Home-stay

I’m sitting on the bed in my new home and it is an absolutely lovely morning. The sun is just starting to come in through the window, sending streaks of warm light across the room. In fact my room is immediately adjacent to the patio, so I have the screen door open and there is a warm breeze coming in. You all know how much I love the heat! :) Someone is downstairs in the gardens playing some kind of a traditional Chinese instrument and I can hear the notes drifting up between the traffic noise. The area I am living in is a huge gated community of lots of tall apartment buildings all surrounded and encompassed by this huge beautiful garden. There are fountains and pools everywhere and lots of meandering paths. The architecture and design is fairly European though, rather than Chinese. Yesterday evening my host parents took me to see the “work out area” which is basically a huge rec. center. Besides the traditional weight/equipment room there is ping pong tables, badminton courts, tennis courts, basketball courts, a dance area, mahjong tables, and two pools. Yes two pools, one outside for sunbathing etc, and one inside with lap lanes. The one inside has a huge glass dome ceiling so that you can look up and see the sky. Is it just me or is this insane?! I feel like I should be on vacation at some fancy resort.

My host family seems great. They are clearly extremely well off. The daughter is quite the little rich girl in that she has clearly been quite spoiled, but she is also incredible smart and precocious and has been making sure to take quite good care of me. She is 12 but comes across as older because she is so self-assured. The family seems to get along well. They laugh a lot and tell me that they have a very “joking” family. Most of these jokes go right over my head since they are in Sichuanese but they seem to have a good time. The mother and daughter act more like sisters than anything, which I feel like explains a lot about the daughter behavior. Both parents work for the government, the mom in taxes and I’m not clear what the dad does. Besides the immediate nuclear family there are two other women living in the house. There is an older woman who is apparently the father’s brother’s wife. I’m assuming the brother must have died. She takes care of most of the cooking and cleaning and acts as a housekeeper of sorts. She apparently grew up during “very bad times” and so she does not speak any Mandarin at all and is illiterate. She will be the hardest to communicate with. I like her already though. She smiles at me a lot, with a mouth full of very crooked teeth, and seems to have a lot of spunk. There is also a younger woman who helps a little with cooking and cleaning, but I am still really unclear on what her role in the family is.

I moved in yesterday and they took me to IKEA to get a little table and chair to study at. Haha that is right they took me to IKEA!! I realize that this is a globalizing world and all, but that was really quite funny. To be in Chengdu, China and be walking around picking out Swedish furniture, with the prop books on the shelves in Swedish and the cafe serving Swedish meatballs was really quite fantastic.

I am probably going to head back to campus around noon to help a bunch of the other girls move into their new place. They are renting this absolutely gorgeous four bedroom apartment right near the school. It is insanely nice, with beautiful views of the city, two balconies and hardwood floors. It is brand new as well, they literally got to pick out what furniture they wanted, request a western toilet, everything. The plan is that I will probably move in with them in February when McKinley goes back to the States. I feel kind of bad because my host dad is coming back from work to bring me back to campus. I feel bad because they keep having to bend over backwards for the helpless American. The idea is that he will show me the bus routes this time though, and then I should be able to do it on my own, so hopefully I will be a little more self-reliant from here on out.

Wow, this turned out to be a really long post! I guess I should wrap things up. I’m meeting my advisor for my research project tomorrow. On Wednesday we have orientation for school and our placement tests for Chinese. I guess that is what I should do for the next couple hours is brush up on my Chinese skills a bit.

End of Olympics

So the next couple posts are old, but I haven't been able to access blogspot to post them. The lovely Alexandra just helped me figure out how to get on, so should be able to post stuff now....

Hi again y’all!

Just wanted to check in. I’m on the plane headed to Chengdu at the moment. I’m very excited to get there and get settled in, but its also been really strange to have to leave Beijing and all the fantastic people I worked with. When you work that intensely with people, you really do become a family of sorts and you rely on them for everything, so it was really hard to say goodbye knowing that I probably wouldn’t see many of them ever again. On the positive side, I am certain that, some of them anyway, I will meet up with, and its lovely to think of all the places I can travel now and know that I have a friend there waiting to meet me.

Eddie is going to meet me at the airport and we will head straight to the school to register. I’ve had a bit of a scare regarding visa, since it will expire in a couple days and I need to get my residency permit ASAP. Hopefully should work out ok though, the key is that I won’t get my physical done, and this means I can stay in the country no longer than a year. I’m hoping that I will be able to stay awake the whole day. We had our work party last night, which wasn’t super intense, mostly a lot of dancing and singing, but I still didn’t get home until 3:00 or so. I didn’t even change, just laid down on my bed for a two hour power nap and then caught a cab to the airport. I’ve also got quite a bad little cold going on, so I’m hoping I can pull it together long enough to apply at the school and I don’t come across as some sick, wacked out American with bloodshot eyes. That would certainly make a great first impression eh?

I know I need to go back and fill in the gaps, gaps meaning the last oh two weeks of the Olympics or so, but I really can’t disentangle everything in my mind at the moment. I ended up going to quite a few events, we were generally able to get tickets to go in with the guests, and if not I usually managed to sneak in on my work pass. I saw swimming, badminton, diving, gymnastics, waterpolo, beach volleyball, a couple of sessions of Athletics and the final soccer match between Argentina and Nigeria. Not a bad selection considering that I wasn’t expecting to get to see anything. That being said, I actually was probably less aware of what was going on at the Olympics in general than many of you were. We certainly didn’t have any time to be watching events on TV or keeping up with the results for the various events. The only way I knew how an event went was if I was actually there, and even then I would usually have missed half the event and usually the last 10 min, running around getting water and snacks for everyone and getting things ready for their departure.

This departure part that I was discussing would often consist of what we called “line of sight”. We had these round lollipop shaped signs with the Lenovo logo on them, which we would hold in the air so the guests would know where to go. It got to a rather ridiculous point and became a kind of running joke, both with the staff but also the guests. For example, one guest rather pointedly told me“I can see the hotel in front of me, you can put DOWN the lollipop”. Amazing product placement for Lenovo though, since the lollipops went everywhere. I’m pretty sure it ended up in most pictures too, which means guests will be going home going “here’s us at the great wall, and the Lenovo lollipop sign” “That’s the Olympic Flame in the background, you can only half see it behind that Lenovo lollipop sign.” They were also popular picture items for local Chinese as well. This often made it very difficult to do your job as a lollipop holder since every 30 sec you had someone coming up asking to take a picture with you and the Lenovo sign. When you weren’t being used as a picture prop, you were being asked to swap pins. This apparently is a big thing at the Olympics, but I had never heard of it before. The Olympics becomes flooded with all these various pins, from sponsors, countries, sports, you name it. You wouldn’t believe how precious some of those pins become. The key is that you must wear them all on the lanyard for your Olympic accreditation. The goal is to have so many pins on you that you begin to walk slightly bent over from all the weight. This is how you know you have truly joined in the Olympics spirit. ;)

Outside of work we didn’t have much time to do anything else. I went by the Holland House one night which was a lot of fun. It is one of the the few national houses that you can get into without being a citizen. It is sponsored by Heineken and has a DJ and dancing every night, basically a big party. It is flooded with orange clad Dutch people though. And man are those people TALL, I’m not sure I have ever felt so small in my entire life as I did at the Holland House. We also went out to Sunlitun one night, which is the big expat club area. It was fun, but I wasn’t to impressed with the area. It was basically just very sketchy with a lot of glitz painted on top.

Can’t think what else to tell y’all about. Perhaps I’ll come back later and post a bunch of pictures and use them to tell a little better story. TTYL-Steph