Changzhou – Fashion City

Posted on 31 October 2010 by gypsy

Yes, Changzhou is the City of Fashion, at least for a few days as the exhibition centre at the Changzhou Olympic Stadium finds itself busy with buyers and sellers interested in fashion.  It is “brand name” time featuring the top brands that are found locally and outside of Changzhou.  You can buy all kinds of formal and informal clothing at this exposition.  It’s amazing to both of us that this city is both modern and yet has a “provincial” atmosphere.  People drive rusty bikes and BMWs.  Outside of our apartment, the car wash is very busy cleaning nice shiny new cars.  And passing by our window are bikes and wagons that make us think of life lived a hundred years ago.

On Friday evening when we went to the theatre to watch Othello, we noticed that there was a lot of banners and other things outside of the Olympic Stadium which was just across the street.  When we went for a walk yesterday, we stopped in and found out that the hype was all about an exposition, a trade fair, featuring clothing for the most part.  Just about anything you could think of was for sale from socks and footwear to expensive fur coats.

There is no doubt that with wealth comes an almost insatiable desire for being dressed in the height of fashion.  At news stands throughout Changzhou, fashion magazines are available for anyone interested.  Magazines such as Vogue are all available in the Chinese language, using Chinese models.  This focus on fashion is bought by the young people that we teach as we see the students coming dressed to kill to classes.  As Maureen tells it, the campus is the perfect display case for the young men and women to strut their stuff hoping to make that perfect impression.  Shopping areas in the downtown area are also  places where the fashion conscious have an opportunity to wear their stylish clothing.

Hopefully, in a future post, we’ll include some “live” action shots of our students dressed up for classes.

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Getting Ready for Halloween

Posted on 30 October 2010 by gypsy

Yes, Changzhou is getting ready for Halloween too.  Well, the truth be told, it isn’t much of a deal at all.  It is more of a store thing and something for kids in schools – no trick or treating in China as far as we can tell.

Billboards at bus stops are advertising a big party in Dinosaur Park for the high school and college crowd, a party where they get to listen to a Korean band called Super Junior.  While walking in Hong Mei Park today we met some college kids who wanted to practice their English.  Of course the topic of Halloween came up and they let us know that Chinese youth are more interested in celebrating western world festivals than their own Chinese festivals.

But something tells me things are going to change even more.  Seeing this little person with his mom and seeing all the costumes and junk in the stores is creating a lot of pressure on the rest to catch up with the times if they want to be modern.  We wonder what Halloween will look like here in Changzhou in ten years?  Will trick or treating ever come to China?  Somehow, it just doesn’t seem to be too likely.

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Being at Home in Changzhou

Posted on 25 October 2010 by gypsy

With the weather turned cooler, darker and windier, I decided it was a good time to post a few pictures taken earlier from our visit to XueJia, such as this scene that reminded both of us of Suzhou.  Of course canals and scenes like this one would have been normal scenes in the past.  Today, the canals remain, but not as in this scene.  Today you can see this scene still alive in Suzhou and some of its surrounding villages.

This is just an interesting bit of embroidery, one that represents a scene that would only have been seen a few generations ago, a scene from the mid-eighteen hundreds wen the “white birds” invaded the Celestial Kingdom of China.

And finally, another scene from normal street life.  This lady is selling freshly made steamed bread that comes with any number of filling options, usually a bit of pork mixed with green vegetables or even more popular, just with the vegetables.

I have to admit that this time around we aren’t doing much in terms of eating “street” food.  Rather, we are treating living in Changzhou more like living at home.

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Teaching is More Than Students in a Classroom

Posted on 24 October 2010 by gypsy

This is Violin, our co-teacher.  No, she doesn’t always dress like this.  Here, Violin is taking part in a dance competition at the main campus.  With more than a thousand Chinese college instructors on campus, there are a lot of then who are taking part in traditional dance lessons with the aim of taking part in this annual event.  Of course there is more to it than simply practicing for a competition, there is the idea of staying in shape with exercise.

One of the side benefits is the ability to call upon these teachers, as well as a number of other staff members, to take part in performances in honour of visiting dignitaries.

Here you can see all the different groups that took part in the performance/competition.  At the end of the competition, the all worked as one for a final dance in order to create a wonderful rainbow effect of colour in motion.  Maureen took these photos when she attended this performance at the main campus while I slaved in the classroom on our campus.  Don’t you feel sorry for me?

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Posted on 23 October 2010 by gypsy

At several parks in town roller blade lessons are the happening thing for young people.  We see these lessons at Renmin Park near the city centre, Xin Bei Park near our apartment, and in the square in front of City Hall.  The idea is to keep the kids busy with learning some skill or studying to become smarter.  It’s all about trying to position one’s children to have them a leg up on their age-mates in the competitive job markets.  The unbelievable population of 1.6 billion people makes for a lot of competition

Another photo from early evening as I look out the kitchen window.  This is a fancy restaurant called the Shanghai Home Restaurant.  I can actually recognize the first two characters as those for ShangHai.  As you might notice, these photos don’t fit into any kind of particular theme, they are just snippets of what we see in daily life.

And now, a final photo for today.  This is a little girl we often see sitting on this chair outside of her parents’ small Muslim restaurant, a little noodle shop that is a popular place with the university crowd as the food is good and, more importantly, cheap.

Almost everything happens on the street.  In between busy parts of the day, the shop and restaurant owners hang out their laundry on racks.  Small businesses cook their noon meals or evening meals in rice cookers on a table near the cash register so that they can prepare the meal while also taking care of occasional customers.  There are no dull moments, even in a short walk of only one block in length.

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Learning From Co-Teachers

Posted on 21 October 2010 by gypsy

Last night we took our co-teachers out for a dinner.  Typically there is a co-teacher for each foreign teacher.  But this year, due to a number of other circumstances, there are four co-teachers being shared by the seven English-speaking foreign teachers.  The eleven of us enjoyed a good meal out to a restaurant none of us had ever visited before, one quite close to the apartment.  The idea was that we would take advantage of the co-teachers’ ability to communicate in Chinese in order to allow us to enjoy the meal in this restaurant where communication would otherwise have been a barrier.

Of course, it is always good for relationship between co-teachers and foreign teachers to socialise and leave school issues aside.  We get to know each other differently.  One part of the socialisation process that caught us by surprise was having me sit at the “head” of the table.  As the oldest male person in the room, it was expected that I would take this position of honour.  Of course it made for some hilarity among the foreign teachers who are more into “equality” in all of its forms.

Being in a comfortable location, away from the hustle and bustle of offices and main restaurant serving rooms, we were able to have some decent discussions.  The young teacher next to me asked all kinds of questions about being a principal in Canada and how staff are evaluated.  The reason behind his questions was due to the fact that we all will be “evaluated” in the coming weeks, Chinese teacher and foreign teacher alike.  Maureen got to talk about parenting with the woman she sat beside, a woman who has a young child at home that is becoming, in the mother’s words, “a bit naughty.”

It is at times like this that barriers between cultures and races are broken.  For example, one topic was about stereotyping.  Our co-teachers assumed that people in Canada are all white people.  Since one of the foreign teachers was from Alberta and was half Chinese, that stereotype was challenged.  We explained how as foreigners, when we walk down the street in Changzhou or anywhere else in China, everyone knows we are foreigners.  Yet, if they walked down the street of any Canadian city, everyone would assume that they were Canadian.

Besides building better relationships, these kind of gatherings help to cultivate friendships that are real.  We still maintain friendships with co-teachers of the past and with other Chinese colleagues that we have had the opportunity to spend time with over a good meal.

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A Little Bit of Happiness

Posted on 20 October 2010 by gypsy

This bush is interesting because of its scent.  When one passes near, the air is almost “delicious.”  This older couple is gathering some of these blossoms which will find their way into either some tea or as part of a cake.

If you can believe this sign, you can buy happiness.  This is a pastry and cake shop that is found all over the city.  I guess happiness is found in a stomach that has enough food.  One of the questions we ask our students is what they would do if they had a lot of money.  Almost everyone of them will give the answer of inviting all of their friends to a meal of delicious food so that they will be happy.  Of course we all know that they way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.

On one of our many long walks we came across this unique kind of work vehicle.  I think Maureen wants to have one.  It’s like an overgrown roto-tiller.  Believe it or not, these vehicles are still being made for use on work sites.  It’s amazing how we continue to find life so interesting here, even though we have “settled in,” and our daily life has become one of routines.   Each day gives us something new to smile about, and that is what happiness is for us.

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Crowds are a Fact of Life in China

Posted on 19 October 2010 by gypsy

I took this picture from the banks of the river that separates downtown Shanghai from the Expo site.  Don’t be fooled into thinking that everyone is outside enjoying the air on this ferry.  The inside cabins are packed as tight as the outside deck.  There is a fleet of these ferries running almost non-stop taking people to and from the Expo site.

Expo isn’t all about pavilions.  There was entertainment happening at several venues while we were wandering around the grounds such as this event which had different guys take their bikes through a circuit that had them jump up to a landing while on one wheel and then land on one wheel to then jump down to a different platform.  Entertainers sang and danced at a few more venues.  It didn’t seem to have the same level of entertainment as we experienced in Vancouver, but we only stayed one day and didn’t know enough Chinese to find out entertainment schedules.

By the American pavilion, several stations had representations of famous NBA stars such as Yao Ming, Steven Nash and Kobe Bryant.  Of all the sports, it seems that the young men are all into basketball.  Chinese university students rate Yao Ming, Yi Jianlian and Steve Nash at the top of their favorite starts.  Carter and Bryant are also heroes for them.  This photo will end up playing a central part in our lesson on sports later this year.

Well, that is about it for Expo 2010 in Shanghai from us.

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Shanghai Expo Part Two

Posted on 19 October 2010 by gypsy

It seems a good idea to post a few more photos of our visit to Expo so that you can get a better idea of what we saw while in Shanghai.  Here is a detail from the Canadian pavilion.  This is what Canada looks like in Mandarin Chinese – 加拿大 – Jiānádà. We did appreciate the variety of pavilions that were at Expo. Spain and Germany had particularly good designs for Eurpean countries while Thailand and China were the Asian superstars.

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Shanghai and Expo 2010

Posted on 17 October 2010 by gypsy

We got to the Expo 2010 site a bit later than we had hoped for and found ourselves in a line up to get into the site.  In case you are wondering, this is the second holding stage and we had one more yet to go before going through security and then onto the site itself.  Needless to say, the crowd inspired many to take photos and video of the “waiting in line” part of Expo.

We got to visit quite a few pavilions which was a surprise considering the numbers of people on the grounds, a crowd easily around 400,000 people.  The site recently set a record number of one day visits at 630,000 people.  We did get into various Central America and South America pavilions as well as African pavilions.  Of course we had to also go into the Ukrainian pavilion.

This is the best we could do as far as the Canadian pavilion was concerned.  The lineup was between two and four hours of waiting time.  The same was true of Australia, France, Italy, New Zealand and a bunch of other European countries.  The Asian countries had line up of four to six hours in length.  Even though the lineups were huge at so many pavilions, we did find enough to see without major lineups.  Of course we took time out to eat pizza at “Papa John’s” during the afternoon.

There is no question that the Chinese pavilion dominated the site.  Since the pavilion will remain long after Expo is finished, we hope to get to see it up close and personal at a different time.

As we made our way back to Changzhou we ran into a snag.  We assumed that the return G train would leave from a new train station near Hongqiao airport as that is the main base for all G trains, trains that travel at more than 300 kilometres per hour.  We found out when we got to the train station that for our return, the train was leaving from the main Shanghai station.  Of course it was too late to make the cross-city journey in order to catch the train so we booked another train to get back – a “K” train, the slowest in the fleet of trains.  Instead of an hour train ride, we would take almost three hours to get to Changzhou.  And, there were no seats left on that train so we would have to travel standing room only.  Now that was an experience.

 

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