Adam’s Not Here

Classes start again on September 1, so right now I am on vacation. Mostly I have been trying to set up my apartment. Shopping is somewhat different than back home. There are large supermarkets that have groceries, bedding, housewares, appliances and electronics. So that stuff is easy to get. But other types of things are clustered all together. I wanted to get some orchids for my place, but you won’t really find flower shops on the street. I had to go and find a flower market, which is where about a 100 little flower shops are clustered together. Same thing goes if you wanted to find a pet. Unlike Toronto where pet stores are here and there on different streets, here you have to go and find the bird and fish market. Some simple things are hard to find. I have been trying to find a lint brush for the past 5 days, I have gone to over 10 different stores and been continually unsuccesful. So a lot of my time has been spent on mundane searches but it has actaully been a pretty good way to explore the city instead of wandering around aimlessly.

The only other thing of interest was the health exam I had to go for my work papers. This exam was much more thorough than anything I have ever gotten back home. It was a modern facility and they took my blood pressure, took a blood sample, took an EKG, did a radiology diagnostic and had an Ears, Eyes, Nose and Throat specialist take a look. I was a little concerned because the radiologist stamped my report with a stamp saying “fatty liver” but he didn’t say anything to me. I’ll have to look into that more, I did an internet search and they said it is mostly for people who are alcohol abusers or obese and I am pretty much the opposite of those two. Although some of the symptoms are fatigue and malaise which is something I went to see my GP about a few years ago. In any case, it is not serious and doesn’t damage the liver, but still something I need to follow up on.

I am not going up to Beijing now, I’ll probably do that for the national holiday in October. Instead Mike is coming down on Friday and we may go and check out some of the neighbouring cities. Perhaps Suzhou or Hangzhou. There are still a lot touristy things I haven’t done in Shanghai, so we’ll try those too. I have put up a couple new photos that show the area where I am living, so check them out.

I have been in my place for 2 days now and so far it has been quite pleasant. I have my own kitchen but the cooking stove is outside my door, in a little corridor that I share with the apartment next door. In the apartment is a couple with a teenaged daughter who seem to be quite friendly, although our conversations are pretty much limited to ni hao (hello) and bye-bye (this time in English). I have taught two mornings this week and it has gone pretty well. The kids are absolutely adorable. They range between about 8 and 10, and a lot of them are so tiny and cute. A lot of the girls seem to enjoy tugging on my arm hairs or calling me monkey. So far I have mostly been doing games with them, using the words they are supposed learn that class. I think I am going to have to try and work in more conversational elements, but I need to find a way to do it that keeps them engaged. I have next week off before term starts on September 1. I hope to go up to Beijing and visit Mike Varey and maybe travel around with him for a few days.

The past few days I had my first experience with the infamous Chinese bureaucracy. For me to get my work VISA I had to get a paper saying that I had registered with the Police as a temporary resident. So I went with Dave to go do this. At the police station near his apartment they said they wouldn’t register me unless I was on the lease. Since I was just staying at Dave’s until I found a place, we decided to wait until I found one. Once I found my place, I went down to my local police station with my lease. They said I would have to come back the next day with my landlord, and she would have to bring documents showing that she had a license for renting out the place. So we came back the next day with my landlord and they said that since I didn’t register within 3 days of arriving in Shanghai I was illegal and that the person who could clear that up wouldn’t be in until the next day. So we came back again the next day and they said I would have to pay 300 RMB (about $45) for them to fix it. We had no choice, so I said ok and we waited there for 3 hours while they did the paperwork. At one point I had to sign a document and put my thumbprint on it which I subsequently found out was an admission of guilt for not registering within 3 days and an agreement to take responsibility for my actions. Apparently this is a relic from the cultural revolution days when people were put in front of criticism committees and things like that. Anyhow, after 4 visits and at least 5 hours I finally got the registration paper. Luckily they didn’t actually ask for the money while they were doing the paperwork, so I didn’t even end up paying. And apparently Shanghai is very foreigner friendly for this type of stuff, so it could have been even worse in another city. The whole ordeal is another instance where I had to thank my lucky stars that I had Dave there to help me through it. He and the landlady did all the talking, I just had to wait and look non-threatening.

Going to interviews was an intersting experience. I had 3 interviews and I was never asked more than one or two questions about my experience or qualifications. Mostly they just talked about their school. The first two interviews were less than ten minutes each. My third interview was with the place I ended up signing a contract with and it was something else. The company is called Shanghai ESL and they send foreign teachers to pricey private schools in Pudong (which is the new part of Shanghai and the financial centre of China). Their foreign director is actually a Canadian. At the interview he spent over an hour explaining the curriculum they have developed. The next half hour was explaining the contract. At the end he gave me the phone numbers of some teachers working for them who I could call and ask questions. As we were leaving he asked if I wanted to stop by his place for a beer. So I agree, go over to his place, have a beer and hang out for a few minutes. After a while I get up to leave but he says he is about to grab dinner and invites me to join him. So we go out, stop at a bar first, have a couple pints, go to an all you can eat and drink (including sake!) japanese place, go to another bar and at about 1 AM go and get a 2 hour massage (yes, it was an actual massage). The interview started at 3pm and we didn’t part company till about 3 AM. Things are certainly very different here.

The job is teaching elementary school kids. I think grades 1-5. I chose this school because it looked like they provided a lot in terms of curriculum and support for teachers and I felt more comfortable about having a foreign boss. There are so many stories going around about foreign teachers getting ripped off, being led on and never getting paid until they finally wise-up and leave the place. My contract runs until the middle of February and the school term starts on September 1st. However, they do summer school as well and they are getting me to fill in for one of their teachers who is going home for a couple weeks. So I actually have my first class tomorrow morning. On Friday I went to the school and watched the teacher I am filling in for. It looks like it will be a lot of fun, although there is definitely going to be a steep learning curve in terms of classroom management and always having ideas for keeping them busy. I am a little nervous about it, but I guess I just have to jump right in.

The last week or so has been spent running lots of little errands. So I feel like I haven’t seen too much of the city yet. I’ve been to a few different neighbourhoods, but haven’t checked out any museums or other tourist sights. I am still staying with Dave and it is almost an hour from downtown. So I’ve been going in to the city each day, usually with a task or two and then walking around for a while. With the heat, I am pretty exhausted after 4 or 5 hours and usually head home. So I haven’t seen that much of the night life yet.

Staying with Dave has been a great way to get started, even if he does live a ways out. He knows all the good restaurants around his place, so there has been a lot of good meals. He also speaks nearly fluent Mandarin, which has been a godsend. The last few days I have been looking around for an apartment, which I couldn’t imagine doing without him. We went to an agent to try and find someplace downtown. We saw about 4 or 5 places and then I decided on the first one we had seen. At that point, the landlady came down to the agent’s office and they negotiated the contract with Dave. The funny thing was, as far as I could tell, the landlady was more focussed on trying to fix me up with the real estate agent than working on the contract. Like the job interview, business and personal get mixed together here, and quite quickly it would seem. In any case, I get the keys for the place tomorrow, although I may have to wait a few extra days to move in as I want to get it painted. I am very happy with the place. The location is fabulous, right downtown and only a 2 or 3 minute walk from the metro. It is in an area that definitely has more of a Chinese feel than some of the modern parts of the city. There is a grocery store 1/2 a block away (where you can buy live chickens!). The place has a decent amount of space too, so if any of you are in the neighbourhood, there’ll be somewhere to stay. Originally I wanted to get somewhere with a roommate, but all the ads I saw were not in the location I wanted and it would have been too expensive (you have to pay 3 months rent plus 1 month security deposit up front) to find a 2 bedroom place and then look for one. This works fine though, as sometimes having a roommate means you don’t go out and meet new people as you are hanging out with your roommate all the time. Either way, I am happy, I’ll put up some photos of the place and the neighbourhood once I get settled in.

Ok, so a lot has happened in the last week. I got into Shanghai 3 days ago, which was sooner than I had originally planned. I quickly found that travelling in China was much different than SE Asia. Getting here made me realize that even though it is a lot less developed there, there is a tremendous amount of tourist infrastructure. From what I saw, China doesn’t really seem to have the same backpacker scene. In Guilin I saw some foreigners, but they seemed to be older, non-backpacker types. Besides the journey out of Vietnam, I didn’t really meet any travellers. Trains and hotels were full of Chinese, I was generally the only foreigner. In Changsha, a city of 6 million people, I didn’t see any foreigners in the 2 days I was there. So the relative difficulty in finding cheap food and accomodation, the lack of social interaction and my anxiousness to get settled somewhere caused me to come up to Shanghai a little bit earlier than I had originally planned.

I had a weird feeling coming out of the train station in Shanghai. I am standing with my bags in the middle of this huge city and after moving around every few days for 2 months I now have to build up a new life. So I started by calling the Spanish woman I had met in Vietnam. Luckily, she was in the area with her sister and so we arranged to meet for lunch. They helped me get oriented to the city and then gave me the keys to her apartment so I could get settled while they went shopping. That evening I was introduced to about 10 of her friends from Spain and we then all went out to this place called Zapata’s. Wednesday night is ladies night and they get free margaritas until midnight, so of course the place was packed. But it was full of foreigners, when I got out of the cab I was thinking, “Am I still in China? It’s a sea of white people.” At Zapata’s I started talking to this guy from Canada. The first thing he did was ask which city I was from, and when I told him he said, “Toronto? Isn’t it past your bed time?” I was like, “that’s a good one, haven’t heard that before” (what else do you say to that?). And he said that based on that comment I should be able to figure out where he was from, which was, of course, Montreal. Anyhow, it was a good ice breaker and we had a nice long chat. He was a friendly guy and said he may have a few job leads for me. The free margaritas meant lots of drinking and we didn’t get home till about 4:30.

The problem was that during that day I had called a place I had been in email contact with about a job and scheduled an interview for the following day. So I had to drag my butt out of bed, slightly hungover, and got lost several times before showing up late for the interview. It wasn’t really much of an interview. It turned out the guy was a recruiter and I think he just wanted to meet me and see what I looked like. He then asked if I could visit a school that afternoon that was looking for a teacher. I go to the school and they ask me some questions. I answer honestly (apparently that’s not the standard) about not having teaching experience. So they ask if I can meet the kids and give a brief demonstration, which I obviously have to say yes to. They take me to a classroom with about 15 6-year olds and get them to sit in a semi-circle around me. At this point I am thinking, “Uh…. what the hell do I do?” The kids are very friendly but the whole situation is very intimidating. There are about 3 or 4 staffers from the school sitting there and watching me with the kids. I try to make small talk with them, ask them their names and such. But this doesn’t work too well, the one kid that I am talking to interacts with me fine (I was impressed by the level of their English at such a young age) but all the others are making noise and being disruptive. So I am desperately trying to think of a way to get all of their attention and have them all engaged with me at once. So I resort to the hokey-pokey. I get them all in a big circle and try and teach it to them. They really seem to enjoy this, especially the part where you shake it all around. And they didn’t seem to notice by horribly off key singing, so I suppose it was a success. At this point the staff have noticed me trying to make eye contact with them and mercifully end the demonstration. The first part was pretty painful, so although it ended ok, I thought that I hadn’t made the greatest impression. We talked afterwards and either they are really desperate for teachers or they liked what they saw because they offered me the position. So I had been here 1 day and already had an offer, not too bad. I had to turn it down though because they needed a 1 year commitment and this was something I can’t do. It’s ok though, after the demonstration I thought about it and I am not sure if I’d be up to teaching kindergarten 5 days a week. So at this point the search continues, although by all signs it should be easy enough to get a job, it just depends on how picky I am.

Shanghai itself is quite an interesting city. So far I have only explored a small portion of it, but I already have some impressions. First, there a lot of foreigners here. Second, I noticed instantly that everyone seems to be about 4 inches taller than they were in the south of China. In the South only rarely did I see someone my height and never anyone taller. Most of the time I was staring over a sea of shoulder height heads. Here lots of people are my height and a few are an inch or two taller. There are a lot of contrasts here. There is construction all over the place and a mix of glittering new modern buildings and old, run down communist style housing blocks. On the street you’ll see some of the most beautiful and stylish people you’ll ever see, and on the next block there is someone in slippers and teddy bear pyjamas. Food can be dirt cheap or outrageously expensive. It seems that there is a little bit of everything. I am now staying at my 2nd cousin’s brother in-law’s place. I’ve been very fortunate, everyone has been so generous with places to stay and help in figuring things out and looking for work.

Last night, typhoon Matsa hit land a couple hundred kilometres to the south of here, so it was raining buckets and very gusty all day. I thought I’d be adventurous and go out and experience the typhoon while exploring parts of downtown. Of course I got lost and wandered around for an hour trying to find my way and got completely drenched. It was still kind of exciting, the streets were actually pretty quiet and people were getting blown around and there were lots of umbrellas being destroyed. Well, I’ve rambled on for a while now. There’s more to say and it will come, this place really has a lot going on.