This may sound quite strange, but for most of my time in China it's as though I haven't really been aware of where I am. You'll be going around, doing your usual routines and then suddenly something will happen and you'll go, 'Oh my God, I'm in China!' You tend to get very sucked into the whole 'China is brilliant, everything is happy and good here,' kind of atmosphere, and then you'll see something like the national day military parade which I mentioned before, and you'll realise you're in a communist country and that this atmosphere is slightly due to delusion.
The military parade was in theory for celebrations of the 60th birthday of the Communist party, which fitted in nicely with the government's wish to show off their newest top-of-the-line nukes and tanks and all of the like, which of course are for 'safety precautions only.' You won't understand the full irony unless you heard the meeting we had with some heads of a school a few days prior, in which they repeated again and again that they want peace and peace with our countries and universal peace and so on and so forth.
I'm still not really sure what is acceptable to do or say here. Obviously we don't walk around with Free Tibet t-shirts, but I was trying to get my classes to have discussions, which is extremely difficult because they are all painfully shy and when their English isn't brilliant it becomes close to impossible to hear/understand what it is they are saying, so I wrote up on the board 'America is better than China,' to which I got the reaction I had hoped for and they all began protesting violently against it. I didn't think this was such a big deal, and I still don't think it was a major issue, but when Katherine and I decided to set up an English club we had to talk to the Head English Teacher to help us set it up, and everything was fine but then he said, 'according to the policies of our country, no sex, no politics! No sex, no politics!' I don't know if that sparked from my rebellious lesson planning.
Aside from the political differences, there is also the utter and wonderful randomness to be found here. It's extremely common for people to ask for your phone number, even if you have literally just said 'hello', and 'I am a teacher' to them. This results in many bizarre and often illegible texts from people you don't quite remember who are. I have a student who calls himself Willim, who texts me asking for advice with peer pressure and the like, (which I find rather awkward but the chenglish and again, randomness of it is also quite amusing), and Katherine has a bankers clerk, who when she asked whether it was acceptable for Chinese to have had more than one boy/girlfriend, replied by saying something along the lines of 'before marriage no sex lives' and 'I am vigin boy.' She hasn't texted him since.
Then there is our flat, which apparantly is also just a normal part of living in China. As I have said before, our accommodation is incredible, better than I ever hoped for, but there is a tendancy for everything to break. We were warned of dodgy sockets and were told that we would be getting numerous electric shocks throughout the year, but despite many of the sockets not being properly attached to the wall, that hasn't been a problem. But everything in our flat leaks: the kitchen sink, the water pipes beneath the kitchen sink, the air conditioner, the bucket we used to mop up the water from the leaking air conditioner, the kettle, the washing machine, the fruit bowl; then water leaked from our flat through the ceiling to the people living below us, and now one of the gas pipes is leaking, so we can't use the stove. We didn't have hot water for a month because the heater turned off during one of the power cuts, (which we weren't aware of, we though it was broken). And our toilet got blocked, which is always a pleasant experience. We have had a repairman in on four different occasions; to fix our air conditioner, water supply, hot water supply, and our landline, and then our host and her husband turned up one evening in their pyjamas to unblock our toilet. I was mortified. We now need to get another repairman in to fix the leaky gas pipe.
I love living in China, there is never a dull day.
