First Day of School

A shout out from CHINA!

Monday, meaning you guys’ Sunday night, I started school at Suzhou Singapore International School. My first day in a private international school? Well, really quite boring, but it’s because all of my grade is working on this huge project, so the teachers aren’t giving homework! Lucky ME! I am taking Chinese, Humanities, English, Science, Drama, PE, Math, and Food Technology. Since this is a British International School, it runs by the block schedule, which means instead of periods, we have blocks of hour and a half classes. Some classes run half of the block, and other s run a full block. Because of this, every day is a different schedule. I never have the same class first, and then the same class second and so on. This is rather confusing to me, but I’m no dumber than anyone at that school, so I’m sure I’ll be able to catch on! Luckily, I met Jake’s (Jake is a boy in our compound and has been a nice friend to me) girlfriend, Emilie, before school started, and I was fortunate enough to have her in ALL of my classes except drama. It’s so relieving to talk into a new school and to know a face J

SSIS has a very formal uniform. The girls wears ‘classic’ black shoes, navy tights or knee highs, a plaid skirt, a white button down, and a zip up tie. I’ll try to send pictures as soon as I can. I am very excited about this opportunity to make new friends and to see people’s ideas and cultures from other countries. As I said in my last email, one of my favorite things so far is meeting people from different places, so this school is perfect for that! I have already met kids in my grade from Switzerland, Germany, Thailand, Belgium, UK, Canada, and Denmark, oh and A LOT of Koreans. Everyone is really sweet and it’s been an easy transition so far going into a new school. Many of my teachers are from different countries; so far, one from Russia, one from Canada, two from the USA, one from China, and several from the UK. All the of the accents are so fun to listen to, and most everyone is bi-lingual or tri-lingual. Just it’s just the Americans, the non-Quebec Canadians, and the British who are taking a ‘second language’,… everyone else is taking their 3^rd, 4^th, or 5^th language!!!

Anyways, school is pretty good so far. I ride the bus, and through the bus rides have gotten to know 3 other kids in my compound! Our bus driver and bus monitor are very mean though. Now you’re thinking bus, as in big yellow metal bus. These are NICE busses, like Greyhound busses. We have to wear seat belts, but since they are made in China half of them don’t even work! But our monitor comes and tugs on them to make sure they are buckled and makes us moves away from our friends if they aren’t. She turns around and glares at us and just bosses us around. Our driver arrives at 7:49am, and leaves at 7:50 sharp. Yeah, that’s one minute to get on the bus. So even if you are walking toward the bus, he is going to try to leave you. I guess I would get bored being a bus driver too, but isn’t that just plain mean? Also when you board the bus, the monitor checks your temperature! Like with the temperature gun. I guess it’s to see if you have swine flu. Dulwich, my cousins’ school, had doctors come to their school and give everyone at the school a H1N1 shot! Talk about taking precautions! I guess better safe than sorry!

Being homeschool my whole life, I woke up this morning being very disappointed that I had to actually go to school AGAIN this morning!! I had totally forgotten! But the experience is one that I’ve been wanting and I’m very excited to meet new friends and be in a ‘real’ private school! Thanks for your thoughts and prayers!

Allie

Xian Nian Kuai Le!

Xin Nian Kuai Le! Happy Chinese New Year!!! Hopefully this year shows prosperous for the Chinese and the beginning of fun for me! The New Year began on the 14th, so on the 13thwe celebrated until midnight just like any New Years’ party does!
Our New Years Eve was spent in Luzhi, a water town outside of Suzhou. We wandered about the streets for a couple of hours, pausing for pictures with the Chinese who just found us to interesting…? This felt like ‘old’ China, like what I imagined…not the modern world of Shanghai and Suzhou, some of the top manufacturing cities in the world! Not that there’s anything wrong with Suzhou, it was just different that what I thought of China to be. Anyways, so we walked around meats racks, crowded streets, firework stands, and over canals for a bit of sightseeing and in search of fireworks. While walking on the street I found several things to be quite funny.
The first, was I saw these chicken on the ground squawking and pecking around.

Animals on the streets really aren’t uncommon, but what I saw next was just funny. Across the street, and I mean directly, like maybe 10 feet away was a food stand. And they were selling… cooked CHICKEN!!!! If I’m not mistaken, which I know I’m not, they were actually killing and cooking the chickens right there in the street. Talk about fresh meat!!!

The second thing that was humorous was when we were trying to buy fireworks. The lady got out a REAL LIVE abacus!!! It was HILLL-ARY-OUS!!! She was like doing the little numbers and then she showed the abacus to my Uncle (but I don’t think it meant anything to him, because I’m not sure if he can even READ an abacus) and then argued about how much the fireworks were worth.

It was funny to think that people still used this ancient way of math in the streets of China! We didn’t end up buying the fireworks, but instead went across the street for a better deal. HUGE fireworks for the grand total of… $20. Yup, and they probably over charged us because they knew they could rip off ‘Westerners’.
We then headed home and had a party at our house with 3 other families: One family from Michigan and two families from the French speaking part of Canada. It was fun to try to communicate with the new family from Quebec, because their children didn’t speak English! We played Apples to Apples and after it got dark went out to the park on Duchsu lake to blow up fireworks!
The Chinese were the ones who invented fireworks and believed that the bright lights and loud noises scared off the evil spirits that would haunt the New Year. So in other words, people get really into fireworks over here, more so than my cousins on the 4th of July, and let’s talk about crazy :P EVERYONE lights up their sparklers and fireworks, poppers and roman candles. Across the lake we saw hundreds of fireworks explode. It was very beautiful. Soon it was too cold to stand out by the lake so we went home.
On Tuesday we went into Shanghai for 2 nights! It was really cool to walk around town during the New Years’ celebration and see all the decorations and fun that the people were having. The second night that we were in Shanghai I couldn’t go to sleep because I kept hearing really loud bang and huge flashes outside of our window. It wasn’t that I was scared of the fireworks or anything…, ohkay I was a little nervous, because they sounded awfully close to the hotel (we were on the 17th floor) and car alarms were going off and it was just so loud!!! So I jumped out of bed after an hour of not being able to sleep and step out into the living room area and look out the window. I look out only to see that RIGHT BELOW US some people are blowing up monstrous-big fireworks only 500 ft from our hotel!!! That explains the car alarms all right! You could feel the vibration of the fireworks exploding in the air and the bits of cardboard were definitely hitting someone’s window. Fireworks were all over the city, in the middle of the city with signs that say ‘no fireworks’, but the police didn’t care. The police were probably admiring the bright lights and wondering if they should get their sparklers out of their trunk. Anyways the fireworks lit up Shanghai’s night sky like no night I had ever seen, not that I’ve been in Shanghai at night before, but it was a sight to behold! After a while the man blowing fireworks next to our hotel stopped and I was able to go to sleep.
I wondered why they were blowing up fireworks five days AFTER New Years’ Day? After some ‘research’ (okay, I just typed it in on Google and pressed ‘I’m feeling lucky’, but research sounds smart) I found that the 5th day after Chinese New Year locals will shoot off firecrackers, in the attempt to get Guan Yu's attention, thus ensuring his favor and good fortune for the New Year. Guan Yu is a famous general who served in one of China’s civil wars and is worshipped and respected as the epitome of loyalty and righteousness (yeah I found that with ‘research’ too :P). The 15th day after Chinese New Year, marking the end of Chinese New Year, is called ‘Lantern Festival’. Candles are lit outside houses as a way to guide wayward spirits home and families walk the street carrying lighted lanterns.
Another tradition is the giving of Red packets and they almost always contain money, usually varying from a couple of dollars to several hundred. Custom, the amount of money in the red packets should be of even numbers, as odd numbers are associated with cash given during funerals. The number 8 is considered lucky, so if you have a cash amount with a number eight in it is ‘lucky money’. Aunt Pam and Uncle Mark gave me 108 RMBs in a red envelope. That’s about $15 USA money.
Chinese New Year or Spring Festival is the most important holiday for the Chinese and one of the most fun times for Western’s to visit China. I’m so glad that I have gotten to experience it! But it’s not over yet! I still have ten more days to celebrate!

Hearing-Aid Battery Search: Proves that the ‘Simple’ Things are the Difficult Tasks

In China, for Westerners at least, no small task is easy. Last week Papa discovered he needed new batteries for his hearing aid. It was the beginning of this trip, and believe me, he couldn’t go without his hearing aid. So Aunt Pam, Papa, and I went on a search for a battery that could easily be found at a Walgreens or CVS…but this is China, remember?
First, Aunt Pam finds the word in Chinese for hearing aid. Don’t ask me what it was, because at this point, I still only knew ‘hello’ and ‘thank you.’ We headed to the electronic store. This is much like a Best Buy I suppose, but this is three stories high and instead of shelves, every person working there is behind a glass counter and they are selling their own stuff. It could take HOURS to find a hearing aid battery in here, because nothing is organized very well. I mean, sure, maybe there is a whole block of DVD player sellers all blocked together, but I mean, where are you going to find a specialized, tiny, little, battery? Aunt Pam asked a lady there if they had it, but the lady wrinkled her eyebrows and blabbed to her neighbor, and concluded that they didn’t have anything like that.
The lady had referred us to a place where she thought it could be. I stayed in the car for this trip, because before we started this hearing aid search, we had also gone to a few other stores, and by the looks of this store, this probably wouldn’t be where we would find our little battery. After about 5 minutes Aunt Pam and Papa come out of the store, and judging by Aunt Pam’s face, we had won the battle. Aunt Pam told me that I needed to come inside and see the store, because it was different than any medicine store she had seen. I walk in and find myself standing in a Traditional Medicine Store… and by traditional, I mean like herbs and crushed plants! There were all these little wooden draws behind the glass counters, each with a Chinese character marking what was in each draw.

On top of the counters were these big wooden bowls, where the “pharmacists” were mixing things into “medicines” for people. In the glass counters there was an assortment of things that they would crush to put into the bowl for mixing. Things like dried snake, dried seahorses, dried poop, dried chicken feet, dried squid, dried EVERY THING!


All I could think about was a witch’s brew… eye of newt, bat whiskers, mummified toenails, black cat fat, troll teeth, and broom sweepings. Hahaha, so yeah. It was interesting to see these people actually asking for different medicines and then seeing them be made!!! This was totally cool.
Now I’m sure your thinking, “So you found the hearing-aid battery IN HERE?”. Well no. It seems that every store in China has a store above it, and that’s where they found the battery. Upstairs, apparently had wheelchairs, hearing aids, canes, and pill cases; no eye of newt to be found :P
When we got in the car, Aunt Pam asked Nikki if people “actually used that medicine”? Nikki’s reply? “Hah, only OLD people!” So that proves though China is named one of the most modern countries in the world, you see the older side come out in the likes of this…a traditional medicine store. Word was that they had even made a medicine to prevent swine flu. There were no reported cases of swine flu in China… so maybe there is something to be said for the medicines, or maybe there’s something to be said to how well the government here can hide things…
So after lots of looking and lots of help from random Chinese ladies and Nikki, we found Papa's battery. Now try doing that 5 times a day for every little item that you need. Welcome to China.

Pollution, Tradition, Radiation Clothes and Blondes

When flying over China, I looked on my map and saw that we were flying over the ocean. I look out my window and see a muddy, brown mess, very similar, my Memphian friends, to the Mississippi River! "This can't be the ocean?", I thought, but then I remembered about all the pollution troubles in China.
Suzhou is one of the top cities for 'most effective pollution control', but still sees no blue skies. That's right, there aren't blue skies in China...they are greyish white. It's forever overcast, and most of the time smoggy. Yesterday I saw the sun for the first time, and the sky seemed more a blueish grey, but even then the smog didn't lift. Most days I've had so far, you can't see much more than a mile or two, even from a high point because it's gets to foggy. The rain doesn't blow it off either, and neither does wind. Aunt Pam said that on Chinese New Year, when most factories close, that the smog will blow off. I guess we'll see though.
Chinese New Year this year is on February 14th, or Valentines Day! It is also called 'Spring Festival' or 'Lunar New Year', because the Chinese use to consider the new moon of the 12 month to being a new year. So that's why the day of Chinese New Year will change; the day is according to the size of the moon! The day after Chinese is yet another holiday: Chinese Lantern Festival. Traditionally the first day of Chinese New Year starts on the first of February and ends on the 15th; much like the 12 days of Christmas to us. This year is the Year of the Dragon! Chinese New Year's Eve is known as chú xī. It literally means "Year-pass Eve". The New Year to the Chinese is the most important holiday of the year.
Two days ago at the store we passed an ail that said "baby clothes, pregnant clothes, and radiation protection." Okay, I can understand 'baby clothes' going with 'pregnant clothes',...but 'radiation protection clothes'? Why would you want to associate radiation to the birth of a child? Well, it turns out it's not the radiation that i was thinking of, like nuclear bombs and such. Rather is was a thought of the Chinese. Either by tradition or fact, I don't know, the pregnant woman wears these radiation protective kind of 'jumpers' over their clothes, to protect the baby from signals from the computers and printers! Hahaha! Most babies here are spoiled, because they are all only children. So I guess mothers do everything they can to protect the well-being of their child, because it's the only one they get to have. By tradition, the sons take care of the parents when the parents get old, so many Chinese hope for a boy.
I went to Uncle Mark's office today. He is the manager of a Sachem plant in Wuxi, a city about 45 minutes from Suzhou. I was introduced to all the office workers. All Chinese except one black guy from America. When I met him, it occurred to me that this was the first black person I had EVER seen in China, and I mean ever!!! You see, China's culture is so different than America. I don't see how other countries can call America racist when there are places like Asia involved. You see, white people are rare here, or maybe there are lots of them, but the Chinese just over power in numbers! Many people stare at us as we walk through the streets. Little children smile and point at us, and then hide behind their parents when I smile back. The blondes in the Stasney family get special attention. And so do the twins. And so the the number of children. And so does Uncle Mark's red hair. And so does our height. And so does my curly hair. And so do our clothes, skin, shoes, groceries, and accents. EVERYTHING is strange about us to the Chinese, and they crowd around the kids like they are some sort of exhibit at the zoo! Aunt Pam says in tourist China, people will come and touch you, and touch the kids hair, because they have never seen a blonde. Once the kids got their haircut, and the hair cutters saved the blonde hair they cut off. David, Mark’s African American co-worker, told me that when he goes to tourist places, people ask to take pictures with him, because he’s sooo tall (he’s like 6 ‘7’’) and because he’s black! It just seems surreal to me that in America we have Chinese, Japanese, Indians, America-Indians, African-Americans, Caucasians, Mexicans, and then mixes of those! All of these people I have seen, and for the most part, never looked twice at them. Never gawked at their weird clothes (with the exception of a few Indian women in their burkas in Walmart), and never tried to TOUCH them! It just goes to show you one of the many ways that America is a different country than all the others: we have diversity like the Chinese have never seen before!
So if you ever want to become the center of attention, get cheap silk, or only see a blue sky once a year, I recommend taking a trip to the wonderful world of China! If not, then don't and say you did, by following me on my continued adventure!

My First Chinese Lesson

Today I had my first Chinese lesson. The teacher, Meiling (MAY-LING), is a Chinese woman, who teaches my Uncle, Aunt, and cousins Chinese as well. The kids learn Chinese at school, but the private tutoring on the side I’m sure improves their speech. I’m doing the same thing. I will be in Beginner Chinese when I start school.
Meiling knows some English, but I wouldn’t call it fluent. She can probably understand everything I say, but cannot answer in a full sentence. It’s mostly broken English, although her vocabulary is very large. She is probably in her 50s, and wears what we would consider ‘Grandma’ clothes. She has very crooked teeth, but I’ve noticed that most Asians do. Her English is very hard to understand, although when you can decipher what she is saying, it is pretty good grammar when she says a whole sentence.
The first thing I did was repeat after her. I don’t really know what we were saying, but it just sounds like ‘ba’, ‘pa’, and ‘ma’. I’m thinking it was similar to letters of the alphabet,…like phonetic type stuff? Also, both Uncle Mark and Aunt Pam had warned me of this habit that Meiling has: burping in mid-sentence. In our first lesson she did is like 4 times!!! The first time she did it, I stumbled over the word I was saying because I almost burst out laughing!!! My eyes I'm sure were huge and my mouth was on the edge of a smile, because I had been anticipating this 'burp'! It was disgusting, because she is just talking along and then out pops a burp, but she seems to not notice, and just keeps talking without a blink of an eye!!! It's quite strange to me, but belching in China isn't considered rude, so I guess there is no need to address it or apologize for it. hahaha
My homework was numbers 1-10, ‘hello, how are you?’, and ‘I am very well, thank you’. We learned all of that in an hour. Chinese is HARD!

Make Shift Bus Stops and the Leakers

There are so many things that are different about China than the US. One of the more noticeable ones is the driving. Our driver, Nikki, like all the other drivers, continually 'cut it close'. in other words, they get into situations what in the US we would call 'almost a wreck', but it's perfectly normal in Suzhou! If some one gets in the way you honk several times! No one uses signals, and if you are slow, you will be passed with a honk. If Nikki ever needs to change lanes when we are in slow or stand still traffic, he just edges his way into the nearest space, even if it mean practically touch the other car!!! And the car behind him will edge up to only a few inches away from our rear end!


One time, we were driving on a two way street, with just one lane on each side in the city. There was a car going to slow, so we drove on the wrong side going against traffic just to get around him! Other cars honked, but Nikki seemed unmoved!
There is often a separate lane for mo-peds and bikes. When we turn, we have to dodge the bikers! Or rather, they better stay out of our way! Everyone is so close to our car, i feel like if Nikki moved an inch in any direction we would hit someone! Aunt Pam describes the driving by ''driving here has no rules, you just drive and dodge!"
When driving on the highway, there are tollways. This is a perfect opportunity for drivers to take a break and.... go to the bathroom? Well, in China, yes! I have already seen several men just jump out of their truck and take a quicky on the road. They just pull the trousers down and go! Aunt Pam calls these the 'leakers'! Yeah, gross, huh?
Once when passing a toll, I saw a group of people crowded around 500 feet away from the toll on the side of the highway. I wondered if they were all factory workers trying to hitchhike. I asked my Aunt and she said that we lots of people gather in one spot, there's a possibility that a bus would stop! So often times, like on the highway, people will just wait until a bus stops for them, because they can't afford cars, bikes, or taxis.
Stop lights are quite unique as well, and actually very logical. Each color light, instead of just a colored circle, is an arrow indicating when to go and where! Just like a left turn signal, there's a front turn signal, and a right turn signal. There is also a timer for all the lights. The green counts down, letting you know how much longer the light will be green, and the yellow comes next, counting down red as well, and the it counts down from red! I think this is smart because it lets you anticipate and focus on when to go and how to gage how fast you should go to catch the light, or if you need to slow down!

Lane lines mean nothing either, at least not on this road we went on today. Today we were going on a ramp up to a highway with two very narrow lanes. There was a big sleeper bus (a bus that has beds in it for factory workers) and it was too fat to fit in one lane, so it just drove in the middle of BOTH of the lanes! One compact car didn't like this, so he wanted to go around! That little car squeezed his way between with probably no more than a foot to spare! Driving in different countries is really crazy, so that would explain why foreigners aren't allowed to get drivers licences!!!
The last funny incident that I can think of was last night on our way home from the Silk Factory. We had to take a taxi because Nikki was busy taking Aunt Pam somewhere. When we were almost home, the road to our house is four-laned. We were in the right hand lane and needed to go left to get in our neighborhood...so did our taxi driver turn on his blinker and head for the left turn lane? NO, he just turn from the far right lane across three other lanes into our neighborhood! A couple of honks but we made it! I'm just trying to imagine the looks on my parents face if I had ever done something like that with them in the car! As Papa would say, ''the driving here is really somethin'"!
What did you think of those leakers?

Fine Dining for a Fine Price

My second day here I got a cell phone. It cost 1,292 RMBs, or 190 dollars! Quite pricy for a phone, but it was the cheapest one they had! Pictures below.



Anyways, so the next day we went to go and activate it, so we went to the China Cellphone place. Aunt Pam struggled to tell the lady that we needed a SIM card for my phone, but the lady kept insisting that she needed my phone number! ARG, you lady, we NEED a NUMBER, so we don’t HAVE a number!!! Aunt Pam called Nikki, our driver in, and he helped explain to the lady that we needed a SIM card and then a cellphone plan. I got the 600 text plan and minutes for less than a penny/min. This cost only $7 a month! The down payment was around $16 for that month and the SIM card. Also, as a bonus for purchasing such a ‘large’ plan, we got…laundry detergent? I’m not really sure how we qualified to get such a fine free-by, but we did? Hahahah!
After getting my phone FINALLY, we went to the store. After the store, Papa, Aunt Pam, and I went out to lunch at a sit down restaurant. We ordered 6 meals between the 3 of us: dumplings, stir-fry green beans, cabbage with some sort of Chinese sauce, fried rice, a chicken dish with nuts, and a pork dish with chives. Our table was set with a little traditional round tea cup with no handle, and also real chopsticks! We were also given a toilette. Fancy, huh? We finished about half of most of the dishes. Aunt Pam said that if she had to bet, our left-overs would be eaten by someone in the back! Papa picked up the check, but that’s not saying much because our huge meal only cost $15! In China, tipping is un-heard of. No tipping drivers, waiters, not anyone! So basically the meal for around 5 people cost less than my cellphone plan. And even THAT wasn’t expensive. How’s that for fine dining with a fine price?