Places of Xiangyang: People's Square and Wan Da Plaza

People’s Square:

People’s Square. 人民广场 (ren min guang chang). There isn’t really a whole ton to say about this one, because I haven’t explored it to its full capacity. If I do, I’ll write more another time. The main reason why I ever go to People’s Square is because of a lovely Western bar that is over there called Pengyou Bar (translation: Friend Bar). Now keep in mind, bars in China aren’t ALWAYS bars where they just serve beer or have glitzy lights where you dance around. Most of the bars I frequented in Kunming are like Pengyou Bar, where they were run by Westerners or Western-minded Chinese and they serve Western style alcoholic drinks or Western beer. IN ADDITION, they are also a restaurant where Western food is served…it is at these places where you’ll find the best Western food in town: the best burgers, pizzas, salads, pastas, and depending on the place you’ll see other things too. In Kunming, there was a bar that specialized in Mexican food. Another place specialized in French food and served lots of French bread. Pengyou Bar’s specialty would be burgers and steak. It’s run by a Western-minded Chinese young lady who is native to Xiangyang, but has spent many many years in Beijing. She told me that when she lived in Beijing, she would always have a wide variety of choices for foreign foods there. If she wanted Italian she could get Italian, Indian, French, Mexican, and of course Chinese, she could get everything she wanted. But coming back to Xiangyang to live, she had a very VERY limited variety of Western foods, so she decided to start her own restaurant so she could eat more Western food. I am very grateful that she decided to do this because she serves the best burgers in Xiangyang. You take a bite of them and the juicy meat melts in your mouth. The only other place that has comparable burgers to hers is the Crowne Plaza, which I’ll talk about next, but their prices are a bit more expensive than hers. Oh, and also, she serves the best pizza in Xiangyang too (at least that I’ve tasted…so it’s possible somewhere else may be better). Her pizza is so good, the cheese is perfect, and the toppings aren’t fake meat like I’ve seen other restaurants try to put on the pizza. Sooooo good. So for now, that’s People’s Square’s highlight.

Wan Da Plaza:

Once more, not a whole lot to say about this one either. You'll know Wan Da Plaza when you see it because there's a big glaring gilded statue of Zhuge Liang placed right in the middle of it. The plaza consists of features such as a stadium, a small fun park for little children, several small bars and stores, the large Wan Da supermarket (where I get much of my stuff to cook food with...the name Wan Da is a Chinese cognate for the supermarket's original name "Vanguard"), and the looming Crowne Plaza Hotel. I've gone to this plaza for several reasons: to hang out with friends at the bars (remember what I mentioned about bars before...I'm there for the food and company, cuz I don't like beer), to go food shopping at Wan Da supermarket, and to have dinner at the Crowne Plaza Hotel (which is rare and expensive, but sooo much fun and so worth it). So here's a little bit about the place.

This is one of the main places Westerners stay if they ever had any random reason to be in Xiangyang. Or rich Chinese people who are more likely to have a reason to come to Xiangyang. But the Crowne Plaza’s claim to fame is, like Pengyou, their FOOD. Okay, I know I may be talking a lot about food in my posts, but really…it’s the rare person that can come and live in China for an extended period of time and not have cravings for any kind of hearty food. (Hearty food is not China’s specialty. Healthy is.) Don’t get me wrong, I love Chinese food…but I need some hearty Western meals every once in a while to hold me over. The other day (and my Jamaican friends and family will understand this reference) I was sitting in my apartment daydreaming of a nice plate of ackee and saltfish, all mixed together, with a piece of fried bammy (or some hard dough bread or a Johnny cake would do too) to eat it with.

Anyway, the Crowne plaza has a delicious variety of foods like the ones I mentioned offered at the Pengyou Bar. We tried these one day and they were SUPER GOOD. But to describe them would be repeating myself. What I WILL mention is what the Crowne Plaza has that is exclusively from Crowne Plaza. The Crowne Plaza has a smorgasbord of seafood which you can partake of ALL YOU CAN EAT style for 200 kuai. Now before you freak out at the price, 200 kuai is like $40/$50. I cannot tell you everything that it has because I have not tried it yet…but I know it has sushi, shrimp, and fish. We will go there for Thanksgiving so when that happens I’ll be sure to give you a full account…and if I’m not starving, I’ll remember to take pictures too.

That's the huge Zhuge Liang statue. As I mentioned in my earlier posts, Zhuge Liang is one of the key icons of Xiangyang, having spent some years here in his life. You can recognize him because he always carries a feather fan (that's it in his right hand). The Crowne Plaza is one of the large buildings behind him, to the right.

These guys have these kind of whip-like things in their hands. They swing it and whip it against the big spinning top thing that's on the ground, and that's how the top keeps spinning around. When it was warmer, these older men used to do it every night. I also saw some people cracking actual whips in the air. I guess it was their form of exercise, like tai-chi or the late-night dancing that the older Chinese women would do.

These are some pictures I took from the upper level of the mall that Wan Da supermarket was located in. Of course, you can see a McDonald's is here too.

Here's a view of the side of the stadium. I thought it was a cool pic with the sun in the background.

Here's the fun park. It was really dirty and some of the rides were rusty and didn't work. So, not really a big hotspot for people to go to. There were only a few people there.

Places of Xiangyang: Gulou District

Gulou has come to be my favorite part of town. It’s a gorgeous section of the city that is recreated to look like how it did in the ancient times. There are a couple large walls and gates there that have been renovated and rebuilt with new materials. The roads are stone, and the stores are all built in the style of ancient Chinese buildings. It’s really pretty. It’s located along the banks of the Han River, which I think I mentioned before is a tributary to the Yangtze River. In Gulou there are bars, coffee houses, restaurants, a small museum, a nice park area along the wall and river, and a lot of stores to shop in. It’s really a lot like a big market area. So much is happening there, it just is such a nice place to be…I’m always happy when I’m over there. A lot of times the other teachers and I have gone over there to either get food, shop, or hang out at one of the bars. Beware of little kids peeing on the streets though, steer away from random puddles on the side of the streets when there has been no rain. Hehe. One time we discovered this lovely little restaurant that serves really great dishes and the prices were really cheap. They had really great Mongolian beef and fried shrimp.

The museum has a ton of artifacts from ancient times and you can get in for free. It’s fun, but maybe only a one time thing…two times tops.

Probably my favorite thing that you can find in Gulou is place where they do massages. It’s not a spa, they only do massages, but there’s a blind lady who though visually impaired can massage like no other. Last week was the first time I had ever had a massage (massages from family don’t cut it, sorry…cuz none of you can massage like I can). And it was amazing…I was in heaven…it was crazy. And it was sooo cheap…only 40 kuai. I am so going again next week…I’m going to have to add that into my budget. She did a full body massage and the 40 kuai was for an hour’s worth of a massage. Yeah, that’s happening again.

PICS!!!!

This is the gate on North Street (Bei Jie- 北街), inside is the small museum I mentioned.

When you go through the gate, you enter more of the ancient style market area.

In the distance is the gate from the other side.

This here was when we were at the restaurant I mentioned. This dish I think is some kind of tofu.

Mongolian beef!!! mmmm...

Biscuits with red bean filling

Li Gong Welcome Dinner Pics

Earlier at the beginning of the term, the teachers of Ligong treated us four foreign teachers to a welcome dinner and before that a welcome ceremony (which was basically a five minute speech from our Ligong boss at the top, Mr. Zheng, saying "welcome, we're glad you're here, we hope we will be able to have a great year working together"). The restaurant they took us to was really nice and beautiful, and it was located along the banks of the Han River, so we could see it from our windows.

Here are some pics from the dinner (get ready for lots of food), and sorry about the blurriness, my camera isn't the best:

Places of Xiangyang: Li Gong Campus

I know Ligong is not as classically pretty as Longzhong is, and I’m sure you won’t agree with my view even if you see the pictures, but I still really like the campus. Because it’s new and maybe only 50% of it (or maybe even less) is actually completed, it’s very open and quiet and peaceful. It’s cool to see a university in its early stages. There’s this one area that eventually will be a large pond with a bridge spanning across it, and it’s not very pretty, but all these shrubs have grown up in it and some murky water fills part of the bottom of it. It’s interesting to look at, and one day I was looking out the window and I saw two cows (that looked kind of like water buffalos from the shape of their horns) were chilling out in the pond, eating the shrubs. On one of the cows had a crane sitting on top of it, but I wasn’t able to get a picture of it before it flew off of him.

Also, apart from the open campus, there are a lot of perks to weigh out the negatives for us four teachers that work at Ligong. Of course, they give us free bus rides to and from the campus, so to me it really feels much more like we’re at work…rather than still students at a college. The other teachers just wake up and walk to class whenever they have it, and we can’t do that. Also, most of the class buildings aren’t completed yet, and one of the classrooms I have to teach in hasn’t finished its ground floor. We have to walk along a tile path that runs through the dirt ground when we first enter the building, and then I go upstairs to teach. I’m not certain they have heating systems set up and so I’m thinking it’s going to be a cold winter. However, they give us a 200 kuai stipend each month to spend at the cafeteria and certain stores on campus. I have found a way to take full advantage of the 200 kuai so that I’m buying necessities that I won’t have to pay out of pocket to get elsewhere. It really does save a ton of money, so I’m loving it. Just as a note: today I just bought a slice of cheesecake on my card so really I just got a slice of yummy cherry cheesecake for free. #WIN. Also, in both Longzhong and Ligong, they assign each of us foreign teachers with a Chinese co-teacher who can speak English…so that these teachers can convey to us any information we need to know from the school, or if we need any help with anything. From what I’ve been told by the teachers at Longzhong, the co-teachers there have rarely spoken with the foreign teachers if ever. But here at Ligong, our co-teachers generally have a pretty close relationship with us and they keep us pretty informed. I’m not going to lie though, I definitely got the best co-teacher. I have an advantage with the Ligong co-teachers because I speak Chinese, and they prefer to speak Chinese if they have a choice…so I’ve developed a good rapport with all of them and know what they’re about. But my co-teacher is definitely the best…as soon as she receives information, she contacts me so I’m always the first foreign teacher to receive info from Ligong. In addition, we’ve become friends and so we’ve eaten lunch together a few times and we’ve hung out together outside of the campus as well. She’s really great, and we have a mutual appreciation for film! Her name is Xixi (pronounced “shee-shee”).  (More about my escapades with Xi-xi another time.)

Anyway, for me the last benefit from teaching at Ligong is this (though at the same time it can be a negative as well): distance from the students. When I go home, it’s nice because I’m able to walk outside and not have to worry about running into my students. Don’t get me wrong, I love my students and all but they have a tendency to not want to leave the foreign teachers alone. Their wish is to be best friends with the foreign teachers, but that really can’t happen because it’s important to establish a line between teacher and student. Unfortunately,  a common thing you’ll see in many Chinese colleges is that the maturity of the students is that of middle school students. This really is a product of the cultural rules and societal expectations around them. For example, dating is not just frowned upon but forbidden until college. If you’re dating and the teachers in high school find out about it, they’ll call your parents. In addition, the development of personality maturity is not a priority growing up in China…the main priority is memorizing a ton of knowledge.

This idea of rote memorization has a history of hundreds of years, in which Chinese citizens would attempt to take a highly intense imperial exam each year. If you obtained a certain level of achievement on these exams, you would be awarded a government position of some level: sometimes it would be as a leader in your town, sometimes it would be as an official in the court of the emperor (if you achieved the highest levels). People would study from a very young age and then for the rest of their lives just to try and get a high level on the test. You’d sit in a small room similar to a cubicle and for THREE DAYS you’d take the test. Some people couldn’t make it, and they’d pass out and have to be carried out of the area. (It makes the SAT look like a little quiz.) The test was based on rote memorization of history, philosophy, and many other things. The questions they asked you required you to recite back what you had memorized for years and if you didn’t know it, there was no trying to B.S. your way around it. And there were no essay questions where they’d give you a topic for you to write on, this was not a test that was interested in what you thought about things…it was not interested in how creative your mind could be. This mentality has lasted even to the modern era: China today.

So there are a lot of cultural differences that I have to deal with when teaching my students here, and one BIG thing that I have to remember not to do is to end up preaching my own personal Western views as fact to them. In the beginning of the term, when my assistant boss was giving us a demonstration of what to expect in a Chinese classroom and how to deal with it, it was very clear to me that he had a tendency to preach his own Western views as fact to his students. For example, he mentioned to us that the Chinese revere Mao Zedong, when in fact “he really was a monster”. This is a very Western and fundamentally untrue belief, because yes Mao did a lot of pretty horrible stuff, but he did it for the sake of making his country better…WHICH I’M NOT CONDONING, but I am ABSOLUTELY saying that every country in the world has leaders that their citizens revere that have done EXACTLY the same thing. I mean, let’s just say our founding fathers have a few skeletons in their closet too…but we respect them and honor them because we owe a lot to them (else we wouldn’t be American citizens).

Another thing that I’m trying not to spread is the American Dream…this Western (shall I say American) mentality that if you just work hard (and just believe<3<3) then you can achieve anything, you can do whatever you want. It’s not something that’s even true in America, and it’s definitely a mentality that most of the time you can’t have in China. I’ve told several Chinese friends I’ve run into that I want to make movies in the future. They say they admire my bravery and they wish they were brave enough to achieve their dreams too. I can’t be stupid and tell them, “Oh, you can! You just have to believe in yourself!” So what I do tell them is this: “I know that in this society it would be very hard to break away from what’s expected of you to do what you want…but maybe if you research and look for different ways to achieve it, you can at least find a way to do both what’s expected and what you may want to do.” One friend wanted to be a volunteer, I told her that you can get a job and still do volunteer work. Another friend wanted to be a singer, I told her that if you practice your singing and look around the city, there are plenty of opportunities where you can sing as a part time job on the side of your normal job. It’s not the American dream, where you get filthy rich and famous, but they can achieve satisfaction and happiness. Okay, I’m ranting now. All in all, I really do love my students and I respect their cultural differences while trying to teach them things that could help them (I teach them new things without telling them that their culture is wrong…I think my assistant boss has to work on that).

Ultimately, I really do prefer teaching here at Ligong, and not having to remain at Longzhong the whole time. I feel like I’ve actually done something with my day when I get on the bus and travel across the city to the campus. Not to mention, getting away makes life here feel much freer. I’m not confined to one place all the time.

Here are some pics:

That building with the unfinished roof is Building 1, one of the buildings that I'm teaching in. But this is the good building. Only the roof is unfinished, everything else is done.

This one is the building next to Building 4 (I teach in Building 4, which is to the left not in this picture). As you can see, there's a whole lot of work to do here. Building 4 is only a little better...it's got more of its windows put in.

This is the library, not even close to being done. Only the outside is finished, the inside is still wood and dirt.

This is the cow I found. The white speck to the right is the crane that used to be on the cow's back.

These are two of the other American teachers that teach at Ligong.

The unfinished bridge. Now they've put some railing up, I'll take a picture of that when I get the chance.

I took this picture out the window of the 3rd floor of the cafeteria. As you can see, beyond the Ligong borders is just farmland and nature...so pretty! I love how rural this place is.

A closer look at Building 1.

Places of Xiangyang: Longzhong Campus

Sorry for the delay!! I’d like to take this opportunity now to describe the general setting of where I live and the typical places I go to. It may be important in future stories.

Longzhong Campus:

This is where I live. There are two campuses of Hubei University: the Longzhong campus where they teach Arts and Sciences, and the Ligong campus where they teach Science and Technology. I live on the Longzhong campus and teach at the Ligong campus (only three other teachers out of the ten total teach at Ligong with me). To me, I think they are both equally beautiful in their own ways, but I think most people (and most certainly you too when you see the pictures) would say that Longzhong is by far the prettier…it certainly is the most classically beautiful. Because we live a little above the base of Longzhong mountain, the area is covered in trees. It’s very dense because of it and you can’t see the sky as much. But there are Chinese statues of ancient people scattered about the campus, as well as a large pond just a little distance away from the front gate. If you stand at the front of the pond and look at all you see in front of you, the scene is absolutely perfect. It’s as if it was purposely structured in that very position, and honestly I think it was. It’s like a painting. The lake is at the bottom of the picture and behind it a small lawn. Behind that are a dense amount of trees and behind those in the way distance is a large mountain looming over everything. On top of the mountain is a pretty pagoda. The picture is gorgeous. I live far at the very back of the campus, almost as far as you can go in what they call the Old Campus. You have to walk through the front gate, past a small street with a ton of restaurants  and snack places on it we like to call Food Street, past the lake and a small park around it, past student dorms, past basketball courts, a soccer field, and a gym, past teaching buildings, past another set of restaurants, past several other similar small apartment complexes, and then you get to mine. It’s a very interesting walk, and sometimes you can hop on this interesting looking small yellow bus that looks like a very long and big golf cart (we call it the banana boat), and catch a ride 2/3 of the way back. If you can’t, though, you must endure a 30 to 45 minute walk of Chinese people staring at you all the way.

My apartment consists of a living room and dining room area, a kitchen, a bathroom (which has a western toilet now and no stoop, and the shower has a shower head now instead of a faucet…but it still is just a shower head without a tub or a distinct shower…the bathroom floor is basically the shower), a teeny laundry room (and I mean a small chamber that is only big enough to fit the washing machine (we don’t have a dryer), an office, and a bedroom. It’s bigger than what I need for myself, I was perfectly content living in the teeny room I stayed in in Kunming with my roommate. However, it has grown on me once I cleaned it up to the best of my ability and put my posters up. It looks much more homey now. My bat Flower has flown away, as I mentioned before, but now I have discovered two geckos residing in my curtains. I’ve now named them Iggy and Ziggy. They come out to play in the middle of the night, but if I’m ever up in the middle of the night I like to switch the lights on and catch them wandering around my ceilings. I leave the light on for two minutes, and they scamper back into the curtains and stay there for the rest of the night. Party’s over.

And now, I’ve decided to start cooking stuff more. As much as Chinese food is yummy, when you eat it every day and there’s no choice of having anything else, you do start to miss the stuff you’re used to. I’m missing things I rarely eat normally, like nachos or bread and cheese. There is almost NO CHEESE in China. I mean, that’s an exaggeration…there is cheese, it’s just not sold widely in the main stores. Or butter either. And once I get some butter and cheese (they sell it somewhere, I know they do, or else how else would they make pizza?), I’m going to make pancakes and scrambled eggs. But I can’t really cook a whole ton, because I’m on a budget and I’m trying to save up money while I’m here. If it’s a success, I’ll take a picture of it and post it! But pancakes here may end up being crepes because they don’t have baking powder, only yeast and I’ve never made pancakes with yeast as a substitute.

PICS!!!

There are chickens walking all around where I live. They say roosters only crow at the crack of dawn...not true. They crow ALL DAY and ALL NIGHT too.

In the distance is a pagoda on the mountain where the famous Zhuge Liang (battle genius) spent part of his life. On holidays this place becomes a huge tourist attraction and people come in swarms.

This is such a great photograph, because even when the sun just moves ever so slightly, you get a whole new scene. I took this one maybe a minute later.

More of the Hubei University of Arts and Science Longzhong campus. That's a teaching building in the distance.