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.