loves of my life

did i ever mention that i love my students? maybe this post is a little premature but i have just over a month left here and i already feel the pain of separation. by my estimates i have probably worked with a little less than 2000 kids here in less than a year! how many first year teachers can say that?!? pretty cool...

the faces in the pictures don't have any meaning to anyone except me but they will be engrained in my memory forever. i hope i can at least stay in touch with a few of them to see how they turn out.

this semester i was lucky enough to have both old and new faces. i have 15 new classes and 11 old classes, which i think was a good balance. i have to say that i definitely feel closer with my old classes though.

here are some old faces:



and here are some new faces!




for some of these kids i probably had very little to no effect on them whatsoever (they saw my class merely as a 35 minute break in the day) but for other kids i think my effect has been bigger than i'm probably even aware of. for example, when i met aaron's mother (my little private student), she told me that aaron felt excited about learning english for the first time in my class. i think it all goes back to when i showed them a justin bieber music video haha, but hey, whatever sparks your passion. to be honest, when aaron asked me on QQ to be his teacher, i wasn't exactly sure which student he was, so it just goes to show that i'm not always aware of who is following me. his oral english is improving rapidly now that he is opening his mouth and giving the language a shot.

moving on, this class is literally a teacher's dream. there's at least like 50 of them but they're well behaved, quiet and polite. they're almost too good...maybe they have something up their sleeve...hehe. the boy in the orange stripes has excellllent english but sometimes he uses his skills for strange purposes. last class he ran up to me in my the middle of my lesson and told me that his stomach was uncomfortable and that he needed to go to the WC immediately. i was like, OK, go!! hahah

sometimes i like to get in the pictures too :) nice, nice 6th graders.

what will i do without a classroom full of chinese kids? oh, woe is me!

grammar

i was just reading through one of my previous posts and i want to say please excuse any grammar or spelling mistakes i make on this blog. although zach will tell you that it is because i am forgetting english, the truth is that i am just writing too quickly and not proofreading very well. although, there may be something to zach's claim, on friday night my friend was joking about knowing 5 languages and i told him that he was wulingual, which seemed to make perfect sense. he gave me a strange look and was like ummm, do you mean quinlingual? i was like oh yeah, that too, where the heck did i get wulingual from? and then i remembered that in chinese the word for 5 is 'wu'. wow, that was definitely a strange mistake....!

zombies

to follow up with my last past, zombies are the hot thing in china right now thanks to a popular video game called 'plants vs. zombies'. this is why they know the word zombie, it's not one of their vocab words :) now i'm not the biggest gamer in the world but i have played this game with my students before and it has got to be one of the most inane games in the world. i got bored after like 30 seconds. the zombies start walking across the grass REALLLYYY slowly while mumbling "braiiiinnnnsss" and then you put out some killer plants and wait for them to die. it's a cute idea, but the strategy is pretty lacking.
this is my awesome new MICHAEL JACKSON zombie sticker. i always let my private students pick a sticker after class, and last week my student my student whipped out this awesome sheet of plants vs. zombie stickers and told me to pick one. she put my stickers to shame! when i show the 'thriller' music video in class i always make sure to make the connection for them because they have no idea that this is michael jackson. i'm like look, they have the same red jacket and pants! the kids looooove the thriller music video (i just show them the scary part where the zombies come to life and then they all dance together). they told me that in the video game his name is just 'the king of the dance'.
if only all english words had as much interest behind them as the word 'zombie'....then all my students would be fluent for sure

new chinese holidays

in combination with the upcoming holidays and the fact that the word 'invent' is a vocabulary word in the 4th grade english book, i decided to ask my students, "if you could invent a holiday, what would it be?" so, if chinese children had their say, this it what we would have. the numbers next to the names represent the number of votes each holiday received as being the best holiday. as you can see, 'play day' was pretty popular. that poor kid who came up with 'restaurant day' though, he didn't even get a pity vote from a friend!!! i thought it was pretty practical holiday :)

this holiday tops the list. i can't think of any other way i'd want to spend a day off from work.

phoenix

i guess i have to take back everything that i said in my previous post about this hair clip. well, maybe that is an exaggeration but there's always more to things than first meets the eye. the mom told me today that the hair clip was designed in the likeness of a 'fenghuang' which explains the crazy design and color scheme. in english we translate 'fenghuang' as 'phoenix'.


here is a picture of a fenghuang below. actually really similar, huh? i learned before that the phoenix is the female counterpart to the dragon in chinese mythological thinking so i was quickly able to understand the meaning of the hair clip (after spending like 20 minutes trying to figure out what a fenghuang is. the mom is pretty young but she really sucks with computers haha). they confused me a little though because they said that either feng or huang represents the female phoenix and the other one represents the male phoenix. i guess it's an androgynous female.

so, new learnings, but this hair clip still remains the most chinese thing i own, hands down! i like it even more now that i know the meaning. i love the combination of old chinese ideas and modern chinese style. i hope it doesn't fall apart like some of the other crappy chinese things i have bought here.

sick in china

it's been a long week. for the first time, i got reallyyy sick here. my symptoms started on sunday night but i didn't want to miss class on monday so i powered through the day. i was exhausted (i'm not exactly sure how i did it) but i still had to teach my 6th grade private student after school. i really wanted to cancel but i had cancelled our previous class for no reason (i teach him at 9am on saturdays UGH) so i decided to power through again and then pass out afterwards. he's a really nice kid and very curious about many things so he's easy to teach even though his english is not super great. if all else fails, we just talk about justin bieber, his new favorite singer.

however, as our class went on, i went from feeling like i had a bad cold to really queasy. i usually eat dinner with this family on monday nights but i let the mom know right away that i would have to go home afterwards because i didn't feel well. she tried to make me drink some chinese medicine but i knew that i was going to throw up if i drank it so i refused. finally, our lesson ended and i went to say good bye to the mom in the kitchen. she was cooking what smelled like 6 different dishes at once, which made me feel even more queasy. she said she would take me home, and i was too tired to argue. after we left the apartment and started walking down stairs, everything hit me at once. i yakked all over the stairs. i don't think the mom had realized the severity of my reported illness and froze behind me. i was so embarrassed. she immediately started rubbing my back though and when i was done dragged me back into her apartment. when we came back in i heard her yelling to my student and her husband in chinese "she threw up, she threw up!"
when i came back in she got some pillows and blankets and made me lie down on the couch. i didn't really know what was going on, but i think she took my temperature, gave me some chinese medicine, and made sure i was okay. it was definitely embarrassing, but it was nice to have a mom away from home and not have to be all sick on my own. i rested there for a while and she said i could sleep at her house that night, but being the american that i am i wanted to get home and be in my own bed. she gave me some more chinese meds and we left again. on the way back down the stairs, i really thought i was going to throw up again, it took my strongest mental concentration and will power not to. i knew i would be stuck at her house for good if that happened! we got back to my place and she brought me upstairs to my apartment. i knew she was probably going to be a chinese mom and mess around in my apartment for a bit so i just went to my bed and buried my head under the covers. finally she roused me and gave me some tea, and i also noticed that she had tidied my apartment a little. she explained how to take the chinese meds, tucked me in, and that was that! i am ever so grateful to her. i really should have listened to my body and not taught that day....lesson learned.

so anyhow, it's been a hard week of recovery, but at the end of the day my students always know how to make me feel good even when i don't!

hair clip

this is a hair clip given to me by the mom in the previous post. it is probably the most chinese thing i own now, besides my new vest :) clearly there's a lot going on with it- the excessive number of fake jewels, the excessive colors...basically it is just excessive. i don't think i would have ever thought to buy it for myself (and probably still would never think to hehe), but now that i have it i can appreciate its subjective beauty. i guess the kindness in which it was given also doesn't hurt. i still can't understand how this mom is so nice. definitely bringing some of these learnings back to the states..

my student and her family

finally got some pictures of my student and her family. this is the same mom who would always clean my entire apartment before i decided that we should switch the lessons to her house so she wouldn't have to do that anymore. now they always invite me to eat with them, they just won't stop being so nice. this picture of the mom and i is a little awkward because it is a picture of a picture- they printed it out for me :) now it's up on my refrigerator. you can see their 2 fish tanks in the background (they have to many pets for the size of their apartment!), the chili peppers strung from the wall, and our post-dinner tea glasses on the table.

here is what a meal looks like at their house. SO MUCH FOOD! i really don't think they could normally eat like this every night. someone told me that in order to show hospitality and friendship the chinese will go all out on meals. starting from the top left hand corner and going around clockwise, they had chicken neck, seafood and egg soup, celery, string beans with beef, sweet and sour fish, tofu, cucumbers and of course, rice. they also gave me a really strange tasting duck egg to try. the yolk had a very ammonia'ish flavor. when i was trying to describe my perception of it to them, i didn't know how to say yolk so i wanted to call it the center of the egg, but i think the way i said 'center' is the colloquial term used for 'city center', so they were giggling. oh well...i would probably laugh too if a chinese person referred to an egg's yolk as its city center!
the dad cooks all of the food for the house, because apparently he is a better cook than the wife. i told them that this cooking ability issue was the same case with my boyfriend and i, and the daughter was delighted to hear that we were the same as her parents, haha. maybe if zach comes to dalian he and the husband can share sob stories about how incompetent their significant others are :) they seem like a pretty happy couple, although i guess you never really know. i have heard that many chinese marriages are born out of convenience and practicality rather than love, but on the surface at least they seem to defy that stereotype.

they were playing simon and garfunkel one time i was there, so i brought my computer over to their house last time and put a bunch of my music on a usb so they could try it out. now they will rocking out to the beatles, bob dylan, stevie wonder, and the mamas and the papas. i think i'll give them miles davis too if i can remember. i am positive about most things in china but i really don't like the music here (i'm not the only one, another foreigner once described it as 'primitive'), but they just happened to have some CDs of a chinese singer i heard on TV one time that i liked. this singer is sort of like the susan boyle of china- she is unattractive, overweight, but has an amazing voice that makes up for the first 2 super important qualities :) i knew there was a reason i liked these people!

here's my little student, amy. amy is a very pretty girl but photographs poorly. her english is dismal and still continues to be dismal even after working with her for several weeks, but i have confidence that she just needs to get over this first language hump and then she'll improve. right now we are still at the basics- months, days of the week, colors, etc. i do have to say that she has made major improvements in those areas after i saw that art was her thing and could be used to her learning advantage. we made little flash cards with her own pictures which helps her remember the vocabulary. to all chinese people's credit though, our naming system for the months and days of the week is about 100 times as hard as the chinese naming system- january translates to '1 month', february translates to '2 month', march translates to '3 month'....i think you get the picture. it's the same with the days of the week. who said that chinese was the hardest language in the world? :)-
here is a little hat that amy made for me. she is so talented! i also saw some of her artwork in room which i'd say was at least on a high school level. she had done a shadow study on several objects and shapes and the different shades of gray was very well rendered. i told her parents that she should be an architect!
despite all these great things about them, there are some culture differences that can make things a little awkward. the language barrier doesn't help either. 2 saturdays ago i was at their house for our 11am lesson and i was feeling pretty tired. the night before was my friend's birthday party so i had stayed out quite late and i had woken up around 7:30 for my 9am lesson at my house (i needed to clean and make myself presentable, ugh). after finishing the lesson they invited me to eat lunch with them, which was cool, and then the mom and i finished watching harry potter 7 pt. 2 because we had watched half of it a few days before. afterwards we talked about the movie as best as i could, and then somehow switched to talking about health and swimming. this somehow led to talking about massage, and the mom proceeded to give me a wonderful chair massage! man, she's always so nice to me, but i felt really uncomfortable about the whole thing and didn't return the massage. i'm going to take her out to get a real massage sometime next week though. okay this is another one of my convoluted stories, now i will get to the point.

the daughter and the father eventually left to go get some groceries and i was left alone with the mom for a while. at this point, i was honestly fatiguing- it was about 4 or 5 pm, i was running on like 3 hours of sleep, had already taught for 3 hours that day, and was attempting to listen to and speak a language that i am not that well versed in. after chatting for a while, i told the mom that i was very tired and needed to go home soon. she absolutely would not have this. she said that i could take a nap in her and her husband's bed (!) and wake up for dinner time. i think this is fairly common in china. i told her that it was very nice of her but that i really couldn't do it. this is where her insistence went beyond all reason in my mind. in america, i think most people would understand that i needed to go home and rest, especially after repeating it twice. the mom was aware of all of the points that i listed above. but in china, sometimes it feels like other people think they know what's better for you than you do, and will be really pushy with you. i also think it's a politeness thing- the chinese seem to have less hesitation about arguing back and forth about who will pay the bill, who will sit down in the empty seat on the bus (i've seen this fight go on so long between 2 old people that it became bizarre), etc. she may have thought that i was just being polite and we were playing this little game before i finally said 'okay'. however, i was not playing, and felt extremely uncomfortable, almost as if i was being held hostage. at first i was like crap i guess i'm going to have to go along with this...but then from somewhere deep inside, a new hardened victoria emerged. i explained to her that we were having a culture difference and that in america we have different habits when visiting friends. this led her to think i was speaking about solely about the bed situation, and she went on to insinuate some things that i didn't want to think about. i tried my best to explain that it was more than just that, but i had trouble because i didn't want to hurt her feelings. finally, she repeated culture difference to herself, and i think she realized that she was just not going to be able to understand where i was coming from, just as i didn't really understand where she was coming from either.

the father and daughter returned to the house soon thereafter, along with a family friend and her daughter. they had a ton of groceries with them. i was like oh great, the WHOLE gang is here now. i felt really terrible, so i played with the new little girl and amy for a little bit, but then they seemed to be looking to me to make up a game to play and i was all gamed out (i play a game in all 26 of my classes each week) so i was like oh my goodness it's time to bid everyone adieu. amy really didn't want me to leave but i had to break her heart and say that i had to. i talked to the father alone for a moment and told him that speaking chinese really makes me tired sometimes, and i think he understood where i was coming from.

putting my shoes on was pretty awkward because everyone was looking at me sadly. they just couldn't handle me leaving empty handed though, so they grabbed an uncooked bag of popcorn and gave it to me. the mom thought for a second and remembered that i didn't have a microwave so they took the bag back from me and popped it in the microwave. while i waited there i didn't know what to do so i told them a "story" about my shoes to ease the tension. then the popcorn was done and they put it in a bag for me. i left, a hot bag of popcorn and all, and took the bus back to home sweet home!

anyhow, moral of the story, it's a blessing and a curse to be so welcome somewhere....! i also teach another boy whose family invites me to dinner after every lesson. so 2nd moral of the story, if you do private teaching every night in china you will never have to cook :)

survival of the fittest

how trees must survive in chinese cities

winter swimming

winter sea swimming is a popular pastime of the dalianese people. i don't know how they do it, it is so COLD in that water. they are a hearty, hearty people! there must be something to it though, this guy looks pretty healthy. the 2 colored things in the background that look like buoys are actually people's heads!


this video clip is of a guy warming up before taking the great plunge. i honestly think he was standing there slapping his arms on his chest and back like this for 10 minutes. he was also doing arm circles and other exercises for similar amounts of time. it seemed a little excessive, but i guess he knew what he was doing. look at all the other people swimming- the people here are really concerned about their health!

team names...

the ultimate of all ultimate team names. although, i'm surprised that the next team didn't want to be 'team all people's GRANDfather'. they like to one-up each other.

jeez

the chinese can organize their children in scales i never thought possible. i took this picture from an upper floor window while my students were doing their daily exercises. i think they were even more organized that unusual though because the dalian education bureau is visiting the school next week and they were preparing for the visit.

chinese poems

last week i had the opportunity to watch some of my 6th grade students read some chinese poems about their love for china. it was a competition to see who could read the poems the best. i wasn't going to go at first because i had chinese class and didn't want to be late but i was happy i stayed- it was really interesting and the kids were happy to see me there. obviously i couldn't fully understand the poems, but the topics included how beautiful china was in the spring, how great the yellow river is, etc. they were all read in this very loud, exaggerated voice that sounded really official and important. i had never heard the chinese language spoken in that way before, so it was a little surprising, especially coming from little kids. here are some of my students waiting for their turn, and one of my students who is apparently really interested in photography and was the official cameraman and videographer for the event.


these are some clips of the best performances that i saw. for the first video, i had been in the room for a while waiting for my students to go because they had to get through all of the 4th and 5th grade classes first. so i was pretty excited when it was finally my 6th graders' turn, and this first reading blew me out of the water- the staging, the unity, the fervor! some of these kids are so shy in my class, but give them a nationalistic poem to read, and all bets are off!! i think i almost died when the boy at the end of the first clip pumps his fist and screams "WO SHI ZHONG GUO REN" which means "I AM CHINESE". wow, he almost fell over! they repeated that several times throughout the reading.

the second clip is of a fantastic little boy reading his solo portion. i've written about him before on my blog. his style of reading and delivery is nothing short of expert- i think it's how the poems are intended to be read. i can't imagine an english poem being read like this...but maybe the style is like the equivalent of our shakespeare? still, i can't imagine little kids in america screaming "I AM AMERICAN" with that kind of intensity. perhaps it is true what i've heard that in american schools we teach our kids to think but in chinese schools they teach their kids how to be chinese citizens!

i'm watching u

the creepiest bag i have ever seen in my life :) this is my english teacher friend's daughter's bag. she said the girl was like a magician. i dunno, i just get a different feeling from this...hahah

long live the chinese cabbage

yesterday one of my classes was cancelled in the middle of the day so i went outside for a walk to clear my head and get some fresh air. as i was walking, i noticed that there was an unusually large quantity of cabbage being sold on the street. in fact, like there were more vendors than usual, and they all had it. it seemed a little strange, but i didn't think too much of it at first because i have heard that the chinese love their cabbage. then, as i got into the more residential area, i realized that this was not a fluke. there was literally cabbage everywhere- in the windows, on the doorsteps, on the sidewalks, on the walls. i was pretty dumbfounded. as the sightings continued, i decided to start taking some pictures so i could remember the day the cabbage took over dalian. i still don't fully understand why everyone wants so much of it at once, but apparently it is a winter vegetable here, along with radish. the amount of radish being sold though paled in comparison to the almighty cabbage.

i'm sorry, this is probably going to be way too many pictures of this leafy green for some people, but it was just very impressive. i also chose these few out of like 200 pictures hahah. i was being pretty obnoxious with my camera that day.

this is one the cabbage trucks that i first ran into. i must have seen like 10 of these trucks just in the little area outside of my school alone. it looks like in the first picture they were just selling the them straight from the truck but other vendors were also taking them out and piling them up on the sidewalks. if you'll notice in the second picture, the vendor has a ton of cabbage behind his little presentation pile that he tried to cover with some blankets.


some of them were lined up outside of people's businesses, but these weren't restaurants. i think during the winter the chinese feel they must have cabbage available to them at all times. they do such a nice and neat job of laying them out.


here is some on the wall of a waterway. i guess the people in those apartments don't have enough room to store all of them in their homes so they must resort to using public spaces. everyone must be on the honor system here, i didn't see any cabbage thieves. i think they also want to keep them in the cold.


windowsill presentation. i really like this picture, maybe i will submit it to some kind of vegetable enthusiast magazine.

i'm not even sure if this is cabbage (it looks a little too green) but i thought it was so strange that someone hung up one piece of it up outside of their apartment. what is the reason?!??

this is dalian in a nutshell! you've got the cabbage, the little shop, the strung radishes, the trash, the bike, the hill, other random vegetables....all in one picture! layers and layers of things. although usually the bikes here do not look that new.

this poor little piece didn't make it home :( usually you think of trash as being soda cans, water bottles, etc., but in china, the trash is little bits of cabbage. if only that were actually true...
a met a few people along the way too. i was walking by this guy's shop and noticed there was some cabbage in it, so i thought sweet, indoor picture! however, as i was taking the picture, i realized that he could see me. i thought i was covertly hiding behind something outside the shop but it turned out to have a glass window, lol. so i figured i should ask him if i could take a picture of his cabbage first. he was like...okay...hahah. the first one i just focused on the vegetable, but then i figured he wouldn't care if i just got everything in it so i took this one. i'm not exactly sure what kind of shop this is.

everything looks all calm and happy in this picture but in reality things were out of control only moments before. i was taking a picture of this measly stock when all of a sudden that dog came running out of the doorway and started barking at me really loudly. it must have been his owner's store. my first thought was that i was about to die, but then i saw that it was just a tiny little dog and his owner was running after him telling him to stop. the dog ran all the way up to me and i had no clue what to do so i started dancing around screaming in semi-faux fear. at that point i thought the worst that could happen was that he would nip at me a little. finally his owner made her way over and scooped him up. so crisis averted. i didn't want her to think that i was trying to steal her pile so i told her that i had seen a lot of cabbage that day and didn't know why it was everywhere. she didn't seem surprised at all by my question, the invasion was definitely a new thing. all i could catch from her was that it was a winter food. i was lucky that she was nice!

when i was walking back to school i ran into one of my students. i was like oh my god, i have to get a picture of him with the cabbage. he didn't quite understand what i was asking him to do so he also picked up a carrot. i think the vendors were like what in gods name is that girl doing, but they just ignored me, so it was okay haha.


that concludes my much-lacking post on cabbage!

these kids rock

i should put this up before it gets so far away from halloween that it's irrelevant!



the kids in this picture are my BUDDIES. i love them. especially the girl who i'm hugging (christina)- she can be a little bit off the wall sometimes but at the end of the day she's a good kid. she also gave me a whole bouquet of flowers on teachers day, which doesn't hurt her cause :)

these kids are always joking around with me and after class it's pretty hard for me to escape because they always want to keep telling me something or other. some new developments that i learned last class- the boy all the way off to the right in the group picture is in love with christina and the boy who's dressed up in the halloween costume is in love with the other girl on the right, lucy. however, christina told me that she is in love with a fat boy. i have no idea. she told me it was a LOVE TRIANGLE HAHAH. lucy showed me the love note from the costume boy, and he had even written 'i love you' in english on it!! so great.

last class 2 of the boys told me that they had to use the WC (bathroom for those who are not up with that lingo) and when they returned one of them was wearing that costume. he ran into the room and tried to scare me. for some reason i wasn't scared at all but i screamed really loudly anyhow. this was my only class where one of the students dressed up for halloween, and this was my friday class so it was the farthest away from it! therefore, they rock. i hope these kids remain good friends throughout school and all get married one day like in the harry potter books. LOL


and here's the little star de-masked! he's such a cutie.

grrr

why are chinese dogs always giving me the stink eye??? i don't think any living thing has given me such a menacing look in my whole life...

pink sweater

problem with the pictures solved!

this obviously is not the greatest picture but that little girl is so freakin cute. since she sits in the front i noticed that she often wears that pink winnie the pooh sweater, so one day i told her that i really liked her shirt. after that she became like my number 1 fan. see that pile of stickers on her desk? she gave ALL of those to me. sometimes, i don't know what to do when my students are so overly generous. on one hand, i want the girl to keep her stickers, but on the other, sometimes i think the kids here don't understand if you don't accept their gifts. anyhow, this little girl in the pink sweater, she's so sweet i could eat her all up.

student profile # 500

the boy with the black wrist band is one of my 5th grade students. his english is off the charts good so i figured that he probably wasn't chinese :) i asked him if he was korean and he told me that he was japanese. he participates in class, but not an exorbitant amount because i think his level is just too high. so he is often in the back doing his homework, which doesn't bother me.

last week was halloween so i started class by asking my students 'what scares you?' i figured that some of them would not know the names of things that scared them in english so i allowed them to draw a picture on the board. most kids were coming up with little halloween things like jack-o-lanterns, zombies, monsters, but then this boy said death scared him. i was like alright kid, come draw it! he drew a really cool grim reaper on the board. i think maybe his mental age is very high.



he goes to a school that i really, really dislike. some of the kids at this school are the naughtiest kids i've worked with in china. i think they feel like they're a little special or something...anyhow last class when i was teaching them i felt kind of tired during the lesson and misspelled the word 'terrible' on the board, i spelled it 'terible'. although truthfully this is a recurring problem, there are several words in english that i can never remember if they have one or 2 r's. in fact, i was not sure about 'recurring'. hoorah for spell check! so after i wrote the word 'terible', i was really unsure of myself but figured no one would notice. this boy happened to be up at the front of the room at that time (we were playing a game, and it can be really hard to get the kids to stay in their seats during games) and i saw him looking at the word strangely and i was like dammit i spelled it wrong. he called me out, and i changed it!

:)

it's zach's birthday in chinese time.

祝你生日快乐! (Wish you a happy birthday!)

now that you're 26, maybe you can be strong like this guy.




<3>
that's supposed to be a heart, lol

i get by with a little help from the chinese people

just got back from a jam-packed trip with my parents. it was tiring (hehe) but it was a really good trip. blogger is not working AGAIN though so i can't put up more pictures.

i haven't written in a while about the acts of kindness i've experienced in china. no good deed should go unrecognized! unfortunately though, i was talking to one of the chinese english teachers at school and she told me that the chinese are often nice to foreigners and cruel to each other. a little shocking, but when i think about incidents like the little girl who was ignored by several passerby after being hit by a car, i can see what she means. http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/chinese-debate-aiding-strangers-after-toddlers-death/?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

however, i don't know if i would have mentally survived here this long with out little (and big) gestures that make me feel like someone is watching out. i can't imagine how hard it must be to immigrate to a country like america where no one really cares that you are foreign and things are hard for you. although i came on my own here, i never really feel like i am on my own, so god bless the chinese for that, lol.

a few things i remember recently that struck me-

just now i took a taxi with a driver who had a really non-standard way of speaking. maybe he was just speaking with a really heavy dalian accent, i don't know, but i could barely understand him. i unknowingly agreed to go to a neighborhood that is near where i live, but not where my apartment is at all. i tried to chat with him along the way, and it was funny listening to him speak. i can't imagine someone speaking english the way some people speak chinese - it can sound so loud and exaggerated. but sometimes i also think the chinese can just be very excitable- like i told him that i couldn't make this popular chinese bread (man tou) and his eyes grew wide and he screams YOU CAN'T MAKE IT!! i'm like no, sorry! haha. we finally got to where he thought i lived and i told him we were in the wrong place. i figured that it was my fault but he didn't say anything like another cabbie probably would have, which was a relief. when we got to my apartment the fare was a little over 20 but he wouldn't let me pay the extra because he had gone to the wrong place. i told him that it was probably my fault so it was okay but he didn't care. then he explained to me what the other area was called, and i realized that i had just not been able to understand the way he had been saying the word for 'neighborhood'. it wasn't a lot of money, but still a nice gesture that said it's okay to make mistakes.

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a couple weeks ago, i took a really long sea walk with the intention of grabbing lunch somewhere and taking a bus back to my apartment. well that plan didn't work out because i left my wallet at home and didn't even have enough money to take the bus (15 whopping american cents). way to go me. i didn't have a plan for getting back yet, but i had drank a whole bottle of water along the way and needed to use the bathroom, so first things first. i finally found a public toilet that had a little old lady sitting outside of it in a dalian worker uniform, so i knew she must be the bathroom attendant. i asked her if the toilet was free, and she told me it wasn't, it was like 1 yuan. dagger. i told her that i didn't have any money and that i was sorry. then she started telling me about how she needed money for food and all this stuff so i just said sorry again and started to leave but she stopped me and told me to use the bathroom. i told her again that i had no money. i don't know how she could believe that this foreign girl in the middle of china was walking around with no money, but she pulled me in and pretty much pushed me into the toilet. it was a normal squat toilet but the place didn't have running water, so after i was done i tried to manually flush it with a bucket of water. i guess she wanted to take care of that herself though because she pulled me away and took me back outside. she took out a large bottle of water from the store and instructed me to put my hands out to wash them. she poured like half her bottle on my hands, and i was like stop, it's enough! i felt so bad. i told her that if i saw her again i would give her some money, but i haven't been back that way since. i should go though, wouldn't it be nice if she was there and i could give her like 10 or 20 yuan.

i couldn't walk all the way back home so i flagged a taxi and explained the situation to him as best i could. he said it was okay if i ran upstairs and got my wallet when we arrived at my apartment. thank god. the fare was like 18 or 19 yuan, but i gave him a 20 and told him to keep the change for his troubles. again, 1 or 2 yuan is like nothing but he seemed so pleased with receiving a little tip. it's nice when little things can make someone happy.

just a couple of memories for me of good interactions i've had here...i realized these stories are all about money but hey, money is important here, especially when you don't have a lot of it.