Happy New Year!!! The year of the sheep promises to be a good!🎈May love and laughter light your days, and warm your heart and home. May good and faithful friends be yours, wherever you may roam. May peace and plenty bless your world with joy that long endures. May all life’s passing seasons bring the best to you and yours!
Courtesy of the hospital here in China. If you stop by, you can visit the Blood Chamber, Urine Chamber, Cell Chamber, Ultrasonic Knife Teetment Center, X-Ray Perspective Room, and the Ultrasonic Scalpelout Room
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China pollution :(. My window sill after two weeks. I missed last weeks cleaning and this what it looked like. [Scowl][Cry][Speechless]😱😱😱
Well, small break in the vacation plans – mom fell yesterday and crashed her hip so I spent 13+ hours in the Korean hospital. Today she is zonked out on pain meds, so I have some time to do a little typing 🙂
I haven’t really had time to answer questions yet, but I wanted to start addressing some of the Commonly Asked Questions people give me about China. While it may not answer everything, I hope that it will clear up some big misconceptions people have about this beautiful country.
When I began telling family and friends about my new adventure plans to teach in China,I found fear and worry was a bit more prevalent than excitement, and I had to do some serious selling of the idea before they would start to get behind me. The most common question I was asked was “well, do you think it’s safe?” After thinking about it, I’ve decided that this question stemmed from concerns of about three things (size/language, health, and security); I’ll address each in turn over the next few posts, but I want to start with the size/language concerns.
Just looking at a map will tell you that China is one of the worlds largest nations (technically #3, right after Russia and Canada). Then there is the fact that it is actually the #1 largest nation in terms of populations (1.3 billion in 2015, making up 19% of the worlds’ people!). Just, woah! There are 45 cities in China with more than 1,000,000 people, and the vast majority of them are closer to 3-4 million. Compare that to the US, where only 9 cities have more than 1,000,000 and only 4 of those are more than 1.5. It’s just kind of mind-boggling to think about how HUGE China really is. And I think this is one part of China that people actually kind of get – we’ve seen the movies about Shanghai and Beijing, watched the tiny little streets and billions of flashing lights in strange characters leading us into back alleys to be lost in the maze forever. China’s size is daunting, and I won’t say that this doesn’t scare me at times.
Unlike Korea and Japan, where subway signs, maps, and bus routes are more or less in English, most of the transportation aids in China are in Pinyin. In fact, there isn’t even a map at all of my home city of Xinzheng, and it has about 600,000 people. While this seems extremely big to a Missouri girl from a town of 12,000; to the locals, this is practically a backwoods country farming village. Even the nearby city of Zhengzhou, boasting 5,000,000 as early as 2010, is considered a small city. And that’s TWICE the size of Chicago! And still no good map! Continue reading
As I’ve mentioned before, China = no Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. However, the Chinese are nothing if not inventive, and they have their own wonderful systems for instant messaging, status posting, and picture sharing.
The first is called QQ, and I’m still getting used to that system because it is almost entirely in Chinese. They have an English version, but the English doesn’t cover many of its tools. It is a little more widely used only in that students use it more often in a day (think Facebook). Every student I’ve met also has a program called WeChat (said Weesheen), and it is how students and foreigners contact one another. It is also the replacement for Twitter for many students, so it is important to be familiar with the program. Continue reading
Living in Henan, we are kind of in the middle of some of China’s worst pollution. If you look at the Air Pollution map, you’ll see that Zhengzhou tends to run parallel with Shanghai and Beijing for some of the most hazardous conditions for people’s health. This is due in no small part to the fact that many foreign companies have built factories in Zhengzhou, such as Apple (yes, we saw the iPhone 6 first! 😛 ) Having watched skyscrapers literally disappear feet in front of me on the really bad days, I can say that it is definitely horrible to try to be outside in. The city looks like a ghost time about half the time because of the smoky look and the abandoned cast that it gives to all the buildings.
So, I’m pretty excited about this news! Some people said that our numbers actually went down so maybe this will really work 🙂 That would be completely awesome! **DB
A truck loaded with a massive aerosol gun is seen ejecting water spray at Zhengzhou, capital city of central China’s Henan province on January 5, 2015. An operator says the carrier with a capacity of 10 tons of water can eject spray particles for 75 minutes. He added that the water spray can effectively relieve the haze weather in the area by dissolving the pollution particles and dust in the air. The anti-smog tool is said to cost 800,000 yuan. [Photo: tencent.com] . . .
“She was free in her wildness. She was a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belonged to no man and to no city” ~ Roman Payne
Language Translation
Deceptively Blonde 