Generalizations

I’m back in the States after two weeks in Chongqing.  I stopped posting around Monday, and I was only up-to-date with the trip through last Saturday, but look for new posts to come in the next week now that I’m back.  (And beyond!  There’s so much to say about China, I’m going to work on this for a while).

I’d like to say a word about generalizations, because as i read back over my posts, I don’t want to be misunderstood.

I don’t believe that all people are the same, and I don’t believe that you can necessarily characterize people completely on the basis of their race, language, sexual orientation, etc.

I do believe there are regularities, however–practices that characterize belonging to a culture, although there are always complexities, exceptions, and sometimes contradictions.

Here’s an example:  This is what you often find in the stalls in men’s rooms in China.

The idea here is that, rather than sitting as we do in the States, the user squats.  I think you get it; most of my half dozen or so readers are quite bright.

You find these sorts of stalls all over in China, or I should say, in Chongqing and Chengdu in Southwest China, because I haven’t been all over China, and it’s a big country.  In fact I’ve only seen a very small part of it, so it would be unfair to say that these kinds of stalls characterize China.  However, I have seen many more people in the small part of China where I’ve been squatting than I usually see in the U.S., so it would also not be correct to imply that these things, and squatting to poo, does not characterize China.  It characterizes the parts of China that I have seen more than it characterizes the parts of the U.S. that I have seen.  Notice also that I’ve only been in men’s rooms, so I have no idea what women’s stalls look like, although I observe on the street that many Chinese women seem comfortable squatting.

These are more common in older buildings.  However, this one was in a fancy hotel near Jindao Xia (Golden Knife Gorge) in Chongqing, and in the airport, where the bathrooms are sparkling new, and they also have Western-style stalls, they still have these.

So yes, it would be a generalization to say that Chinese people squat to poo, and if say that I should probably try to be more precise.  I should just point out that apparently more people are comfortable using these in China than are people in the U.S.

I personally would fall over.

The Giant Panda Base (Xiongmao Jidi)

I’ve discovered a way to make my posts go much faster. I do voice to text in the notes app on my phone, then make corrections, and then upload it. It is saving me a lot of time.

Saturday morning was our trip to the giant panda base. Of course I woke up way too early, which is what I’ve been doing the whole time I’ve been in China. I haven’t been sleeping very well at all. I tried to go to Starbucks at about 7 o’clock, but they told me they didn’t open until eight. Li Qin and Rachel wanted to leave early, because they said we needed time to get there, and the pandas are out mostly in the morning. I told them we had to stop at Starbucks first. I’ve been needing coffee.

They said the trip would take us about an hour, but it really was only 20 minutes. You always have to factor in the possibility of bad traffic, but there just wasn’t any. The panda base was fun and beautiful, although I expected something quite different. I thought it would be a a more wide-open research base, like when we went to visit La Selva Biological Preserve with Drew in Costa Rica. It is more of a breeding center.  It appeared like a very beautiful, elaborate, large zoo, with a lot of giant pandas, some sad in small cages, and some in much larger habitats. We also saw red pandas, lots of small birds and fish, black swans, and several peacocks.  There are also beautiful gardens and a lake.  Pictures follow, with commentary.
The Giant Panda Base    Li Qin, Rachel and I had an interesting conversation about why the bamboo hangs over the walkways, and Rachel found the words phototropism and auxins in her Chinese-English dictionary.  I used this as an example in my talk on Monday when I was talking about how engagement in scientific practices is necessarily knowledge-based–knowledge either from everyday experience or knowledge learned from other sources such as teachers or texts.  Most people, thinking about this question, would likely tap into their everyday knowledge that plants grow toward light. I love to watch people doing ordinary things…  The red panda is not related to the giant panda or to bears at all.  It is more closely related to the “Musteloidea”–which includes animals like raccoons, skunks, and weasels.    It took me a while to figure out what this bird was, as there were no signs about it.  It’s a female peacock–a peahen–with babies. I have a student who I otherwise think is a brilliant biologist who claims that giant pandas are evidence of evolution gone wrong. He says, “why should the panda exist?”  This makes no sense to me. The panda exists because it does. It is exquisitely adapted to its habitat. It has no major predators and it’s large intestinal system allows it to digest the cellulose-heavy bamboo. With no competition for resources, the panda has evolved. It is only human encroachment and habitat destruction that has endangered Xiaongmao.    Natalie Portman       Everyone was standing around with cameras at the ready, waiting for this guy to open that  beautiful tail.  No luck.  After the panda base we went to an area in Chemgdu called Shwa Du, which is apparently the only place in Chengdu where you can get Beijing (Peking) Duck. There were lots of restaurants, but it seemed unusually empty.

Unfortunately, the only Bejing Duck restaurant in Chengdu had closed, so we had to go somewhere else. We ended up in a nice place where we got a booth in a little room to ourselves. Of course we had our phones out to take pictures as soon as the food came. 
Quail eggs   

  

Chengdu

After the shinga hou gou revelry Thursday night I took it easy Friday morning, and got ready for our trip to Chengdu, which I thought was going to just be a place to stay so we could go to the Giant Panda Base. It has turned out to be a lot more.

I had lunch with Li Qin and Rachel, who were going to accompany me. It was raining (big shock–that’s what it does in Chongqing when it’s not oppressively hot and humid)  We caught a taxi for the hour ride to the train station.  Here’s a picture from when we arrived at the train station.   I’m including it to show the Chinese obsession with umbrellas. At Southwest University (hereafter SWU) there are frequently huge piles of them, open, crowding the entranceways to buildings and the hallways outside of classrooms. As I’ve said before, most Chinese people apparently do not like to get rained upon, even a little, and they all carry umbrellas–although Kitty pointed out that in the States people wear raincoats with hoods, which is not typical in China, at least in the Southwest. Many people, particularly women also carry umbrellas when it’s sunny. You see this in the states sometimes too, although not necessarily only among Chinese women. One female Chinese friend of mine does not like to be in direct sunshine–not even briefly. She thinks it’s very bad for your skin. She’s right, I know, but I still love it.
The train station was enormous and packed with people just like everywhere else I’ve been, except when I’ve been out in the early mornings or late at night. The two hour high speed train ride brought us to Chengdu, which we are just leaving as I write this. You are assigned a seat on the train, and it is completely full. I’m including some pictures of the Chengdu East Train Station where we are now, just to give some perspective of the size I’m talking about.    We caught a taxi to go to the hotel.  In Beibei and Chongqing all legitimate taxis are yellow, but in Chengdu they are all green.  Chengdu is not as big as Chongqing but still pretty big. It is the capital of Sichuan province, which Chongqing was part of until it became an independent municipality in 1997. Sichuan province is the origin of our Szechuan-style Chinese food, although the girls seem mystified by the idea that any particular kind of food could define the entire province (especially Li Qin who is from a rural part of the province. BTW, you should see her light up in Chengdu, happy and proud to be in her vibrant capital city). Chengdu is also home of Sichuan University, where Kitty went to college. According to Rachel and Li Qin, it is the most prestigious university in the entire country–the Harvard of China. If you know Kitty, I’m sure you’re not surprised.

Chengdu is fantastic and I’m going to have to write at least two more posts about it. Unfortunately, we got caught in bad traffic in the taxi on the way to the hotel, probably because it was 5:30 PM on a Friday. It’s the little things that stand out–especially when they’re the same.   I didn’t know it, but Kitty had booked us into a great hotel (Jingli Kezhan-Jingli Hotel) in the famous Jingli Street (Jia) of Chengdu. Jingli is a tourist destination in the heart of Chengdu, visited by people from all over China and around the world, probably because of it’s proximity to Wu Hou Ci (The Shrine of Wu Hou) and The presence of Xiong Mao Ji Di (the Giant Panda Base). More on both later. Here are pictures of the entrance to Jingli, the hotel entrance, the courtyard outside of my room, my room, and my breakfast. Breakfast was included; they brought it around in little baskets any time you wanted it delivered.        At every meal all three of us immediately take our phones out and take a picture.

Rachel and Li Qin generally are pretty calm around me, but I heard them yelling with delight when they saw their room. Rachel said it was the nicest hotel she’d ever stayed in. It is lovely. After we got settled we headed out to walk the streets of Jinglin. Everywhere there are food stalls, vending carts, artisans, restaurants, bars with live music, ponds, streams, waterfalls, and…a Starbucks, which was the only place in Jinglin (and most of Chongqing, Beibei, and Chengdu) that would take my foreign check card. I did a lot of shopping but felt like I spent hardly any American dollars. The exchange rate is about 6.8 Yuan (RMB) per dollar, but I estimated that your money goes about 3.5 times further. A $35 dollar meal will cost about $10, and there’s no tax or tipping. The only places where prices are more commensurate are the Western-style spots like Starbucks and Hands Coffee.  Here are pictures from our first night in Jinglin.  Rachel and I have to approve every picture that we are in.  Li Qin looks good in everything so she doesn’t care.  Rachel and I both always think we look fat, but she’s 100 pounds with three layers of clothing on so I can’t take her too seriously check out these girls below.  I love  their look.  Just two of the many characters you see here.    This place loves to be photographed               Jackie Chan, Deng Xiaopeng, and Audrey Hepburn together at last.    Got a selfie stick and it broke so I got a new one.  Rachel stays busy answering my constant questions while Li Qin takes care of all our needs. One thing I don’t understand about Southwest China is that most signs are also written in English, and they translate everything they say on the train into English (including a version of London’s “Mind the gap”). This is curious to me, because I’ve only seen a handful of other Westerners in Southwest China and that’s in a sea of millions of people. Sometimes it feels like they’re just speaking directly to me. The Chinese don’t seem to mind. I guess it makes sense; English is a second language all over the world, but it makes me a little uncomfortable. I feel like I’m part of a hegemonic culture, and I’m not sure all aspects of it are best spread around the world. I guess I should feel proud, but instead I’m a little embarrassed.

First class, “Future Learning Environment”, and more hot pot

Thursday morning we had our first in the series of four classes on responsive science teaching. I’ll talk about it offline with people who have interest in it, but I’m not going to bore the rest of you with the details. The students were excellent–a mixture of masters and doctoral students at the university and local teachers who asked if they could come. We had great discussions about science and about students’ thinking in science. They are genuinely curious about US science education policy and practice and they push me to argue for my (what might appear to some) radical ideas about science teaching and it’s relevance to the Chinese science education context.

One striking difference has become clear to me–it should have been obvious but was not. Since Dewey, US education has focused on the need to educate the population to participate in a democratic society. In contemporary science education, this takes the form of calls for “science for all” and “scientific literacy”. In China, however, individuals generally do not participate in political decision-making. What then is the motivation for teachers to improve their science instruction beyond preparing the next generation of scientists and engineers? Kitty has lamented the general disinterest in science education in China and I think I now have a better grasp on why it has relatively low status. This is the question I have to grapple with here. How do I make the argument that science education for all matters in China? I have some thoughts, but I wonder what the rest of you think.
After class I spent some time talking to students and then Kitty and I talked about next steps for the second class session. At three, we had a meeting with the Vice Dean “Mike” and other faculty members about a large project Mike has about “Future Learning Environment”. It’s very broad right now, but they’ve asked me to participate, and I’m excited. I shared my ideas about the technology-enabled classroom and mobile devices in instruction. It could get really interesting…

I started to get nervous after about two hours though, because Mike said he was taking us all out for hot pot in Beibei and I knew Kitty and I still had planning and preparation to do, and the meeting seemed to keep going. In the middle of the meeting, however, it became clear that there was a conflict Friday morning with another class students had to attend, so our next class was postponed until Tuesday! Well, Kitty and I were both very relieved; that meant that we could go out and enjoy the hou gou and the good company without stress.

Robin drove me down in his BMW (most people dig German cars–BMW and VW mostly–all the taxis are VWs–but I saw a Maserati today!  There are definitely very rich people here–I also saw a high-end Jaguar); we talked about the use of cell phones in the classroom–the potential promise, peril, and power. We went to a place in Beibei that is right outside of the campus. Most of the people who were in the Future Learning Environment meeting were there. I’ll tell you who was there by their English names (We had a long conversation about how everyone chose theirs, but I won’t go into that): It was me, Kitty, Robin, Mike, two other faculty members–Claire, who got her doctorate in the Netherlands and Janet, who was educated in Australia–and two graduate students, Carol and Maggie. Funny story about Janet–she originally called herself Rose, but then she realized that Rose sounded a little too much like a Chinese word that translates into something like “spicy pig meat” so she changed it.
Here’s a picture of us:  from left to right that’s Maggie, Robin, Kitty, Me, Mike, Claire, Janet, and Carol.   Unlike many Chinese people, Mike likes to drink beer. A lot. He ordered about 10 pint bottles and kept them right behind where he and I sat–five cold ones for me and five warm ones for him.

We had hou gou and lots of laughs. This time I had the real authentic hou gou, with every organ meat you can imagine; pig intestines, pig stomach, etc. No part of the pig goes to waste in China. Not good to be a pig here. Not that it’s any better in the States really, but at least your brains, stomach, intestine, spleen, and liver don’t get boiled in hot oil.    Again I was completely overmatched. At one point they asked me if I was taking a break–we soon decided it was a permanent break.

Discussion turned to my Chinese name. Weizhen (Zhen-Zhen/Jenny–she’s actually going to be Rachel from now on because she thinks Jenny is boring and she likes Jennifer Aniston’s “Friends” character) and Yi Nan (Cherry) had helped me come up with Leining Dan, which I kinda liked, but Mike and Robin were not happy with it. They said a Chinese name needs to have more meaning than just “Red Lightning”, and they found that translation dubious anyhow. They settled on Lin Wen Dao, which I think is beautiful and has a Taoist sentiment and a naturalist philosophy. It means, “In the forest I heard about ‘The Way'”. Robin wrote out the Chinese characters for me. The first character “Lin” means forest and you can see in the pictogram the image of two trees, representing the forest. I love it.  Happy Independence Day to everyone at home!

Tea and coffee

Most of the time, people in Chongqing seem to just drink hot water with their food.  Sometimes it seems like a very light tea, or hot water with a little lemon flavor.  Today at lunch I noticed they hadn’t brought us anything so I asked for some water, assuming they would just bring over some of the room temperature bottled water they had behind the counter or at least some of the ubiquitous hot water.  Instead, the waitress (who I’ve gotten friendly with, but that’s another post) came over and poured us some tea.  Neither Li Qin (Freya) nor Weizhen (Zhen-Zhen/Jenny) seemed surprised–I asked about it and Zhen-Zhen said that maybe that was what they had available.  It wasn’t as though my meaning was misunderstood, because the girls emphasized that I wanted water, and I know the word for water.  She just decided to bring us tea.  It’s the littlest things that are the hardest to understand sometimes…

I have seen tea in the supermarket, and I assume there is some strong tea somewhere, but I haven’t come across it.  That saying, “…all the tea in China” keeps running through my head.  Maybe it should be “…all the hot water in China.”

On Wednesday, Kitty and I finally had a chance to meet and talk about our research and plan for the first class on Thursday.  I won’t bore you with the details, but she took me to a coffee place off campus, “Hands Coffee”, where she says many of the international students go.  (Kitty goes there to sit and work a lot too, she says, because after seven years in the States she took on the American academic habit of making the coffee house her office).

But the main point is, there is virtually NO coffee in China, at least not in Beibei or Chongqing that I have seen.  There may actually be instant coffee in the supermarket; I was there on Monday but I didn’t think to look.  But my friends who have been to China did warn me to bring some instant coffee.  And some toilet paper…but that’s another post, and you might not want to read that one anyway…

Well, Hands Coffee was a very American coffee house with all of the latte and cappuccino variations you would expect, English speaking baristas, and an English menu.  My first drink is below.  I forgot the name of it, but it had “red” in the title and it seemed exotic so I got it. Pretty huh?    So Kitty and I kept talking and working and then I made a big mistake.  I ordered another one–a caramel mocha latte.  Also pretty, right?     I guess I was so absorbed in what we were doing, and so comfortable sitting in a coffee shop, that I forgot that it was 4 PM, and for me, drinking coffee at 4 is a BAD idea.  I did not sleep at all Wednesday night. Not. At. All.  I know people say that all the time, but I’m being absolutely literal.  I was up the entire night and my first class was Thursday morning.  Around 6:30 I gave up and walked down to Beibei to get some coffee at Hands.  It didn’t open until 10:30!! Clearly people here are not using (abusing) coffee the same way we do in the States.  Ugh.  At least I got to see some of the other early morning risers.    And that is what I have to say (so far) about tea and coffee in China. Oh! Except this update–we are now on the train on the way to Chengdu to go to the Giant Panda Base and Zhen-Zhen and Li Qin just bought me this:   Water is hot and coffee is not. Go figure.  

Chongqing

It has been three days since I last wrote on this blog.  This is partly because they have been keeping me very busy (future posts will elaborate) but also because the internet here is very unpredictable.  Some days one site will connect and another won’t, the next day it will be reversed.  Also, I’m doing this blog entirely on my phone because while the WordPress app works well, the formatting on the website is all screwy.  Do my posts look normal to you guys?  I can’t really tell.  I have an entire post already  composed in my head about the relationship between the people and the government (especially related to use of the internet) but I’ll save that for later.  Today I want to talk about my trip to Chongqing on Tuesday.

Chongqing (重庆) is the major city that Southwest University is close to.  (The Weatern world formerly referred to it as “Chungking”).  It sits on a peninsula where the Jialing River feeds into the Yangtze River. It is enormous.  The metropolitan area had a population of 28,846,170 in the 2010 census, and the population of the city itself is about 7 million.  But these numbers do not convey what it feels like to be in this place.  Honestly, to me it feels like being in a city the size of five or six Manhattans.  Below are a combination of pictures I took and a picture that I took ofa panorama they had in the museum.  Maybe this will help convey the sheer magnitude of this place, but I doubt it.        Kitty’s graduate students accompany me everywhere, unless I insist that they don’t.  I could never have explored Chongqing without them.  They are Li Qin (Freya), Weizhen (Jenny-the others call her Zhen-Zhen), and Yi Nan (Cherry).  As I’ll talk about in a later post, most educated Chinese people I have met choose an English name, because it makes it easier to communicate with foreigners.  They all have different reasons for choosing them.  Kitty chose hers because that was her grandfather’s nickname for her (in Chinese of course) and she loves “Hello Kitty”.  (Incidentally, none of her colleagues knew that Kitty was her English name and they are all enjoying a good laugh about it).  Jenny chose hers because it sounds a little like Zhen-Zhen, Freya chose hers because she read it in a novel and liked it, and Cherry chose hers because as she said, “I like that fruit”.  Here’s a picture of the four of us in front of The Great Hall of the People in Chongqing, which was our first stop when we got off of the subway.  From left to right that’s Cherry, Jenny, me (Lin Wen Dao–more on this in a later post), and Freya.  Incidentally, I asked them what goes on in there and they just kind of shrugged and looked puzzled and said they didn’t really know.  More on this when I post about the relationship between the people and the government.  Here’s a broader picture of me standing in front of The Great Hall and another of the beautiful gate on the plaza between The Great Hall and the Three Gorges Museum.  The art and the architecture are incredibly beautiful and intricately detailed. 

   Here’s another example of some of the beautiful architecture. Next we went to the Three Gorges museum.  There was a lot of beautiful art there–I’ll show some here, but I won’t talk too much about it because Cherry and I were both getting hungry and excited to go have hot pot (hou gou).  Here’s just a taste of some of the things in the museum.   Honestly, my favorite part was the Hall of Minority Peoples, where they had pictures, geographical distributions, and descriptions of all the minority groups in China.  The Han Chinese majority is so dominant that people don’t realize how many diverse groups there are in this huge country.  I could have spent a lot more time in that exhibit, but as I said, we were ready for some hou gou.

   
   For our hot pot experience, we took a taxi to Hongya Cave.  It was on this trip that I learned the term “hou gou” for hot pot.  Jenny said that “hou” was “hot” but it was not to be confused with calling a woman “hot”.  That word, I was informed, was “shinga” (sexy).  We had a good laugh on the way there, saying that we were going to have shinga hou gou (sexy hot pot) and we’ve been laughing about it since.  

Hongya Cave is a series of stairways and structures dating from the early Ming Dynasty.  There’s a cave up near the top with a stream running down from it and creating a waterfall.      But honestly, now it’s really a commercial center with stores and restaurants.  Notice in the following pictures you can see a Subway and a Starbucks at the very top! (It’s really hard to get good coffee here; more on this in a later post). We pursued our main purpose: some shinga hou gou.  I won’t say too much about hot pot in this post; we went out last night with Kitty’s colleagues and got much crazier with it then, so I’ll save it for that post.  Besides, this post is too long already.  

But I will say this:  Chinese people can really eat.  A lot.  I’m a pretty big guy, but these three young women were able to eat FAR MORE than I could.  (And this was the case again at hou gou last night).  And nobody is fat!  I don’t get it–but maybe it’s because they eat mostly meat and vegetables.  There’s very little starch or added sugar in their diet, and I’ve found myself craving both.  Okay here’s some hot pot pictures for ya.  You’ll notice the big bucket of ice in the top picture.  As I’ve said before, no one here drinks cold water, and it was a hot and muggy day, I was already sweating, and I knew the shinga hou gou was going to make me hotter, so I asked for some cold water. Apparently they’re used to needy Westerners at Hongya because they brought me this huge bucket of ice!  I yelled, “Yay!!!!!” and threw my hands in the air, and I almost got up to hug the waitress but decided that wouldn’t be appropriate.  I ended up consuming two whole buckets of this ice.

After hot pot we went downstairs and walked around the “Folk Shopping Street” that is inside of the Hongya building.  There they make it look like a traditional Chinese market with shops selling all kinds of different food and wares (which is kind of silly, because real versions of these streets are all over Chongqing and Beibei.)  I guess it’s for tourists.  Anyway, The day’s trip had called for visiting The Great Hall, Three Gorges Museum, Hongya Cave, a visit to the ancient town of Coqikou, and a boat trip on the Yangtze and Jialing, but it was raining (Most Chinese people do not like to get rained on; Gemma’s father could have made a fortune selling umbrellas here), and the travel to and from Beibei was exhausting AND we were supposed to go to Kitty’s for dinner.  I would have liked to see Coqikou but we skipped out on that and the boat trip and I rested in my room for a while before we went to Kitty’s.  All of her graduate students came (she has two others who are graduating) and they each made a dish.  I’ll end today’s post with a picture of that dinner and some shots of Kitty’s son “Little Walnut”   

 

The talk

Last night I gave my first talk, in the College of Education.  Kitty claims that she asked me for a picture but I didn’t send her anything so she pulled this one off the web.  I always liked this picture because it shows me with a turtle, but I didn’t realize until last night how appropriate it is since the Maryland mascot is also a turtle, albeit a different species.  I can’t read Chinese, so I’m assuming that this poster is my bio and not just a series of insults.   Before the talk, I had a welcoming ceremony, where we had an exchange of gifts.  They gave me a lot of gifts, including a gift for our dean, and gave a presentation about the university and the college of education.  They also gave me a smartphone to use while I’m in China and a HUGE office!  (I think they might think I’m more of a big shot than I am).  Anyway, the dean couldn’t make it because he was at the gym or playing tennis or something (maybe they don’t actually think I’m that much of a big shot), so Kitty’s colleague Robin welcomed me instead.  He’s a funny guy-educated partially in the States and in Ireland.  Thus “Robin”.  As you can imagine, most of the people here who have been overseas have Western names.  I met James, who is applying for a Fulbright to study at Harvard and wants me to read his application and Jenny, who is picking me up in a few minutes to take me on a tour around Chongqing.  The talk was two hours long, which would be really unusual in the States.  I talked about NGSS and about responsive teaching and then did my usual shtick of having the group talk about a science question, then “go meta” by talking about what we were doing that aligned with scientific practices, and then showed them a video of students talking about the same question.  Kitty wasn’t so sure how much people would engage in these activities, but I thought it went really well.  They seemed to enjoy it. We collected some feedback, but since it’s mostly written in Chinese I’ll have to wait for Kitty to translate it, but we have time.  At the end I opened up time for questions and they had a LOT.    People definitely asked more questions then they would in the States. 

 Anyway, we are on the vast subway system heading from Beibei into Chomgqing for the day.  All the cities here are much larger than at home and all the distances are much longer. They say that Beibei is a suburb of Chongqing but I think we’ve been on the train for over an hour already.

Chongqing literally means “double celebration” although no one seems to know why.  It is known as “the city of fog” or “the city of mountains”.  We have been passing through much fog and many mountains on this trip, so that seems to ring true.  We also passed over the Jialing river, which apparently we are going to see in Chongqing.

Anyway, here’s a picture of my enormous office!

 

The people

This morning I walked through campus and into Beibei, the Chongching suburb where the campus is (even though Kitty didn’t want me to because she was afraid I’d get lost).  But if you know me well then you know I don’t mind getting lost.  It took a while because it is a huge campus.  There are 60,000 students.  Seriously.  Most of what you see is residences; apparently most of the faculty live on campus, so the university basically looks like a small forested town with it’s own shops, mechanics, etc.   At 8 AM or so, when I started walking, there were lots of people outside, many of whom were doing some form of martial arts.  Note:  I love to take pictures of people, but I know it can be obtrusive so I try to do it from far away, or from the back, if I haven’t asked for their permission.  And everybody stares at me here because there are very few Westerners in Beibei, so it’s not easy to be surreptitious.There are lots of outdoor shops, and there are many of them on campus.  As you can likely tell from the pictures, the Chinese population is aging, partly because of the one-child policy.  Apparently that policy is being relaxed to counter the aging problem, but it is difficult for many people to afford more than one child.    It was sweet to watch this couple doing some martial arts/exercise with swords.  This older couple was carrying a baby on the woman’s back, and the man was walking behind them fanning the baby. Everyone carries fans, which is smart, because it’s hot and humid even early in the morning. When I walk out of my air-conditioned room it feels like getting hit with a burst of hot gas, even in the halls of the hotel.  By the time I got back to my room my shirt was completely soaked through.  There are men everywhere in Beibei carrying these bamboo stems with ropes on the end.  Finally I stopped one of them and pointed to the word for “what” in my phrase book and pointed to the thing.  After five minutes of gestures and the involvement of three policemen I learned that they are for carrying things.  Apparently, these guys hire out to carry people’s stuff and they just fling these things over their shoulders.  Walking back onto campus from Beibei I walked through a row of shops with a laundry, a guy fixing old machinery, and something that looked like a shop just filled with trash and junk.  This nice woman beckoned me into her shop-the first person who has directly engaged me so far.  She wanted me to buy something.  She taught me the word for water and beer, and I was so grateful for the attention that I bought some (cold!) water.  The weird thing is, even though they add very little extra sugar to their food, the water had sugar added.  I’m going to gain back all the weight I lost here, seriously.  Anyway, I was so distracted by her giving me attention that I started to walk out without paying and without my phrase book. In the States, I think we tend to think of Asian people as very formal.  One thing I love about the people here is that they seem totally unselfconscious.  Men walk around bare-chested and even walk into stores like that.  People pick their nose or clear phlegm from their throats in public.  It’s really very refreshing.  We are so squeamish in the States.  I kinda fit in here in that way

丹尼 (Danny)

The beginning of the eating…

Chongqing is the site of the original Chinese “Hot Pot” and because if its tropical environment it, and several other cities, are also called the “hotpots” of China.  The hotpot apparently originated when the poor workers, working here on the Yanghtzee River, had little meat to eat so they took the organs that the wealthy people discarded and combined them with spices to make the hotpot.

I haven’t had hotpot yet, but I had a great lunch and dinner yesterday.  For lunch, Kitty and I and one of her graduate students went to the little cafe on campus where I’ll be eating my breakfasts and lunches.  We had delicious dishes of rice, duck with vegetables, and stewed eggplant.  Kitty doesn’t actually like spicy food, so it wasn’t very spicy.  (I’m probably going to have to go places without her if I want to get really spicy food).  Anyway, it was boiling hot, and people only seem to turn their air conditioners on when I walk in, so I needed to cool down.  But did you know no one drinks cold water in China?  They say it gives you a stomach ache.  Kitty and the grad student were drinking hot tea and it was probably 95F and humid.  Anyway I asked if maybe they had some ice and the waitress just laughed when Kitty translated.  But then she seemed to have an idea…apparently they don’t have a problem with cold BEER!!!!!

In the afternoon, Kitty took me to her apartment (only the very rich live in houses in Chongqing) to meet her mother and husband and 7-month-old son Little Walnut.  Kitty is a terrific cook, so she made dinner while I played with Walnut, who seemed fascinated by the size of my nose.

Like I said, Kitty loves to cook and her husband told me that her dream is to open her own restaurant.  She says if she does that, maybe she won’t have to work so hard, like she does as a professor.  Um….I think she detected that I was looking at her like she was nuts.

Oh!  I forgot the really funny part!  Kitty was telling me that it is really problematic for Chinese people to order at Chinese restaurants in the States, especially when other people are in line.  This is because the typical way to order in Chinese is to point to the thing you want on the menu and just say “that one”.  Well, the translation of the “that one” is “naygar”, which, when spoken, sounds very much like an offensive word in English, so Chinese people in the states have to learn to order differently.  Anyway, here’s a picture of the meal Kitty cooked last night.  Notice the fork and spoon that they thought I’d need.  No way!  

journey to China

 I have arrived in Chongqing China to work with my colleague Kitty Tang (Tang Xiowei) for two weeks.  I’ll give several talks and teach a short course for students in the College of Education.  I haven’t seen much of Chongqing.  I’m waiting for Kitty to come pick me up for breakfast.  I hear the great thing about breakfast in China is that it’s Chinese food!  Beijing, even just the airport was very uncomfortable.  The smog is everywhere and it permeates the airport.  Here in Chongqing it is very hot but the air quality seems nicer and you can see blue sky!  As you can see it has some real beauty (from what I’ve seen so far from campus)

  

Southwest University is located in Beibei, a suburb of Chongqing.  There are 20 million people in the Chongqing autonomous region (about the size of one of our counties), about 8 million in the city itself and about 60,000 people at the university!  There are a lot of people.  

Facebook and Google are blocked in China so I hope people will read this blog.  I feel the need to share this grand experience.  Here are some more pictures from my walk around campus this morning.   

Please comment and let me know what’s going on with you!

  

  

This is where I’m staying, at the international center.  Like in Israel you need an electrical adaptor and the air conditioning (a must in Chongqing, it’s supposed to get to 100F tomorrow) is a white box on the wall.  Of course the remote control is in Chinese so it took me an hour last night to figure out the AC, wireless, and TV.  But hey, there’s lots to read and learn.

更多很快 (more soon)