O brave new world with such people in it!

Many things have wandered through my heart and mind since my last journal entry. When I last wrote in this thing, I was stuck in a gritty industrial town waiting in the office of a reputable recruiter to be placed in a job; now, I am in a cleaner city living in the dormitory-like accommodations that I will call home for the next year. Welcome to China.
In searching for a job, I had several key criteria in mind: I wanted to be placed in something of a backwater, where I could be assured that contact with foreigners would be kept to a minimum. It would be in this way that I would be forced to learn Chinese. Additoinally, I wanted a clean and comely city that would provide enough stimulation to keep me from going mad.
When I went to the job office on Monday, I found that there was a position available at a Kindergarten in Yangzhou, a city of 4,5 million — not big at all by Chinese standards — in the far hinterland of Shanghai and adjacent to Nanjing. It was agreed that I would leave the following evening to investigate the school.
Monday night, I joined my friends from the Mandarin camp in a night of eating in drinking in Shijiazhuang. We ate our dinner at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant on some back street whose name I’ve already forgotten. According to my friends here, the best food is often found at these grimy places that are clustered in groups on certain back streets. The “restaurant” we ate at was little more than a group of beat-up tables on a sidewalk flanked by large grills tended by shirtless and sweating Chinese men. Keep in mind that, in this country, hairnets are only worn in expensive, Western-style supermarkets. We ordered our food, which was brought out to us in large buckets and big bowls, and ate amid the yelling of drunken people on a warm summer’s night. Yes — it was a lot like a barbeque.
The highlight of my last night was to be found in my multiple journeys (there was beer involved) to the “toilet” at the restaurant. The first visit I made down there, I was greeted by the strong spray of a water hose that had been turned on to cleanse the floor. On my second visit, several seconds into going about my visit I heard the door opening behind me. As this was a one-holer (or so I thought), I modestly pushed the door closed and offered a polite “I’m sorry” in the best mandarin my slurring breath could muster. Several moments later, in a blur of Shijiazhuang dialect, a Chinese man entered and proceeded to urinate in drain in the floor. After finishing my own business, I turned around and answered some of his questions while he emptied his bladder into the hole in the floor. At that point, I learned why the hose had been opened earlier to clean the facilities.
After being treated to a big lunch by my recruiter, I was sent on a 14-hour train journey to my city here outside of Shanghai. I arrived for a layover at 3am in Nanjing, where I was met by a fellow who took us to a cheap Chinese hotel to crash for the evening. After only four hours of sleep, we left for Yangzhou, where I was treated to the customery welcome banquet by the headmaster and several employees of the school. Later that afternoon, I purchased a cell phone downtown with the headmaster’s daughter and signed a contract for the year.

Buying that cell phone was a lot of fun. Yuki [the headmaster’s daughter] steered me first to stores that sold first-hand phones for what I thought were high prices. I got her to take us to a second-hand market that was filled with cell phone hawkers. There, I got my first real taste of the joy of bargaining in China. To get a good deal, you have to go through all the fun motions: feigned outrage, walking out at least once, giving the merchant an incredulous look or two. My favorite part of this experience was returning to one merchant with money to purchase her phone. She was at an early stage of haggling with a customer and, upon our approach, through a slew of reproachful words at the two men occupying the stools in front of her counter. In a wonderfully theatric moment, she shooed the men away, dusted off the stools with her hand, and welcomed us to sit down and do business with her. What a circus!

I've been exploring this city on my bicycle, and I'll have to say that I like it. I think that I'm going to take up swimming, as riding one's bike here is more for transport than for recreation — it's quite difficult to build up speed on my old clunker while navigating these clogged roads. Plus, there's the fact that riding one's bike in China involves a bit of wheezing owing to the rather opaque air here.

A funny thing happened the other day. I went down to the city center to find a book store. After looking through a few shopping centers, I finally found a place with a foreign language book section. My going to that book store was mostly out of necessity: my books have not been forwarded to me yet, and I've been stuck in this city with only my Lonely Planet "China" travel guide and a bad translation of Kafka's The Trial to read. I’ll have to say that it was quite a pleasant surprise to find a copy of Nabakov’s Lolita here. Brilliant. I had been meaning to read this book, anyway — and what luck to find it in an edition that was less expensive than its equivalent in the US (13,5 RMB or around $1,50 US)

After purchasing the book, I went to have a cup of joe and loaf around at the Ming Tian Coffee Language [sic]. In China, tea is of top quality, but the only coffee widely available is the egregiously-overpriced instant stuff to be found on the shelves of upscale Chinese supermarkets. Of course, in more affluent areas, coffee shops are opening up as places for businessmen to deal-make and middle-class Chinese consumers to look pretty and daintily sip. Coffee bars here are quite elegant, and since they're a luxury, they really do serve good coffee. I will be happy to frequent the Ming Tien Coffee Language, making that my place of choice to kick back and read trashy books in an elegant setting.

My city has about 4.5 million people. It's not small by any stretch of the imagination — but it's much nicer than Shijiazhuang. The air is cleaner, and the streets are much more comely. Even in the older parts of town, you just don't find that "dingy" look that is so much a part of Shijiazhuang's aesthetic. Indeed, I'm in love with the older part of the city. Willow-lined canals wind through old building stock. Large blocks of pre-Communist low-rise buildings are cut by state-of-the-art boulevards lined with all sorts of posh stores. Of course, if you want the old-style stalls with sweating people hawking merchandise... you only have to venture a little ways from the main street to find a another world of city life.

Yangzhou is quite aesthetically pleasing. There are tree-lined boulevards and gardens to visit throughout the city. As I'm slowly settling into the rhythm of life here, I wonder if I'll eventually drift towards a metropolis like Shanghai or stay here in the (semi) quiet periphery. For me, I don't think there's any in-between: either I'll take the nice quiet of a medium-sized Chinese city or go for the amenities of a big city and put up with the annoyances. A city like Nanjing doesn't interest me at all: it's too small to have, say, a thriving art and music scene, but large enough to have all the pitfalls of large Chinese cities.

I am quite happy to report that I taught the English-speaking daughter of the headmistress here two new words: prostitute and lesbian. Last night, we were out on the town and contemplated taking a drink at a bar. We stuck our heads in the door of one place and noticed that there were only gussied-up women sitting around indolently smoking cigarettes and chatting on cell phones. I urged her that we not have a drink there. I remember saying, "Gosh, I think that's a bar where you can pick up prostitutes."
"Pros-ti-tute?"
"Yes. If you pass buy a bar and only see women sitting around, you can assume that it's either a place to pick up prostitutes or a lesbian bar."

I explained the two terms to my shocked pupil. Though they aren't words that one would, perhaps, learn in an English course in school — they are quite useful to describe life even in Yangzhou.

I have been, thankfully, kept busy socializing with the above-mentioned daughter of the headmistress. I am invited to meals, to visits to the city’s beautiful gardens, and to play mah jong with great frequency. I am happy that the family of the headmistress has been so warm towards me and hope that I can build a good social network starting with my relations with them. Only time will tell how things will work out, of course, but I feel optimistic about spending the year in the company of these people.