12 days of christmas for the trash lady...

first of all, i hate that i call someone the 'trash lady,' but it is actually what i do call her, and i don't know what else to call her. she is the woman who goes through my trash. let me explain.

everything in wuhan is reused. people here are terrible about littering, but there is always someone who comes along to pick up. there is still tons of litter everywhere, but it is hard to imagine what it would be like without all the people who pick up and sweep. if i am drinking a coke, or a bottle of water, there is always someone nearby, waiting for me to finish so they may have my bottle. i have seen people breaking apart blocks of concrete from torn down structures to get the tiny metal reinforcements inside. people pick through the trash cans on campus, and rescue all storts of stuff.

so, as you can guess, when i take the trash out from my apartment, there is someone there to go through it. i always take it to the same woman. last year, when my friend kellee was here, she was really upset by the idea of having someone pick through her trash. she'd take it out at night, after the woman had left 'work' for the day. at first, i felt the same way, and it is still odd, but i really like this woman. she is always so happy to see me or duff coming. we try to keep our recyclables from the stuff that we think no one will ever want again. sometimes, though, we are still wrong. i though no one would want our old used paper noodles bowls and used disposable wooden chopsticks. wrong, the lady picks them out. i still haven't figured out what she wants and what she doesn't. the trash doesn't go to a dumpster or anything, by the way. it goes into a three sided concrete enclosure. the woman sits there all day, every day, on a little stool under a tree. next to her is her bicycle. the back of the bike is a trunk, or a bin, which she fills up with everything she takes out of the trash. i am assuming she then carts it to the bottle recyclers, or the paper recyclers. who give her some money for what she brings in. even beer bottle caps are worth 2 jiao. what she doesn't fish out, is burned. i have never heard of anyone doing anything with the trash other than burning it. it is part of the reason our air quality is so bad. this fall, they normally burned in the evening, around dinner time. i would come home from class, realize they were burning, and run the last bit home to get the laudry off the balcony. the laundry gets to smell terrible anyway, like pollution, if it is left out too long. the trash burning smell is awful, and it suffocates me. it burns my throught and my eyes.

this week, the trash lady is really happy with me. last year, after christmas, i hoarded all the boxes and wrapping paper from presents in my room in case.....what? what was i every going to need that for? silly. this year, realizing that i will never again need these packing materials, i take them to the trash lady. she loves it. my parents had the greatest idea for christmas for me this year. one day i got a call from the office where our mail comes, and they said i had 7 packages at the office. when my dad called the next time, he directed me to one to open first. inside was a note that said, "on the first day of christmas....." it is so exciting, especially since i haven't opened them all yet. it is such a great idea. i am so loved and lucky. when i open one, i take the packing materials to the trash lady. it is better to take it a little at a time. if i take to much at one time, she won't be able to get it all on her bike and someone else may get it. i realize i am getting christmas presents and she is getting the wrapping, but the wrappings here are valuable, and she runs to meet me when i bring out a box.

merry christmas!

i hope everyone is having a merry christmas!!

i had a busy weekend with lots of festivities. oddly, it never felt like christmas. on christmas eve, i had dinner with many other foreign teachers at an italian restaurant. the food was excellent, and the company was lovely. the restaurant is run by a chinese woman who lived in new york for ten years. the food at this place in not only good for china, but it is good food for america. they had turkey (which is almost impossible to get here), pizza, pesto pasta, salad, garlic bread, and many other dishes. it was warm and fun.

sunday, i was with friends at a few parties. they teach at a beautiful school on the shore of wuhan's south lake. they get a lot of wind off the lake (which is huge. 'hubei' means northern lake province, roughly), but it must be fun to live right next to it. the other famous lake in wuchang in east lake. i haven't been there since my first weekend in wuhan over a year ago. i will go back in the spring. they built a road that winds through the lake. it is only one lane, or maybe two. there are wispy chinese trees on either side, and old men fishing. i plan to rent a bicycle and spend some time messing around in the area.

for christmas dinner we went to a huge chinese restaurant called 'drunken river moon.' it is one of my favorite places in the world. the food is great and exciting. all of the dishes always have beautifully carved vegetables. they have excellent presentation, and very good bbq ribs.

all weekend we had to fight with traffic. even though most chinese don't celebtrate christmas in the religious sense, they do celebrate it commercially. many of the big stores are open all night. the students have a midnight curfew in the dorms, but for christmas they stay out all night shopping at the giant sales. China’s streets and sidewalks look busy normally, but this christmas weekend it was almost impossible to walk. travel times doubled. the busses were packed and it was always difficult for me to find a cab.

i am getting ready for a really challenging week. since duff has gone back to america for christmas, i am covering his classes. normally i have 20 classroom hours a week, but this week i have 34. i will be sleep-walking through the new year. i am also giving exams this week. because of the student's wide acceptance of cheating, proctoring a test here can be a stressful affair.

leave your comments, i love reading them! happy holidays!

for here or togo?

i listened to mark and james' presentation on togo today. it was an excellent presentation, but the boys had a small pronunciation error. until i corrected them, they were pronouncing 'togo' as 'to go.' as in, 'would you like that for here, or to go?' darling.

final presentations

all this week i am sitting for the student's presentations of their final projects. judging by the student's work throughout the semester, i wasn't expecting the final presentations to be any good. i'm happy to say, i was quite wrong. the presentations have been excellent. for the final project, the students split into pairs, and each was to pick one country and research it (no one could pick china, and no one could have the same country). i have four classes doing this project. most of the students picked italy, france, germany, england, japan, australia, switzerland, and korea. a few got more creative. today i will hear presentations on the maldives, iceland, costa rica, and togo.

it is really fun to watch the students do their presentations. i have gotten to know the kids over the semester, but because our material is reading and writing, and not listening and speaking, i still have trouble matching faces and names. i can match handwriting and names perfectly. in our university, and it may be this way at all universities in china, the students are divided into classes. there are 40 students in each class, and they are always together. the have all of their classes together, normally in the same room, and the teachers rotate in and out. as a result, the kids are really close to each other. some classes are tighter than others. oh, they also all live together. boys and girls are separate, of course. still, they see the same people all the time. there are four kids in a dorm room, and to have all of their classes and activities together....it doesn't seem to drive them crazy, they are close. presentations are not that difficult for them. how hard is it to speak when you have your 40 best friends in the room?

also, because the students know each other so well, there is a lot of laughing and joking, and very little shyness. i had one student start his presentation by throwing extraordinarily well aimed chalk at everyone who was laughing at him. i throw chalk, particularly at sleeping students, but my aim isn't so good. i should take lessons. one student, johanna, stuck out her tongue and waggled it like a lizard or snake ever time she made a pronunciation error. the class was dying. i had another student, sikey, who got up front and pulled her hair down over her face and gave her speech. we couldn't see her and she couldn't see us. just a wall of straight, shiny, black hair. toby, a really jolly kid, was presenting on russia. he ran into trouble trying to pronounce some of the place names. finally, after struggling for 30 seconds or so, he looked at his watch and realized he'd gone longer than 3 minutes (the time each student was required to speak). He smiled, said, "oh, nevermind," and crumpled up his paper and tossed it over his shoulder. the class loved him. the kids either had to bring in a map, or draw one on the board. the class exploded when kerry drew japan: one long oval with a dot representing tokyo.

it can be really difficult to keep the students quiet when their classmates are talking. i tell them i will take points from their presentation score. this helps a little bit, but it can still get really loud. the students will be quiet on their own, though, for the classmates that they really respect. one kid, seven, got to the front of the room, and the class was more quiet than they are during quizzes and tests.

the most surprising presentation was by one of my best students, steven. he is a quiet kid, and very thoughtful. he is also one of my favorite because he comes to every class, sits in the front row, and puts a lot of time and effort into his assignments. even though the project was supposed to be done in pairs, he begged to be alone. i let him, since everyone else had partnered up. he chose to do the usa. steven started off his presentation like all of the others, but gradually his voice rose, and the chatting and constant text messaging in the audience died down. steven was speaking without notes, and he had everyone entranced as he began to talk about september 11th. his comments continued, and he moved to talking about the iraq war, and his feelings on it. he spoke so passionately, his fists were clenched, he had tears in his eyes. he spoke of the children who were being injured and killed, and the families torn apart, and all the other results of war. he finished up, with the entire class silent and wide eyed, by saying, "i have a dream..." and turned around and scrawled across the board "NO WAR." the whole class was silent for a split second and burst into applause. it was a really neat moment.

steven came to talk to me after class. he was worried that he had offended me. i wanted to say, "of course not" right away, but we talked for a bit about speaking openly and political debate. so different are our cultures. i know it was a stretch for him to speak so openly in opposition of the us government, because so many people would never think to do the same thing in china.

again in china

i know i have been horribly out of touch recently. in october, i returned to wuhan for a second year of teaching at hubei university of technology. the school has about 20,000 students and is located on the outskirts of wuhan. wuhan is a giant, sprawling metropolis in centra china, that we often refer to as 'the world's largest village.' it is huge, but wild and disorganized. most of the time it doesn't have the feeling of a big city at all. it feel more like a million small towns were smashed together, and resulted in wuhan. i guess this is partially true, though. three formerly distinct towns, hankou, hanyang, and wuchang, now make up wuhan. i live in wuchang, on the south bank of the chang jiang river. it is an hour and a half bus ride for me to get to the river. i don't think anyone really knows how many people live in wuhan, i think the most accepted estimate in around 8 million. could be more, but it probably isn't less.

i teach mostly university freshman. my teaching situation is radically different from what it was last year. this year, i have 6 classes of 40 students each, making it impossible to get close to the students. we are in week 16 of the semester, and i'm sad to say i haven't even mastered all of their names! last year, i had a core group of 47 seven students, who i saw for about 20 hours each week. we became very close, and i really miss having that in the classroom this year. i am responsible for teaching the students reading and writing. the hope is to get their level to the point that they can go and study in canada, if they should so choose. the students are pretty typically freshman, but some of them seem so young. they are having a lot of the same problems that american freshman face. the most frustrating, as their teacher, is that they haven't quite yet learned to balance their time. some are managing beautifully, while others have chosen to forget that homework exists at university. and then there are those that have forgotten that they came to university to attend class. ha.

i will update about teaching in china and my activities and travels. i came back to china because there is a lot more of this country that i want to see. also, i have a fantastic chinese teacher, and i have a faint glimmer of hope that i may, someday, be able to speak mandarin.