Springtime in Chongqing was short and sweet. Just two weeks ago, I was padding around the apartment in my fuzzy winter slippers and a cardigan. Now, I'm sleeping sans pajamas under the sarong my mom so kindly sent me from her trip to Hawaii (thanks mom!). The question now is: how long can we make it before the temptation to use the air conditioner becomes too strong? Our two weekends of "spring," as I would consider it, involved a day trip to Fuling on the 16th to plant trees as part of a public relations event for foreign students and teachers in Chongqing and then some Earth Day/Easter-ness with our Chinese people in Chongqing. For the Fuling trip (the same town that is the setting for Peter Hessler's Rivertown) we got matching t-shirts and hats, tromped through the mud and rain to dig a couple holes in the ground and put trees into them and take pictures (to be fair, there was close to 400 people there so I think at least a couple hundred trees got planted). We then took a tour of the famed zhacai (pickled mustard tuber) factory, which was about as interesting as factory tours can be. We did get a few packs of free zhacai for our effort. For Earth Day I gave my students an overview of the holiday and showed the film Erin Brockovich, which I am hoping will encourage them to think more about how they can advocate for environmental issues in China. I then colored Easter eggs with my nine year old tutoring buddy Max, who I tutor in English in exchange for his mom tutoring me in Chinese. I drew a bunny face on one, and he drew a monster rat on another. On Sunday, instead of a traditional Easter dinner, we had a vegan Easter meal with a couple of our Chinese artist friends, my vegan PCV friend Kim, and a few Chinese friends of hers. It was low key and we spent the afternoon chatting, doing an interview for the PCV Rice Paper publication with the two Chinese vegetarians in attendance, and working on the recycling craft projects that Kim and I have been working the past couple months (mostly knitting with plastic bags).
Yesterday, at 34 C (93 F), we participated in our college's sports day craziness, which involved an 8:00 am "free breakfast" of white sugar bread and boxed milk (which they seem to think is a "Western style breakfast") followed by a nationalistic opening ceremony (apparently not as spectacular as previous years) and then a somewhat confusing "relay" that involved six people running around cones holding hands. When asked what we would call that sport in English, we coined the term "amoeba relay" which only led to confusion when the English-Chinese electronic dictionaries were busted out. Yes, small organisms that live in fresh water. No, we can't really explain why that makes sense in English. At 10 am, with the sun rising hotly in the sky, we ran the first real relay of the day, a 20 person 50 meter dash in which 10 people lined up on either side of the 50 meter marks and passed the baton back and forth while running between them. It was harder standing in the sun waiting for the baton than it was to run the 50 meters. Richy and I quickly established ourselves as some of the strongest runners of the foreign language department team, which is another way of saying that foreign language teachers at our school are not the most athletic. The ruffians in the engineering and mathematics departments put us to shame.
We got a respite from the glaring sun with a banquet-style lunch at the nearby Sunny Block (Xi Jie) shopping area, which serves as kind of a miniature entertainment district to keep the college students in University Town entertained. We hadn't been out for this kind of meal for a few months, and such banquets are much more enjoyable when they are few and far between. It's easier to enjoy the abundance of oil and spicy dishes when you aren't recovering from eating them just a few days prior. We got back to campus with a few hours to spare before the next relay at 4:00 pm, so we went to our campus apartment to cool off and take a nap.
The 100 meter relay was a little more challenging physically, and also more formal, with starting blocks and numbered jerseys. Our team came in last in both the women's and the men's event (there's just no beating those petroleum engineers), but we were glad to have participated and be done with it.
The most interesting part of these school sports events is that it gives us a rare chance to socialize with the other teachers in our department, since being foreign teachers puts us in an awkward place in the school structure - not quite integrated with the foreign relations department, and not quite integrated with the foreign language department. We have our own office, just for the five of us foreign teachers, and we don't really get a chance to see any of the Chinese English teachers on a regular basis. The awkwardness of obligatory team sports gives us something to talk about. We met a teacher from the PE department who spoke English surprisingly well and told me how interested he was in history (Richy pointed out that PE teachers all over the world seem to have the same interests: history and sports), an English teacher who was apparently good friends with a previous PCV at our school who seemed interested in taking us out to dinner sometime, and two young foreign language teachers at our school who teach Spanish and Arabic respectively (and who at first assumed that I was German - I'm used to being mistaken for Russian, German is a new one). Richy pointed out how interesting it was to have an English conversation with a Chinese girl who kept slipping into Spanish accidentally.
We have also started with a new Chinese tutor two nights a week which is giving us a lot more speaking and conversation practice. Next week, after the Labor Day holiday, we'll start teaching an intensive course to teachers who will be doing visiting scholar programs abroad this summer and next school year. Then we'll be heading off to Wulong for our summer project in July, where the Chongqing 16s (that's the 16th group of China PCVs) will be teaching English teaching methods to a group of more than 300 elementary, middle, and high school teachers. We are also hoping to find some time this summer to do a two-week language intensive in another city before Richy's sister Sara, and her fiancee Tim, come to visit us in August.
28.4.11
24.4.11
Yangtze Riverside - Chongqing, China
Yangtze Riverside - Chongqing, China, a set on Flickr.
New pictures of Chongqing in the spring.
7.4.11
Stop the Bus
A few things that have become regular parts of our daily existence in China are extremely spicy foods and long bus rides. Unfortunately, sometimes these elements are combined and make for a disastrous combination, especially for the colon. [Warning: the contents of this blog posting may be unsuitable for sensitive individuals, those currently consuming food or those who wish to believe that visiting China someday will be an experience without occasional intestinal distress.]
Finishing up a weekends' trip to Yibin to visit friends, Richy and I headed to the bus station to pick up our tickets back to Chongqing. Our bus still wouldn't be leaving for about an hour, and since the trip is usually about 4 hours (give or take depending on traffic) we decided we'd better get something to eat beforehand to avoid the overpriced and questionable cleanliness of the pit stop snack stands. The only restaurant nearby was a typically small, family-run restaurant serving noodles and local dishes. We sat down and looked over the menu, noticing that they had a dish we often enjoyed in Chengdu, but rarely, if ever, see in Chongqing: hongyou chaoshou (red oil dumplings). Slightly spicy and slightly sweet, the red oil provides a nice contrast to the pork and green onions in the dumplings. What a pleasant coincidence that this restaurant would have them! The son/grandson of the women working the fully-exposed kitchen took our order and walked away.
To our disappointment, he soon returned, "Jintian meiyou." They didn't have any that day. Back to the menu. All of it was in hanzi (Chinese characters) and although we can recognize several dishes, the majority of the items on the menu were a mystery and we have a constant fear of accidentally ordering parts of animals we are not fond of eating (as has happened on occasion). I recognize niu rou mian (beef noodles) which, although it's not my favorite, tends to be relatively mildly spicy and edible. Richy orders the local specialty, dandan mian (spicy noodles with peanuts). When my order arrives, it confirms what I have begun to suspect about food in Yibin - it tends to be much spicier than the already quite spicy Sichuan-style fare in Chongqing and Chengdu. Gristly chunks of beef were floating in a totally opaque red broth, with puddles of bright orange chili oil collecting in the folds of the noodles. I took a deep breath and dug in. Although I have come to enjoy spicy food to a certain extent, in some cases, especially these types of noodle joints, you might as well be seasoning your food with pepper spray. Add a kick of hua jiao (Sichuan peppercorn) and your lips will be tingling (and burning!) for at least a half an hour to boot. I can understand adding a little kick to spice up a dish, but at a certain point, you can't even taste what you're eating anymore. It's all texture and sensation.
I finished most of my noodles, but had to leave the beef (almost all gristle) and broth behind. We quickly paid the bill (about $1.50 for the two of us). The heartburn started kicking in almost immediately, and I started looking for a milk tea or peanut milk to wash it down, which usually kills the burn. I bought an overpriced bottled milk tea (almost $1) from the elementary school-aged child manning the bus station snack counter and we hopped on our bus.
The driver was flying unusually fast down the highway, blaring his horn and aggressively passing other motorists. We were seated in the back of the bus per our assigned seats, so our passive-aggressive protests in English and Mandarin fell on the deaf ears of the noticeably-less annoyed passengers around us. Finally the traffic got heavier and he slowed down, giving us some time to sink back in our seats and have a bit of a nap. By the time we got to the customary halfway point pit stop two hours into the ride, my stomach was starting to churn and gurgle a bit, but when I used the restroom there was no urgency and things seemed to be generally operating as normal in my bowels.
Back on the bus, I drank a few more swigs of my milk tea and settled in for part two of our bus nap. After about 40 minutes, just as the traffic was starting to thicken to a crawl, I woke up in a distinctive cold sweat. The gurgling had intensified and I could feel a slight burning sensation in my bowels. The line of tail lights up the hill in the distance was not a promising sign. I began mentally preparing myself for a long wait for a restroom. I tried to focus on the scenery, but the sky was beginning to darken and the windows were foggy from the outside, making it hard to distract myself. The entertainment selection on the TV screen was a manic Chinese variety show with a distinctive, rapid, zoom-in, zoom-out, zoom-in, zoom-out cinematography style that did nothing to quell my discomfort.
As 10, 20, then 30 minutes passed, my ability to keep my thoughts distracted from my bowels waned. Memories of childhood "incidents" began to flood my mind: wetting my pants as the flower girl my cousin's wedding - age 5; vomiting on the table after one too many ice creams at Old Country Buffet - age 10; puking on the school bus after over-indulging on the poorly-executed fruits of my labors from ethnic foods class - age 15. I was starting to imagine how I would remember the time I soiled myself on a Chinese bus - age 27. I informed Richy of my predicament and began to plan. "Richy, I may need to ask them to stop the bus. You need to make sure they won't leave me behind." and "Do you think we could just have them let us off in the next town and we can find another bus from there?" Richy shot me worried looks, and asked me if I was sure I couldn't hold it until Chongqing. I was taking deep breaths, squeezing the seat cushion as I endured waves of cramps from my bowels. I had goosebumps and chills, I could feel the sweat starting to bead in my hairline.
Finally, when we reached a toll booth about 30 kilometers from Chongqing, about an hour after I first awoke in my dreaded condition, I knew I had to act because I didn't think I could hold it in through another 40 minutes or so of traffic. I grabbed my purse and ran to the front of the bus to present my case in questionable grammar and diction:
"Fuwuyuan, wo you laduzi. Zhende li hai." (Attendant, I have diarrhea. Really serious.)
"Shenme? Laduzi ma?" (What? Diarrhea?)
"Dui. Wo xuyao yong cesuo. Wo keyi paobu." (Yeah, I need to use the toilet. I can run.)
The attendant shoots the bus driver a worried glance. The bus driver mumbles something about foreigners and pulls the bus over near the restroom.
The attendant tells me, "Kuai yidiar!" (Quickly!) and I manage to respond with, "Duibuqi, duibuqi, bu hao yisi!" (Sorry, sorry, how embarrassing!) as I jump out of the bus and run to the restroom.
In the bathroom, I bypassed a long line of middle aged women and jumped into the next available stall. I didn't have time to apologize. As I fumbled with my belt and my jeans, I could hear them mumble something about foreigners.
(I'll spare you the details of the following five minutes - it was not pleasant, but I imagine much more so than if it had happened in the back of a bus).
Upon returning to the bus in which 36 pairs of eyes, no doubt curious as to why their long bus journey had been suddenly halted, had just watched me bolt out of the bus and into the women's restroom on the side of the highway, I felt a surge of relief. I knew they would have been much more annoyed with the stench of a foreigner who can't handle the spice in the back of the bus. Still, I hear them mumbling something about foreigners.
For the rest of the ride, I sat more comfortably, but exhausted, and curious about the long term effects of ingesting (and holding) the Chinese culinary equivalent of pepper spray in my guts for those hours.
Moral of the story: even if you have learned to be capable of consuming the very spiciest of foods, it is most certainly not a good idea before a four hour bus ride. Although I hate to waste food, I probably would have done myself a favor by just pushing that bowl away or if I had simply swallowed my pride and told them "bu yao la jiao" (don't want chili pepper) when I had ordered it in the first place.
~ Katie
Finishing up a weekends' trip to Yibin to visit friends, Richy and I headed to the bus station to pick up our tickets back to Chongqing. Our bus still wouldn't be leaving for about an hour, and since the trip is usually about 4 hours (give or take depending on traffic) we decided we'd better get something to eat beforehand to avoid the overpriced and questionable cleanliness of the pit stop snack stands. The only restaurant nearby was a typically small, family-run restaurant serving noodles and local dishes. We sat down and looked over the menu, noticing that they had a dish we often enjoyed in Chengdu, but rarely, if ever, see in Chongqing: hongyou chaoshou (red oil dumplings). Slightly spicy and slightly sweet, the red oil provides a nice contrast to the pork and green onions in the dumplings. What a pleasant coincidence that this restaurant would have them! The son/grandson of the women working the fully-exposed kitchen took our order and walked away.
To our disappointment, he soon returned, "Jintian meiyou." They didn't have any that day. Back to the menu. All of it was in hanzi (Chinese characters) and although we can recognize several dishes, the majority of the items on the menu were a mystery and we have a constant fear of accidentally ordering parts of animals we are not fond of eating (as has happened on occasion). I recognize niu rou mian (beef noodles) which, although it's not my favorite, tends to be relatively mildly spicy and edible. Richy orders the local specialty, dandan mian (spicy noodles with peanuts). When my order arrives, it confirms what I have begun to suspect about food in Yibin - it tends to be much spicier than the already quite spicy Sichuan-style fare in Chongqing and Chengdu. Gristly chunks of beef were floating in a totally opaque red broth, with puddles of bright orange chili oil collecting in the folds of the noodles. I took a deep breath and dug in. Although I have come to enjoy spicy food to a certain extent, in some cases, especially these types of noodle joints, you might as well be seasoning your food with pepper spray. Add a kick of hua jiao (Sichuan peppercorn) and your lips will be tingling (and burning!) for at least a half an hour to boot. I can understand adding a little kick to spice up a dish, but at a certain point, you can't even taste what you're eating anymore. It's all texture and sensation.
I finished most of my noodles, but had to leave the beef (almost all gristle) and broth behind. We quickly paid the bill (about $1.50 for the two of us). The heartburn started kicking in almost immediately, and I started looking for a milk tea or peanut milk to wash it down, which usually kills the burn. I bought an overpriced bottled milk tea (almost $1) from the elementary school-aged child manning the bus station snack counter and we hopped on our bus.
The driver was flying unusually fast down the highway, blaring his horn and aggressively passing other motorists. We were seated in the back of the bus per our assigned seats, so our passive-aggressive protests in English and Mandarin fell on the deaf ears of the noticeably-less annoyed passengers around us. Finally the traffic got heavier and he slowed down, giving us some time to sink back in our seats and have a bit of a nap. By the time we got to the customary halfway point pit stop two hours into the ride, my stomach was starting to churn and gurgle a bit, but when I used the restroom there was no urgency and things seemed to be generally operating as normal in my bowels.
Back on the bus, I drank a few more swigs of my milk tea and settled in for part two of our bus nap. After about 40 minutes, just as the traffic was starting to thicken to a crawl, I woke up in a distinctive cold sweat. The gurgling had intensified and I could feel a slight burning sensation in my bowels. The line of tail lights up the hill in the distance was not a promising sign. I began mentally preparing myself for a long wait for a restroom. I tried to focus on the scenery, but the sky was beginning to darken and the windows were foggy from the outside, making it hard to distract myself. The entertainment selection on the TV screen was a manic Chinese variety show with a distinctive, rapid, zoom-in, zoom-out, zoom-in, zoom-out cinematography style that did nothing to quell my discomfort.
As 10, 20, then 30 minutes passed, my ability to keep my thoughts distracted from my bowels waned. Memories of childhood "incidents" began to flood my mind: wetting my pants as the flower girl my cousin's wedding - age 5; vomiting on the table after one too many ice creams at Old Country Buffet - age 10; puking on the school bus after over-indulging on the poorly-executed fruits of my labors from ethnic foods class - age 15. I was starting to imagine how I would remember the time I soiled myself on a Chinese bus - age 27. I informed Richy of my predicament and began to plan. "Richy, I may need to ask them to stop the bus. You need to make sure they won't leave me behind." and "Do you think we could just have them let us off in the next town and we can find another bus from there?" Richy shot me worried looks, and asked me if I was sure I couldn't hold it until Chongqing. I was taking deep breaths, squeezing the seat cushion as I endured waves of cramps from my bowels. I had goosebumps and chills, I could feel the sweat starting to bead in my hairline.
Finally, when we reached a toll booth about 30 kilometers from Chongqing, about an hour after I first awoke in my dreaded condition, I knew I had to act because I didn't think I could hold it in through another 40 minutes or so of traffic. I grabbed my purse and ran to the front of the bus to present my case in questionable grammar and diction:
"Fuwuyuan, wo you laduzi. Zhende li hai." (Attendant, I have diarrhea. Really serious.)
"Shenme? Laduzi ma?" (What? Diarrhea?)
"Dui. Wo xuyao yong cesuo. Wo keyi paobu." (Yeah, I need to use the toilet. I can run.)
The attendant shoots the bus driver a worried glance. The bus driver mumbles something about foreigners and pulls the bus over near the restroom.
The attendant tells me, "Kuai yidiar!" (Quickly!) and I manage to respond with, "Duibuqi, duibuqi, bu hao yisi!" (Sorry, sorry, how embarrassing!) as I jump out of the bus and run to the restroom.
In the bathroom, I bypassed a long line of middle aged women and jumped into the next available stall. I didn't have time to apologize. As I fumbled with my belt and my jeans, I could hear them mumble something about foreigners.
(I'll spare you the details of the following five minutes - it was not pleasant, but I imagine much more so than if it had happened in the back of a bus).
Upon returning to the bus in which 36 pairs of eyes, no doubt curious as to why their long bus journey had been suddenly halted, had just watched me bolt out of the bus and into the women's restroom on the side of the highway, I felt a surge of relief. I knew they would have been much more annoyed with the stench of a foreigner who can't handle the spice in the back of the bus. Still, I hear them mumbling something about foreigners.
For the rest of the ride, I sat more comfortably, but exhausted, and curious about the long term effects of ingesting (and holding) the Chinese culinary equivalent of pepper spray in my guts for those hours.
Moral of the story: even if you have learned to be capable of consuming the very spiciest of foods, it is most certainly not a good idea before a four hour bus ride. Although I hate to waste food, I probably would have done myself a favor by just pushing that bowl away or if I had simply swallowed my pride and told them "bu yao la jiao" (don't want chili pepper) when I had ordered it in the first place.
~ Katie
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