Transplanted

Nearly two weeks have passed since my last update. I have no excuse.

Well, I have several.  But in the end, I haven't updated again because I haven't chosen to.  Inertia can be an interesting experience, but it is by nature self-perpetuating.

I can't (and never have attempted to) promise any kind of posting regularity.  At least, not until I get my life more in order - particularly once I've rebuilt my desktop computer and situated a comfortable desk setup.  And those are unlikely to be anytime before the end of November, as I am on limited funds until then.

Still.  I can post now, having had some time to settle in and get my foster kitten situated.  I've called her Second, like the time measurement, as the Chinese word for second is miao.

I'm a dork.

But in my time here, I've found some interesting variations on familiar things, some nigh-indescribable things (those are basically banana-flavored cheetos), really just a whole host of new foods. In clockwise order: hot pot flavored potato chips, snack pancakes with banana pudding filling (banana pudding features prominently in snack pastry here), prawn flavored puffed corn (just as odd as it sounds), regular Oreos, 3+2 Hawthorne, 3+2 cheese, and what basically amounts to asian-seasoned Chex cereal.

3+2 is an interesting snack brand.  Hawthorne is a berry much like strawberry, in that it is extremely prevalent in sweets around here.  Hawthorne 3+2 is three Ritz crackers sandwiching two layers of sickly sweet berry flavored frosting.  3+2 Cheese is more or less Cheese crackers made with saltines, but slightly sweeter.

American convenience stores have a wide variety of a small handful of items (potato chips in 8 flavors from three different companies, chocolate bars from four different brands, etc).  Chinese convenience stores take that variety out of branding and into the selection itself; there aren't a lot of flavor alternatives for any given thing, just new and different stuff.  A lot of it quite odd.

I cannot depart from the topic of food finds without these (Not Safe For Work) cakes I found at a normal cake shop in the mall.

I've also seen in China plenty of questionable translations and one of the more clever bathroom signs I've ever found in person.

If I've learned anything from eating Chinese food, even at local versions of American mainstays like McDonald's, Pizza Hut, and KFC...it's that American food is kinda boring.  Sugar in place of real flavor.  Street food in particular here, is some of the most delicious stuff I've had anywhere (admittedly a small field of experience), and is typically cheaper than even fast food in the US.  I've only dabbled so far - I'm still at the stage of "adventurous" where I want to know what I'm eating before I try it - but there's a lot left to see and taste.

As for work, most of my time until the past day or two has been observing classes of other teachers.  I've yet to walk into a classroom without at least one student gaping, and usually it's accompanied by several expressions of awe.  Occasionally fear.  That was expected - I've been told by more average-height foreigners that their early classes often cried simply from the overwhelming new-ness of it all.

As regards height, however, I feel it's worth noting that while the average is certainly a tad lower here, I have encountered a few men as tall as me, maybe even one or two taller.

Women are still super short.  But that's been common everywhere I've been (again, small sample size).

I still intend to complete my "History Bites" series, and perhaps one of my next posts will be about the Great Firewall of China, which has received some limelight very recently when Google was found to be developing a version of their engine specifically designed to comply with the strict censorship laws here.  It's a potentially broad topic, and one that would likely play well into later posts about the history of China as a whole.  Regardless, it's one I want to cover.

Zaijian,

-L