March 18, 2018 - Cherry blossoms

This was one of those weeks when we worked more than we played.  Hard to believe, isn't it?  We do try to focus our class preparation in ways that allows us time to explore as much as possible.  But it's early in the semester and we are still busy with getting all the lessons planned - and we gave our first quizzes this week, so the grading begins.

We did receive some unexpected news on Wednesday.  Back in the summer, while in Utah, we were extras for a TV show called "Studio C" which is a weekly family-friendly comedy show.  They aired our segment.  Kathy is one of the mourners and  John is the organist - you almost get a glimpse of him a couple of times, but only if you watch closely.  Anyway, we had fun doing it, even though they edited a lot out (including John's crusty stare at the people disturbing the funeral), and it was a fun surprise to find out it had aired.  It's the first skit of the episode, which has several comedy skits. You can see it at: Studio C Season 8 episode 13

In the "not so fun"  department, another BYU China teacher in Shanghai got appendicitis.  He first went to a traditional Chinese hospital. Decided it wasn't for him and navigated several subway lines with his wife (ouch!) to go to an "international hospital." We didn't see the first one, but when we visited him after surgery we could see that the international hospital was very nice.  While most of the doctors and staff are Chinese, they speak English well.  He had a good experience - if having appendicitis can ever be a good experience.

The biggest surprise of the week was the cherry blossoms.  One street on campus is lined with cherry trees, and apparently is famous enough to attract large crowds of visitors.  We knew we have a beautiful campus, but we were surprised to round the corner of the street and find it restricted to all traffic, including bicycles, because of all the pedestrians.  Mobs of people, most with cameras, out to see the blossoms! 

We found women (and girls) dressed up especially to have pictures
taken among the blossoms.

And there were other flowers in bloom on campus that were also attracting attention!

People pulled small children out
of strollers so they could explore
the blossoms. And get their
pictures taken.

What especially touched us about all this was the appreciation of all these people for the beauties of nature.

Other excitement revolved around cinnamon rolls - an unusual treat in China. Our friends, Jared and Heather Turner, own CinnaSwirl, a cinnamon roll store in Shanghai.  We went to the grand opening of their 2nd store on Friday.  They are located in the basement of a mall at one of the busiest subway stops in Shanghai.  And was it ever busy on Friday!  

Okay, we're used to busy subways, but when we looked down this escalator
and saw this sea of people, we had to take a picture. We haven't seen crowds
this bad since we visited the Terra Cotta Warriors during a national holiday.
The people on the right are riding the escalator down. The people in the middle
are taking stairs down. We are all hoping blissfully that we will be able to
navigate the crowd in the bottom to get to the subway. 

We successfully navigated the subway crowds and made it to the new store.  So open, bright, clean, and colorful with a wonderful smell.  And the rolls are delicious, too! They're based on a family recipe and can be ordered without frosting, or with light, medium, or tremendous amounts of frosting.

Samples! Choices include caramel frosting, walnuts, raisins, etc.

We ended the week with a near tragedy that had a wonderful ending.  John left his phone in a taxi on the way to church.  At the end of the meeting, he had someone who spoke Chinese call the phone, expecting whomever answered would not likely speak English - no answer.  "Find my phone" didn't work because he had changed the SIM card to a China SIM which wasn't registered with Google, etc. So he tried calling again, using Kathy's phone.  Someone answered!  He quickly handed her phone to someone who spoke Chinese.  A man had found it in the taxi, had taken it to his hotel with him, and was waiting for someone to call.  So we went to the hotel and retrieved the phone.  Wonderful! Amazing! A lost phone in a city of nearly 25,000,000 and a happy reuniting!  And a new friend...

Our friend Tammie did not have such a happy ending to the story of her lost phone, and that really was a tragedy. These phones are crucial to our success in navigating subways, finding our way around town, calling taxis, looking up information, contacting our classes (all of our classes are signed up on WeChat, the Chinese social media system that not only lets professors send out documents, etc., to their classes and answer their questions, but also allows us to pay for things by scanning QR codes with our phones). 

On the way home from the hotel, we crossed a river over the Garden Bridge pedestrian bridge right at sunset.  It was a pleasant and beautiful way to end the day and the week!

March 11, 2018

We meet a number of business people coming through Shanghai. Some visit our church on Sunday when they are in town for business trips. Some live here. On Tuesday of this week we attended a meeting of the BYU management society, where the speaker was one of the founders of doTERRA, a company headquartered in Utah but with a center in Shanghai. We learned about how they grew their business from a handful of people ten years ago to several thousand today, with a supply chain that spans the globe. We learned about their humanitarian work, which is impressive, and went home with samples of essential oils. Many of the international college students we meet here have aspirations to do business in China. This is a vibrant business area.

Our new challenge this semester is a course at the hospital affiliated with our university (for potentially anywhere between ten and one hundred doctors on any given day). We were asked to teach an English course they could take for continuing education credits, centered around the theme "The American health care system." It's an extra gig, which the hospital is willing to pay us for, and which we thought would be fun in a challenging way, as long as we do not have to be medical experts. We were assured that what they wanted was "a typical American perspective" about the American health care system. We may be calling on some of our typical American friends for help with this!

The biggest challenge as we started was that we did not know the doctors' level of English proficiency. We were also puzzled about how the lecture format we were asked to provide would actually advance their English, since practice is so important in language learning. We're still working those things out. In the meantime, we are hoping to learn a bit about the Chinese health care system; we're assigning the doctors to do presentations about the same topics we are. According to a questionnaire we passed out and feedback we have received, they need us to slow down our speech (a lot!), give them opportunities to practice pronunciation, and not take up valuable class time with pronunciation practice - sometimes conflicting needs! We continue to refine our approach

One of the doctors in our class 

When Kathy and Tammie, our neighbor, went to a Relief Society meeting Thursday night, John and Clay, her husband, took that as an opportunity to go find interesting food at a Hunan restaurant.  They ordered six dishes between the two of them.  And they all have something in common:

Eggplant with red and green peppers.

"Pork trotters" with red peppers

Cabbage with red peppers

Shredded potatoes with red peppers

Fried fish with red and green peppers

Hunan noodles (yes, there are red peppers)

They loved the dinner, but probably wouldn't order the potatoes again.  Speaking of food, John is always so pleased when he finds something "new" in a store.  This time it was "chili pepper" Snickers.  Okay, but not really an improvement on the original.

In some parts of China, Americans feel like they get stared at a lot.  We haven't really experienced that as much in Shanghai, probably due to all the foreigners that live here.  However, now that spring is here, we have noticed we get are getting more stares.  John figured out why.  The Chinese are still wearing coats when we go out in short sleeves!

This is everybody else on campus

How John was dressed to ride a bike over to campus.

We hosted another couple from the China Teachers Program for a few days so they could attend district conference meetings with us at church. They wanted to visit one of the famous water towns we've talked about, so we all went adventuring to Suzhou, a town 25 minutes away by high-speed train. It's famous for being part of the Grand Canal, which goes from Beijing to Hangzhou, connecting the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, and is one of the architectural wonders of ancient China. It's a UNESCO World Heritage site and is the longest canal in the world.

Suzhou is famous for its traditional gardens - at one point there were 200. We've heard great things about them, and several are also designated as UNESCO sites.

Spring is starting to show in the trees.

Traditional Chinese gardens have fancy paving stones. They also have
walkways constructed through "grotesque rocks." You can climb
through and often on top of tunnels. The goal was to make
landscapes that looked like hills and caves.

Particularly beautiful "grotesque rocks" were displayed with
custom-created carved stands.

Every angle is beautiful. And there are rooms with
elaborately carved furniture. The owners of a garden
would use the pavilions to meditate or entertain guests.

This garden contained a beautiful pagoda and lighted buildings.

By an interesting turn of events, we ended up joining a Chinese tour group. We wandered through two gardens, went on a canal boat ride, saw a silk factory and a pearl factory, but our transportation from place to place was in a bus full of Chinese tourists.  They had a helpful guide who spoke to us at great length in Chinese about everything we were seeing and doing. There was also a wonderful guide on the boat ride who talked all the way up and down the tour's section of the canal. In Chinese. We enjoyed ourselves but decided that next time, since John has students from Suzhou, we will hire a student to go with us as a tour guide. . . There will hopefully be a next time, because we barely scratched the surface of what there is to see, because spring will be in full force in a few weeks, and because it is only a 25 minute train ride away. It takes us longer than that to get many places in Shanghai. Stay tuned.

Oh, and we did find a new food we hadn't found before. Apparently, it doesn't have an English name.  Some sort of berry that is candied and dyed.  Pretty good, but not as good as juicy, sweet Mangosteen fruit!

Suzhou Hongmei berries

Mangosteen - so strange and so delicious!

In a popular Shanghai city park, we were attracted to some music we heard and went to investigate.  Not sure of the instrument.  It is a string instrument with keys and a pick. He played to the audience and favored us with an American tune.

We'll finish this week's blog with a video of the children's choir at our District Conference at church today. They were practicing the song they sang in our conference, one which brought tears to many eyes.

March 4, 2018 - Back to China

We're back! There were moments this week when we felt like we had a bird's eye view of what China is like for retired Chinese.

One morning we went for a walk and found a park we had never explored, even though it's less than a mile away. Tucked away in our little neighborhood is a pretty little 1.4 acre park. The fun thing about the park at 9:00 am is that it is alive with retired people (and some of their toddler grandchildren). Some are dancing, some are doing a slow motion type of martial art/exercise, some are playing shuttlecock (looks like hacky sack with a badminton bird on steroids), some are exercising by marching around the pathways clapping their hands or pounding on parts of their bodies, and some are exercising on the playground equipment - permanent, well-used exercise equipment for adults. Bird cages were hanging from the trees, complete with very vociferous thrushes whose cages had food containers made of painted porcelain. Men bring the birds to the park to give them a chance to be outside.

Another day we went with a friend to an area of Shanghai where we found little antique stores full of all kinds of treasures.

Hand-painted snuff bottles

And a market with pets (as well as some flowers and jewelry) you can buy: turtles of every shape and size, fish, rabbits, fluffy mice, salamanders, frogs (some pastel pink or blue), birds, and crickets. Yes, crickets. Although our students seemed unaware of the tradition, the tradition of keeping lucky crickets it is alive and well among retired men. Cricket fighting is a sport, but we haven't seen that.

Several varieties of crickets to choose from

The cool thing about this little slice of old China, where no building is taller than two stories, is that it's in the middle of an elite section of skyscrapers and Lamborghini dealers. We were told the government wants to keep sections of town as they were before all the modern growth so they can preserve that part of their culture.

The old and the new. Laundry day!

And some retired people in China, ie., BYU China teachers, had a busy first week of the semester.

Kathy's freshman class from last semester is now John's

John's business English class from last semester. 

On Wednesday, our biggest day, we set the alarm for 5 am. We'd been waking up really early because of jet lag, but we set the alarm to make sure we didn't sleep too late--we'd been too tired in the evening to finish getting ready for our day's classes. We taught our morning classes, ate in the cafeteria (one of our favorite things to do because there is such a huge variety of choices to try), ran off copies for our afternoon class, and took a taxi and a student interpreter to the University hospital, where we taught our first class about "The American Medical System" to about 80 doctors who want to better their English by taking a continuing education course from native English speakers. (Stay tuned for more information about that!)

After class we hurried home to change because we had tickets to one of the playoff games for the Shanghai Sharks, one of the China Basketball Association (CBA) teams. Since we didn't really have time for dinner, we were faced with the task of finding fast food on our way to the game. We weren't sure there would be much at the game, since eating does not play a major role in Chinese recreational venues. McDonald's was an option, but not our first choice. We thought we'd get baozi (filled, steamed buns) from the little shop around the corner, but they were out of all the filled ones, and steamed buns without any filling were not very appealing. So we continued down the street, in the rain, on our way to the subway station. We stopped at one little place for a piece of chive pancake bread which we ate on our way down the sidewalk, and another little place that makes a different kind of baozi called jianbao (a Shanghai specialty - see the post from January 28th of shui jian bao for pictures). Total price for the meal for eight of these meat-filled treasures, including sauce and chopsticks? $1.80 (USD)

We hurried into the subway station to get out of the rain and huddled our faces over our takeout bowl of jianbao. These are a bit challenging, because not only do you put a vinegary sauce on them, but when you bite into them they squirt hot meatball juice in random directions.  Kathy took one in her chopsticks (hoping not to drop it), bit into it, and because she was huddled so close to John, she squirted juice onto his coat. Payback happened, though, when he bit into his and a stream of juice squirted out on her coat. They forgave each other, caught the subway, got to the game only a little bit late, and watched Jimmer play his heart out but not quite achieve the win.

And we saw a retired man playing his flute along the street - seems to be a tribute to his son.  We are sure there is a great story, but not one we can learn without some help with translation.  So, we just enjoyed his music and made a small donation.

Busy week for a couple of retired people.