Sept. 23 Classes Start, Rain, Dr. Yang, Moon Cakes

This is what the top of the moon cake looks like.  The characters on the top are supposed to tell you what is inside.

We started off the week bright and early on Monday morning.  We had to get up at 5:30 in order to catch the bus at 7 a.m. for the ride over to Qianfoshan Campus for our classes there.  I was lucky enough to get a seat, but David had to stand for the entire 40 minute ride. 

After we arrived, we had a 10 minute walk to the building and then four flights of stairs to climb to the classroom.  It was a hot and muggy day, so thank goodness there was AC in the classroom!!  They are just small units that are in the front and back of the classroom, but to have that cold air blowing on me as the sweat trickled down my face gave me some relief.  

The classes were great!  They were all a little smaller than we had been told they would be, but that’s okay.  After classes, we crossed on the bridge back to the other side of the campus and got some lunch at the canteen.  

There are three possibilities for us to eat there.  On the first floor, there are all sorts of booths that you can go to and select your food from.  The second floor has basically the same options, but there is also a place where you can get fruit juices and soda pop to drink.  The third option is a special teacher’s restaurant in the basement.  We opted for the second floor. 

The canteen is popular for the middle school students that come from the nearby to eat their lunch at.  It was extremely noisy and there was hardly a spot at a table.  We looked around for the trays, finally found them and the chopsticks, and then approached the windows that held the different choices.  

At the window that I went to, the lunch lady was trying to tell me how much the baoze was (bowd-za are little meat filled steamed buns).  I understood her, but I tried to ask if they were pork or chicken.  Two of the middle school girls had come up behind me and the lunch lady wanted them to explain to me about what the cost was for the baoze.  The girls giggles and looked at me and then each other.  They finally told me what I had understood from the lunch lady.  I then tried to ask if they were pork or chicken.  I know the word for pork, but the girls didn’t know what pork was (the term for pork translates better into pig meat.  I need to remember that.). I decided that the only way I was going to get my question answered was to pull out my little picture of a pig with the Chinese characters on it.  After I did that, she showed me which ones were pork and I bought two of them. 

We had a long time to wait on the campus before we could take the bus over to the massage place.  We cleaned off the table that we had eaten at and tried to do a little work. Soon the workers started cleaning the tables and wanted us to move, so we packed up our stuff and decided to seek out a bathroom before we got on the bus.  We went through three buildings before we found a bathroom!  At the third building, I finally asked a cleaning lady, and she walked us down a long hallway and finally we got to the bathroom!

The fortunate thing about the trek to find the bathroom was that we found a beautiful area that we will be able to relax in with small tables and soft chairs for our Mondays at the Qianfoshan campus.  We were glad to get home after a long day away.

My classes on Tuesday were really fun!  Each class has their own personality.  We had a lot of laughter and fun in getting to know each other.  I think Tuesdays will be my favorite day, but Wednesday and Thursday were almost as fun.  Some of these students choose rather usual names, and some choose rather unusual names.  Here are some examples:  Nucky, Brume, Boohoo, Athenals, Lingle, Family, Amitty, Honesty, Varato, Ordinson, Hubery, Children, and Boeing.  Some I know are just very rare, others...

David’s classes are all a little larger than mine, and he was getting frustrated, because the program he uses to keep track of student progress was not working for him.  He finally had to give up on it, because he needed to go teach the accountants class for one more time.  Things started working better the next day. 

 

The accounting students are preparing a speach.

This game is called "Talking Cards."  You line up in two lines facing a partner. The teacher pulls a card from a regular card deck and there is a question that coordinates to that card.  Then they have two minutes to talk about it.  Great English practice!  

David with his class of accountants.

Just as David was ready to leave for the accountants class, we were invited by Dr. Yang to have a party with his students and colleagues that work in the oncology department that he heads.  Dr. Yang is the head oncologist at QiLu hospital and he is in contact with David’s doctors in the US to help with David’s cancer care while we are in China. 

David hurried home from teaching his class, gathered me, and we headed out he door.  Jinan has been inundated with lots and lots of rain this week.  Even umbrellas couldn’t keep all of the rain off.  We headed for the south gate of the campus to try and catch a taxi.  There were NO taxis that would stop for us, and with the ability of the Chinese to call a cab with an app, we had no chance to get a taxi.  

Dr. Yang was able to find out which bus we could take to get to his area in east Jinan.  He sent us an address that we could show to the bus driver and have him help us know which bus stop to get off at.  The traffic was terrible! It crawled through the streets and stopped for long periods.  Dr. Yang was getting anxious, because we were the guests of honor, and they wouldn’t start without us.  We started counting the stops, hoping that we got the right one.

David had figured the right stop based on the characters at the bus stop, but the bus driver was adamant that it was not the one.  The bus driver told us the stop to get off at and… it was the wrong stop!   Dr. Yang’s assistant, Miss Zhang Xiaoli, started calling us, and we tried to tell her what stop we were at.  This stop only had the Chinese characters to identify it, so we couldn’t tell her.  We handed the phone to one of the men that were standing waiting for a bus, and he was able to tell them where we were.  Five minutes later, we were in an Uber type van and headed to the restaurant that the rest of the group were waiting for us at. 

Dinner with Dr. Yang and colleagues.  Dr. Yang was supposed to send us the pictures, but he forgot before he left for Canada.

Dinner was great, I told Miss Zhang that I can’t do spicy hot foods, so she was able to warn me that something might be hot.  Some people don’t think some things are hot, but they still are.  Dr. Yang asked us to introduce ourselves, and then everyone around the table did the same.  All but one of them were able to do it in English.  After dinner, they ordered another “Uber” driver, and he drove us home. 

Dr. Yang, his colleagues and David and I.

Dr. Yang, David, Zina

Wednesday was still very rainy.  We went for our massages and taught the people there a few more English words.  Last week, it was “face up” and “face down.”  We talked about wet.  One of the men has an app that translates, and they wanted to ask me specific questions, so they used the app to ask.  I had to keep my answers to things they could understand.

On the way home from the massage, we decided to quickly shop for some groceries.  Instead of going out for supper like we usually do, I decided that I was going to make supper.  We were tired of the rain and wanted to stay home.

After our classes on Thursday, I waited at the apartment for the maid to come while David went over to the Hongjialo campus to pick up the Mid-Autumn Festival gift from the university.  It was two huge boxes of Mooncakes.  Mooncakes are the traditional food of this festival.  They have lots of different fillings inside.  Some are sweet, some are savory, some have nuts, and some just don’t taste good to us.  Others are good.  Since we can’t read the Chinese characters, we don’t know what is in them until we open it up. Kind of like gambling…

 

These are the moon cakes from the university.

We had supper with Eva that evening.  She had brought David back from the other campus and we wanted to try out the new 3rd floor canteen. They have a more restaurant type atmosphere there.  You still pick up your food at a window, but you can also order some special things that they will serve to your table, you just have to be able to read and speak Chinese in order to do that.

 

These moon cakes were a gift from the three fourth grade students that we tutor, Michael, Doris and Stone.

This moon cake it "Hong Kong" style, which usually means that it is a sweeter filling inside.

It also has what we think is an "egg yolk" inside.  While the rest of this is moist and sweet, the egg yolk is hard and dry.  We usually take that part out.  It's okay, but I'm an adult now and I don't have to eat it all if I don't want to! 

Close up view of the inside with the "egg yolk." 

Friday morning, we made our way over to the baking store.  It is the only place that we can find in Jinan that has the kind of brown sugar that we are used to.  What they call brown sugar here has some spices mixed up in it and also has the really dark black strap type of molasses still in it.  That messes up my recipes.  They also have a “red” sugar that we were told was the same as the brown sugar from the US, but is isn’t.  Once again, they add something else to it.  I was very happy to find this baking store when we were here the first time so that I can bake with familiar ingredients. 

We had to hurry and finish our other shopping, and then meet Eva at the canteen for lunch again. There is an expanded menu for the noon meal, different from the evening meal the day before.  After lunch, I went home to put my feet up, and David went to get copies picked up.

Saturday, Lily came to Jinan and wanted lunch with us again.  She brought her nephew along, who is studying computer programming.  While we were finishing up some things on the computer, Tresa and Jay Wilkins called us and wanted to know if we knew what bus might get them back to their campus. They had decided to ride bus #1 all the way to the end and see where it went.  The buses usually do a circuit route so that you can ride it from where you got on back to the same spot.  However, sometimes, it is the time for the driver to end his route and take his bus back to the station.  That’s what happened to them.  Tresa sent us a picture of the buses that were at the closest bus stop, and we told them a bus that would get them back, but they were able to find the stop where bus #1 starts.  Since that bus also passes by our campus, we invited them to come meet Lily and eat with us. 

David was keeping track of their progress through texts, and they thought they were at the right stop for our campus.  They weren’t. David went out by the bus stop, while Lily, her nephew, and I went to the canteen to save some seats at a table.  By the time they finally got to the campus, it was too late to eat lunch on the fourth floor like we had planned, at least there was no decent food left.  

We decided to go down to the basement because they serve food there for longer times than any of the other floors.  We still got some good food and had a nice visit. 

While we were waiting for David and the Wilkins to come, two Chinese men asked if they could sit down by us.  There were just two more chairs available, so we said they could.  One of them introduced himself to me, Peter, and said that he had been teaching philosophy and English at a university in the Philippines for the last few years and was now back in China teaching at Shandong University.  His emphasis in philosophy is “Knowledge and Morality.”  He asked me whether I thought that knowledge led to morality or caused a lack of morality.  Wow!  Deep subject for a foreigner who has to watch what she might say about religion!  I told him that I thought that sometimes people that had a lot of knowledge sometimes led to that person thinking that they didn’t need to follow laws of morality because they were “too smart” and didn’t need to be moral.  

Peter also wanted to know what I thought about brainwashing.   Was it necessary for people to be brainwashed so that they would be moral?  My opinion was that if you were brainwashing someone, you were taking away that person’s ability to be moral.  Brainwashing takes away the ability for a person to think for themselves and to make moral choices.  They were only making the choices of another person, not for themselves.  We should have the ability to make our own choices- to choose either to do what was moral and right, or to choose what would cause harm to others and eventually themselves.  Where Peter led most of the questions and discussion, his dinner companion was listening, and while his English may not have been as good as Peter’s, he understood what I said and seemed to agree with it.  They left before David, Jay, and Tresa arrived.

After we finished eating, we said good-bye to Lily and her nephew and then got on the bus to take the Wilkins over to the old market that was near their campus.  We had several items that we were shopping for and they had some things to get.  Since it is so close to their campus, it is good for them to know about it.   We were able to find most of the things we needed.  David needed to go get money on his bus card, but I was tired, so I went home, and he came home later. 

Sunday was pretty usual, going to church and lunch afterward.  We didn’t get to linger, because I needed to be home for Branch Council Meeting.  Quiet evening.