Days 137 to 151 - Thurs March 19 to Wed April 1 - Daily dominant things to do

We plan to try our hand at a weekend road-trip on days 145 to 147 (last weekend) but the weather promises rain and thunderstorms and I catch a bit of a bug, so we stay in the city for what I estimate is our 5th or 6th weekend in a row.  Not really a big deal in the short term, since we both like the city and the downtime in our own place, but it does cut into the number of things that we'll see while we're here.  

Huizhou is not very well-situated for short weekend jaunts to charming villages and cities (the south-east is fairly industrial), so we have the choice of either a) spending a large number of hours on the weekend travelling by bus or train with a short time spent at our actual destination or b) visiting locations within a few hours of Huizhou. The debate continues.

Meanwhile, we find things to fill our week-day time.  People aren't quite sure of what to make of the fact that I'm not working at the moment.   The most common response from the Chinese is "That's wonderful - you'll have so much time for shopping."  I find this a funny response, especially since it's almost everyone's first reaction.  At one point, I wonder whether I should find this a little offensive - is it meant as a sexist jibe or is that just really one of the things they imagine doing with unlimited amounts of time?  (It's the latter.)

I don't really enjoy shopping without a purpose, so it's not something I do with my time alone if I can avoid it.  Most of my solo-shopping is for notebooks - I go through one every week or two and China excels in cute covers, so I'm in heaven.  Bad English abounds.  The cover of my latest notebook reads:

I am in my sweet dreams, the sky / to celebrate with you, gentle, /quiet night, People at the bus drunk Flower

One cutesy planning diary that I come across has a space for a to-do list entitled: Daily dominant things to do.

Though "shopping" is rarely on my list of daily dominant things to do, the three of us seem to spend a lot of time trolling for merchandise as a group, usually after the gym or before dinner. We hit the Walmart for homeware, the Park-and-Shop for groceries, and walk up and down the city streets and alleys, past fruit vendors, DVD stores and tea shops.  Most tea shops boast small group of people sampling tea on low stools at low tables.

"They closed down the tea shops during the revolution because people were going there and fomenting rebellion," Dre mentions to us one day.  We enjoy the verb "foment" for a moment.

"If the anarchists ruled," I say, "people would hang out at the tea shops and foment peace."  We spend a few minutes making up imaginary anti-anarchy slogans for order-niks.

• No more freedom - tell us what to do!
• Screw you, we want rules!
• We're scared.

Pierre's list of daily dominant things to do includes guitar and Chinese study, but these are scheduled around his work hours:  

• Monday 8 to 11:30
• Tuesday off
• Wednesday 8:00 to 9:30, 3:00 to 4:30, 7:30 to 9:00
• Thursday 8:00 to 9:30, 3:00 to 4:30
• Friday 10 to 11:30

It's a relatively light schedule, which is exactly what Pierre was hoping for during this part of his year off from work.  He has few complaints about class, and those he does have seem evenly balanced between those directed at students (rarely take notes) and himself (not well-enough prepared for a particular class).  

The demographic of English classes seems to be about 9:1 girls to guys.  Not really surprising, since in my experience that's a pretty typical ratio for language classes.   At least a few girls are "twitterpating*" a little bit over Pierre, which is sweet.

* A reference to Disney's Bambi, and not to Twitter.

I don't meet many of his students in March, but he fills me in here and there, and gifts and thanks you's from his students make their way home.  

Around day 137,  one student interviews Pierre after class hours for a school project, accompanied by a few fellow students and her mother (so sweet :) .  As a thank-you gift for his time, they send a box of berries home with him, which we devour: 

(We're not sure exactly what type of berry this is - possibly something from the blackberry family, though much tinier and more delicate.)

During one class, Pierre mentions something about being interested in some new recipes.  The next week, a student brings Pierre a recipe for a beef & beet soup (borscht?) - we haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but it sounds yummy:

My personal favourite is a gift he receives on Day 150 (April Fool's day) from his afternoon class. They present him with an anime drawing of himself (and emphasize in their note that it's not an April Fool's trick): 

Photo credits: D

Days 134 to 136 - Mon March 16 to Wed March 18 - Chinese is a Holey Cheese, or: Hey, they're doing that verb

Any other time that I've taken a long trip like this, the Internet has been either not quite as accessible or not as well established.  This time round, I'm enjoying how much easier having the internet makes some things, especially searching for information.  

I spend a lot of my free time (Pierre's work hours) working at my desk, picking away at a few projects I had planned for our time in Huizhou.  One of these projects is language study, especially Chinese and French. The more I search the internet, the more I find fabulous multimedia tools for language study.

Recently, I came across France's TV5 Monde which has a section called Apprendre.tv that they've dedicated to teaching French via video clips and quizzes.  My favourite section at the moment is called "Double Je" and consists of a series of interviews with artists and writers who have mastered French as a second language.  The interviews touch on the process of learning a second language and various aspects of being bilingual.  My favourite interview so far is with Shan Sha , a Chinese woman who published her first novel, in French, only seven years after she moved to France and started learning the language.

At one point in her interview she describes a few false starts she had with trying to learn French:

"Je faisais des phrases en français, c'est un peu comme le fromage, le gruyère, il y a des trous, alors dans ces trous, sortaient les mots chinois, que je regardais dans les dictionnaires, que j'installais dans la langue française." *

* this roughly translates to: I made sentences in French, a bit like cheese, like a gruyère that has holes, and in those holes were Chinese words that I looked up in the dictionary, and that I then plugged back into the French language."

I love this image because for us, right now, Chinese is definitely a holey cheese.  We stumble on holes all the time.

To be clear: I have a grip on reality.  I realize that Chinese will largely remain one big gap even by the time we leave.  Even if I were to spend all of my time flailing away at the dictionary,  it wouldn't download into my brain in the short time we're here.  Still, I have a basic standard: I prefer to be able to basic, everyday things somewhat gracefully (read: with as little grunting and pointing as possible.)  If I run into a situation where I'm lacking a word or a phrase, I make an effort to make sure I look it up and learn it so that the next time I need it, it's there.

It seems to be working well, though basic things slip my mind.  At the teacher's canteen, Pierre and I can proudly say the words of most food we want because we order them every day.  But there are still many times when I come across something we've forgotten to learn though I've made a note of it more than once.

"Please give me bok choy, eggplant, one egg, and...uh... that."

Note to self again : look up the word for "duck meat".

The dictionary is great for filling gaps, sometimes imperfectly.  I know that I can't look up the words for "snow" and "flake" and put them together to talk about winter.  Just as easily as I stumble on gaps in conversation, I stumble across useful words while searching for something else in the Chinese-English side of my Oxford Concise.  I share some of my finds from these dictionary-dips with Pierre from time to time.

"Hey neat," I yell to Pierre in the next room. "The word for snowflake is snow flower."

Most of the words I stumble across are gaps that I instinctively know exist.  Things with equivalents in my English-speaking mind, like shoe, forget, love.  What I find even more interesting are the words I come across that fill gaps that I didn't even know existed.  

"Hey," I tell  Pierre on the bus, "I just found out there's a word in chinese for a friendship spanning two or generations." (shi-4 jiao-1; generation + friend) 

There are some newly discovered gaps I haven't found fillers for yet.  For example, I'm curious if there's a name for the split-bottom pants that so many young toddlers wear here instead of diapers.  Instead of wallowing around in their mess, kids are held up and out by a parent (usually over a sewer grate or near a wall) while the child discreetly (or not) does its business.   There must be a name for these pants, but the search continues.

Every language has things that are hard for students to take seriously until they find out that yes, people actually use that grammar point.  A lot.  In my experience, most English students find the present perfect ("I have ___ed") hard to take seriously, and they often don't bother learning it well.  

I used to find Chinese measure words* hard to take seriously, but now I know they're used constantly, and these too are spread throughout the dictionary.  

*(RE Chinese measure words: it's a bit like the way we might say two cups of tea, three sheets of paper, or one box of chocolates.  Chinese has words like this for every noun, most of which English doesn't have an equivalent for.  Like "three ___ of book" and "one ___ of mattress" and so on.)

"There's a word for things that can be carried in pairs on a yoke," I tell Pierre while we wait for a bus.  We admire this idea for a moment, because it's actually quite practical in a culture with a history of farming and carrying things around on yokes.  We eventually end up in a conversation about English's obsession on names for groups of animals.  A herd of elephants.  A litter of puppies.  A murder of crows.  An ostentation of peacocks.  

Some of the random dictionary words I share with Pierre appear to stick with him.  

"Hey," he says on the bus, and points out the window to a young family on the sidewalk.  "They're doing that verb."

Ba. Third tone. To hold a baby while it relieves itself.

Days 130 to 133 - Thurs March 12 to Sun March 15 - Huizhou West Lake

Huizhou isn't getting a lot of sun right now.  Most days, it's cloudy, some days it rains. Our apartment, like most apartments in south China, has no insulation or heating, so when it's 10 or 12 degrees outside the apartment is only slightly warmer inside.  On cold days, we walk around the house with layers of clothes - I shuffle around in long johns, pants, several layers of shirts and wrapped in a blanket; Pierre curls up in his fleece jacket and a toque.  At night it's even colder, so we curl up under several layers of blanket in several layers of clothes.  It's a bit like being on a camping trip with no fixed end date.  We buy an electric kettle and drink many pots of hot water.

After a short (or long) stretch of these cold cloudy days, we appreciate even more those days when the sun comes out.  On Day 132 the sky is blue and air warms up so we throw on a couple of light jackets and head out to check out the West Lake area of Huizhou.  

On the subject of West Lake, our Huizhou map says: "With time passing by, there are some changes having taken place.  West Lake has become a resort for holidays."  This translates into: there's been a lot of work done to make/keep the area beautiful (about 3 sq km) and it's a popular tourist spot.  From what we know of Huizhou it's one of the few "touristy" things to do in town - other than the scenic area at West Lake,  the city mainly caters to eating, working and shopping. Mostly the latter two.

Because of this, West Lake seems to be the place to find large numbers of families with small children, and the sellers have plenty of toys for them.  My small experience with kids in Canada tells me that most Canadian toddlers are pretty koo-koo for balloons.  In Huizhou, toy windmills seem to be the big sellers: 

Windmills = less torment for toddlers than balloons.  They don't float away or explode.  (Plus you're more likely to avoid situations like Billy's Balloon :)

West Lake also seems to be a popular date spot.  It's a beautiful spot (5 lakes, 6 bridges) and it's cheap, only 10 kwai/2 $CAN for a ticket to visit three main sites that are offered: pagoda, bridges and a landscaped hilly area (<- not quite sure what it's called).  We see throngs of couples wandering around taking advantage of the weather.   The majority we run into at this pagoda, (re)built in the 1600s:

It's possible to walk up to the top and get a good view of the area.  There are maybe 10 or so flights of steep wooden stairs leading up to the top.  Each flight of stairs is only wide enough for one person to climb up or down using both hands and feet, so it takes a while to reach the top, especially when it's crowded. The walls are about 6 feet thick with recessed windows below geometric patterns like these:

Other windows have small stairways that lead up to them, and where you can get a view of the city:

Here, someone (top left) is sneaking a peek of us taking a picture: 

Pierre's been here before, so he's on a mission to find a doorway that he took a picture of last time with his old camera, and that he wasn't happy with.  So he takes it again:  

We're not in top tourist form today - since we're enjoying the weather and the chance to get some photos.  I know we'll be back so I don't pay too much attention to the historical details this time round.  We learn that a famous poet, Su Dongpo, lived in Huizhou during the Song Dynasty (around the 1000s). We see a a statue dedicated to him and wander through a museum with calligraphied copies of his poems.  Other than that, we just enjoy looking around.  We see what looks like a grave:

...check out some stone detailing...

...and a great old tree outside a temple:

We stop for a quick dinner of duck and veggies, and then head off to catch city bus #7 back to the university before sundown:

photo credits: P, P, P, D, D, P, P, P, P, P

Days 63 to 65 - Sun Dec 4 to Tue Dec 6 - A plague upon you, plagiarists

December/January is the end of the Chinese university semester, so most days Dre has a lot of free time to spend with us, in between private lessons and exams.  This year he's taught his third year students to write research essays in English and which leaves him with 160+ papers to mark before the final exam on December 8th.   Pierre and I are recruited for a few days to help out with some of the easier aspects of marking, such as format (proper margins? proper font and bibliography style?) and plagiarism patrol.

Every year in school, Canadian professors warn students that it's incredibly easy to spot plagiarism.  I sometimes get the impression that the faculty find plagiarism not so much unfair as insulting.  The general consensus among profs and TAs seems to be "Really, do they think we're that stupid?"  Now I better understand what they mean.   When you go from "Dickens is many years ago all fame writer..." to "Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches..." - well, you've got plagiarism.  Sometimes it's really that simple and obvious. (PS. That's an actual sentence "borrowed" by a student, courtesy of John Steinbeck.) 

Since the students are new to APA style referencing, the plagiarism in this semester's papers has to be judged on a curve.  Andre's general rule is this:

• if the text in question is not set off by quotations or indentation, but the text borrowed is listed in the bibliography and/or noted in brackets at the end of the quote, that isn't considered plagiarism on this assignment.

Otherwise, it's plagiarism.

A lot of the students have referenced their quotes with indenting, etc, so those essays are quickly added to the "to be marked" pile.  The ones with obvious or suspected plagiarism are put in the  "to be Googled" pile.  By the tenth time we have to head over to the computer to Google phrases, we start to get pretty annoyed.  

The signs of plagiarism are usually pretty obvious - drastic shift in the quality of writing, turns of phrases that Normal Mailer would be proud of, and so on - and with ESL students, the signs are even more clear.  Especially clear are any cultural references that aren't within the experience of your typical, atheist/Buddhist, never-been-abroad student.  A flawless paragraph of text that includes the phrase "As Allah has taught us..."?  Plagiarized.   References to lesser cultural institutions such as the 4-H club within a well-crafted sentence? Plagiariffic.

We find ourselves start saying thing like "You guys aren't going to like this one - proper use of the semi-colon." 

Plagiarists aside, we're all impressed with what these students have written and it's an interesting introduction into Chinese culture and thought, siphoned through the minds of Chinese university students.  Their writing includes a lot of interesting idioms  - we learn things like: the Chinese equivalent of "bad apple" (as in "one bad apple spoils the bunch") is "the dung of a mouse" (as in ""the dung of  mouse can destroy a pot of soup").

We also come across a saying about choosing your friends wisely: "Friends always will have an immeasurable impact on people.  Just as the saying goes, who keeps company with the wolf will learn to howl."

Original thought and any effort to craft an original sentence get points for the students, even if their sentence results in an unfortunate punchline.  In the case of a female literary figure whose downfall is caused by premarital sex, we have the memorable: "...it was her honesty, care, braveness, and penetration that led to her tragedy."

Some skip the dictionary and work with what they know, such as:

        Exhibit A: "she refused to be babied"

        Translation via context:  She didn't want to get pregnant 

        Exhibit B: "Female are really made of water."  

        Translation via context: Girls cry a lot.

Some sentences prove that electronic translators, like Babelfish, are not always so useful:  this sentence, regarding some Australian holiday ritual, is mystifying in a way that only an electronic translator can be: "At holiday evenings people take the drinks to the forest to hold a picnic which called 'Pakistan do not occupy.' "

Babelfish does have its poetic moments, such as one student's discussion of the benefits that newly graduated teachers brought to the rural villages where they had taught: "Once section of time, they had woven riot color dream for the village children."   Not English, exactly, but beautiful - I love the idea of weaving a "riot color dream" for someone. 

A lot of the essays make us laugh, but in a respectful (though drink-spraying) kind of way. Myself, I find English blunderers charming.  These are my people.  I fully realize that they make the same caliber of mistakes that fumble out of my mouth when I speak other languages.

At one point, while we're trying to riddle our way through a few sentences, I say to the guys "You know, some of these papers are thrown together and full of plagiarism, but they're still  probably a lot better than some papers that North American profs have to mark.  It must be so depressing to get this kind of paper from a native English university student."   What a sobering thought - the three of us share a moment of silence for those profs and TAs as we continue to mark. 

Several of the students are very eloquent and, in addition to the funny bits, we read out some of the more impressive ones, like this mini-rant from Wayne regarding the study pressures on Chinese kids (title: "Crisis of Adolescents' Values Education"):

"In any era, children should be the people who are light-hearted and spend most of their time playing with friends.  However, children are the busiest, saddest and thorniest people.  What education gave children are: exams but not dreams, reciting but not singing, homework but not hankering, marks but not hopes, get up early and sleep late."

Days 48 to 76 - Sat Dec 20 to Sat Jan 17 - Livin' La Vida Huizhou

This short blog post is my way of fudging through our time in Huizhou.  I've decided to make this entry the great dot-dot-dot of blog posts for a few reasons:

a) I want to shorten the lag between the actual date as I write this (mid-January) and the date of the trip blog (still back in mid-December) so that I'm not too far behind while we're touring Cambodia.

b) We aren't really doing much in Huizhou (sounds like "hway-jo"; rhymes with "away go").  

In university, Christmas vacation was traditionally the time of year when I'd go home to mom and dad's for a visit.  In a good year (take home exams or full year course with no mid-term), I could manage 3 or 4 weeks at home between the end of classes and the start of the new semester.  Those weeks were always spent doing a mishmash of things, and usually included great visits with family and friends, lots of movies and books, home-cooked meals.  When the weeks were over, I could never figure out where all the weeks had gone but I knew I'd enjoyed almost every minute.  

That's the best comparison I can think to make for our 4 weeks in Huizhou.   We're spending a lot of time with Dre and his Chinese family, getting into the city, exercising, doing a bit of footwork for Pierre's work visa, catching and fighting off colds, watching episodes of "How I Met Your Mother", and so on.  It's not the way we plan to spend our next 6 months in China, but it's feels perfectly respectable for a winter holiday.