Bye-bye Beibei (Glorious Feats)

In just two short days, I will be taking my last look from our 18th floor balcony at the town of Beibei below. The ten months of study as a scholarship student are over, and it's time to head out for new adventures again.

I am certainly happy I got the chance to come here and to study Chinese, it is definitely a highly valuable investment at this point in my life. The school here was mostly ok, though the efficiency of teaching and learning was not always ideal. But small class sizes, a green campus and a couple of good teachers make up for it in the end. However, I don't know if I can live up to the ideals of the school myself: (These pictures are from the lobby of the building where we had our classes.)






Many days, hours, minutes in these months have been full of boredom and useless killing of time. At times it was hard to keep myself motivated, especially when I saw people around me sort of laze into an existance of home, school, dvds... And the cold, wet winter, now replaced by a sweatty summer greenhouse is something I will be happy to be leaving behind. But despite all that, I will miss this place in a way. What I will miss the most is the small town life: being able walk everywhere or going around on the motorbikes for 2 yuan, the relaxed athmosphere, friendly people, the nearby river, the mountain just up the road...

But now it's time to move on, the boxes are packed and although we haven't found it yet, somewhere out there in Beijing is our new house, waiting for us, ready to be the stage for the Act 6 of my China life. Glorious feats, here I come!

Man Needed

Today I added a new word into my Chinese vocabulary: short circuit. This was the result of an explosion, which happened as I switched the light on at home. A puff of smoke, a rain of glass, and no electricity.

As I am rather useless with this type of thing (yes, I am blonde), I immediately phoned the man of the house for some instructions as he wasn't at home. But after my playing with the main switches for a bit there was no reaction, I turned to the section option of male assistance: the guards of our compound. After I underlines how important it was that we have electricity for the Italy game tonight, one of them came upstairs with me.

He barely just touched the switches and behold ----- there WAS light.

So now we can power up the telly and keep the beers cold. I guess it really is quite useful to have men around sometimes ;-)

phhhhhh

Before I moved to Chongqing, many Chinese people warned me of how unbearably hot it would be here. In reality, I have spent most of my time here being cold to the bone and fearing I may never feel warm again.

But here it is finally, the Chongqing summer. The heatwave hit just in time to make me want to avoid exam revision and just sit with a good book in the one room with airconditioning. (Finding things to read has finally become easier. I don't have to hunt for those rare English novels anymore, most of which are from the 19th century --- I have discovered that I can read my novels in Chinese without any struggle!)

Still, the temperature is just as high in Beijing so no relief in sight.

At the same time, it's the period before moving when things start accumulating in little piles everywhere ("I'll deal with that later, it will have to go together with those other things so no point in putting it away anymore...") and you start designing dinner menus based on what you have left in tins and dry food in the kitchen cupboards ---> some very inspired "Ready, Steady, Cook" -style meals coming up!

Watching Football with the Gods

Living with an Italian, the football frenzy of the World Cup is impossible to avoid. That means that a month-long TV marathon has now begun, making our extremely uncomfortable straight-backed wooden sofa my second home for a bit.

Unfortunately, living on a different continent than where the games are organised, the matches are all on in the middle of the night our time. This means I have spent the past couple of days trying to desperately convince my body to stay awake during the night and get its rest through daytime naps. So far I haven't been that successful, physically I now feel like I have been binge-drinking for a week without proper food or sleep. In reality, I have been on a diet of green tea, salads and fruits. Silly body still complaining...

But tonight starts the serious competition, the first match of Italy kicks off at 3 a.m. our time. Getting ready by filling the fridge up with fruit beer and the kitchen cupboards with snacks.

Speaking of that, I'm continuing the series of snack pictures with this one. I wonder how this brand name would go down with Western consumers.

Washing Machine

Today, instead of writing much, I leave you with a picture that I took a couple of months ago in a little guesthouse/restaurant on top of the mountain that we can see from our window. Sorry for the low quality ---- but if you look closely enough you can see the print on the fan. Or on what I thought was a fan...

Black Days

Yesterday and the day before that are referred to as 'the black days' by Chinese students.


No, nothing tragic happened -- it was just time time for the yearly nationwide university entrance exams. This year a record 9.5 million students took part in the fun.


The exams are a time of stress not only for the students but possibly even more so for their families. Aftr 12 years of work, now it's the time to see the results. And in China of 2006, results matter.


For these couple of days, each news broadcast has been showing interviews of nervous parents, relaxed students, angry parents, stressed students... Even parents who had paid thousands of yuan to get a luxury hotel room by the school for their kid to study and rest.


And then there is the cheating. This year, there are strict measures in place to try and stop to cheating. Still, each year there are thousands of students who get caught and get a '0' stamped on their result sheet. And how many thousands who don't get caught?


My teacher suggested that I take a detour on my way to class and go check out one of the places in Beibei where the exams are held. He told me to expect masses of parents waiting outside, all standing up for the few hours the exams last at a time. Many parents, he said, make the long journey from hundreds of kilometres away just to be there for these couple of days.


So, I thought I'd go and take a look as one of the schools where the exams were held is not far from where we live. As I got to the school gates, there was a line of maybe 10 parents, all standing with their arms crosses over their chest, staring at the gate. Maybe the bigger scene was inside the school area, but I didn't dare go in since as soon as I walked into their field of vision, the eyes were drawn away from the gates and attached to the laowai. "Eeeeehhhh, loook everyone, a foreigner!!"


So much for my covert operation then, I didn't feel like going around asking for any more attention so I left quickly and continued on my way to school.

I hope they did well and made their parents happy.

Of Work

As I have already mentioned, I have been looking for work in Beijing for a while now, sending out emails and resumes to companies and organisations that look interesting. Although I am not looking for one particular thing, I know what I am NOT looking for and can tell my requirements to potential employers --- and then leave it up to them whether they are willing to give me what I want or not.

So, in the middle of this job hunting process, I was stopped today for a while to think about the situations that many Chinese young people are in. They do not have the luxury to present their own demands when trying to find work, and often end up working in conditions that I would never dream of accepting.

I was pulled to think about this as I went to the hairdresser to get a wash and a dry, combined with a lovely head, shoulders & arms massage. (All this was a ridiculous 10 yuan or 1 euro!!) The girl doing the massage told me about how she had moved far away from her hometown in Sichuan and come to Beibei to find work. Being only 17 years old with no experience or higher education, she was lucky to find a job at the hairdressers. There she must work 11 hours a day, from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. almost every single day, only getting 2 days off each month! This means practically no time for anything of her own , all her time is spent at work. Only once a year does she get to go home to meet her family. And for all this, she barely gets enough money to buy food (on normal days she eats the food brought from the common kitchen at work) and pay for her housing.

And yet, she is one of the lucky ones. After all, she did find a job.

On a lighter note, she could not stop talking about how strangely soft my skin was and how lovely my haircolour was. I was just a little too thin, she said. I'm taking care of that right now, munching on chocolate chip cookies.

Alarming

This afternoon, as I was about to go to class, there was suddenly a LOUD siren sounding from somewhere nearby. It sounded just like the testing of the general alarm that they do every now and then back home, exactly the same signal as well. I thought that must be it and just ignored it.

But a few minutes later it still hadn't stopped and the sound was so loud that it pretty much pierced through everything. Soon the signal was changed from the high pitched tone to a rising and falling one, sounding slightly more alarming.

And a couple of minutes later, it was joined by other sirens, sounding just the same, coming from different directions. We were practically drowning in the sea of noise.

Although everyone in the street kept going about their business as usual, I couldn't help but wonder if this really was something else than just a test. In the past few months there have been two serious large-scale industrial accidents in the Chongqing area, both resulting in the evacuation of thousands of people. With that thought in mind, I was wondering if it was our turn...

When we went downstairs to ask the guard what it was all about, he looked at me blankly and said "What sound?? You mean the construction noise?" Apparently, he had managed to completely ignore the siren that was howling its way through absolutely everything.

With not much information, I just picked up my bag and headed to school. Eventually, the alarms quietened down.

So, I guess this time it was just a test. Or maybe something that we'll read about in the foreign papers a few days from now... Who knows...

The 'Bang Bang' Method

In attempt to get my laptop's dvd drive fixed, yesterday we finally made the trip to Chongqing'a 'computer city', an area with massive shops with everything computer related.

And out of all of those places, this is where we were referred first to ask about fixing the computer:

Needless to say, the name of the place did not give us much confidence in their working methods.

And yes, I quickly put the computer back in my backpack and we ran for it.

Next Move

For those who don't know already, my next move will be in the direction of Beijing. I only have about a month to go on here, and then, hopefully holding yet another red-covered certificate, I'll be leaving student life behind me (once again) for now.

And....off to Beijing! 北京

For the past couple of months I've been sending out tons of job applications for more and less interesting positions in Beijing. No luck so far and if I don't find something that I really like, instead of signing a full-time contract I'll just start it off by "freelance teaching" and other small jobs like that. That should keep me in 'baozi' until something more interesting comes along :)

Up to date

In the spirit of the latest revival of my blog and inspired by the fact that I can actually SEE my own blog now, I have finally updated the list of links and deleted the links to my old photoalbums that seem to have disappeared to the cyberwaste universe.

Job Opportunities

Some time ago I posted a picture of a Chongqingese porter carrying his load. In the post I also mentioned how the armies of these porters gather at street corners, waiting for a chance to pick up their bamboo pole and and the bit of rope.

But a picture speaks more than a thousand words, eh? So here's a shot I took this morning, on my way to the market for some fruit shopping. So if you need a hand with those groceries, you know where to go now.

Besides the army of the porters, the second largest troops belong to the army of shoeshiners. I reckon their trade must be going down a little now with the arrival of this flip-flop weather, but still, the otherwise oh-so-rough looking Chinese men (brown teeth, BADLY fitting pseudo-western suits, with trousers rolled up to their knees, sometimes instead wearing the shirt they will just carry it around in their hand while cooling themselves down...) will always make sure that their shoes are well polished. And these people at the corner just next to the porters are ready to attack your best shoes with an old tooth brush!