All in the Neighborhood

So, uhh, yeah. Things happened. An internal organ of mine did its best impersonation of a balloon, which admittedly was a really darn good impersonation. However, the gall-bladder-led game of charades got a bit too rowdy and I had to kick him out for the neighbors' sake. I'll be giving more info on that later, when I do a September Retrospective post. For now, I wanted to post the much delayed snap-shot of life here in Harbin by showing the pictures I've taken around the neighborhood. Some show a spot that is relevant to my life here, others are pictures of life in general, but all these photos are within walking distance of my apartment and circa September.

So, Harbin in the summer. I'll have to take pictures of the shift to winter when given the chance.

Apartment Exterior 

Home sweet home. This is the sight that greets me every time I return from school. I live up on the sixth floor, and we do not have an elevator. That means I have to choose all my trips wisely, because if I don't take the elevator at school, or I carry too many bags of milk (yes, bags) back from the grocery story, I'll have to do the equivalent of 120 one leg squats to get back in the door. Pays to have the room cooled off, because I work up a sweat getting home even in dead winter.

Apartment Semi-Exterior

 
Two shots of the stair case. The construction looks old, it's filled with unending dust, the pipes are insulated but exposed, and yet that doesn't really matter. The interior of the apartment is roomy for a guy living alone and comfortable, and the exterior is nice enough. I just wish I had that elevator ... If there is a reason I move out, it'll be to avoid the unending stairs while carrying a week's supply of groceries. And lack of hot water in the sink dead winter. You can only wash your hands so thoroughly when the temperature coming out of the faucet borders ice water.

Courtyard

(Top) This is the courtyard while living here. Every apartment I can see has some scattering of playground-equipment-colored exercise devices. Things to twist on, exercise your legs, arms, not much of it is actually designed for outright enjoyment, but that doesn't stop the kids from having fun. Under the little gazebo, you'll find usually a collection of people. Either they'll be children playing card games with collectibles, or elderly folk setting up something with more traditional games or Chinese chess, xiangqi. As you can see from the car parked on the sidestreet/parking lot, it is a bit more wealthy of a neighborhood, though I wouldn't call it ritzy.
(Bottom) same area, but from a higher perspective. Here, you get to see the amount of space in the courtyard, as well as some interesting smaller bits that you'll find around in China. Like the bicycle wagon on the side, or random odds and ends just stored there.

The Street

These are your views if you choose to stroll the neighborhood.  It may look quiet in these shots, but that's because I timed the pictures to be dodging traffic. Fun little bits are seeing the cars parked on the sidewalk, the strange paint on a lot of the trees, and the care you have to take to dodge on going construction, which there is plenty of.

Things to See

Walking around, I can't help but ponder some aspects around China. How poverty can seem so intermixed with the rising economic growth. I view apartments like these and wonder about the life of the people living there, and I even wonder how poor they really are. Though my apartment is quite nice, it can have the appearance of  poverty from the outside. There is a glass window on the stairwell that was broken some weeks ago and yet to be repaired, yet that doesn't stop the place from being comfortable to live in. Are these apartments truly a reflection of poverty, or is that just my eyes used to foreigner things?

Some of the most definitely poorer spots (this is a home of a trash collector) have some unusual architecture that I just find fascinating. I feel sorry that in the drive for economic growth, China has abandoned some of their more interesting designs in favor or giant brick-shaped buildings. Seeing these older buildings makes me wish they kept in that style for a truly unique environment.

The City

Most of Harbin has a look more like this. Giant complexes in all directions. If you look in the background, you'll see several cranes hastily building more. Anywhere you go, you'll see dozens of these cranes building more of those tall square buildings. It's been said that the new national bird for China should be the crane due to how many litter the country. The since of scale this city is on is much grander than most big cities in the states, and hard to convey through a single picture, though perhaps you can sight down the road as far as possible and see that the buildings go on and on. Dallas has a population number approximation 1.3 million. Harbin reaches 10 million.

A side note are those little umbrella shapes shrubs on the lower left.

 Beautiful Highway

Harbin has a reputation for being the "Paris of the East," at least so I hear. I appreciate the length gone to protect that reputation, then, and it's no more apparent than on the highways (especially the one to and from the airport). Trees are planted, grass is kept green, and there are a variety of small art-like plant sculptures scattered about.


Ground Floor

Circling back to more places of local importance, you'll see that the bottom floor to all these giant buildings are tiny ships. Shop after shop after shop. Most resemble something like a privately owned 7-11 style store. Only with less Slurpee machines and more odds and ends that you might need around the house. Toilet paper? Chop sticks? Scissors? Spray bottles? You can get those here as well as milk or coke.

Other ships might be restauraunts, coffee cafes, art supplies, lots of art supplies because of a local university here. One or two grocery stores as well.

To the Market

One of the places I visit more regularly is the street market outside the university. Never quite know what you're going to find there. Even puppies.

Especially puppies. However, copyright infringement is a favorite of mine, too. The infringement gets really creative at times.

I want those Mario socks. No idea what that guy on the left has to do with Tekken, though. Is his head floating on a basketball?

You never know what you'll find at the market, and I could flood this blog with pictures of neat or bizarre finds.

Food is very common in the market, too. I've picked this one at the center out as my favorite. I never get sick eating there, and her Chinese egg-tortia things are really good. Filled with potatoes too.


Put-put-put-put-put-put

Trikes are common here, tiny little three wheeled taxies that remind me how I'm living in another country. I do not have the guts to try one though. Have you seen how people drive in China? If armored tanks were available, I'd pay the premium for that.


Snapshot

This picture just fascinated me after I took it. So much was captured in a single image that really makes me think. The uppercrust, new apartment complexes in the background tower in the distance. Yet mashed also into the city, much closer to the camera, you can see the little shops with long faded paint, a layer of city grime over them, dumpsters on the left. A police car idle at the center, a quiet presence of government. Walking right by, several young people, smiling and laughing, for whom life goes on. The longer I stare at this picture, the more interesting things I find.

Hello Kitty

 I'm curious, yet afraid to go in here. I think it's a restaurant.

Red Building

This building is red. Isn't that cool? Like really, really red.

Work

Lastly, here is the picture of where I work. Eight stories tall, with many English classes going on. With that, I'll wrap up this post and see you all next time.

Precognition

Truth be told, I knew this would happen. I knew it the moment I stepped into Haerbin and had little but free time on my hands.

It seems to be a fact of life as inescapable as taxes, but not quite the level of death. I know that some people get away with tax evasion, but I’ve yet to hear anyone being put away cheating death.

I arrived in China during the school’s summer holiday which meant about 90% of the staff were out on vacations somewhere across Asia, from the Chinese employees and owners to the foreign teachers. Only a few people were left behind to help me settle in Haerbin, though they were helpful. That meant no classes, few people to talk to, and even less to do (it’s hard to go out places when you don’t know the places to go out to or the language in which to ask what places are those places worth going out to in the first place).

Nevertheless, I made myself busy. I spent a most of my days trying to get over jetlag (which requires a lot of strenuous sleeping or lying around watching TV), unfolding the contents of my two boxes out into the apartment and trying to find the bare minimum essentials I could survive on at various local stores or venders.

It was a very easy too weeks with little on my table.

Then, a dump truck backed up and buried my table in an avalanche of panic, schedules, and kindergartners.

The problems started showing up when I began my “training.” Normally, this is done in a mock-class with demonstrations, plenty of preparation on behalf of the trainer, and after the new teacher had perhaps seen a class or two in action. My training was “Who is left in town? Just send that dude.”

Local helper and all around nice guy, Scott, did a fair job for not expecting he’d have to train me but …

… To make matters worse is I had no context to the training, having never seen a Chinese-English class. It’s like showing someone how to drive via holding up two disembodied pedals and a steering wheel. And the student having never seen a car or a road before.

To make matters worse still, no administrative staff were around, so Scott had no idea what classes to train me for. Is he teaching ABCs? Grammar for high level courses? Conversational role play? It’s like training someone to drive while not knowing if he’ll be a pilot, a trucker, or a ship captain. You get the basics of speed, brakes, and steering, but that's the best you have.

To make matters even worse yet, there was a foreign teacher staff shortage, and they needed to have a foreign teacher for half of every class due to the expectations of the parents paying for the school. So, the moment everyone returned from vacation, they manage to tell Scott my duties only the day before I actually get ready to teach ... about 17 classes in a row. So the answer to the question: am I teaching Grammar, ABCs, conversations, or what not? is D: All of the above. On my first day. (Granted, the school did realize the enormity of this and said to just get through this as best you can and get some brownie points with the school).

To make matters … I think I’m out of adverbs. To make matters evenner worsest still yet, that creates a situation where I have to absorb a metric gigaton of information on how to be a teacher in the details, while planning and preparing to execute 17 different lesson plans with only a half day to prepare and memorize each one.

So I was being thrown in front of 20 or so students to perform, teach, and entertain them for 17 different occasions, on a wide range of subjects with only about a half a day of actually training.

And their parents can watch you via cameras in the lobby.

Good luck.

I knew this would happen. It’s always like this in life. Either you have nothing to do, or have to do everything. There are few times that feel in between and even.

Putting yourself in my shoes, I’m sure you can imagine a fraction of the tension I was under, to song and dance so many times for all these different kids and try to take in as much as possible. Come the end of that weekend, I was so worn out, my eyes were more glazed than a donut, and my brain could have made a great jello providing you had little purple food dye.

Even after all this, I can say it went … well. It actually did. It was not without problems though none really make amusing anecdotes. I’ll go into more of the day-to-day or class-to-class teaching of it another time, but in a nutshell, I really like kids, goofing off, and making people laugh, and my classes largely consist of me harnessing these traits to engage kids in English.

It was long, it was tiring, and it was very stressful to plan and wait between classes, not knowing how they’d go that weekend. But after it was all over, I realized something: I really love this job.

DON'T PANIC

Does anyone else remember those iconic words from Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy? Inscribed on the fictional manual that was supposed to educate all travelers on what they'd encounter as they travel anywhere in the universe. Of the oddities, customs, histories, and how on the cover of this manual was written its very first piece of advice to all travel's DON'T PANIC!

Wait, you don't? 

C'mon! It was a big budget movie just back in 2005? That guy from Harry Potter voiced the robot! What do you mean you don't remember? Well, granted the movie wasn't that good so could easily be forgotten, but it was a TV miniseries, too! 

From England … in 1981… played on PBS … with badly dated special effects …

But it was a book too! A classic! Still no? Nothing?

Radio play?

Alright, alright! So some of you less nerdy members of my family and friends might not have heard of it, but you should go try to check it out! It's really funny. 

Anyways, there are two words printed on that guide for travelers that I think are very important for even us terrestrial roamers. DON’T PANIC. 

Why is this so important? Let me tell you about my flight from Dallas to Haerbin. 

It started with a little bizarre event that was next to forgotten about five minutes after it happened. When checking into my flight’s first leg, from Dallas to Seattle in American Airlines (the rest would be in Hainan Airlines), the check in, uhh, person made a small comment on how the last flight number didn't seem to match up right in the computer, but it'd probably be taken care of once I reach the Hainan check in. Okay, shrug, I was checked in and took off, taking a small nap in between. 

American Airlines is as unpleasant as I remember, with cramped leg room, no window seat, and a reclining chair that makes such liberal use of the word "recline" as to render the word imaginary. That's why, whenever possible, I choose to be unconscious during their flights, preferably by nap but I'd accept blunt force trauma if the flight was long enough and there were no other methods available.

Seattle, in contrast, was pleasant. I saw my brother there and we had a great lunch and caught up with each other and he shook his head disapprovingly at me for educating the Chinese. I saved some cheese cake from desert for the flight, which is often filled with food only mildly more edible than gravel. Even then, if the gravel was sugared, this would be a tough choice. The cheese cake didn't really survive fourteen hours in my backpack, but that's unimportant at the moment. 

Next, I prepare for my twelve hour long flight to Beijing by … well, sitting down. I sat down in the car, I sat down waiting to board, and once on the plane, I sat down a third time and with some finality. Checking baggage went without a hitch and I was on Hainan Airlines.

Never again will I try to take a US based airlines. All patriotic fervor aside, everything was simply better once you left the sinking ship that is the American airline industry. The hostesses nonunion, therefore incredibly polite, my knees were no longer rubbing the pouch in front of me (that magical extra inch that means a great deal) and the food, while winning no accolades from Top Chef, could still defeat the competition of sugared tarmac. Also, I had coconut milk. That was enjoyable. 

It was in between napping and watching movies** that I really had to remember the motto Don't Panic. Usually, the times when there isn't a possible thing you can do to change your course, reality chooses to reassert itself and remind you of what you're really doing. I'm moving across the world, entering a country where all my language skills have rusted to the point of uselessness, to meet a group of people who up until this point have only existed in the realm of text and ideas that is the internet. Well, Mark had been there, so there is that. But at that moment I could only think of how easy it'd be if I step off in the flight at Haerbin and find no one waiting. 

Just me, by myself, with two huge boxes, no language or reading ability, at the farthest possible point on Earth from anyone I know who'd help.

It's a daunting thought. Which is why I told myself DON'T PANIC. There is no point in panicking now. We'll just sit back and alternate between napping, speaking to the person next to me (a kind Chinese woman), and watching either 500 Days of Summer (interesting), MI: Ghost Protocol (good), or 21 Jump Street (didn't finish but really funny in a juvenile way). 

I get off the flight, ready to check in to the leg to Haerbin and, remember how that checking thing was going to be a problem? Yeah. First off, I'm dropped into a foreign airport and I don't even know which counter I should walk to. Almost everything is in (you can probably guess) Chinese. After wandering around a little bit, I just bite the bullet and walk up to a random counter to see what the person would do to assist me. She looked at my tickets a bit, sent me to another counter which thankfully had someone who could speak basic enough English that we could do business.

Wellllllll, that number mix up at American Airline's computer? Turned out that they checked me into the Hainan leg of the trip to Beijing, but not to the number mixed up one from Beijing to Haerbin. So, without confirmation Hainan gave that seat away. 

I had no flight heading out of Beijing. No working phone either, or even if I did, I suddenly realized I had no numbers which to call anyone from the school to get help. 

DON'T PANIC. 

They put me on the Stand By list and told me to come back at 7am tomorrow, an hour before the flight. He also wrote a quick note in Chinese explaining the situation to whoever I'd encounter tomorrow. Yes, that was the other thing. I had an overnight layover I didn't realize because, jumping time zones, I didn't know when was landing or taking off.

Now, I was hoping I could stay in the airport and sleep behind the security gates, as I had done before when some US airlines screwed up on a domestic flight and I was stranded overnight (with them refusing to pay a hotel, mind you). So, I had to find a hotel … in a country I can't communicate in.

DON'T PANIC.

I walk up to the Hotel Information Desk and hope she knows English. Of course she does, this is perhaps the single most international airport of China, which is doing a lot of business with English speaking nations. For a time, it was tense, because my debit card wasn't working.

DO-- you get the drill.

Took about a half hour to fix that, it ultimately worked and I was ready to head to the hotel overnight (one I made sure had internet). 

I had to blindly follow instructions from then on. A van pulled up and the person at the desk told me to go with them with my bags. Was this a taxi driver or a shuttle from the airport? Did I have to pay him? Did I have to tip? I had to not panic and just keep going wherever they indicated. They took me about a five minute drive back to the hotel where I dumbly just followed leads hoping it’d all work as planned. I paid for a room, and tipped* the person who helped me carry my bags.

*Two things. 1) A minor miracle of providence here. A friend of mom's who had returned from China had about 50 RMB left over. She just passed it from mom to mom to me when word travelled where I was going. So, I had a little to buy food at the hotel and tip. 2) It's not customary to tip in China, and can even be insulting to pay someone already being paid to do their job. This guy, though, he knew the English word “Tip” and made sure to ask, so I did pass him a few yuan.

I set up, took a breath, and opened my email. I had a message in my inbox with numbers from the school, several contacts to call in case of emergence because of some worry about my flight status. I learned later that this has been the wettest season for north China in 60 years. Beijing flooded the day I arrived (the diver I ran into later jokingly called it the water city) and Haerbin has been uncharacteristically humid. Really humid. And raining every other day for the first two weeks I was ere.

I wrote down the numbers and sent a return email about my status with the flights. After that, I killed a little time, ate a few snacks, threw away my neglected cheesecake puddle, and went to bed. Next morning, the shuttle took me back to the airport.

As told to, I went to the desk at 7am and they told me to come back at 7:30. Odd, the flight was at 8. That's cutting it a bit close. I watch the airport fill up as the time passes and return a few minutes before 7:30. Hooray! A seat is open. They take my bags and tell me to head through. I walk to the security gate, knowing that the plane will stop boarding at 7:45. I look at the line which I have about 10 minutes to clear.

And the at least 200 people in front of me all waiting to get to the security gate. This can't be right. I can’t have been told to wait until 7:30 and then expected to clear security and get to my gate in under 10 minutes. I see someone passing by me with a shirt that said “Let Me Help You” on the front and back. I get her attention and point to the time of my ticket and the gate. With an urgent look, she gathers me, about 6 other people and heads us through the super ritzy VIP line. I rush through the gate and look at how far I have to go. 

I've got 5 minutes and I've got to run up and down two stories and catch a subway shuttle to the right group of terminals. Each turn has me jumping through doors at the nick of time. The doors just close as I step inside the shuttle. I skip the elevators for the stairs, which I take at a run. I follow the signs (A12-20 and an arrow is the same in any language, apparently) and I hear the speakers call the Final Boarding in English for my flight as I close to the gate. I rush to the counter, she takes my boarding pass, and I rush inside. 

Finally! Deep breath! Only two hours away from Haerbin. I made it. 

The people from the school were there and waiting for me. I'm all set up in my apartment.

**The movie selection was better too, for the record. Anything that saves me from watching Back To The Barnyard out of boredom deserves a mention. A movie in which I spent the majority of the next couple of days discussing the mind-bending notion of why a male cow had udders. No, no, not a bull, a male cow. With udders. There is simply so much to destroy your synapses with that little notion. From: how come they didn't just make it a bull somewhere in the development process? I mean, how many people did this pass? The writer, the editor, any of the writer's trusted beta-readers, the director, the producer, the animation team, not a single one of these people at any point just raised their hand and said "Wait, hold up! Isn't a male cow just a bull? Why are we giving him female anatomy? What possible reason is there to not make him a freak of nature? To more inworld reasoning, like, do bulls exist in the barnyard universe? If they do, what is the protagonist? Is he perhaps a hermaphoditic cow/bull? Maybe he had the XXY chromosone disease? Could he just be a hypermasculine female because of how the food industry  pumps the cows full of hormones? Why on earth does this thing exist? 

Yes, this was an extrordinarily long flight and I had little less to do but contemplate the horrific reality of the movie that is Barnyard.

Next time on the blog! First school days! Trial by fire! Wait a minute, what do you mean there is no time to train me!?

Post Script:
Beleive it or not, but this beat up, dented, scrap heap of a box was once perfectly rectangular. That is, before it was on four different flights. Despite the fact it had twelve arrows, four of which brightly colored, pointing the proper orientation, I don't think I once saw the right side up. 

A Great Fortification Of Inconvenience

So, my day has been quite fun. I've spent a good half workday trying to figure out how to put pictures on this blog, because of an error in accessing this site from China. No, it doesn't keep me from the blogs, or facebooks, reading them, or writing in them. Just the pictures. I feel like instead of the Great wall, it should be called the Great Inconvenience. 

Despite all the effort put into stopping social media access and only being successful in confusing picture software, I think I still found away to get past it the moment I changed my thought process from make-this-work-darn-you to guess-I-need-something-else. 

So, here are the links to the first Of Place article, holding pictures of the apartment I'm staying and showing off a few funny objects I've found.

Introduction

Chances are you found this blog through the Facebook link. Therefore, you probably know me, what this blog is about, and why I am doing it.

So, now to introduce this blog, what it's about and why I am doing it. Being roughly 6,438 miles* away from family and old friends, there will be some problems with keeping in touch. I'm not sure why, though. After not talking to family at home, you'd think not talking to them abroad would hardly be a change of pace. Expected even. Nevertheless, here is a blog where I can keep people more informed of how things are going.

*And if you correct this figure, that's because it's hard to load Google here.

At first, I was merely going to use my much neglected Facebook to post updates, but then I clicked on the Get Timeline button under the mistaken impression that newer things are better things. Instead, it was like I stepped on to a user interface designed for the people in Picasso paintings, only even more visually confusing. So, I'm using blogger, which will give me more control over the presentation, and no garbling mess of blue boxes attached to a rope.

This blog will generally have three kinds of articles:

1. Of Place
2. Of Story
3. Of ... Whatever. I'm sure there will be a third kind of article when it comes to me

Of Place will focus on pictures with anecdotes to establish impressions of daily life. They'll help the reader to visualize the setting in which stories will take place, or just be some amusing observation about the odd things that can be found in Harbin. These will be articles like of my apartment, neighborhood, or the street market.

Of Story will be ... that's fairly self explanatory. It'll be a story of something that has happened here. Usually of interest. I do not know why I'd bother sharing a boring story. And if I do share one and you think it is boring, that's because you are wrong. Best stop being wrong.

Onwards and upwards! Or ... downwards. Being in China. You know, other side of the planet, everything that is up is down. Yeah. You get it. you get it.