www.rapturina.com

Last week I bought a bicycle. I’ve seen a lot of people cycling here and though nobody really seems to be doing it for the exercise (just to get from one point to another), at least a person on a bike is not such a strange sight. I bought the bike brand new at a shop close to the school, and paid only 350 yuan for it (44 euros). It seems to be a pretty good bike, though I suppose time will tell!

The word for “bicycle” in Chinese is actually quite interesting. It is called a zìxíngchē, and exists of three characters. The first, zì (自）, means “self”. The second, xíng (行), means “go, walk, travel”. The last one, chē (车), is a general word for “vehicle”. So the literal translation of the Chinese word is “a self-going vehicle”, i.e. a vehicle that you have to make go yourself. Kind of cool, I think!

Riding a bicycle is quite an adventure in China. You have to pay quite a bit of attention to the road as there can be some really big holes in it. Plus the drivers are a little crazy here. The good thing is that they’re used to people cycling or walking on the roads, so generally they do keep an eye out for slower traffic on the road, but it happens quite regularly that they swerve around you in a manner that takes some getting used to (i.e. it takes some time before you stop shitting yourself). Still, it’s actually kind of fun, having to avoid people, carts and potholes, and trying not to get run over. It’s kind of like a computer game, really.

As bike theft is apparantly quite common here, my boss advised me to keep my bike safe in my apartment, which I thought was a bit strange at first. There isn’t really any other place though  where I can park my bike without the risk of it being stolen, so when I’m not riding my bike I keep it inside. Everytime I go for a ride I have to bring the bike down in the elevator and back up when I come back. It felt a bit odd at first, but nobody batted an eyelid when I entered the elevator with my bike, so I guess it’s normal practice here. Some people even bring their scooter into their apartment!

This week (April 4th) it’s Tomb Sweeping Day, a traditional Chinese festival for which we’re all getting a day off. Many schools and employers actually give their students/employees three days off, or so it seems… They do get Monday and Tuesday off, but to compensate the kids are going to school on Saturday and Sunday. This means that the week before they have three days off, they actually have to go to school seven days in a row! It’s the same for people with jobs. So they really only have one day off, and will probably need this day to recover from having to work seven days in a row… Mind you, one of my young students told me today that they actually get a lot of extra homework as well, as they have three days off and supposedly will have all the time in the world to make homework, according to the teachers at their middle school.

One of my adult students told me that it’s the Chinese government that has come up with this 3 days off deal. The holiday is originally only one day, but as the Chinese government wants people to be able to visit family or have a short holiday (and spend a lot of money, good for the economy!), they decided to make it a three day holiday. However, as they didn’t want to give people just two extra days off for free, they decided to just rearrange the working days for everyone. Apparently, the same thing will happen in the Fall, when there will be a three day holiday, but people will actually have seven days off in a row. They will need to work two weekends to  make up for that though, which means they will actually need to work fourteen days in a row before getting those 7 days off!

As for me, at my school they’re just giving us the day off on Tomb Sweeping Day itself.  The classes we have on that particular Wednesday are actually moved to Monday though (our regular day off). So I still teach the same amount of hours and days, just on a different day than usual, though my boss still insists on calling it a day off. I just call it a “day off”. I don’t mind so much as I already kind of enjoy having my regular schedule mixed up a bit, even without an extra day off, but it is a little mind-boggling. Obviously the Chinese have a whole different idea about what constitutes a day off than Westerners do, and I must admit I’m a bit in awe that they take this whole working-seven-days-in-a-row business so well. I’ve asked my adult students what they think about it, and they basically just shrugged it off. All hell would break loose if someone tried that in the Netherlands, I’m sure!

Temperatures have been steadily rising here in Yantai, and we’re getting a lot of sunshine this week. Perfect weather for a day out! Yesterday I went to downtown Yantai with two of my fellow teachers to check out the Yantai Hill Park. Well, that was the plan, but we never actually made it into the park. We didn’t know exactly where it was, so we spent quite some time walking around trying to find the entrance, but it was so enjoyable that we continued walking around even after we found the park. Yantai Hill Park (Yāntáishān Gōngyuán) is located in the part of town that has quite a few old colonial buildings and it’s a nice area to spend a few hours strolling around and enjoying the atmosphere. It’s also near the boulevard that stretches along the seaside, offering a nice view. All in all, it was a good way of spending the first real warm and sunny day here in Yantai!

Before we went downtown I had another little adventure as I had to go buy a new phone. I had accidentally plugged my phone into my Nook charger (they look very similar), resulting in the complete destruction of the phone’s charger plugin. As it was an old phone anyway I figured I’d just buy a cheap new phone that I can just use while I’m here in China. So, off I went to the Zhenhua E-Mart down the street with a mission not to leave the building without a phone. Fortunately, it was actually really easy to buy a phone, even with my limited Chinese (and I’m quite proud I understood what the sales girl said when she said they didn’t have the phone I wanted and offered another similar one, and that I had to make sure to keep the guarantee papers safe). It didn’t get difficult until after I had bought the phone, when the sales girl pulled out a rather large loaf of bread from under the counter and said a lot of things in Chinese that I didn’t understand. I still don’t know what exactly happened there, maybe she was trying to sell me the loaf of bread?! A bit odd in an electrical store… I guess it’s just another WTF moment in China.

An interesting fact I learned a few days ago is that the popular phrase “long time no see” actually comes from Chinese. In Mandarin, the phrase is hǎo jiǔ bù jiān, which literally translates to that particular phrase in English. Apparently it was used by Chinese immigrants who literally translated the Chinese to English, resulting in the grammatically incorrect “long time no see”. Despite its incorrectness, it was picked up by other English speakers and became so popular it has become a fixture in the English language. As with most language facts there is some discussion as to whether this is actually the true origin of the phrase (see also the Wikipedia entry), but I like the idea of it coming from Chinese immigrants, so I’m just going to assume it’s true.

Anyway. So I try to write an entry here every week, but sometimes that doesn’t really work out, obviously. Last week I wasn’t feeling well, so that’s my excuse! I had the flu first, and then got hit by a stomach bug, which I will spare you the details of. I’ve been having a lot of colds here (I blame the children bringing in Chinese germs my body is not used to), but the stomach bug was a bit of a surprise as I had been handling the food here quite well. Ah well, maybe it was just one street food adventure that got the best of me.

One, more exciting, thing that happened though last week was that I actually understood some spoken Chinese. I was in the elevator in my apartment building, going up to my floor, when a Chinese lady told her small child that I was not a Chinese person, but a foreigner. I had just learned the word for foreigner, so it was a bit of a coincidence that I understood exactly what she was saying, but it was the highlight of my day. I don’t have any illusions about speaking fluent Chinese now, but it was a very rewarding experience to understand something. It doesn’t happen very often!

Not much else has been going on… The weather seems to be getting a bit better here, which basically means it’s no longer freezing. Hopefully we’ll get proper Spring soon!

There is one thing I was rather apprehensive about before coming to China to live in a city where a foreigner is still an anomaly: the staring. When I was in India last year the amount of people staring at me drove me crazy, so I was worried it’d be the same here in China (I could obviously never be a celebrity!).

People in Yantai have seen foreigners before, but it’s not like this is Beijing or Shanghai, where foreigners have become more or less part of daily life (or so I’ve heard). I suppose here in Yantai it’s still kind of special to see a foreigner on the streets, so people do stare a bit sometimes. I don’t find it as annoying as I was expecting though, so that’s a relief! People don’t really do anything but staring. Some of them might do a double take as I walk by, and some might yell “hello!”, but that happens maybe once every two weeks. Not *all* the time, like they did in India, and they don’t want to constantly take pictures of me either or try to sell me stuff, so it’s not a problem at all.

Mind you, the staring is actually a lot worse when I’m out and about with my fellow teacher Simone, who has dark skin and dreadlocks. She’s much more of an event than I am, I’m just a boring white person, which suits me fine.

Having said that, being a boring white person is one thing, a running white person is apparently a lot more exciting. Yesterday morning I went for a short run along the beach and some cars would actually slow down beside me to have a good look at the running foreigner, which I thought was rather funny. I was too out of breath to really care anyway! A word of warning to my former colleagues in Tilburg though: I was wearing my Tilburg University hoodie, so you will have to mentally prepare yourselves for a big inflow of students from the general Yantai area next year!