|
Bryan Stumpf's China Journal |
||
|
Safe in Shanghai I have arrived safely in Shanghai. The flight was fine - I watched three movies: “Radio” (pretty awful), “Master and Commander” and “School of Rock,” two of my favorite movies. There was a bit of a delay in San Francisco, but they gave us vouchers for a free lunch. At one of the airport restaurants, I saw an altercation between a Chinese businessman and the woman behind the counter. Apparently, the guy had waited too long for his drink and really wanted his drink. He started yelling and then when the woman prepped his drink by starting with ice, he shouted, “NO ICE!!!” in about the same register as one might yell “I WILL KILL YOU!!!” Then, one of his friends tried to calm him down by aggressively pushing and shoving him away from the counter. I worried that this would be what I would see in Shanghai. But since I have been here, everyone has been very nice; Yaping especially has been very helpful. She picked me up from the airport and helped get me settled into my apartment. In trying to make the apartment cozy, I tried to make a little cubbyhole in my balcony/porch. I wanted to put a reclining chair out there, but the windows are four feet from the floor so I wouldn’t be able to look out at the city. So I took the apartment’s TV stand out to the balcony/porch and set the recliner on top of the TV stand. From the elevated chair, I had a much better view of the city. I then put an end table on some boxes and put the elevated end table next to the recliner. After I felt I had made a satisfactory cubby hole with a good view of the city, the apartment’s maintenance guy came in to fix something in my bathroom. He noticed some of the furniture was missing and tried to ask me in Chinese where the furniture had gone. I proudly pointed to my balcony/porch. He just stared at the elevated chair and end table - he didn’t know what to make of my little cubbyhole. He then tried to tell me something in Chinese; he pointed at the furniture on the balcony/porch and then pointed at where they used to be in the apartment. I just nodded, pretending I knew what he was talking about. And then he went about his business in the bathroom. The bathroom is an interesting part of the apartment. There are tubes coming up from the floor and down from the ceiling in some sort of crazy circuitous plumbing. And I am having trouble keeping my balance in the shower - the floor isn’t flat, it’s more V-shaped. I have to stand in the center of the shower floor - if I step away from the center of the floor, like near the edges, then I easily slip and lose my balance. So when I shower, I have to make sure I hold onto the wall just to keep my balance. I’m not sure if this is common of Chinese showers or it’s just my shower. The rest of the apartment is very spacious and the traffic outside isn’t nearly as loud as I thought it would be. Also, the sidewalks are not quite as crowded as I thought they would be - though it is surprising to see cars driving on the sidewalk. According to Yaping, this is common. But it’s pretty unnerving to be walking down a sidewalk and have a car honking behind you, the driver being upset that you are in his path on the sidewalk. Yaping and I walked to campus today and ate at the university’s cafeteria. Shannon had a funny moment in this cafeteria when she and Yaping were eating figs - Shannon had trouble controlling her chopsticks and dropped a date in her tea. Well, when Yaping and I had lunch today, there was a very similar date mishap. Confident with my chopstick skills, I reached for a date, squeezed too hard, and the fruit flew up in the air. Somehow, I actually caught the date in midair with my free hand. Yaping thought it was a great trick. She probably thinks Shannon and I are like Penn and Teller with chopsticks. Well, that’s all for now. I’ll be meeting with the other Foreign Language instructors in about an hour. Please write back as soon as possible. And I will contact you again soon.
|
||