I think I'm getting old

because even though the Lion King was my favourite childhood film I can't remember this character for the life of me...

titanic fail

Chinese people love the film titanic, so much so that I am lucky enough to hear 'my heart will go on' on a daily basis.  And now they have sunk to a new low with this.

e-bikes

7. Ebike

I mentioned in an earlier Blog about ebikes, electric bikes, which whiz silently along the roads and stand very noisily and obstructively on the pavements.  Due to the very high temperatures and humidity over summer I though I would get one, and as my friend already bought one I thought it would be fun to go out on exploratory city rides together.  It set me back £180, and costs about 20p to recharge, which will take you 20 kilometres.  To convert that in to petrol prices, I get over 400 miles to the gallon on this Hog.  To drive it once around the world would set you back the equivalent of 277 litres of petrol.  Anyhoo, apart from being extremely economical it also looks the part, and gets a lot of stares from the locals despite the fact that there are thousands thronged across the streets.  It feels great to ride, especially as summer is in full swing and it’s nearly always mid thirties. Walking even a short distance leaves you hot and sweaty, but the ebike gives you a nice breeze to sit back and relax in as you dodge the potholes, drain covers, cars, trucks, people blindly walking across the road, people blindly driving across the road and of course all the other ebikes.  It has foot peddles in case you run out of juice or encounter a particularly nasty slope.  It’s a funny feeling when you pedal and open up the throttle at the same time, you feel like Lance Armstrong effortlessly accelerating away.  You certainly don’t feel like Lance Armstrong when you run out of battery though, pedalling alone will require a lot of effort to keep up walking speed.  There are luckily however, charge points around the city, which will give your battery a speed charge for 20 or 30p.

 

As you can see from the photos she is a beauty, and as her Chinese name is 小鸟 xiǎoniǎo with 小 xiǎo meaning small and  鸟 niǎo meaning bird, I think it translates in to ‘the millennium falcon’.

Quite a few of the EF ream now have E-bikes and we have formed our own E-bike gang, ‘the easy laowaiders’, for those of you who don’t know, laowai is the name for ‘foreigner’ that Chinese people shout at us from across the street when they can’t remember how to say ‘heellloooooo’.

Below is a picture of the bikes specifications, I though you might not be able to understand so I translated it.

1. This is the battery, where the plutonium rods are housed

2. The Flux Capacitor

3. The pillion seat

4. This stops the passenger from getting thrown off the back under extreme acceleration                                  

5. Hydraulics, that’s how I roll!

8. May look like a brake disk but this is actually the power station, which generates the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity needed

9. Rear centre stand, perfect for applying the tyre warmers

21. basket storage unit

23. Primary thrust control

24. This actually does nothing at all, but the lever that you can’t see on the other side will kind of slow you down a bit if you pull hard on it.

this is also an e-bike

E-bikes are also very convenient for transporting things!

or taking long road trips!

8. Hospital 2

8. Hospital 2

I was lucky enough to get ill enough to go to hospital, again!  This time with some funny disease with a funny name I can’t remember.  It started just as a cold and then turned in to a fever, and when I went to hospital they decided to give me days and days of IV, oh joy of joys.

I mentioned the IV room before but I think I can elaborate on it somewhat, as it is quite an experience visiting one.  They partially resemble an airport waiting lounge, with uncomfortable blue chairs and lots of rubbish scattered across the floor.  There can quite often be a bad smell, more on that later, and a funny mix of people. 

With quite a lot of the IV rooms the first thing you notice when you walk in is the screaming, funnily enough, small kids and babies take a rather strong disliking to being held now and having needles inserted in to their hands, feet and the top of their heads.  And this creates a really rather uneasy atmosphere, not only have you got your own illness to worry about but the naturally distress inducing ululations of a small child.  Then you have to go and find your seat and tell whoever is sat there to move to another seat, this is sometimes a person on IV and sometimes just someone who is accompanying their unfortunate friend.  Or you can just find an empty seat and sit there and wait for someone to tell you to move, and perpetuate the IV room flux.  But luckily being a laowai, and not wanting to move, it’s possible to pull the ‘I don’t understand’ ‘ting bu dong’ card, anyone who comes waving a small piece of paper at me saying something in Chinese and looking faintly annoyed but mostly curious will get a swift ting bu donging!  And I will be left to sit back and enjoy a couple of hours of mediciney antibioticicy in the veins hydration. 

So with a couple of hours you tend to glance around a few times, and it’s quite funny what you see.  There is a really eclectic mix of people, from young babies to old biddies and people who look like they’re about to die to people who look like they are just stopping off here on the way to work, like they are just sat on the underground reading their newspaper the way they do every other day.  It’s not uncommon to see two people waiting for IV, one looking terrible and the other obviously accompanying them, and then the nurse come along and hook up the healthy looking one!  And of course anyone whether ill looking or not is likely to cough up a big ball of phlegm and spit it on the floor.  Parents too lazy to walk their children to the toilet will just pull over a bin, whip down the kids trousers and let it rip, whether it goes in the bin or not does not matter, neither does it matter if the bin doesn’t have a bag in.  And as you can imagine, if people are willing to litter the floors of a hospital they are not going to hold back anywhere else.  There are always kids going in the street, children’s clothes here even have a little slit running along the bottom for easy access.  But it’s not just the kids, everyone seems to be in on it, just about every urinal I have used here has a sign above it that reads.

向前一小步，文明一大步

Literally, ‘forwards a small step, civilized a big step’, but maybe I have the translation wrong here, as it seems that most Chinese blokes go ‘backwards a big step’.  I don’t know if this is because they just can’t be bothered to take an extra step forwards, or they don’t want to stand so close to a dirty urinal, but they just don’t seem to care either way.  They will happily stand a good foot or two back and just watch as it goes everywhere without thinking to step forwards and actually get it in the drain rather than on the floor.  This even happened in school, when both urinals broke, cardboard signs were placed inside saying ‘do not use’, but this did not stop them.  The signs got pissed all over and were soon soggy jokes left standing in a flooded urinal.  And when these became too malodorous or ugly to urinate on people just came in and pissed on the floor.  The worse thing about this was that the toilet still worked absolutely fine, it was just the urinals that were broken.  But this did not matter, urinating here is just something that happens, and it doesn’t matter where.  When I was walking out of the terracotta warrior museum I saw a mum walk up to her young boy, standing in front of the main entrance, lift his t-shirt up, pull his trousers and pants down, point at him and tell him something seriously.  Then he started peeing and she ran back and got a nice photo of her boy at the museum.

To get back to my hospital visits, I had all this to enjoy whilst feeling so ill I actually thought I was dying at one point.  But this is all over now, no more illness, I am back to good health and making sure I stay that way.

A Chinese Massage. No skin off my back!

 Not your normal massage, I think I was lucky to come out of this one alive, this was five weeks ago and you can still see the marks on my back.  I asked a friend to take me to a massage place and she said her family uses a really good one, which she took me to.  I was laid down and given a ferocious back rub and then told to take my t-shirt off, I remember thinking at this point ‘that was very painful, maybe I should just say I don’t want any more, pay up and scarper’, but for some strange reason I ignored this intuitive impulse, which I guess it was my survival instinct, and decided to continue.  I put my head back down in the little hole and got ready for the second wave.  I couldn’t see what he was using but it was sharp, and he pressed it against the back of my neck and scraped all the way down to my lower back, and kept doing this until it was red raw and felt like I’d been lashed.  After this I could hear him preparing some other form of torture and it took all my courage to stop myself from jumping up and running off half naked with no shoes on.  I heard what sounded like glass clinking, some kind of liquid and a lighter, followed by a little popping noise as he applied something to my back and then the kind of suction that Dyson could only dream of.  I was just happy that he didn’t chuck a Molotov cocktail at me as that would not have been surprising.  What he was actually doing was pouring ethanol in to jars, lighting it and sticking them on to my poor back as the ethanol burned and created a flash of heat, then an incredible suction followed by a cold pain.  He did this with twelve jars then left the room, the agony was intense and movement created more pain so I just had to lay there and wish I could have gone to Guantanemo bay instead of China for about fifteen minutes.  When he came back he ripped off the jars and turned on some insanely bright heat lamp which he used to warm up my back, which had got pretty close to absolute zero.  Then he removed the lamp and told me to put on my t-shirt as it was over.  I felt relief like nothing I have ever felt before and then got a shock as I sat up and looked over my shoulder to see one of twelve perfect circles of pure black skin.  These remained very dark for about two weeks then gradually began to fade.

hospital

Being in china has really hit my health, I am nearly three months in now and I am on my fourth cold, I only got food poisoning once which was not too bad, an ear infection, lots of sore throats and coughs and have lost six kilograms.  The worst thing has been the ear infection, I woke up one morning early to cover a friends class and took some cocodamol as my ear was a bit sore, by the end of the two hour class my ear was so painful I was a shivery nervous wreck, I had to cancel the classes for the rest of the day and go to hospital.  The doctor stuck a few things in my ear and sent me to the pharmacy to get some medicine, which did not help, I got some weak antibiotics and a paracetamol based painkiller that was pretty much just homeopathy.  I was very grateful mum had given me a ten pack of cocodamol which I hoped would last me til the antibiotics kicked in the next day.  I don’t know what was happening inside my ear but it felt like the pressure was building up and up and the pain was tremendous, sleeping was pretty much impossible, the cocodamol would give me about twenty or thirty minutes every four hours.  After the morning and the painkillers had run out I was escorted back to the hospital to try and get it sorted out, this seemed to involve never ending waiting, followed by walking from room to room and waiting some more.  This was made all the more worse by all the stares that being western attracts, and the weird way that Chinese hospitals operate, when waiting to see a doctor, you don’t wait outside the room, you walk straight in and put your form on the doctor’s table, while he is seeing a patient, and so do about 6 other people.  Really annoying when you want to see a doctor and when you are being seen by one.  After all this waiting around and getting inspected by doctors and fellow patients nothing was helped, I went home with some more useless medicine and spent the whole night up in agony.  I remember at some point getting up and going to the toilet, half way through I started to black out though and the next thing I remember I just made it back to my bed and lay down, as I got my vision back I started to hear a funny noise in my ear that didn’t go away, after about fifteen minutes I realized that it wasn’t in my ear, I cautiously got up and walked back to the bathroom to investigate.  For some reason, when I blacked out half way though peeing I decided to take the shower hose out of it’s holding, put it in the sink and turn the tap on, before making it to my bed to crash out.  Funny what two days without sleep can do to you.  In the morning I started laying my head on my pillow bad ear down, after a while there was a funny noise and a bit of movement and then blood started coming out of my ear.  Back to hospital, and after 4 hours of walking from room to room getting blood tests, seeing doctors and sitting down waiting with my head in my hands I was told I needed an IV drip, I didn’t really want this but eventually agreed because nothing could really be worse than the pain I was already in.  I was then told I couldn’t have it until it had been okayed with the school, so I had to go back home and wait.  When this was done we made our way back to the hospital for IV, when we got there they told us the IV had just finished for the day, so we went to the emergency room, where we could sort out IV, this however, involved more walking around the hospital, waiting in hallways and random rooms and seeing funny doctors.  We did finally, however, make it to the IV room.  A great big open space with over a hundred chairs and all kinds of different people, some looked close to death and others looked perfectly healthy, IV in China is perfectly normal treatment for a cold. 

After the IV I got home and fell straight asleep for the whole night, my ear continued to bleed for a few days and I felt pretty weak for quite a while.  I kept having IV everyday for a few days and eventually the pain went away.  My hearing however, did not come back, and after 5 weeks I went to see a doctor friend of a friend to try and see if it was recovering properly and if my ear would ever get better.  Being a friend of a friend there wasn’t any of the joy of endless waiting around busying from room to room to wait more, and it was only after a fifteen minute wait that Doctor Hu let us in to his tardis, I mean room, and after an inspection prescribed me some more medicine.  Some of the worst tasting drinks I have ever had and nose drops, funny stuff but they did the job, after about a week or so my hearing got better and I started to feel and interact normally.  Amazing what difference having one ear out of action does to you,   I was constantly mistaking what people were saying, not following conversations properly and whenever walking with someone having to jump around them to make sure they were on my right hand side, which everyone found very funny.

food

I have been here for nearly 3 months now and have cooked twice, and this cooking only involved pasta and bottled sauce.  Luckily restaurants here are so cheap that eating out twice a day is no problem, apart from being a bit bad for you.  The food here is good, there is a wide range of food to try, some of it is great and some of it is terrible.  Xuzhou’s central location in China gives rise to its nickname ‘the gateway to the four provinces’, with the four provinces meaning the four main parts of China, and these also represent the four styles of Chinese cooking.  With Xuzhou’s location it gets a lot of influence from all four provinces, but it also has its own local styles.  If you look up Xuzhou on wikitravel, the first thing it says to do is get a dog meat taco, I haven’t seen or tried these yet.  Luckily dog meat is fairly expensive and a bit fancy so you won’t usually get it by accident.  You will however get some things by accident, there are these great street barbeques you get around town called shao kao, where they cook meat and bread and fish on skewers on these long thin coal barbeques and then bring them over to your table to finish off on another barbeque before you eat.  I visited one a few weeks ago with some other teachers for a meal, and we ordered a selection of skewered meats and some bread and vegetables, we started eating and got to the chicken skewers which we wrapped up in tortillas, Charlie and I eat ours down and Dan took one bite and said ‘that’s not chicken’, he was right, it was testicles.  Charlie had very sneakily realised that that was no chicken but continued to eat just so that he could see the look on our faces when we realized what we were eating.  Luckily I eat mine obliviously just thinking it was very soft and spongy chicken, and had finished before Dan bit in to his and saw Charlie’s smile and put two and two together.  Apart from that the meal was really good.

There are basic restaurants where meals start at 40p, and places where you can order a steak for £20, and similar to Thailand I find there is a general rule that the less money you pay, the better the food, the expensive western style restaurants give terrible quality western dishes at pretty much the same prices as western countries, or you can buy some dumplings on the side of the road that will cost next to nothing and taste great.  There is also a big divide in portions, Chinese restaurants give massive portions, so it’s always best if you go with several people, being so cheap you can quite happily order four or five different dishes between two people and get a shock when a truck load of food arrives.  The western restaurants on the other hand cost a truck load, and the portions are not so much smaller.  However I’ve just been to a fancy European restaurant tonight and got goulash soup, garlic bread, Caesar salad, a pizza, piece of cake and a coke for £10, which isn’t really much to complain about, but for the same price I could buy 40 of my favourite eggy bread sandwiches, which is over a month of lunches,

I went to a fish restaurant with a Chinese friend, we ordered some fish soup, some Xuzhou sushi style fresh fish and a turtle.  The soup came and it was nice, a bit boney but that’s alright because in China every meat is boney, you just spit the bones out on the table and enjoy your meal.  Then the sushi style raw fish came, it looked like they had just put a fish on a plate, especially as when she put it down on the table it started flopping around, its fins were still contracting and you could see its mouth and gills moving.  I’m pretty sure it was dead, because its head had been cut off and when the waiter opened the fish up, it had been gutted and prepared so that the flesh was lying there inside.  Disgusting.  I was very happy when my Chinese friend seemed to be as shocked as I was and told them to take it away and bring back just the flesh, we had it with a wasabi type sauce and it was delicious.  Shocking to think though that the idea of the dish is to eat it out of something still moving