All my dishes are gone: bowls, plates, and plastic containers. My most useful frying pan and a small saucepan. Several other convenience items and foods are missing. It’s not surprising that a thief would remove locks, but this thief takes the time to put the locks back!

Until I have a solution, the floor of my small room is littered with cooking equipment. Foods that a mouse would enjoy must remain in the kitchen. I met a neighbour while I was taking things back to my room and he says he’s lost cooking oil, dishes, and other items. Someone here is robbing from all of us. Even if I could cook, I don’t have anything left to eat from.

Cat sleeping with toy mouse (Flickr photo by Artiii, Creative Commons).

I’m afraid that my food will be stolen. My new neighbour is rude and loud… probably a thief too. A mouse is now living in the wall beside my bed. 哎呀！ This is the second time I’ve had this kind of neighbour since I moved to the International House in Halifax.

我有点儿害怕我食物被偷。我新邻居很无礼，很响亮。。。想他也是小偷。一个老鼠现住在床边的墙里。哎呀！从我搬家到哈利法克斯的International House公寓，这是第二次我有这样的邻居。

Update: The building owner arrived with poison today. No one had told him about the mouse, but his timing was perfect. Problem solved? I hope so! Friends with cats are especially invited to visit anytime.

我最近搬家到了加拿大哈利法克斯，在圣玛丽大学学习商业。在加拿大换大学换得不难，但是不太容易。比如我以前在温哥华是电脑老师。圣大商业学生都学习程电脑课，内容是Access, Word, Excel,等等。我觉得太容易的课。老师说：我必须参加程电脑课，所以没办法。

我星期一，星期二晚上有上课，不可以吃中秋节的特别的菜。我真想在天津我和朋友们2004年一起包饺子，吃饭，喝白酒。这次晚上有数学课。我以后安排教哥哥的小孩儿怎么包。觉得他们太小，但是可以好玩儿。在加拿大可不可以买中国的白酒？我不知道。我从中国只拿一瓶山西的白酒。如果在哈利法克斯要真的中国食品，可以买。我已经买了饺子皮儿，花椒，等等。两次我自己做葱油饼，但是做得不好啊！我不熟练。做炒面比葱油饼更容易，所以常常做。

你中秋节在你家乡吃什么菜？

Happy Mid Autumn Festival everyone!

Saint Mary’s University (圣玛丽大学)

It’s really normal for the water pressure to be non-existent for long periods of time. I have slowly learned that from about 8 to 11:30 every morning the water pressure is no more than a trickle — good enough for brushing teeth, but impossible for showers. The water always comes back for an hour or two at lunch and for most of the evening. In addition there is some random times when the water will flow at a barely useless trickle. Today is different.

I’m starting to wonder if my landlord paid for the water this month; certainly, I paid him for the water as I do every month. I’ll try to contact him tonight. He works in the night and probably can’t help me now anyway. Luckily I have some bottled water in the house. Bottled water is a basic provision around here since the water from the sink is always of a questionable quality. At least I can brush my teeth before teaching my English class; my students don’t need to suffer from second-hand halitosis.

Update: My water is back. I don’t know what happened. Now I’m back to being able to shower (assuming the water pressure is present) and boil water, as I normally have to, for drinking and cooking.

A quiet hidden street

Another foreigner introduced me to a small restaurant that was in an area hidden from me until I was introduced to the pedestrian thoroughfare that links two major shopping streets — essentially a shortcut. I’ve now decided this little restaurant has the best eggplant dish I’ve eaten in China. Tonight I decided to show this restaurant to another foreigner.

While sitting together in the small empty restaurant, a Chinese man came into the restaurant to pick up some food to take out. As he walked past us he stared a little bit and casually asked the restaurant owners about their new foreigner customers in the same way someone might ask about the weather. I met his gaze with a polite ”你好“ (hello) and suddenly he was standing over our table and interrupting our conversation with 3 questions:

1. Where country are you from?
2. Where do you work?
3. What is your salary?

Every conversation I have in Nanchang starts with #1 and #2 and usually becomes a chance for the person to ask as much as they can about my personal life. People are curious in cities where foreigners are a rare sight, but it surprises me that no one seems interested in my opinion of their city, or what life is like in other parts of the world. Not that my opinion matters, but instead of talking to people, I find myself being interrogated.

Recently I mentioned on this website about different privacy boundaries held by North Americans and Chinese people. The students of my oral English class think it’s pretty funny that western women would keep their age a secret, let alone lie — even jokingly — that they’d been 30 for the past 10 years. It seems equally amazing to me that a total stranger would ask me about my salary.

In Tianjin I had purchased three sets of flash cards that each have 100 cards to help learn 汉字 (Chinese simplified characters). I don’t use them very often, but they are still very helpful to me. Today was one of those days when I whipped them out while sitting cross-legged on the styrofoam floor mats in my living room. Despite the foggy feeling of having a cold, and having not looked at these cards in months, I managed to correctly identify 75 of the characters in the first set. The frustrating ones are the characters that I recognize, but I can’t identify — after 14-months, every character looks familiar.

When studying, I often listen to the TV to hear what a good accent sounds like; I think Chinese TV is particularly good for this because almost everything has subtitles that are really great for studying. Like other days, today I kept catching words I understand, but were used in contexts I did not understand. Some text messages with a good friend of mine in Tianjin enlightened me to the meaning of these words, but there’s no dictionary that can help in situations like that. It’s comforting to know this is the universal experience of learning a foreign language.

Feeling dizzy and hungry, I escaped my apartment to catch dinner with a friend. My apartment is about 3-blocks away from the school and one can never be sure how the local people will react when I emerge from my apartment. The people I pass in the hall of my building are quite friendly, always giving me a “你好” (hello), or asking “你吃了吗” (have you eaten?) — especially when I greet them first in Chinese. Outside the building there are always lots of people walking around, playing poker or mahjong, and otherwise being very social. I suppose I’ve never wanted to submit myself to the endless questions of nosy and curious neighbours (who could blame them), but each day I can feel like I’m on parade as I leave my apartment.

I walk through the complex to the only exit gate and sometimes get a friendly response from the security guard, or the old men and women who perch there. Less frequently now I can still occassionally catch someone’s voice behind me asking other residents what building the foreigner lives in. Today a girl younger than 10 was looking at her friend while they walked toward me along the sidewalk. When she turned to look at the person in her path he jumped in surprise and put her hand on her chest momentarily winded. Some old people snickered quietly while I just smiled and said, “你好” (hello), to the stunned little girl. The expression on her face was so dramatic, thus inspiring the title of my article today.

Today I was greeted by a family possibly from the Xinjiang autonomous region. Fairly or unfairly, most people warn that crime and pick-pocketing is high when many of these migrant workers pass through. I dislike generalizations, but this particular band was suspiciously walking up and down a small strip of a busy sidewalk and my friend suggested we’d better move along quickly just in case. It seems like everyone I’ve met in Nanchang has a story of being pick-pocketed. I haven’t had the experience and I have no wish to change that.

Today’s experience made even more shocking the news that a few days ago 10,000 students may have demonstrated and torched buildings and the luxury cars of their officials. I haven’t heard anything about this until tonight. Please note that my host school, Nanchang University (南昌大学), is not mentioned in any of the reports I’ve read online.

Chandelier in an administrative building

Walking around part of the campus while waiting for lunch gave everyone some time to meet each other. As I had seen the campus already, meeting my classmates was the real fun. We ate some food at the school cafeteria before returning to the school.

Wednesday dropped a little bit of rain, so when I met our leader for another outing, the group was decidedly smaller as most would rather stay in their hotel. Only 4 of us, plus our guide, ventured out to explore the shopping along 中山路 (ZhongShan Road). I had been to this area before, but I managed to discover a few new spots including an interesting indoor market of clothing, toys and knick-knacks, and even bolts of fabric. This is a place I’ll have to return to and explore futher.

Local market

When Thursday rolled around, we met for our first pre-class. Our very capable and knowledgable teacher wanted to introduce and review our pinyin knowledge and pronounciation. I found it a bit boring, only because pinyin is the only part of Chinese language I’ve been able to practice this past year, but the practice is always good. Every day I sit in my apartment and read out-loud all the combinations of initials and finals that make the sounds of Mandarin Chinese and I will probably find a tutor to drill me and correct my pronounciation mistakes — an easy job because I make so many. Outside our 7^th floor classroom window we could see all the freshmen going through an annual ritual of manditory military training. The USB on this 网吧 computer isn’t working, so maybe later I’ll upload a photo or two of the kids learning to march.

Tomorrow is Monday and will bring us our first week of real classes. The 20 foreigners here have been divided into two groups: a beginner (Group A) and advanced group (Group B). I was placed in Group A because my vocabulary is so limited, but I want to be at a higher level. I don’t want to lose the next few weeks reviewing basic pronounciation when I’m ready to study vocabulary. Honestly though, when you consider that some the Group B students have 3-years of study in their home countries, I think Group B is going to be out of my league. I wish there was a middle group. Part of this frustration just comes from the simple fact that one year later my language skills are painfully limited. In Tianjin I had to pay extra — beyond my tuition — to have some serious Chinese language classes. That was 8-months ago, and in the time since then I’ve had to devote my energy to being successful in my business classes (taught in English) for the sake of my GPA and academic career. It’s just exciting to be studying at all, now that my living and school situation has finally become stable. Maybe next year I’ll be able to return to Tianjin and shock my friends by speaking in their native tongue. That would be so great!

There’s nothing strange about starting a bit slow and then being overwhelmed quickly. My other friends studying in China say that learning Chinese has that effect. They say you start to learn 5 characters a day. It’s nothing really. But after the second week, you are trying to remember characters you learned in week one and what started out simple is actually quite a challenging exercise. At least I can say that my ambitious desire to reach Group B is extra fire to motivates me to study hard. 好好学习中文！

Extra motivation isn’t really required though. Once you are here, motivation is everywhere. The more you can speak, the more you enjoy just being in a really great and interesting place. One of the big fears for people coming here is how to find food. There is plenty of food that can be ordered by pointing, so ordering from a menu is an extra pleasure. This past week I’ve been planning to cook two meals. I want to try making Korean Kimbab now that I have a labratory in Nanchang. China’s Mid-Autumn Festival falls on October 6^th this year and the traditional food to make at home with friends and family is dumpling, called jiaozi (饺子). A friend from Tianjin has given me her recipe for jiaozi and I plan to host a big lunch at my place to celebrate this festival and welcome them to China. For both of these recipies I have a small list of ingredients which have given me something specific to study.

Translating the English names of vegetables — particularly special ones, like pickled yellow radish for Kimbab — can take me hours. The payoff for adding these new words to my vocabulary makes the learning fun. Yesterday I went to a restaurant with some classmates and for the first time I felt like some of the menu made sense to me. It’s a slow process, but it’s extremely rewarding. There was a time when it was fun to order a dish from the menu and not know what to expect. I was never disappointed by the food that arrived. By reading a menu I can now avoid dishes I’m familiar with and try new things.

China is full of surprises. Yesterday, one of my classmates learned of a football match (soccer to you North American readers) at a nearby stadium. For RMB$5 we watched the local team try in vain to break the zero-zero stalemate. I was most impressed by the well mannered local hooligan whose shirtless torso was covered in team slogans. Donning giant red horns and a giant 八一 flag, he led the energetic crowd to chant in support of the home team. I never saw anything like it in Tianjin.

Later in the night, after exploring other parts of the city, we spotted dancing at the park outside the stadium. When we approached, we were soon surrounded by local people wanting to say hello and be friendly. It was quite an overwhelming experience to watch everyone waltzing while being overloaded by questions from curious local people. I did learn about an English corner that usually draws about 100 people (or so I’m told) at 9am every Saturday and Sunday at 8-1 Square (八一广场).

Sometimes I’ve been having a strange cultural experience. In Tianjin, all the foreigners came to China with very little understanding of customs and we modified our behaviour accordingly. After a few nights of having dinner with some of my new classmates I’m very aware of small things I would have never noticed before. I spoke today with a foreigner I knew in Tianjin and he asked if I noticed people doing ‘rude’ things. I don’t think of them as rude, per se, because they are being very polite for their own culture; however, they are unknowingly rude in small, yet noticable ways, when you are immersed of Chinese culture. We had a good laugh. It’s just one of the strange experiences you get to have when you’ve been living abroad for a while.