Where In The World Is Kelita? : The Never Ending Blog Post

Don't let the title frighten you! The reason why I am calling this the Never Ending Blog Post is because it is taking me a few days to complete it. I feel like I am continually working on it! At first it seemed like I didn't have a lot to write about. But then I keep remembering things I need to add, and as the days go by more and more things are happening that I want to add. And uploading pictures usually is what takes the longest time. I separated it into sections so you can just browse through the sections you may want to read since it is a LOT or you can even just look at the pictures.

Topics Include:
Chinese Friends& Language
Painting
Foster Home
Sun Yat Sen Memorial Park & Hall
Flowers from a Secret Admirer
Lunar Market
Museums and Buddhist Temple
More Pictures

CHINESE FRIENDS & LANGUAGE

So I think some of the things I am surprised at most about China are

1) making Chinese friends and

2)how I am already picking up the language

Some people might say other things were more surprising- like squatters, or getting stared at all the time, or the weird foods like chicken feet, or just other random things that are different than America. And yes all those things are weird and different at all…but I kind of expected them. Especially when people tell you “Oh China is going to be sooo different from America!” and I hear stories about these things before I already leave, it’s not as much as a cultural shock. And it’s nice to see that there are just some things that are universal and that people are people and kids are kids no matter where you go. So what is surprising me the most is that I am already making Chinese friends and getting to know Chinese people! I figured that since I was living with the other volunteers and not a host family (like the ILP program does in some countries like Mexico or Russia) that I wouldn’t get to interact with Chinese people other than the kids we teach. But we are meeting and getting to know more people than I thought! Whether it is on the bus, or the waiter or waitress at a restaurant, there are always chances to meet people! Oddly enough we have also met a couple other foreigners that are fluent English speakers who live in the apartments around us too.

Also this week we got an opportunity to ride with a man named Aaron. Don’t worry, we aren’t riding with a (complete) stranger. Actually the coordinator at our school set us up. She said for the past few years this guy named Aaron will volunteer to pick a few of us up in the morning and drive us to school for the purpose of practicing his English. So we will rotate about 3 people each week. He is really nice and it’s fun getting to know about his life (he is around my parents age). He says he has always wanted to come to America but his English isn’t good enough. At his job he can take an English test and if he scores high enough they can send him to America (I think a university in LA/California). He took the test once and didn’t do as well so he wants to improve his English! I think his English is pretty good. Most people here that know English are always saying “My English is not very good” but they are pretty good. Hopefully this will also give us an opportunity to learn more about Chinese culture and even practice our Chinese!

I am also making friends with the other Chinese teachers at my school. There are three girls who all recently graduated from college (degrees in English) and moved to Zhongshan from other parts of China and are teaching at our school with us. The awesome thing is they are my age! I didn’t think I would really get to make Chinese friends my age but I already love these girls! The other night it was two girls’ birthdays so we went to an American restaurant and Serena had her first American food/pizza for the first time! It was so funny watching them eat pizza. Then again they find it hilarious when I use chopsticks…(and I thought I wasn’t that bad..) After that we went to our apartment with them and played a game called Ipod Idol, where you wear a blindfold and headphones and turn the music up loud so you can’t hear yourself or anything but the music and you sing along with the song. And everyone else is watching and they can’t hear the music- only you singing to it. And most of the time the singing ends up pretty bad or off key because the person can’t hear themselves. Even our Chinese friends played! Serena sang a Chinese song but Debby and Bella both sang American songs J Love them!

Meet Bella! She is super cute and probably my favorite. She is also the same age as me (20)and her birthday is in October too (but because of the weird Chinese calender she is 21 in Chinese years and her birthday is in September). She also knows a little bit of French so it is fun talking about French with her. Bella is also our Chinese lesson teacher! A few times a week after school we have chinese class where we learn some chinese. So far we have learned the pinyin characters and how to pronounce them so now I know how to pronounce words in my Mandarin Phrase book and also learning how to use the tones as well. I actually am picking up on that easier than I thought I would. Learning the chinese characters is a lot harder (I am picking up on a few!). Sometimes she will teach us entire sentences to use in conversation which is a lot harder to remember a whole sentence. I like learning little words or phrases here and there to use on a daily basis and those are a lot easier to pick up for me. So that brings me to the point of I am learning Chinese more than I thought I would! Ok I am definitely NOT a pro. I can’t say a whole lot still…we still mostly rely on charades or pointing to things. I can’t really have much of a conversation in Chinese (and listening to others speak is hard too). But hey I am learning lots of little phrases and I am sure I will pick it up more.

We also learn a little about Chinese culture in our Chinese class, the other day we learned about different Chinese festivals. One teaching I am sad about is all the cool festivals seem to be at the beginning of the year or in spring- I really want to go to a big Chinese festival parade with those dragon costumes and fireworks. This week we also learned a song in Chinese!! It’s funny because I was talking to Bella once and she asked me if I knew this one French song. I didn’t but I told her I always loved in my French class when we learned French songs and would watch the music videos. I asked her if she could teach us a Chinese song sometime and voila! Wish granted because the next day she had a song prepared for us to learn! And I have to say I love this song!! It’s catchy and it’s about friendship which I think fits perfectly J I can pronounce and sing the words to the song in Chinese as long as I have the lyrics but I am determined to memorize the entire song in Chinese! Click HERE to listen to the song. It has the lyrics in Chinese characters as well as pinyin and English. It’s a great song so you should listen to it!!!

I also got this app called WeChat. They don't have Facebook here in China so this is what most people use to text/chat/etc. So I got one to keep in touch with my Chinese friends!

PAINTING

Another thing that happened this week was painting. The “sister” school to our school wanted us to paint the walls in some of the classrooms so we switched off every day between teaching and painting. They wanted different “English speaking” themed rooms, there was already an American themed room so we painted a British themed room. I love painting so I enjoyed it J

FOSTER HOME

We also found out about a foster home that we could volunteer at. And to our surprise it just happened to be in our neighborhood, just a few apartment buildings over! There are two different groups/rooms, the little babies and the toddlers/older kids. First we visited the babies. The couple that runs the foster home is actually American and they are an older couple. They have been in China about 8 years, they were in Bejing for a while then came here to Zhongshan. The woman is from Alabama and also lived in GA for a while so it was fun talking with her about different places she has been to in GA! Also she told me about adopting in China and which was cool because I’ve always thought I would want to adopt a little girl from China (or India) after I have some of my own kids. Also most/all of the kids here have health problems or disabilities. The foster care works a lot taking the kids to hospitals to get treatments and surgeries. A lot of the kids are soo thin. It is also really sad because except for a few kids whose parents may have died, most of the kids were abandoned. The foster care people don’t know anything about where they came from or why they were abandoned. It is really an inspiration to me and when I am older and all my kids are grown up it would be cool to do something like this. She said they had about 15 babies but we only saw about 5. They were so cute and actually very good- no fussy babies! They definitely need attention. We then visited the “older” kids. Really most of them are toddlers, the foster care owners said most of the kids usually get adopted at young ages which is great (almost entirely by foreigners, they don’t usually have Chinese people coming to adopt). There is just one girl who is 9 years old and has cerebral palsy. She is a very sweet girl and she just gets soooo excited to see us and have us play with her. I totally would have taken pictures, except we aren't allowed to so sorry! We are planning on making weekly visits to the foster home.

SUN YAT-SEN MEMORIAL PARK

So there's this guy. His name is Sun Yat-sen. He was the founder of "Modern China" and it just so happens that the city I am in is his home town. In fact, Zhongshan is named after him. I don't really know much more than that but you can do your own research if you want or visit this website. Anyways so there is this big Sun Yat-sen statue right around the corner of our school that we see every day on the way. So we finally decided to go check it out! It ended up raining (and I forgot my umbrella) so I didn't take a whole lot of pictures because I did not want to ruin my camera or phone, but you bet we will be coming back again! So we totally thought it was just this statue...but on the other side there is this huge park and it's so beautiful! There is this place called the "scented forest" that is full of bamboo and actually smells good. There are lots of statues and memorial stones on the ground (like a cemetery almost- only one I have seen in china!) There was a lotus pond, cool trees, a cave, a pong with lots of giant coy fish, and a random path and stairs that led us up to another pagoda with a beautiful view. So enjoy the view pictures I took!

SUN YAT SEN MEMORIAL HALL
We also ended up going to this Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall. It was huge and beautiful on the outside (didn't get a picture) but it ended up being kind of disappointed. Really there were only two rooms we could go in that were just full of pictures and things about his life, but of course it was all in Chinese so kind of useless. But hey it was free. And there was this cool statue of him so there's that.

FLOWERS FROM A SECRET ADMIRER?

A really funny story that happened last week. So we just came home from school and a few other girls went to the store. We heard a knock at the door so we assumed it was the other girls coming back. Allie goes to answer the door and instead I hear her talking in that "little kid voice". So here's how the story goes

Allie: Hey Kelita...some little kids left us a bouquet of flowers at our door, should I bring them in?

Me: (thinking) oh how cute, some kids picked us some flowers and left them at our door. Yeah of course bring them in!

Allie: (sounds really unsure) Um.....ok, if you insist....

So I go into the living room to see what all this is about and there Allie is holding a HUGE bouquet of flowers and roses that is all profesionally wrapped. My jaw just drops. Then I started wondering...did those kids steal someone else's flowers and put them on our door? uh oh. It looked like the flowers were already a bit battered, Allie said she noticed them playing with the flowers when we walked in our building earlier. So we went in the hall and there were about 3 Chinese kids being VERY mischievous. The boy was tying a rope to the balcony and using it to throw objects over the edge onto the first floor. There was water EVERY where and I am just like WHERE ARE THEIR PARENTS??? No where in sight. Also note that the kid put another jar of water and flower and dirt in front of our door AND a dead cockroach. Yup he thought that was pretty funny. So he spoke a little English and we tried asking him about the flowers, where he got them but he wouldn't answer. Suddenly he picks up the flowers and starts swinging them in the air like a baseball bat, then proceeds to chuck them down the stairs. Poor beautiful flowers that probably belonged to someone else...After that we just went in our room and decided we were done dealing with those troublesome kids. Don't know what happened after that. But it made for a very entertaining afternoon and story to share!!

LUNAR MARKET

So there is this thing called the Lunar Market that happens once in a blue moon....well ok. It happens more frequently than that, every lunar moon. Which will happen a few times while we are here. But it is a special market only open that day. Well we went Wednesday thinking it was the Lunar Day but it turns out Lunar Day was actually the next day but it looked like a lot of tents and shops were already open so we still looked around. You can pretty much find anything at these markets and it looks like a great place to souvenir shop! They also seem to have a lot of pet shops, especially fish. It's actually sad sometimes to see the way they have the animals just in a tub of water and they are trying to escape. We actually stopped to get some fish food for our fish! Yup that is right we have a fish that we got when we went to the zoo a few weeks ago. The first day we had 8 fish but the next day there was only 1 survivor...Space Cowboy . Don't ask me why that is his name, my roommate named him (she went fishing at the zoo to get him). We were surprised that even after our trip to Yangshuo (and we were gone 3-4 days) he was still alive! And we never had proper food to feed him. The past 2-3 weeks we gave him a slice of cucumber that he nibbles on...and even after 3 weeks he is still going strong! Space cowboy is a survivor so we finally got him real fish food and a few things to decorate his little tank.

Did you know getting a good picture of a fish is kind of difficult?

(skip this paragraph if you are sensitive/squeamish)

They also have tons of fruit they sell on the street (but I heard to be wary of that) and this area where they had all kinds of meat. There is a tub of live fish you can pick and the guy grabs the fish and just guts it right there in front of you. Or there are cages with LIVE chickens and they slit the throat, put it in boiling water, skin it and prepare it all there right in front of you so you can take home a very fresh slab of meat...it was gross but oddly intriguing walking down that isle. It's interesting. Some of the fish insides you can still see the heart beating. Or a slab of pig head with the eyes still intact and maybe even rolling around.

So many bird cages full of Birds!!

Another random thing I did not expect about China. Eggs and tomatoes. I didn't know that eggs and tomatoes was such a big part of Chinese food! They have it at almost every restaurant. Rice or noodles with eggs and tomatoes, sometimes ham. It's so good!! The sauce in this dish was especially delicious, I wanna know what it was so I can make it!

Museums and Buddhist Temple

Since the Memorial Hall was a dud we ended up finding a few other free museums. One was a radio museum with lots of old radios, not super interesting so I didn't get any pictures. There was also a pottery museum with some gorgeous Chinese pottery. I would love to take home some Chinese pottery or a tea set, but I am so afraid of bringing fragile pieces in my suitcase!

We also found a Buddhist Temple! It was way cool. Outside around the temple on the "temple grounds" they had people burning incense, it was also very beautiful with stone paths and trees. Inside there were a few different rooms, a Monk told us to come in and sit and he spoke a little English and tried to speak to us. Then there was the main room with the little kneeling cushions and tables with chanting books, lots of shrines and fruit and candles. The monk had a big gong that he pounded on to signify it was time to start! It was mostly women all dressed in black robes and a few male monks dressed in orange robes. They recited chants from a book and did their bowing down to Buddah. It was pretty cool to watch! I'll admit it got a little boring after a while causes it's the same thing and it just went on and on....but it was so cool to see real Monks! Not sure what the women dressed in the robes are called...I'll have to learn more about it!