Goodbye Leah

We said farewell to one of our colleagues this past weekend and the American contingent is down one of their prettiest members. A small gathering was held at the Cornell's to celebrate Leah's new beginning and our loss. We will miss her ever present smile that could been seen from a block away and her patience in always being there to help us out of a jam with her excellent Chinese. She is returning to London to visit with her Grandparents then on to spend some quality time with her family in Massachusetts before joining main squeeze Will in England to begin a new phase in their life. Will, the only British member of our group will continue teaching till the end of the semester and after a little travel in China, will return to England to begin his duties as a teacher in the Chinese Department of a posh public school. In England, they call private schools, public schools. Still trying to figure that one out.


A number of our group will be saying goodbye at the end of the semester so there will be a few more goodbyes to be had. I have said this before but I will say it again. It was so easy to bond with these kids. I am sure that some psychological mumbo-jumbo could explain our feelings but this will somehow spoil what has been a wonderful moment in our life. Who cares why, it just happened and our lives are better for it. Sometimes it is better not to know how, but just to savor those moments.

"Stay in touch" is so easy to say, but over the years Nonie and I found it was easier said than done. But this time Nonie and I will stay in touch with this crazy bunch. We just gotta know!

For reasons that will come up in future blogs, Nonie and I will not be returning to Harbin next semester. It was a difficult decision.But don't worry, the adventure continues. Stay tuned.

Welcome To Middle Age

I had to break the bad news to our birthday boy, Edoardo, that he can no longer qualify as a youngun since he has now officially entered middle age or the Dark Side as I like to call it. "Luke, You are starting to sound like your Father". (sotto voci Darth Vader) I made a grown Italian man cry. I quickly told him that he was eligible to maintain his youngun status for another five years by acting as a mentor to the other younguns. Sort of like the Past President position maintained by many organizations, created to allow the passing on of all the accumulated wisdom of the policies and procedures of the organization. Of course he will discover that the younguns won't listen as they fully believe they know everything and that what input he has is ancient and of little use in their lives. Those of us who have entered our senior years have had to face that stigma for the last 25 years so it is now second nature to us, to be regulated to "old news" status.

We celebrated his birthday on Saturday night with a lovely meal in a large private room at a local restaurant with over 20 people attending. Most Chinese restaurants provide one or more rooms for their guests to dine in privacy. The nicer ones provide only private rooms and have no public seating areas. Some of the larger restaurants occupy 3 or more floors of a building with small rooms seating 8 and growing to larger rooms with seating for up to 20 or more. The room will always have a round table with a Lazy Susan occupying the centre of the table. The Lazy Susan on a table for 20+ is huge but it may need to hold 15-20 different dishes. The one on our table was a round piece of 1/2" glass over 5' in diameter. It looked strong enough to stop a puck.

There is some unwritten rule about the ratio of the number of food dishes to people but I have yet to figure it out. I think it is based solely on the appetite of the person or persons ordering the meal. Kind of like the rule "never go grocery shopping when you are hungry as you will have a tendency to buy too much". Ordering food is quite a process. Some restaurants have the food artfully displayed on tables in a room usually located where you enter the restaurant while other make do with pictures. You point to the dishes you want or in some cases, to the fish swimming around in huge tanks. Over the last year we have seen some interesting dishes. From live silk worms to turtles poking their little heads out and staring at you as you ponder their fate.

You return to your room and twenty minutes later the dishes start arriving. Typically, they will arrive one at a time, delivered 5 or 10 minutes apart. Once a few dishes have arrived people will start to eat while more dishes continue to arrive over the next 40 minutes or so. The Lazy Susan will be in continuous motion so you need to be quick when one of your favorite dishes goes by. That is a challenge for me as I have not grasped the intricacies of chopstick use yet. I think it has something to do with the missing piece of my thumb. There are no serving spoons for the dishes, you just dig in with your chopsticks. This can involve lots of work as most dishes are usually carved up into small chopstick size portions so it can involve quite a few transfers to your plate. The plates are usually no larger than a coaster making it difficult to pile on a lot of food. This helps to reduce your food intake and may explain my shedding pounds during our time in China.

The nicer rooms will also contain couches, and all the makings for a karaoke party. Wandering around the restaurant, you will often hear some really bad singing. The room is yours for as long as you want it so most diners make a night of it. You can carry on as crazily as you want, as long as you keep it in your room. As a long time people watcher, the private rooms do not satisfy my needs but it is more civilized. Nothing can spoil a nice meal than watching some sloppy drunk at the next table unless he is your sloppy drunk.

Life has settled into a nice rhythm since Nonie has returned, with long lunches and surprisingly late nights for us. Our switch to late afternoon and evening classes has thrown both our Circadian clocks into disarray. We are staying up till 10, sometimes 11 o'clock at night and sleeping in till 6:30 or 7:00. I not sure if we will become night owls but it is actually a nice change all be it a temporary one.

A Chinese Easter

Unlike Christmas, Easter passed relatively quietly in Harbin. The only signs we saw were a few posters of cartoon Easter bunnies in the window of the local Pizza Hut franchise. The Chinese have not embraced Easter as they have Christmas. Not sure of the reason. Perhaps the religious tones of Easter are so much stronger than the Christmas.

Nonie, who is always thinking, brought back all the fixings for an Easter egg decorating party. So Saturday was set aside to have the younguns over.Much like our Christmas tree ornament making party, they immediately jumped into the spirit of the moment creating some truly unique designs and patterns on their hard boiled eggs. White eggs do not exist in Harbin, brown only. This created some interesting colors after the eggs were removed from the dyes.

Faberge had better watch out if the Chinese should take it into their minds to start creating those beautiful and intricate egg creations. We had to make it very clear to some of our guests that even though the eggs were hard boiled, they would not keep for ever and would need to be eaten or thrown away. Much to their consternation as they did not want to destroy all their hard work. The afternoon included a highly competitive Easter Egg Hunt and finished with a piece of Easter Bunny cake and ice cream.

Nonie has had a successful return to the classroom. Her Friday students presented her with a lovely bouquet of flowers and a small wall hanging to welcome her back. That is just another of example of the kindness that we experience almost every day from the Chinese. I will miss these little civilities when we leave China.

We will be celebrating the thirtieth birthday of one of the younguns this weekend. I sense a party in the wind. More next blog.

Seven Weeks, One Day, Four Hours

Nonie has landed safely back in Harbin. Seven weeks, one day, four hours snce we last saw each other. This is longest we have been apart since we first met on November 30th, 1973. She experienced no problems along the way. All her flights were on time with her luggage arriving in Harbin at the same time as she did. I can relax now. Tom, a fellow Canadian has lost his luggage on three out of four trips back and forth between Canada and China. I think that I can count on two fingers, the number of times we have lost luggage in all our years of travelling. I would like to say it is all due to careful planning but I cannot in all honesty claim that. We have had some hairy connections over the years. I remember one that had us running through LAX like O.J. Simpson on his way to the Hertz counter. We arrived 90 minutes late to catch a connecting flight in another terminal. We made it to the gate only to find we had been given the wrong gate number on our boarding passes. This little glitch required another Simpson like dash to the other side of the terminal. Despite this, our bags managed to arrive with us in Vancouver. Perhaps we should have let the baggage handlers get us to the correct gate.

Nonie arrived to a impromptu hall party organized by the younguns. They were as thrilled to have her back in Harbin as I was. She was greeted by a huge bouquet of balloons and a welcome home sign decorating the elevator lobby on our floor. Lately, the lobby has been the location of a number of social gatherings. It has a nice couch and two comfortable chairs with more room for a crowd then in our apartments. Word quickly spread around the building of Nonie's return and the lobby was soon filled with well wishers. Even the building staff wandered up to say hello. I am constantly amazed at how quickly we have bonded with the people here. Most are in their twenties and they remind us so much of our own kids. Full of life and way to much confidence. It will be difficult to say goodbye over the next few months.

Happy Qing Ming Day

It was a quiet long weekend with only the sound of money being burned in the streets. As I wandered each evening, I came across small fires burning on just about every street. On one small block , I counted 14 fires. It was quite windy, so the flaming embers were blowing every where. It was a very surreal atmosphere. And thus began my introduction to the Qing Ming festival. Qing Ming is a time for the Chinese to honour their ancestors and departed loved ones. Tombs and grave sites are cleaned and offerings of tea, flowers, food, wine, joss paper accessories and perhaps a small libation are left on the tomb for the enjoyment of their ancestors. Starting early in the week, market stalls opened up on every block selling all the necessary items for a successful Qing Ming. The colourful packages contain stacks of joss or rice paper and bricks of paper money wrapped in red or gold foil.

One of the rites of Qing Ming involves the burning of offerings. The traditional belief of the Chinese is "when someone dies, their spirit goes to the afterlife or Hell". Hell in their sense is not like our Hell, it is a kinder, gentler place. Here the spirit lives on doing much the same things as they did in life. But, to do this the spirits still need money. Wait a minute, maybe it is like our Hell. Those surviving want to assure that their ancestors have a comfortable after life so they burn different offerings including cash. The money is actually play notes and are called "Hell Money". The notes are quite colourful imprinted with lotus flowers, thistles, dragons, and pots of gold. They also burn facsimiles of cars, houses, watches and even cell phones. It seemed to me that the joss or rice paper was the most popular for burning.

The ceremony begins by laying the offering down on the street or sidewalk. Many of the celebrants carried a stick or branch. The branches may have been willow as the Chinese believe that willow branches can help ward off evil ghosts that wander about on Qing Ming. They take the branch and draw a circle several times around the offering, then set it on fire. There were many different styles. Some lit the entire offering at once, while others slowly fed small portions into the fire. All this was done in silence. As I walked around, I had to be careful where I stepped as there were literally dozens of small ash piles littering the streets from previous ceremonies. I returned early the next morning to get a picture but too late, they were gone. Judging by the numbers of fires I saw over the three or four days, the GDP of Hell will not be experiencing a "financial crisis".

My baby is back safely in the fold. More in the next blog.

Ten Reasons Spring Has Arrived

1. My nose is running continuously.
2. Basketball is going on non-stop morning to night.
3. The street vendors have shown up everywhere with more coming every day
4. The dogs have shed their cute little winter coats for cute little spring coats
5. The canvas door screens are disappearing from all the entrance doors and are being replaced by the lighter plastic ones.
6. The little woolen booties covering the metal door handles have all but disappeared.
7. Tables are showing up outside a few of the neighborhood restaurants.
8. The bottled beverages are disappearing off dorm window sills. Students are looking for cooler places to store their beer.
9. The leeks and cabbage that once hung from every balcony and window have about all but disappeared and been replaced by laundry.
10. Thick woolly long underwear has disappeared off store shelves or has gone on sale for deep discounts

Good news. My baby's coming back. Nonie was given the go ahead to fly this week and will be back in Harbin next week. Exactly seven weeks,one day and 4 hours since we parted company in Penticton. This has the longest we have been apart since we met on November 21, 1973. Thanks to Skype, it has not been as bad as it could have been.

I have now completed five weeks of teaching and thought perhaps a few comments on our new group of students would be in order. The students are all third year juniors, supposedly the creme de la creme of the junior students. They are all expected to enter the graduate program at HIT when they complete their fourth year. Nonie and I were given the classes as we work for the grad department in foreign languages.

My first impression of the juniors was based on our experiences with the Grad students and I quickly assumed these students had a much higher level of skill as they appeared confident, almost brash in speaking English. In the early weeks of our first semester, getting the Grad students to talk was a major hurdle for Nonie and I. The high level of confidence displayed by the juniors led me to falsely believe that they had a much greater skill level than the Grad students. Now five weeks in I find that on the whole their proficiency in English is at only a slightly higher level than the Grads but their confidence to speak is certainly at the next level.

Our grad classes were formed based on marks that the students received in placement exams they took at the beginning of the semester. This allowed for a reasonable balance of skills in each class. The makeup of our current classes are around the students majors and the skill balance of each class is definitely broader. It presents a few challenges to assure everyone is on the same page when giving instructions. Something that I struggle with sometimes. The students look out for each other and will help others when my directions become a little blurry. I now spend a bit more time soliciting feedback from students to assure that they are getting it. Giving instructions was an area I sucked at during our TESOL course. (If you are reading this Sean, I know, I know!)

While there is only a few years separating the Grad students and the juniors, there is a great divide when it comes to their maturity levels. That coupled with the lack of young women can make for a very loud and boisterous classroom at times. I got the stink eye from a teacher who was teaching in the adjacent class on my first night. But despite the lack of maturity, most seem to have a higher confidence level than the Grads. They almost seem empowered, perhaps by their standing as the top students in HIT.

Despite the differences, it has been an enjoyable five weeks in the classroom. Our schedule is not as favourable this semester. All our classes are in the late afternoon and evenings. I have been slow to adjusting to this as I am a morning person. I get home from classes around 8:30-9:00 PM but find myself a little to wound up to go to bed right away so stay up another hour or so. Now my usual 6:00 AM wake up has moved to 7:00 AM. I think that no longer qualifies me as a morning person. Not sure of the rules.

This weekend is a long weekend so planning to be very lazy.