"Enjoy your English. Enjoy your Day" is the signoff that sadly replaced "You stay classy, Jinan!"

I was asked back to the TV station to do another show today, which I figure was for one of two reasons. Either they liked me or they liked what they had to pay me. Nothin.
Either way I have fun doing it, so I went back for more. Today Bonnie and I taught a local Jinan man how to give directions to a lost and confused foreigner. “Turn right at the second intersection.”, “The No. 1 Bus will take you to the city center.”

The whole process is very casual. From what I have learned so far about conducting business in China, you don’t get much information up front. And in my experience, what information you are given doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. This is a pretty good setup for someone who is comfortable making their own rules, but for those who don’t work well without specific directions, it can be a real headache. I’ve become pretty comfortable with this and enjoyed the chance to interpret each job on my own. And heck, if it’s not what they had in mind, someone will let me know. Or not. Whatever.

This afternoon I applied a heavy coat of makeup, and rode my bike forty-five minutes across town to the TV station. By the time I arrived, my made up face was buried under a thick layer of dust, exhaust, and assorted particulate matter.

After freshening up, I edited the “script” to make it sound native. Next, we moved lights and extension cords downstairs to a little auditorium. A few minutes later, the cameras were rolling. Bonnie, the Chinese host, says to me, “just teach us this” and points to the page of sentences I’d edited. No problem. Except maybe just one small one today; it felt and sounded as though a helicopter was landing on the roof. Right when we were in the groove, right when we were “enjoying our English and enjoying our day”, we had to stop all of the above and wait for the building to finish vibrating.
Despite that obnoxious interruption, we managed to shoot seven short episodes in two and half hours. I was feeling pretty pleased with my smooth performance up until the last task. The cameraman asked Bonnie and I to look at each other and nod for several moments so they could edit that into the show if necessary. I was useless…completely incapable of looking and nodding without laughing at the awkwardness of it all.
It took me right back to seventh grade Spanish oral presentations when I could barely speak through my fits of nervous laughter.

By 4:30, I was pedaling home and gathering another layer of pollution.



This is the crew. From left to right: local Jinan man, director, cameraman, station owner, Bonnie, Betsy.

Take me to the nature

I couldn’t be happier to bring you the official news: Spring has sprung in our little part of China.

A couple of weeks ago, there was one lone flowering tree on campus and every time I passed by, someone was standing in front of the tree surrounded by a wreath of pink and white flowers having his or her photo taken.

It didn’t take long for word to get around that a whole forest of such trees was hidden away in the Botanical Gardens. Before you could say “pink enchanted forest”, Josh and I were pedaling across the city.

As if we’d never seen real flowers before, we immediately dove into the tangle of pink and felt fresh offshoots swat our cheeks. Then we tucked our heads in between branches and sniffed the tiny pink petals up into our nostrils. I think the bees felt displaced by our up close and personal devotion to each tiny blossom.
After snapping some photos of the happy moments, we made space for another group of beguiled visitors to lose themselves in ‘the nature’.

If you like counting down as much as me

Check this out. It's is personal countdown that tells me precisely how many seconds until I hug my Mom at the arrivals gate next month. You can make your own at the site.

Jiminy Cricket--this is post #100

With the 100th post, I celebrate blogging by creating my first link.

This is Muslim BBQ. Lots of meat, lots of bicycle spokes, and extra large bottles of local beer.

Hot Pot

Huo Guo or "Hot Pot" is a tasty experience.
A pot of spiced water and oil is kept boiling by a gas burner below the table. You can order a great deal of raw meat and veggies or noodles to boil.
We like paper thin slices of lamb, frozen cubes of tofu, cabbage, spinach, and potatoes. After everything is boiled, you have your choices of sauces. The favorite is a peanutty tahini type sauce.
And while you wait for everything to cook, you can munch on pickled garlic. Whew!

If it weren't for all the boiling water splashing about, I think this idea could take off in America. Or has it already?

Josh and the Cat and the Couch have some good Color Coordination going on

Nothing to worry about, Diane

In the show (which looks like it was filmed in some high school auditorium) we taught a taxi driver some English relevant to his profession in preparation for the influx of lowai in the summer of 2008.

My Chinese cohost, BaoJie or "Bonnie", said she needed a sign off for then end of each show (we filmed seven) and I convinced her to say, "You stay classy, Ji'nan!"
I told her to point to the camera and wink, but she didn't go for that.

Talking the Walk

Yesterday Josh and I set out to walk to the supermarket. Seconds after we were through the university gate, I let out a long and distressed sigh. My companion did not take notice of the sigh as I'd expected, so I asked myself, What’s on your mind? and what I found was a little surprising. There was nothing on my mind.
So what was the deep sigh all about? After a moment of confusion, I discovered that it was just a habit I’d formed. Every time Josh and I go for a walk, I empty out the contents of my mind as though it were a ‘junk drawer’ from the kitchen. With the scattered contents, Josh facilitates a discussion in which we throw out all the useless junk and organize the important stuff neatly back into the drawer.
Thankfully I have a number of friends with this skill. I don’t know how well I would survive without them.

I decided to tell Josh about what had just taken place in my head and how I had been a Pavlov’s dog with the walking and my sigh. We walked and I told him of how my drawer felt a pleasant emptiness, the conversation periodically interrupted by our need to separate for survival. [Sharing a narrow and pockmarked sidewalk with fruit stands, birdcages, cyclists, parked cars and moving cars makes it impossible to stroll side by side.]

I was having one of those days where I'd decided most of my thoughts and words were needlessly thought and spoken. In a way, though, I felt like I had cut myself loose from the need to think. Loose from everything that bothered me. I was suddenly so detached that I couldn’t even remember what it was like to concern myself with…anything.

All those thoughts about my future. All those thoughts about my past. All those thoughts about what other people are thinking of me. All those thoughts about what I think of other people. All that time.

“We are just floating around out here. I feel so insignificant and ashamed for thinking about myself so much. All that struggle to make sense of myself; what a waste of time. What is time anyway?”
Josh quickly replied, “Ask that to someone with cancer. Every minute is defined. We have all of eternity to float around; we only have a finite number of years to be here. You can only talk this way because you aren't suffering.”

And then I felt clarity. I thought, I have to become part of something more important than myself and I have to do it quick. I felt rushed because in the very back of my mind, I knew these feelings wouldn’t stay with me for long. Now, they were so crisp and tangible, but soon I would be in the grocery store and in the midst of all those people and products and sounds, I would lose them in aisles of soap and air freshener. I would let them get lost.

It would be just like that feeling you get when you walk out of the theatre after watching a movie like Hotel Rwanda; so desperate to help. Absolutely inexcusable to stop thinking about this movie and to forget about suffering.
Don’t stop. Don’t stop. Don’t stop. Can I think myself into action?
I feel like I need to sit down have a serious discussion with myself in which we carefully consider what sacrifices I can make. I am trying to get all up in my face and make a lasting impression.

All in a day's work

At some intersections around here, you might get the idea that a big concert or sporting event had just let out; people are pouring across the road weaving through cars awkwardly crammed onto the street as if lanes were an afterthought. Sometimes this disregard of the road rules infuriates me. It feels like one huge game of Chicken. Everyone is out for himself. Those of us with a little less nerve will move and accommodate at the last moment. You might call us considerate or maybe just cautious.

I don’t often see road-rage around here, its more of a road-recalcitrance. On a fellow commuter, what may look like a smile that says, Beautiful day, huh? is really an apathetic smirk that says, Oh, am I in your way? Did I just cut you off? Sorry, sucker!

But sometimes I see things differently. Sometimes I see this beautiful ebb and flow of cars and bikes and people, a symphony of constant motion, maybe even an unspoken cooperation between all of us.

Work was kind of like that today too. At first I couldn’t see beyond my bad mood, but eventually I came around.
Last week I was sick and had to cancel my English class with the kindergarteners. My contact at the school laid the guilt on me pretty thick for canceling. Today, all I could remember was how upset I was over the guilt trip and how hyperactive the kindergartners were. So after a long morning of teaching at the Medical school, I was dreading the kindergarten class.
But when I knelt down and twenty Chinese six-year-olds surrounded me, I felt my bad mood loosen its grip. We sang and solved riddles. Mostly we laughed the six-year-old laugh that starts in your belly and reverberates all through your body until your head tilts back, your lips are stretched wide, and sound is bursting up and out of you. They laughed at my animal impressions and I laughed at their six-year-old laughs.

On the way home, the five o’clock traffic was in harmony. Through heavy smog and pollution, the sun cast a reddish glow. I thought everything looked beautiful. Even the litter in the gutters was gently rippling, almost dancing like the plastic bag in American Beauty. I gazed at couples doubled up on bicycles. I saw a mother and son eating ice cream on a stick and guessed that it was her idea to throw out the rules and have ice cream before dinner. I imagined the two of them ten minutes before and I could see his light up when she said, How about some ice cream?
I love China, I love China kept circling through my mind and every time I exhaled the words would tickle my lips, itching to be spoken-----like when you want to say something so badly that it swells up and repeats in your head until you can’t concentrate on anything but those words. In the end I just swallowed them back down and let the thought take its time to bleed out of my head. And before I knew it, a new thought had worked its way in and taken over, What’s for dinner, what’s for dinner?

It seems my rock star status has worn off with the Medical college girls. Now, I am just another person trying to get them to think at four in the afternoon. They get that labored look on their faces and are beginning to squirrel around in their seats.

Last week, if I broke a piece of chalk and muttered “oopsy”, I heard little “oopsy” echoes and giggles all around the room. And if anyone let out a peep while I was talking, two dozen “shhhhhh!”s would hiss all around the room until there was nothing but air particles and chalk dust in between my words and their eager ears. It was beautiful. Now who’s doing the shushing? Me.

Look out, Diane Sawyer

This week I will fulfill my secret lifelong dream of becoming famous among millions. I will be the star of my own television show. At least that’s the gist I got when this proposal came to me.
A student of mine said that Jinan Television Station wanted to find someone to co-host a show that teaches a little English lesson everyday. I told him I was certainly interested and not two days later, I got a telephone call from someone at the station. The woman suggested that we discuss all this over dinner. How very businesslike. I played out scenarios in my mind of how my big break into stardom would later be described as having humble beginnings at a small television station in China.

Last night I dressed up extra special for our dinner meeting. I wanted to radiate charismatic TV personality. We made a little bit of small talk as we walked to a restaurant of my choosing, but I couldn’t wait for Bonnie to start talking showbiz with me. The first thing Bonnie said to me on the topic was this: We can’t pay you, is that okay?

I could feel a big smile sweep across my face as I had a little laugh at myself. I was reminded of an experience I had at the United Blood Drive shortly before I came to China. My agenda was to determine my blood type. It seemed to me the perfect combination of giving (blood) and receiving (information and oatmeal cookies). When I signed in, I asked about the blood test and the nurse told me she could mail it out to me in several weeks. The blood results were not going to be timely so I turned to head for the door. A split second before calling “okay, thanks anyway!” over my shoulder, I remembered that I was not in the blood test store; I was in a place where people come to give. How could I dare to add my name to a list of givers---a list of good people---with such a selfish motive? How on earth could I forget about giving? Luckily, I was the only one who knew of my secret agenda and my sudden instinct to leave; a nurse promptly whisked into a little office to give some personal history. After forty minutes, it seemed I was the ideal blood donor.
Just one more thing, have you had any unusual injections lately?
As a matter of fact, I had been stabbed with a number of needles only the day before, I was carrying a little bit of Hepatitis B, a drop or two of Japanese Encephalitis, and some Typhoid fever. And so it happens, they didn’t want my temporarily diseased blood.

Back to We can’t pay you, is that okay?
Of course I said, "yes that’s fine". It was the fame I was after; the riches would surely follow. But I did have the realization then and there that this was probably going to be a low budget production. No make-up lady, no trailer, no snacks. And my visions of reading off the teleprompter were shattered when Bonnie asked if I would please write the script and print out a few copies.
Hold up. Did I just go from Michelle Pfeiffer in Up Close & Personal to an unpaid English-speaking intern before we even looked at the menu? The straight story is that we will do our own make up, film it all in one afternoon, and every night a five-minute segment will air.
So, the beginnings might be really, very humble.

You know the one

Last night we went to a big party for the Bank of China. Everything was wonderful except I had a really sore throat. The kind of sore throat that makes you carefully weigh the pros and cons of dismembering your entire head and neck. The one where you would prefer to let someone is push whole Doritos down your tonsils than to swallow your own saliva. The kind of sore throat that when you yawn, it feels like 30 stitches are about to rip apart somewhere down there.
At one point, Josh asked me if I would pay $1,000,000 for the sore throat to be gone. That question is absurd because I don’t have that kind of money, but it did make me consider how much I would pay to part with the pain: US$150.

When squeezing a steady stream of honey down my throat proved unsustainable, I tried gargling saltwater and then tried to get some crushed aspirin to have a wee rest in between my mouth and my stomach. But alas, nothing helps the cause for too long.

I sat up in the middle of the night and imagined the Word document I would have to type out to Josh in the morning. I planned to describe to him that it was too painful to talk and ask him to make some phone calls for me. When I finally did get up, I let all the pain and stress of inconvenience overcome me until I was in tears making everything worse. Even though I knew working would be a step in the wrong direction, I wanted someone to say, “You can’t teach this morning! Are you crazy?! Go back to bed!” and thus relinquishing me of any guilt attached to making that call by myself.

In the end, I didn’t teach my morning class in hopes to get enough rest so that I could teach in the afternoon. It would be my first day at my new job at the Medical College. My new boss, Wangju, called me early this morning and I thought it might be my opening to explain to her that I was really not well enough to come in and teach,

Wangju: Hi Betsy. The driver is coming to get you today at 12:45pm today. At the South gate, okay?
Me: Oh, hi, Wangju. Actually the reason I am at home right now is because I am feeling very sick. I might need to go to the doctor.
Wangju: Oh, you are going to the doctor today?
Me: No, not today. Maybe tomorrow.
Wangju: Then you teach here this afternoon, okay?
Me: Uh…okay. Yes.

It’s my own fault for being such a sissy. I know that subtle hints don’t work around here, but I didn’t have the courage to come right out and say I couldn’t do it.
Fortunately, I felt a lot better by midday when I had well and truly put an end to my pity party. And as it turns out, teaching at the Medical College is a lot of fun. I teach one hundred and fifty of China’s future nurses; one of them is male. The rest: a sea of 19-year-old girls. Not only are they extremely easy to please, but also they are more than willing to participate. I think I will look forward to my classes at the Medical College.


Speaking of ladies, it turns out yesterday was Woman's Day in China. So, all us ladies handed in our banquet tickets to take a spin in one of those big barrels that turns with a handle. Ten tickets were drawn from the barrel on stage. I had a side bet going with Josh on whether or not my name would be drawn. He bet no and I bet yes.
One Chinese name after another was called out as the tickets were drawn out of the barrel. And then there was a long pause that caught my attention. Suddenly, two heads were looking down at a ticket. Then, a third man was called over to study the ticket! I knew it!
"Bee..eezz...buh ezty?"


Yes! I won! This is me collecting my prize from some important men at the Bank of China. My prize: BeiBei, JingJing, HuanHuan, YingYing & NiNi! These little Olympic mascots are big celebrities around here!

Big Day

The workload is extremely comfortable around here. With five different groups of students, we are able to use the same lesson plan all week long. On a Friday, this could result in a flawless execution of the lesson or a sick-and-tired-of-this-material drone. Of course we aim for the former.
I am just going to put it out there: we teach for 15 hours a week at the University. I try to take a moment every day to appreciate that this will probably be the most casual workload I have until retirement. That moment usually takes place somewhere between my daily siesta and Oprah.com.

On the occasion that we have to work a grueling six hour day, we come home completely incapacitated, unlock door and directly plant face on couch. Yesterday was Saturday and I taught for two hours. Now, all this weekend activity has left me with aching eye sockets and the taste of blood in my throat. Before you jump to conclusions regarding my sluggish ways, I should mention that on top of my two hours work yesterday, I also sampled dishes at a culinary competition for Jinan’s most acclaimed chefs.

This was more than your average food tasting, I think. Four Americans, including myself were swept up in a mob of photographers, and reporters. We posed with chefs. We posed with food. We gave interviews in which we declared a soup “delicious” or pumpkin turned eagle “absolutely amazing”. The whole situation had me divided. Half of me loved all the attention, one quarter of me did not, and the other quarter just felt embarrassed that we had done nothing to deserve this attention other than simply being western.

Others who attended the competition watched us with their arms folded. I was certain they must have been thinking how ridiculous it all was. I longed for a way to express to onlookers that I knew I wasn’t anyone important and didn't expect to be honored just for coming.














But honor us they certainly did. In a private room, we had an elaborate lunch with the five finalists of the competition, the hotel owner, the event coordinators, and two translators. The food just kept piling up, cicadas, squid, various mushrooms, vegetable balls, boiled peanuts, and a large fish surrounded by squares of tofu. As it usually goes in China, we were encouraged to try everything. Eat.Eat.Eat, they told us. The chefs smoked cigarettes, and watched us as we ate and ate and ate.
Every few minutes someone would stand up and propose a toast. We would all lean into the circular table and reach across with our glass of red wine. To show respect to someone, you hold your glass lower than theirs when the two glasses clink. Quite often, during a toast, two glasses will quickly travel down towards the table, both people unwilling to clink until they are holding their glass lower. When the two glasses finally come together, an inch short of crashing into the lazy susan, there is an exchange of laughter and smiles.
“To Chinese friends and Foreign friends” Gambei!
“To Chinese cuisine and wonderful chefs” Gambei!
“To beautiful women” Gambei!

And then when we had shown our utmost appreciation by way of eating through 11 lbs of food apiece, we were asked “Now, noodles or rice?” It’s traditional to have some noodles or rice at the end of the meal, to fill you up of course.

The man who writes with soapy water has a well trained dog

This man writes with soapy water and his sweater clad dog trots through the maze of slippery characters. Never a single paw misplaced.