First Month of Food

Hey guys! So a lot of my family and friends from back home have been asking about what food is like here in China.. what I've been eating for dinner, what's on the menu at McDonalds, when to say "yes" to hotpot and when to politely refuse, etc. , and I have to say it's been quite the adventure so far. I've been lucky to have super friendly colleagues (both Chinese and foreigners) who have been been inviting me to a lot of dinners and other types of gatherings involving food, so I've been getting quite the tour of different Chinese cuisines.

This is one of my favorite street foods I've tried so far. It's called jian bing (煎饼果子) and is like a Chinese crepe. They spread the batter out on the skillet, sprinkle on some green onions, cilantro, and hot chilis, crack an egg on top of it all, then throw some fresh romaine lettuce on right before wrapping it up. 

Oh man.. the way the crepe is slightly crispy on the outside, but tender on the inside, and the crunch of the cool lettuce contrasted with the heat of the pepper.. so delicious! And it only cost 5 rmb, which is the equivalent of 85 cents.

And something not so delicious is.. my school lunch. I have the option of eating all three meals at the school canteen, but I have to supplement whatever I can stomach with food that I cook at home. Below is an example of a typical school lunch.  They use a ton of oil and hot chili peppers in the canteen..and  my stomach is not happy about it. The bottom left is some kind of breaded fish with potatoes, this is served for lunch almost every day. Then we have lots of rice with every meal, as was expected, topped with the infamous "Jin Dongfang Cabbage" .. the students and teachers here have a running joke about it. And I can see why.. it's pretty gnarls.  A dish that I can TOTALLY get on board with here is the one on the top right, which is pretty much just scrambled eggs with stewed tomatoes. This goes really good mixed with the rice and whatever other veggies are being served that day. Lunch also always comes with a soup that is really more water than anything else.

Here are some examples of what I've been eating at home. Cooking here is hard. I have a saucepan, a small kitchen knife, a cutting board, and a rice cooker. And because fall is coming, I am anticipating crazy urges for baked goods and roasted vegetables, so I will soon be adding a toaster oven to the lineup. I'm maybe a little too excited for this.

My home cooking has been pretty basic so far as I get more used to the spices and produce available here. It's also been exclusively vegetarian because I usually only eat meat at the nicer restaurants. I will start buying my own meat once I know enough Chinese to ask the right questions in the meat markets (they don't refrigerate the meats).

carrots, snake bean (which isn't actually a bean, it's a root!), purple sweet potato, garlic, and green onions with brown rice and lentils. 

Chinese snake bean (or long bean) .. they taste kind of like asparagus!

I kind of dig that yogurt here comes with straws

Milk and cereal.. an expensive delicacy here in Yichang, and a great temporary cure for homesickness!

I've also been eating lots of potatoes, eggs, and rice

A wedding feast I was invited to during my first week of work.  Dinner here is eaten communal-style with a rotating table in the middle and tons and tons and tons of dishes! So awesome! 

The fish dishes here are unspeakably delicious. And beautiful!

 

This is an example of strange menu items at McDonalds.. I have no idea what the black bun is made out of. Maybe black beans? You can also buy bubble tea, and the pies come with taro root in the middle.

More on McD's later!

Favorite comfort food / cheap eats. Jiaozi (dumpling) joints can be found  on virtually every street corner here, and they usually have great prices. Wash 'em down with a TsingTao!

Well, you know me. More food pics coming later.. :)

Rain catharsis = I'm definitely from the Northwest

Today I read an article by a friend of a friend who had some pretty interesting things to say regarding periods of transition / major upheaval in life (http://tatterhoodblog.com/2013/09/22/caterpillar-slime/) 

My most relevant takeaway:  trying to fool yourself and everyone else that what you're doing is easy isn't gonna do any good.

Tomorrow I will have been inn China for one month, and I've come to see that I need to start being more realistic with myself. In this new place and new culture, everyday frustrations build up and it feels like the more you fight things, the deeper in you sink. I need to let go of "the pressure to figure things out, to have a plan, to be able to explain what it is you're doing and where you want to go with it."  So, this afternoon I made a choice to stop trying so hard. The funny thing is, I realized I'm going to have to try hard not to try hard, because my first instinct when being thrust into a situation like this is to struggle.

Soon after, as I readied my materials for my walk home from school, the torrential rains came out of nowhere. No wind, just sheets of  massive rain drops falling straight down onto the warm pavement. I pushed headfirst out into the rain wearing my sundress and without an umbrella, and the water poured down on me, almost seeming to move through me. When I got to the bottom of the hill, I came across a group of men huddled under a makeshift rain shelter in front of an old building. They had drums and horns and gongs, and were playing what seemed to be some kind of traditional Chinese music. I stopped in my tracks, mesmerized. Standing outside that tent with the rhythm and the warm rain together washing over me, it was cathartic. It just felt too surreal--almost as if the universe was saying, "You're definitely onto something. Now let's give this another shot."

view from and tour of my office

Jiǎozi rhymes with yowza

Today was the first day of club meetings at JDF High School--now officially my favorite day of the week! JDF has a variety of clubs / electives for students to choose from including badminton, musical instruments, ping pong, basketball, photography, and cooking. If you know me, you probably could already guess that the clubs I will be frequenting the most are the cooking and instrument clubs. For the first elective day I decided to join in on the cooking club meeting. We made dumplings, or jiǎozi which is pronounced kind of like the word "yowza" with a j instead of a y, and at the end you have the sound "uh" like in "put" instead of "uh" like in "butt". This is definitely my favorite Chinese food so far. I love that you can totally customize them with whatever filling you like, and they're pretty healthy because they're boiled or steamed.  So far, I like the ones that come with pork and cabbage best, but I've also tried egg and chive, and beef and chili, which were also delicious! 

My first dumpling! I gave up on the fold they were trying to teach me, so just made up my own. It turned out weird when it was cooked. 

The kids mixing up the ingredients for the pork dumplings.. staple flavorings included ginger, green onion, and garlic! I was in heaven <3

Filling up a tray of freshly filled and folded jiaozi

Students folding jiaozi. This part was difficult to get down!

A couple of my senior 1 (freshman) students excited to get these jiaozi cookin'!

nom nom nomnomnom

happy campers

Cold Feet

It was inevitable.

I'm actually surprised it took this long to happen.  

Today I had my first "oh my god what am I doing here" moment. 

I was sitting at my desk devising some plans for the afternoon classes and it hit me out of nowhere. 

Panic.

This place is so rainy. No one here understands me. I'm tired of getting lost. I miss cheese. I hate living alone.  I'm not even a teacher. What was I thinking? 

All of a sudden, I feel so out of my element. It's overwhelming. 

The thoughts keep coming and I find myself sliding into a downward spiral of uncertainty. 

Then just as sudden as it came on, I slam on the brakes. 

C'mon, Kirsten. Why are you doing this to yourself?

I've realized that in this moment of fear I had forgotten everything good about this place.

I had forgotten how much things have improved since I got here, how many amazing adventures I've already been on with my friends, the good food I've eaten, the beauty I've witnessed, and how friendly everyone has been. 

I had forgotten the laughs I've shared with my new Chinese friends, and the games of soccer I've played with my students in the schoolyard. 

Most importantly, for that moment I had forgotten the main reason I came here: to teach. 

And in that regard, I have no excuse for cold feet. 

View of the Yangtze and a tributary from my office window

Since I arrived here at Jin Dongfang High School, I have had a strong network of professional colleagues and friends who have shown me endless support and offered invaluable guidance whenever I have asked. 

Not to mention, my students are so intelligent and incredibly driven. When I am able to get them talking, the amount of creativity and humor some of them use blows me away. I keep having to remind myself that English is the only barrier here-- the thoughts and ideas are there, the intelligence is there, my only job is to help them express these things in English! This thought is extremely humbling, as I am reminded of the difficulty of learning a foreign language, and of how little Chinese I actually know myself. What these kids are doing is amazing, and I know it was forced on them from an early age (sometimes I wish we had been forced to learn  a language as kids), but it is pretty impressive how far they have come.

 In my classes there have been intensely satisfying moments where I feel so proud of the original thoughts coming from my students, and happy to have discovered activities that get my students talking and using new vocab. That is something that is so nice about this job. If you put in the hard work, learn from your mistakes, and modify your lesson plans, you are (usually) rewarded with a classroom full of happy, chatty students, sometimes having enough fun that they don't even realize they're practicing their English  :)

Today's cold feet incident has turned out to be a much-needed lesson in perspective. After stepping back and looking at things for what they are, I feel like I'm on level ground once again. 

No, things aren't perfect. The cultural differences and language barriers lead to daily frustrations, but also out of these new conditions spring new and exciting things to discover, and endless opportunities to learn about the people and this place they live in. Not to mention, I think I'm really starting to like my job. Living and working here really is a rush, to say the least, and sometimes I need moments like this to kick me in the butt so I don't take all of this for granted. 

Yesterday was national Teachers' Day, and this cake was in the teachers' lounge on the main floor of JDF . I was wondering why all these tiny Chinese women had such massive piles of cake on their plates. My question was immediately answered when we exited the room and hoards students swarmed my colleagues, pointing to their open mouths. As we moved through the crowd the teachers fed bites of cake to their students like little birds. It was one of the most adorable / funny things I've ever seen!

River running high -- Run deep, run wild

This last weekend, Lindsey and I took advantage of the first open chunk of time we've had since we arrived in Shanghai. We live on completely opposite ends of the city, and so to cure the separation anxiety I pretty much spent the night at her apartment all weekend while we explored during the day. The first night, we attempted to go out and explore some of the nightlife. The strategy we adopted was 'follow the neon lights,' which, in the US, is usually a safe bet. However, as we quickly learned, China uses neon lights for everything. Neon lights for cell phone stores, neon lights for book stores, neon lights for travel agencies, neon lights for sock stores...  So using this strategy, we found ourselves in a business district that resembled a scene from a zombie apocalypse movie, minus the zombies of course. All the lights blinking eerily, advertising to an empty street. We did, however find a great KTV (karaoke bar), and by great I mean full of old people slow-dancing to Chinese power ballads.We had better luck on Sunday night, when we met up with a handful of laowai (foreigners) for drinks on a street that had a pretty substantial looking evening scene. 

Tibetan prayer flags?

On the days in between, we explored the city and even ventured across the river to hike Moji Mountain. Moji Mountain is actually a long grouping of hills that go along the river, and there are no trails, only steep stairs that go up and down each hill. A little different than what I'm used to, but it was so refreshing to 'get out of the city' and have some fresh air. It's amazing how different things are on the other side of the water. A lot less developed, a lot of green, and the small town we hiked to seemed a lot older and even more 'Chinese' than Yichang.  The bridge we took over the water is massive--about 3000 feet long.  Walking over it made me nostalgic because it reminded me of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

Chinese-style roadside entertainment. The goal of the game is to throw some hoops and make them land around these figurines.

stairway to heaven

So many oranges!

After the hike, Lindsey and I reflected on how amazing it is that (in Lindsey's words) "we're just casually living on the banks of one of the largest rivers in the world."   I see this river every day from my office, and Lindsey gets to walk along it for her daily commute to and from work. As I get to learn about more about this new place I am living in, one thing I am particularly interested in is the role this massive vein of water plays in defining the people who live here in Yichang. I think about how the rolling wheat fields of Spokane are a part of me and my family--as the seasons change we witness the fields transition from bright green to deep gold, year after year. I think about how the essence of the Rocky Mountains flows deep in the veins of every Coloradan I know. Especially when I feel homesick, I think often of the Puget Sound, wondering sometimes if I left a piece of myself there. 

For now, however, the Yangtze remains a mystery to me. Lots of plans for down(and up)river explorations this year!!

Yichang Fast Facts

And for those of you who don't know...  (heck, I hadn't even heard of the place before I got a job here) , this is Yichang! It's in Hubei province, which is about 700 miles directly inland from Shanghai. Lindsey and I took a bullet train here after orientation and it took 8 hours, which was a super fun way to travel/see the countryside/nurse our 'Shang'-overs from Zapatas the night before.

Yichang  is a small city by China standards, with an urban population of 1,300,000 and area population of about 4,000,000. That's according to the Wiki article though and I've heard a spattering of different figures from people here in Yichang. What they can't seem to stop talking about here is how fast this city is developing. Wuhan is currently the capital city of Hubei, but apparently the government's plan is to make Yichang more of an urban , metro capital city that is more progressive and internationally focused, and Wuhan will turn into more of the industrial capital of Hubei. 

What strikes me the most about this place is the dramatic and sudden contrast between old and new here. They're right up against each other, and often tangled up with each other. And yeah, yeah this is all we read about in our textbooks and nat geo articles and so on, but it's totally true!! I'll post some pictures later of the area around my school, and you will see. It's like a mountain village in which someone just decided to plop a bunch of big apartment buildings right down in the middle. Yes, my apartment and high school are on a mountain. At least that's what they call it here: "Ship Mountain". I honestly thought Daisy (my main coordinator here) said "Shit Mountain" the first time I heard it. That made for some good laughs, and a good first impression. Well done, Kirsten. 

Shanghai Shenanigans

 On the first night we went to a well-known international chain called Din Tai Fung. I actually tried this a few weeks ago in L.A. with Danny and his sister and was immediately hooked. Way stoked to find out there was one in Shanghai! (But what isn't in Shanghai, really?? This place is MASSIVE)
Here are some pictures from that night and other nights in Shanghai. From this post you'd think all we did was goof around all week! Well, we did, but we also learned a bit about teaching English too, in 7-10 hrs worth of classes each day. Without that training, I think I would have been at such a loss when I got here, so I'm grateful that all of my visa stuff worked out for me to get here in time for that!

great new friends at orientation!! 

<3  <3  <3 dumplings <3  <3 <3

 Mao n' Me

 Awesome giant cello!

 Mom and her pup in front of our hotel

So just to fill all of you in, I have a 10-month contract working at Yichang Jin Dong Fang Highschool in Yichang, Hubei Province. This area is beautiful. The Yangtze River runs right past the city, the mountains look over at us from the other side, and the greenery is overflowing. And I get to see all of this from my office window!

...but before I get too much into that, I will give you guys a little brief on what I've been up to since I got to China!I arrived in Shanghai a little over a week and a half ago. We had a 5-day long orientation with about 60 others like us who are teaching English in China through an agency called Ameson. Ameson recruited about 300 recent grads from around the US and placed them in cities all up and down the eastern side of China. I feel really fortunate to have been placed further inland in this smaller city. There is only a handful of expats (foreigners) in this place so I feel like I am really getting a true taste of China this year. I am even more fortunate to share this rare status with a lovely girl named Lindsey Pointer, another Ameson teacher like me. She hails from Colorado and  let me just say we’re a pretty dang good fit. To the extent that no one at orientation believed us when we told them we weren’t friends before.

At the orientation, we took classes during the day then in the evenings groups of us wove through the streets and subways of Shanghai to explore and eat delicious food and drink bottomless free margaritas on  Girls Night at the city’s most hoppin expat bar, Zapatos. 

 Ladies Night at the infamous Zapatas expat bar

 awesome new friends :) 

 sleaze

We danced on the bar!

Welcome and Intro to My Blog

     Howdy, All! Welcome to my Yichang blog! I can't even express how excited I am to finally start blogging. I went for a little over a week with no internet or phone and let me tell you, I thought I was going to go mad. Being in a brand new country in a brand new, giant apartment, with a brand new job, and a brand new language and culture-- it's the most overwhelmed I'd ever been in my whole life.

     Sitting here right now about a week later, it's difficult for me to believe how far I've come since that point. I will not deny that finally getting access to a phone and the internet played a large role in easing me through. At first, being completely disconnected from my friends and family, I was left alone, relentlessly consumed by feelings of fear and isolation. Today, I have several new contacts in my phone of my amazing new friends and colleagues at the Jin Dong Fang schools around the city, and with WeChat, G-mail, and Skype, I've been able to reconnect with my international friends and catch up, sharing experiences and photos. It's unbelievably relieving! On top of that, I have about 40 high school students who are totally stoked (yeah right) to take their standardized IELTS tests, and it's my job to make preparation for that somewhat bearable. It's only been 4 days, and we've connected  on a lot of levels so far. When I put the work into my lesson planning, the room comes alive with creativity, English, and laughter, and as a teacher there really is nothing more satisfying than this!

    So, as I emerge back onto the grid,  I want to say hello to all my family and friends who are reading this blog! I think about home often, and my memories with all of you help to keep me grounded in this crazy period of my life! Thanks for reading and please, find me on WeChat and Skype if you haven't already!

WeChat ID: kourada

Skype ID: kirstenourada