It’s official – my name is too long for China 😭 They took my boarding pass away and had to get special approval for my name 😂 Finally (after deliberation) they officially agreed to just write it on the pass. 😜
Tag Archives: Zhengzhou
#Strawberry ‘Betterfiles’
18 Jun
The name was ‘Betterfiles’ but I think it was supposed to be ‘Betterflies’ 😜
Tastes #Divine! Small restaurant in the new CityOn Mall in #Zhengzhou called “Strawberry Forever” — all the deserts are strawberry! 🍓
Zhengzhou is really growing recently – the #Mall is HUGE and has #Forever21 #Zara #sephora and more. So nice and lovely!
National Holiday in Zhengzhou
2 Oct😘 Made it safe to my hotel! Traveled around the fair in Zhengzhou Garden 🌹💐 Visited Wal-mart (not very impressive 😭), and ate a DELICIOUS peanut smoothie! Also ran into Eric, my student from my first semester at SIAS. In a town of 6 million people, I randomly ran into him! Completely awesome!
Anti-Smog Truck!
7 JanLiving 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
Anti-smog Carrier Appears in Zhengzhou
by Sun Wanming via “CRI“
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] . . .
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First Trip to Zhengzhou
7 SepLast Thursday we took our first trip into Zhengzhou,
a large city about 1 hours drive from Xinzheng, my new hometown. Xinzheng is considered a rural farming town out here in China, but it actually boasts of about 600,000 people living here. While it has a ton of normal shopping, the prices can be a little high and the variety of items is small. Consequently, a lot of the foreigners and students prefer to go into the much larger Zhengzhou (8 Million Inhabitants ~ the size of New York City) for a greater selection of products and more opportunities for bartering prices down.
One of the things Zhengzhou offers that Xinzheng doesn’t is a far larger number or walk-in clinics, including one that works solely on Job Physicals or Physicals required by Visa Applications. So this past week we were sent into Zhengzhou to visit the clinic to have our physicals for the Permanent Residency. This was really our first major foray outside of the College Campus, since we have been so busy moving in and settling down. It didn’t help that classes were starting last Monday and we had to instantly jump into lesson planning. But all that aside, this was really our first adventure and we soaked up every minute of it. I’ll post more about the physical itself later, but here are a few things we noticed in our drive through the city:
The Traffic is INSANE!
Two lane roads that suddenly have five lanes of cars, scooter and taxis driving down the sidewalks, huge poles holding up the overpasses above suddenly appearing in the middle of a driving lane, no merging lanes, and a complete disregard for any road signs contributes to what seems like absolute chaos. It’s truly amazing that there are not more accidents than we saw. There are NO traffic laws ~ at one point we had a four way corner with cars going from each corner all at the same time, crossing three lanes of traffic in any given direction. The only exception is that you are responsible for everything in front of you. Conversely, you don’t have to look behind you at all, whoever is behind you is responsible for not hitting you. It’s pretty confusing, but they work it out. Makes for a lot of butting into lines.
Crazy Drivers ignoring the lanes
I couldn’t snap fast enough to get the hold picture, but these two lanes meet at the bottom.
It doesn’t help that they tell you how long til the light changes. All the cars just get impatient and jump the light.
Scooters and bikes take up a shocking amount of room!
Arrived at Last!
6 Sep
Sorry! I started writing this back on the 25th, but I only just finished it. 😦 Many Apologies!
Well this trip was quite the fun experience. . . ~ Murphy’s Law was working in overtime throwing things in our path! If one more thing had gotten screwed up, I’d have just screamed. I probably should have known that was how it was going to go when my first photo of the trip was of the Jack Swigert (coined “Houston, we’ve had a problem) 😛
As I mentioned before, my mother and I were part of a group of four people who weren’t going to fit on the original flights arranged for everyone else ~ they ran out of seats for us. So instead, they decided we should leave the morning after the rest of our team. Which would have been fine had Sias not wanted us to pay for the hotel up front. They agreed to re-imburse us later, but with hotels around the Denver Airport as expensive as they were, this was a lot of money that we didn’t really want to spend out-of-pocket. Who knew how long we were going to have to wait to be re-imbursed? . . . it just didn’t seem worth the risk. Continue reading
New Job as a Teacher in China!
8 MayHello one and all! I have a job Woot!
Mom and I will both be teaching Business/Law courses at Sias International University the Henan Province of China. This program is a cooperative program with Fort Hays State University in Kansas. Basically we are teaching Fort Hays classes to the students in China. We will have 5-6 classes of 50-60 students each. Classes start Sept. 1; we’ll be leaving in mid-August. Here is a map of the biggest city (Zhengzhou) next to where we are moving this fall. If you zoom out, directly south you will see Xinzheng, our new hometown. We will be right next to the Longmen Grottos, Shaolin Temple (home of kung fu!), the Terra Cotta Soldiers, beautiful mountains, temples, etc. Zhengzhou also has cheap direct tickets to Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Beijing! The school itself is pretty sweet–it has a beautiful campus, we will both get an apartment, we have 3 meals paid a day, good salary, three months off a year, awesome benefits, a great community, and what promises to be great students. So Exciting!
“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
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