"Good Old School"

Aside from a rather inappropriate portion of donkey meat over last weekend, I haven't eaten anything particularly unusual recently. In fact, this past week on the whole has been pretty straightforward. Not in such a way as to be boring, but rather in a way that is steadying. It was my first full week in the class room; and while I am continuing to make up my syllabus as I go, I feel like things are coming together. Classes are productive, students are behaving (and hopefully learning), I'm falling into a rhythm—the ebb and flow of life in Zhengzhou. 

With some money in my pocket from my most recent paycheck and some free time early in the week, I bought a bicycle. I could've purchased a much cheaper/run down bicycle as there is no shortage of those for sale, but I chose to solidify my friends and family's suspicions that I am indeed a hipster. I bought a fixed gear bicycle. I've been using any chance I can get to cruise around ZZ and am starting to not only get the hang of, but also to appreciate the simplicity of life on a fixie. Admittedly, it's not all milk and honey and I've had a few close calls (definitely glad I got a front brake). Still, I'm glad I bought it and my students and coworkers think it is pretty cool too, so it's become a conversation piece. 

Beanie + Black Skinny Jeans + Fixie = Hipster

My other adventure this week was to the Henan Regional Museum, which is only a few minutes down the street from where I live and work. It's free for foreigners and I'll definitely be getting my money's worth during my stay in Zhengzhou. It's not very large, but the exhibits are well done and informative (and more importantly have English translations). It'll take several more visits for me to appreciate the grand history of China, but a more immediate pleasure was the ancient music concert. Everyday the museum has a short concert where performers use actual ancient instruments (one of the drums is 2,000 years old) to perform traditional music. It was well worth the visit. 

Ain't No School Like the Old School

Similar scene minus the red light. 

"Dino Eggs"

My Chinese tutor back in the states told me about 皮蛋 (pi dan) before I left for China, and it sounded pretty cool. It's a chicken egg that by some traditional Chinese magic/trade skill is caked in mud and tea leaves and then cooked in such a way that it becomes like a hard boiled egg that is translucent. Sounds kinda cool right? I mean just look at the thing, it looks like a dinosaur egg!

 As it turns out it is a very acquired taste. The taste is best described by the color. I ate the first one and then offered the second to my Chinese coworkers, all but one of whom said they don't eat pi dan. I can understand their decision.

I can now add pi dan to my growing list of strange eats in China. 

"Open Close, Near Far"

开封, Kaifeng, is a city just outside of Zhengzhou. It is a smaller more traditional town that is famous for its night markets, snacks, and expositions of traditional Chinese culture. Having met up with some fellow AYC-ers the week before, we decided to travel to Kaifeng this past weekend. Theoretically it was a simple affair to get there. Trains leave several times every day and make the trip in less than an hour. Buses are a slower alternative but a bit cheaper. I was all for the trains, but as a foreigner you need your passport to buy a ticket and most of us had turned ours in to get our residency permits (we'll get them back in 15-30 days). So busses it was, expected travel time 2-3hrs.

I left my school at 2:30pm. We did not arrive in Kaifeng until 9:30pm. In the seven hours between: our group got lost in Zhengzhou, found the rubble that used to be a bus station, stumbled into a Chinese drivers ed course, took a very sketchy rickshaw ride, bought over priced food, walked around,then went back and drank beer, finally got a bus, made new friends, got off the bus, drank more beer, ate dinner at the now winding down night market, and collapsed at our hostel. We also somehow managed to thoroughly enjoy ourselves (the beer helped). 

The following morning we were greeted by some less than ideal weather and a friend of mine from work, Michelle. Kaifeng is Michelle's home town, and she was nice enough to serve as our guide for the morning and afternoon. She brought us to a muslim neighborhood, where we enjoyed some scrumptious lamb stew for lunch. We then took to our feet and tried to take in the sights. Michelle offered bits of history and insight along the way. Kaifeng, it turns out, means "Open Close." This was an appropriate name, I decided, as it described the paradox of its being so near and taking so long to get to.

Abandoning the idea of paying 100 RMB to enter one of Kaifeng's famous parks which may or may not be putting on the shows that made them famous due to the bad weather, we retreated to a tea house/ cafe and warmed our bones for a bit. Here another friend from my school, Jessica, met us (She is also from Kaifeng) and arranged for a private van to take us back to Zhengzhou. No travel troubles this time...till we hit the worst traffic jam I have not only seen, but pretty much ever heard of. If it wasn't for our drivers disregard of anything resembling a traffic law we could still be at that intersection mashed between buses, cars, e-bikes, bicycles, and pedestrians. 

It was our first attempt at traveling in China and it was certainly a learning experience. The takeaway points: attitude is key, beer is very important, take trains.

Tour Guide Michelle

Rose Tea and Me

 

Try the lamb stew

Troy vs Cicada

Cicadas in their glory

*Photo cred to Percy Baker, iPhone photographer guru. 

"If It's Soft You Can Eat It."

If that looks like a bowl of cooked chicken heads...Well that's because it is a bowl of chicken heads, and I ate one of them. When I asked my Chinese dinner hosts how I should begin the process of eating this rather head-spinning Hors d'oeuvre, I was given some very practical advice that captures a very fundamental tenant of Chinese cuisine, "If it's soft you can eat it. If it's not, spit it out."

 So with these instructions I used my chopsticks and a spoon and popped one these in my mouth and went to work. With a distinctive "clink" the beak and various bones fell from my mouth into my bowl. It was not my most distinguished moment. I wasn't even that hungry and here I was acting like I hadn't seen a chicken in so long that even the head looked appetizing.

 Still, it wasn't even all that bad. It tasted like chicken, just with a texture I wasn't all that familiar with. I mean what really makes the head of the chicken any less edible than the rest of it? We suck the heads of crawfish after all. It's more of a mental block than anything I suppose, but in a country as populated as China there isn't much space for mental blocks at the dinner table. 

"Electric Thing Vehicle"

Electric-thing-vehicle is the literal translation of the Mandarin 电动车, diàn dòng che (1). In English these things are called E-bikes— and they are crazy. They take various shapes and sizes ranging from more mo-ped like, to standard scooter, to electric motorcycle.

 You don't need a drivers license to drive one as they are classified as bicycles (motor cycles are illegal within the city limits). They seem to only follow the traffic laws when it suits them, switching from driving in the street like a car or using crosswalks and sidewalks like pedestrians.

 It also seems like you can carry pretty much anything on them. Everything from a family of four, to a mobile petshop, or even a set of living room furniture. I can only imagine what the traffic police officers in the states would say if they saw one of these cruising around.

Obligatory guy in Asia riding a bike carrying way too much.

Everything but the kitchen sink.

Guy curbing his dog (and his birds). 

Three people. Two wheels. 

Minute-To-Win-It

I came to China to teach English, but I haven't had a single student yet. Instead, I was given the task of assisting the school host a halloween party. Not really knowing what they wanted or what was or wasn't my responsibility for the party to be, I did my best to make it fun and as close to a celebration we might have in the states as possible. Basically I just relapsed into my past role as an RA.

 Trying to find Halloween supplies though, was (pardon the pun) a nightmare. I live in a city comparable in size to New York; and yet, I could not find a single tube or container of face-paint. I had to email a friend who is from China (shout out to Alex Yang) to even figure out how to ask for it. Even then all I got were blank expressions of confusion or misguided tours of a women's makeup section from various shop owners.

In the end I was able to scrounge up some witch hats and capes which I could use for activities or decorations. The school actually had some stuff left over from past years which helped a lot. To compensate for my lack of decorations I decided to make the spectacle a bit more active. If you haven't seen the game show Minute-to-win-to-it, then I'm sorry. Not only because at this point you don't know what I'm talking about, but also because it just means you haven't been laughing as much as you could. Luckily for you this is the 21st century and the internet has no higher purpose than to bring you as many amusing videos as your bandwidth can carry. For those of you who skipped the links, the basic premise is to create very silly and difficulty tasks using very mundane objects all with a sixty second time limit.

For the party I set up two such challenges. One where two contestants race each other to sort 50 skittles by color using only one hand, and then another one where someone has to shake six ping-pong balls out of a tissue box strapped to their rump (this is what is featured in the second link). The other station I set up was your standard bobbing for apples. This also became somewhat of a game show though as no one had ever heard of it before and got really competitive about it. My last role was something like that of a whisk. I was charged to mix up the guys and girls and get them all dancing. This was ALOT harder than anything minute-to-win-it had could throw my way. In the end things came together quite well, the students were very resourceful in making/finding their own costumes so the face paint wasn't necessary and after some serious encouraging they all started to dance on their own (which was good cause I needed a breather!) Here are some photos that I rounded up.

Race-The-Rainbow

Classic Michele...

Baller.

Overachievers.

Witches.