nice that it fell on Sunday so at least it wasn’t a normal work day but we’ve been so busy at work that Bonnie and I ended up working part of the day anyway. Things have gotten crazy with this company. There has been an investigation going on regarding accounting irregularities and they have proof of some misdeeds by the former management. They haven’t finished the investigation yet so I imagine that they will find more. They had to announce that they found some things and that we will have to restate financial statements for the last 2 or 3 years and that caused Nasdaq to stop trading in the stock. We’ve also had some changes in leadership which are unrelated to the other issues. Add all that together and it makes for big challenges. These things haven’t directly affected my division (and no improprieties in my division) but they do have significant indirect consequences. Needless to say, it’s not real fun here right now. I’ve already told them that I want to cut back to part time by August and sooner would be fine with me.

Otherwise, married life is going well. Bonnie is working as hard as me as she has been doing a lot of work for our company in addition to her teaching duties. Recently that work has been translating documents related to the investigation I mentioned above.

We went to a wedding party on the 18th at the Marriott for the daughter of one of Bonnie’s colleagues. One cultural difference is that normally spouses or significant others are not invited to a wedding party here unless they personally know the bride or groom so it was a bit unusual that I was invited to go with Bonnie. I think they were curious to meet her foreigner husband and I was the only foreigner in the group. Wedding parties here only last a couple hours as they don’t have music and dancing after dinner.

We went to the Marriott for their Christmas Eve dinner. It was very expensive at more than $100 usd per person and included some entertainment and nice door prizes. Unfortunately we weren’t lucky enough to win anything. The place was packed and in another part of the hotel there was a big party put on by the local BMW dealer for BMW owners in town. There are so many rich people here and this is a relatively poor city. I don’t know where those folks get all their money. I have read that more than 50% of the rich in China want to immigrate to the west mostly because they don’t feel secure here (probably because most of their gains are ill-gotten) and because they want a better education for their children.

Well this will wrap things up for 2011. Happy New Year and best wishes for a great 2012!