My Month Long Travels Part 1

  Sorry I have not been posting as much as I should. I have been rather busy with life and other things, one being planning my Spring Festival Trip. It will consist of going to Xi'an to see the Terra Cotta Soldiers, other small towns, Harbin for the Ice Festival, Beijing to see the Great Wall, The Forbidden Palace, Tiananmen Square (that has the giant picture of Mao on the wall), then South Korea to see Seoul, the DMZ zone between North and South Korea, Busan and finally back to Changzhou just in time to start the next semester classes. I will be traveling with friends for some of the trip and by myself for others making my way around a large area of China.
  I started out yesterday heading to Xi'an on the slow train, which are similar to trains that we have in the United States, meaning it takes a long time to get across the country. Since Spring festival is the largest holiday celebrated in China that is the time when many people head back to see their families, it is like Christmas to the extreme. Since so many people do travel during this time a phrase has been coin of 'Spring Festival Migration' or 'Spring Festival Migrants.' These are people who go somewhere else to work and migrate back home every year for spring festival. It is during this time that schools are out for winter holiday so many families and college students return to their hometown to celebrate the holiday.
  Also, (mom skip to the next paragraph) during this time crime rates increase, for people need money to get back home so they steal it from other travelers. People who have not made very much money during the last year do not want to go home empty handed and have their family look down upon them so they will steal to make themselves look better in their families eyes. Getting robbed does not happen to everyone and if you are careful you will be fine but it is something that I have been told about by many other Chinese individuals. I have many many promise to be careful. Cities that are mostly for manufacturing will become empty during that time since everyone who was born outside of that city will leave to go home. I was told that Beijing will become emptier, we will see how many people are there when I arrive.
  With all the people moving the use of train travel increases leading to people being stuck places if they do not buy ticket early enough. This is almost what happened to me going to Xi'an. My school let me leave early so I could travel this distance with two Chinese friends but it was last minute so we did not have enough time to buy the fast train ticket so the slow train it was. However, all the sitting tickets were sold out so we had to stand part of the way. We transferred trains at one station so we could sit down the rest of the trip. I have taken long trips before but standing for seven hours is in a whole different ball park. Try standing in the same location and position for seven hours with people squeezing by you every fifteen or fewer minutes while trying to keep your luggage together while trying not to overheat, but not wanting to drink too much water so you do not have to use the train toilets. It was an experience.
  Heading towards the train to embark on our adventure is what the picture below shows.

    The train.

   This is getting on the train, for us it was standing room (below).

   Below you see people standing, they are not moving to their seat because they have just bought standing tickets, which means you just stand around the train until it come to your spot then you exit the train. The next three pictures are of people standing on the train. I ended up standing in front of the hot water area so many people squeezed by me to fill up their special keeping warm water bottles with hot water or added hot water to their instant noodle bowls. One time two people decided to make their instant noodles right when people were getting on the train so they were hindering everyone getting on the train and instead of moving to let people pass they just stood their until they filled up their noodles and water bottles. I was a little annoyed and was told that those people were just really rude. I now share their rudeness with you.

  This little girl in the picture was walking around going up to people with cellphones and kinda grabbing them to see what the person was doing on them. It turns out that she was wanting to listen to music on their phones. She went up to this one young man and did this and we thought that he was related to her because she was being so bossy to him but he had never meet her before in his life. She went to another young man and others standing around her that had their phone out. Below she is with the first young man listening to his music. I had her listen to my music for a little bit but she could not understand and did not want to listen any more. She was only six but she was not afraid of strangers, maybe overly friendly. She did say that she could not do anything with me because I was a stranger but them she said I was her friend so not a stranger anymore and she could talk to me, although I could not understand her. My friend, Alice, did most of the translating for me and was very patience when doing so. 

  Getting off the train in Xi'an around 8 in the morning.

  Outside the station with the many, many people.

  After the train station we headed for the hostel which is where I am at the moment. I was able to access WIFI so I could write this post. I am going to try to keep up with my posting during my travels so you do not get one insanely long post at the end of February upon my return to Changzhou. 

  Thank you to those reading and keeping up on my journey, I love reading your comments.

Food I Eat!!! aka "Food Journal"

  I was asked, quite a while ago actually, to write a post about the food that I eat in China. I had to wait until I remembered to take enough pictures of the Chinese food that I eat to write this post. Once I came to Changzhou I keep forgetting to take pictures of my Chinese food since that is what I eat all the time and I would just take pictures of the Western food that I found around the city. I will put both into this post. This post is going to kinda be a food journal. You can just look at the pictures if you want. All this food that I have taken pictures of I have found and eaten in China. Sorry about the bits taken out of some of it . . .

  This first one is pizza from Pizza Hut, it tasted the same but was ridiculously expensive. 

  This was from a place that I cannot remember the name of but it had the word 'Seven' in its title. It was okay, a little spicy but fine. When I ate this it was the first time that I had gone into Chinese restaurant in China, it was kinda fun ordering it in that I had no idea what I really was getting but was hoping that the one person in our group that was wonderful enough to translate for the rest of us was getting the orders correct. I also was given a bowl of soup which I have come to understand why and enjoy for I have a small bowl of soup for every meal at school. In China they do not really drink anything with their meals but will have a bowl of warm soup afterwards. It is suppose to be healthier for you.

  This is a famous noodle breakfast. A teacher took me here after I had my Chinese physical completed so I could stay in China as a Resident for the next several months. It was really good but there were soooooooo many noodles, I have never been able to finish a bowl of noodles yet in China.
  The next two pictures are of a meal that I had with another one of the teachers. We had finished school club that day and she took me out to eat. She really like fish so we went to a fish place. So in a sit down restaurant in China ordering food is a little different. In American everyone gets a menu and they order what they want individually and what they order they will consume individually. Everyone gets their own food. In China it is different, the sharing things happens. The groups gets one menu that they look through together selecting different dishes that everyone will share. The menu is usually a piece of paper or they will give you a piece of paper that you will check the box next to the item you want or write the item down on the paper. They waiter/waitress then takes the paper and turns it in for the order. You wait, then they bring out the first dish and over the course of your meal they will bring out all the dishes you ordered. As a group you will consume them as they come out each person having a little of the dish until it is finished and taken away. From what I have seen many Chinese groups order way too many dishes having much left over. Some with take the leftovers home while others will just leave them. For the two of us and our fish dinner we had the main dish of a fish cooked in several different vegetables and five different dishes on top of that. We did not finish it all but the teacher sent the leftovers home with me. I did not eat the left overs because later that night the fish enlightened me on just how much it did not like going through my digestive system.

  I kinda gain a little bit of weight during my first several weeks in China and no I do not look that much fatter. I blame it on the small bakery shops that I diligently searched for around where I live. China's food does not have the same unhealthy sweetness that is present in many American foods, at least the foods that I ate and because of this I was craving sweetness. So, every weekend I would walk around looking for a great bakery that had western tasting sweets, I found at least ten of them and I bought something from every one. The Cherry Cheese Cake below was one of my conquests. Needless to say this was not good for my waistline or my wallet and I have since controlled myself and lost my intense cravings. I still indulge every so often.

  The next three pictures are from a dinner that another teacher took me out to. We had a Ice Cream Sunday (which did not help me lose any weight from the Bakery Searching Fiasco/Or Success Depending On How You Look At It), A 'Meat with Rice and Cheese Thing' and a 'Cheese Thing With Unremembered Items.' You may be thinking 'what is with the cheese' and I will tell you. In China they do not eat very many dairy products so cheese, butter, sour cream, cream cheese, etc. are hard to find and expensive so, that night we decided to cheese it out since I like cheese and she likes cheese. This night I also tried octopus for the first time and the only thing I have to say is it is really chewy.

  I found an American Hamburger and almost died of happiness. The fries were amazing and I mean that word!! I have since gone back to this place four times for food. It is almost two time the cost of a cheap Chinese meal but it is so worth it!! It did feel weird actually having my own plate and not sharing with anyone.

  I do not understand why people eat these things looking like this. I feel so sorry for them and they still have their eyes. They are shrimp and I did eat one, breaking its back, pulling off its skin shell, and crushing it between my pearly whites. I only ate one and it was a traumatic experience. Now I just feel sorry for them when they appear before me, dead, in their bowl.
  I have had the fish below several times. It looks gross and you would think if I could not eat the shrimp from above how can I eat this fish. Well, the simple answer is that this fish tastes amazing and is supper sweet. Those two reasons make that appearance acceptable.

  This is fried shrimp. We (me and two other teachers from my school) had this when several educators from Holland visited the school. They were setting up a program to have several of their students experience school in China for a week or two. They will be back in spring.

  This was the meal I had at Nanjing, it was okay, rice, potatoes with meat, and cucumbers. It was okay as I said, it was also cheap.

  Another one of the desserts that I found on my Bakery Searching Fiasco/Or Success Depending On How You Look At It. It was delicious.

  This is what my school lunch looks like. This was not the best meal that I have had at the school canteen but it was one of the few times I remembered to take my camera with me to lunch. Everyday I get rice then I can choose from the many different dishes and they put some of it on my plate. The other teachers say what they want but I just point at it. The others things are potatoes and beef and a cabbage dish. You can see the soup that I have talked about.
  The next two dishes are from a restaurant near where I live. They were really good. I think they were Thai food. I went out with two teachers and one's husband was there too. I am not going to say very much about it because technically they were not suppose to be serving food to people because the residents near by complained about the smells of the food cooking and were keeping them from actually opening the restaurant. (Shhh no telling).

  I eat lunch and dinner at my school. Lunch is a meal and dinner is more like snack foods. Below in the picture are two items that I bought. The one on the left is a length of fried dough and the other is a 'hotdog' wrapped in a sweet tortilla like thing with sweet sauce and lettuce.

  The picture below is really just a roll, but it was a roll in China that was really good so I took a picture of it for you to admire.

  This was a dinner I had with friends at a Hong Kong restaurant. We order several different dishes, much of which was meat. They ordered chicken feet, which many people like and so I tried one, but never again. To me it looks like someone is eating baby fingers when they eat chicken feet because the feet stick out of your mouth when you eat the rest of it. Also, there is not much meat on the bone so you have to work hard to get your protein and I do not like to work for my food that much.
  The next two picture are of all the different snacks that I can get for dinner at my school, I have tried most of them finally figuring out which ones I really like. It is really cheap and you can get full, at least I can, off of only 4 yuan or 70 cents. I have no idea what the names are so these pictures are just for your enjoyment and wonderment of what they actually are : ).

  One evenings snacks with bits taken out . . . I was hungry and could not wait to eat something before I got back to the office and my camera.

  A bowl of noodles from some place in Changzhou. This is a friends bowl of noodles so I do not know if they were good.

  Egg tart with blueberries on it. Blueberries are rather expensive here in China, kinda like in Indiana during the winter. Egg tarts are rather popular and you can buy them at bakeries and grocery stores. (Once again my hand looks weird but at least it is not as bad as the picture I took in Nanjing).

  This next one was delicious that I still want to go back and eat it again. It is just a chocolate cheese cake that had much chocolate in it. Soooooooo good.

  At the same place I had a bowl of pasta. I was there for five hours straight one day with friends exchanging language knowledge (Chinese for English) so I had two things to eat with dessert first. It was really good, I am waiting for lunch at I write this and have a very strong desire to go back to this place tonight at eat food there . . . I am so hungry!! Never write a food journal right before lunch, a perfectly bad idea.

  Two more dinner snacks from my school. The second one is a kinda wrap with lettuce, a type of meat, some other things, and a dressing. I like it but it can be a little messy.

  Nanjing potatoes that can be found in places besides Nanjing. We stopped for them because they looked good. They tasted good as well.

  These next two pictures are of Finnish food that I tried. I had mashed potatoes and meatballs with a roll. I was a little disappointed by the roll, it was not as sweet as I wanted it to be and it said cinnamon roll. That to me was not a cinnamon roll, it must have icing. Also, the meal was a little over priced however, the owner came in while we were their and played the drums. Not sure if that made up for the price, but it was foreign food. This was during my Nanjing adventure.

  These last three pictures are of food that I lovingly consumed in Nanjing with two friends. We spend the day walking around and this was how we ended our adventure. The first picture is of dumplings (top), a rich cake with stuff stuffed in it (haha) (bottom right), and a bag filled with piece of meat which are hidden in the bag (bottom left). The next is of a bowl of noodles and last is of us eating the food. Look at that chopstick usage!

  I had no idea I ate so much food. That was crazy and took too long to type. If you have any thought on this Chinese food compared to Chinese food that you have eaten outside of China please leave comments about it. I may do another food log if I can remember to take picture of my food. It kinda feels weird to take picture because I have been here so long, do not feel like a tourist any more.

Parks in China . . . Or just me missing the grass

  I have not been so dedicated this past month with my posts. Sorry to my readers for that, I would assume you would be busy with family gathers and have limited time to read, that is my justification anyway. I arrived today to my desk and found five Christmas Letters from family and friends. Thank you greatly for remembering me. It was nice to sit and open each one, looking at the Christmas pictures and reading the letters. Glad everything is going well back home. No matter where you are in the world you have busy lives and many responsibilities, some more than others.
  This weekend, after the new year, I visited yet another park in China. Since there are so many people land is limited and wide open spaces are not to be found in urban areas. To counteract this Parks have been created for people to gather. Yet, these parks are different from the ones that I am use to in the States. To find a stretch of grass to sit down and have a picnic is actually harder to do then you would think in a city of around 3.5 million. These parks are usually taken extremely good care of and look beautiful but are mostly cement paths surrounded by manicured shrubbery, no taking your shoes off and walking on the grass. If there is grass their is almost a silent understanding that no one can walk on it. However, this weekend I found a park in my city that had a wide patch of grass were people were playing, or their children were playing at least. The park also had a lake where people could take out boats. It was a really nice day and many Chinese had decided to spend it at the park. Below are some pictures of the park.

   I thought the sign's use of English below was rather funny so I had to take a picture and share. I think I know what the sign is saying but not 100% positive on that one.

   This picture is of the large grass area that people were able to walk on. As much as I was missing grass I did not actually walk on the grass. I wanted to take my shoes off and walk on it but it was rather cold and I did not want to be stared at and have people thinking 'weird foreigner.' When the weather warms up I may come back.

   The water of this small lake was the clearest I have seen any body of water since arriving in China.

   The reason the tree have that white patches around them, I was told, was to protect them from getting a disease. I have not looked into it but that was what I was told when I inquired of another Chinese individual.