Journal Entry #6: Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Wednesday morning, and as per usual, I was up early.  My only class that day was at 3:00 o’clock in the afternoon. I walked into town just to look around. I bought some pastry for breakfast. I had already consumed two cups of coffee at my apartment.  They DO NOT have ground coffee here - only instant, and almost no restaurant has coffee at all!  Ed Mosby brought the Myers some ground coffee when he arrived on Sunday, and yesterday Mary Myers (knowing I had not had a good cup of coffee yet) made me some.  But I must say the Nescafe coffee that I bought at the Supermarket is a lot better than I thought it would be. 

As you all probably know, Tea is very popular here.  I bought some regular Black Tea (Lipton) at the store on Sunday when the students took us, and I made some this morning - It was really good. It was called Yellow Label Tea. The package comes with Tea bags and packets of honey. If you are a tea drinker you're going to love the hot tea here.  My apartment is supplied with a five-gallon dispenser of bottled water with a hot and cold spout, so making instant coffee or tea is really easy.  And, good water to fill an empty water bottle is readily available as well.

I also bought some instant Oatmeal at the store. It was better than I thought it would be. Here is a photo of my pantry and its meager supply... Oatmeal packets on the left, a package of peanuts from the plane, Lipton Yellow/Black Tea with honey packets, Peanut Butter, Nescafe Instant Coffee, A juice box of Herbal Tea and what looks like a Rice Cake of some sort that was given to me.

Wednesday was also full of the normal (whatever that is at this point) and a "first and unusual.” First the mundane: it has rained every day since we have been here.  Only Sunday afternoon has there been even a glimpse of a bright sky.  But yesterday, (Wednesday) it rained even harder all morning and it kept me in the apartment for longer than I wanted it to.  I have a TV here but all of the channels are in Chinese with very few selections.  I can only read the email and Internet for so long, so I was ready to get out of the house.  Then I noticed an umbrella that one of my visitors, Amy, left here the night before, so I took the umbrella and headed across campus just to get out some, and I gave her a call to let her know that I had it and I would be happy to meet her to give it back.  She couldn't meet me anytime soon, and said she had another umbrella, for me just to use it for myself while it was raining.
 
With not much else to do I walked into town.  I did so by walking across campus to the main entrance of the campus.  The campus of 30,000 students is several square blocks large and has a wall/fence around it with only a few "gates" to enter and exit.  Some gates are small and somewhat understated, but the main entrance has a very large and ornate gate. It’s very Chinese, and once you leave through that gate you are on a very busy downtown Hengyang Street.  I didn't take my camera because of the rain.  As I left the campus for a stroll through the heart of the busy city I was fascinated by the busyness of the activities.  There were lots of people out in the rain with their umbrellas. I saw street vendors, stores with open fronts, lots of traffic with people on scooters, bikes, cars and they all were going whatever direction they wanted without regard to traffic laws! I saw a family of five riding on one Vespa style electric scooter.  Two children were standing between the dad (the driver) and the handlebars, one child/toddler was sitting behind him and the mom sitting behind that child.  I wish I could have gotten a picture of that!

As I strolled along the street I smelled a lot of bakery shops and saw their pastries being displayed.  I bought something that resembled a muffin but it was very different than what I was expecting.  It was very doughy, soft and an unusual sweet flavor.  It was coated on top with some sort of icing, and it had what tasted like some chocolate chips, but they were shaped like a coffee bean, so I'm not sure what they really were.  I really don't know what the dough flavor was but it was pretty good!  Right next door there was a small stand-up style coffee shop with a completely open front wall/door to the street.  It was very crowded with a lot of young men inside watching a large flat-screened television. I poked my head in and stood there to see what they were watching.  It was the NBA basketball playoff game between the Boston Celtics and the Orlando Magic.  They oohed and ahhed with every great play and replay! 

A lot of my students during the Q & A have asked me if liked basketball, which is another very popular sport here, and who is my favorite basketball player?  I always told them yes, I like basketball but not as much as baseball.  Then I told them my two favorite basketball players were Michael Jordon and YAO MING!  Yao Ming is a seven-foot NBA player for the Houston Rockets who is from China.  They applauded!  Students here applaud a lot when you're the speaker and you say something they like.
 
I went back to my apartment, because at some point the maintenance staff was supposed to come by and fix several items that were not working in my apartment.  I ended up visiting more with Edwin and Mary Myers about their work, this mission, school, and the opportunities that are before us. They are wonderful people!!  And I mean a REALLY GREAT and loving couple! They are just a few years older than me, probably in their early sixties. The workers never came and I had to get back across campus to convert my PowerPoint for my class to something they could display on the classroom computers.  So Edwin waited for the workers for me. The classrooms have very old software and a lot of my materials are not compatible without jumping through a lot of digital hoops.  Thankfully, with the help of one of my Chinese student-hosts, Charles, I was able to get something to show to my 3 o'clock class.
 
The class was about 30 teachers and a few students who wanted to attend. It was a class on communication theory and they seemed to enjoy it a lot. Many stayed around for about 30 minutes after class to ask more questions.  I even had Charles help me get a handout run off to give them. 

By the time I got back to my apartment the work crew and Sunny, the manager of our visit/work, was there to finish up and to make sure I was happy and ask me about anything else I needed.   Sunny also gave me the rest of the money that they pay me for food while here. Altogether they gave each of us ¥1,400 which is about $210 USD.  With food as cheap as it is that should be plenty!
 
The team and I went to the Myers’ house for dinner where Mary served Chinese dumplings that one of the mothers of one of her students made for us because she thought Mary would need some help feeding us.  They were a lot like the dumplings that my Chinese friend Eileen made for us a few years earlier except they were much larger.  They were very good.  We picked them up with chopsticks, and dipped them in different flavors of soy sauce and other flavors. It seemed to hit the spot at the time!

Now for the "first and unusual."  After dinner Edwin suggested we all walk to town for everybody to get a "Foot Rub!"  But, it wasn't just a foot rub.  It was more like a semi full body massage.  We all sat in recliner type chairs, all lined up in a row.  They started with giving us shoulder and arm massages while our feet were soaking in some hot solvent, and then they went on to the feet.  It was more than I expected.  It ended up being a pedicure, foot washing, leg and foot massage.  I had never had a pedicure before in my life!  This went on for about 45 minutes!  My camera battery was down but one of the students had a camera and was shooting stills as well as about a 60 second video of our "oohing and ahhing" with every stroke!  None of the six Chinese massagers spoke any English but seemed to be having a good time laughing with us when we laughed.  We all had our pictures made with them, and they even went and got their cameras to do the same.  We were laughing so hard we were hurting.  When it was over I floated home on my newly rediscovered feet and drifted off to sleep for the night!  The day may have started out rainy and mundane but it certainly didn't end that way!