我爱景德镇!
CHINA | Wednesday, 28 October 2009 | Views [58]
Here're some reasons why I'm starting to love Jingdezhen:
1. The porcelain. The lamp posts are all made of porcelain, the traffic lights are made of porcelain, shop doors are made of porcelain and in general it's just everywhere. When you arrive in Jingdezhen there are rows and rows of shops on the outskirts selling absolutely huge porcelain vases (like ceiling high huge) and there's a market where you can buy almost anything under the sun mae of porcelain. You kind of forget about it when you live here, but occasionally you'll walk past a particularly beautiful lamppost and remember quite how special it is. Living in Jingdezhen also has it's perks - practically everyone knows somebody who owns a porcelain shop so you get lots of amazing freebies. We invited a student over once and she bought us each an amazing porcelain coffee set, then we're privately tutoring a boy who's mum owns a porcelain shop and they took us there and said we could have anything we want. So we're building up quite a collection.
2. The little juice and milkshake shops which are everywhere. On our road alone I think there's about 4 or 5 of these little shops where you can buy amazing fruit smoothies and milkshake like things for 2-4 kuai (20 to 49p). I think the most useful thing I've learnt to say so far in chinese is 'manguo naixi' meaning mango smoothie and our vocab has now spread to chocolate milkshake and coffe milkshake too. At first we just pointed randomly at characters on the menu and waited for the surprise but now that I know my trusty mango smoothie phrase I tend to opt for them most of the time and they are the best things ever! We've also kind of got to know the people at one of these shops as we go there so often and they now recognise us and say 'manguo naixi' immediately when we go there.
3. The school bell and the sound of the chirpy birds which are kind of like cicadas. The school bell is really strange, it's this really long tune which starts off slow and then then picks up a bit and it goes off every 45 minutes from about 7 in the morning till 9:30 pm. As we live right next to the school we constantly hear it floating through our window. At some point it will probably get very annoying but for now it's kind of relaxing, and with the cicada-y noise it sounds quite nice. There is also somebody in the building opposite from us who plays a traditional chinese instrument (I've got no idea what it is) and the sound of that also floats through our windom at all times of day.
4. The little roads around our house and the school with all their small restaurants, random street vendors and general chaos. On these little streets you can buy anything from pyjamas and slippers to sticks of sugar cane or toffee crab apples. There are amazing little restaurants selling all sorts of noodles, rice dishes, dumplings or anything else you could want for about 6 kuai max (60p). Then there are all the random people on the street often with bikes carrying trailors full of oranges, plums, candy floss machines etc. Every time you walk by there's something new and it often takes a while to discover all these strange snacks that the students are buying but you're completely oblivious to.
5. The little old lady who lives in the house just by the school gates and I'm pretty sure is the gate keeper. As soon as we arrived here she invited us into her house and gave us bananas and we chatted to her for a bit in our basic chinese. Ever since she constantly jabbers away to us in chinese whenever we see her and often comes up to our flat and just wanders around talking in chinese or telling us we need to dress warmer or how to do the washing or whatever. She doesn't seem bothered that 90% of the time we have no idea what she's on about but she's lovely and has got us to call her our chinese mother.
6. The mountains in the background. I can't really remember what it was like not having a backdrop of mountains everywhere you look. As soon as we get our bikes we're going to cycle all the ay out of the city and attempt to do some walking, but we've been saying that for a while now and despite our many efforts our bokes do not seem to be coming!
7. Friday lessons. My friday classes are my best I think, the senior 1 class are actually small enough so you can have proper conversations and explain things to them properly which is so nice. It actually feels like I'm successfully teaching them, unlike some of the other classes which have started to really lose attention. Then the Junior 2 class is just so great I always leave it practically skipping at how rewarding they are to teach.
8. Tuesdays. Tuesdays are my day off and we have our chinese painting classes in the morning, which are great fun and then can do whatever we want for the rest of the day. This often involves just wandering round Jingdezhen aimlessly, exploring new places etc and buying manguo naixis. It's brilliant.
9. All our random friends, students and people we get incomprehensible english texts from. I think the point when i really felt kind of settled here was when my phone contacts list had more than 10 contacts in, and now i've got 44! We firstly had the nice teachers we knew, who took us out shopping and things, tehn the girls who teach us chinese (or really just come over to our house and chat), then a couple of senior 3 students, then some neighbours, then the girls who come over to play uno, and now the list goes on and we're pretty busy with being invited places, having people round etc. We've been set up with a qq account which is like msn in china and now have started texting in chinese and things and getting in with the chinese music etc (I'm just about to go and buy a 'super junior' cd who are this one band my students will not stop talking about).
10. The fact that at school and in the streets arund school people have stopped staring at us, the majority have stopped calling out 'hello!' and most people seem to know who we are already. We went to a fruit shop the other day to buy some different fruits and the people were like (ni shi yi zhong laoshi) - you're English teachers here? Maybe in a very small way we're starting to blend in. Well a little bit at least.
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