Bruce Teaching English In China: Sunday, May 27th, 2012 - Dandong Fun/Exercises in Chinglish

Still trying to get used to safety razors

I figured that when I start teaching in rural China this fall, I better start getting used to not having reliable electricity so I started to try to use safety razors after 5 years of using an electric razor

This morning I gave myself 7 nicks and at least it makes me look younger (like I have a lot of pimples on my face) so it's no wonder why no Chinese want to take a picture with this foreigner

Websites I found blocked in China

I woke up really early so for fun I wanted to see what websites I couldn't get to if I didn't have a VPN so here are a few and I realized that information would be a lot harder to find if I weren't American so thank you Uncle Sam

Here’s some more that I didn’t have time to check because I had some exploring to do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_the_People's_Republic_of_China

Dandong looks a lot like my hometown of Rockford, IL

Just take all of Dandong, put it in north central Illinois, and you might not be able to tell the difference

You can almost think of Dandong as Detroit with all of the buildings with busted out windows and dirty roads but you just feel really safe anyways for some odd reason

- Not only that, at least Rockford has toilet paper in every bathroom stall
Trip to Great Wall of China
Dandong has a piece of the Great Wall they call “Tiger Mountain Great Wall” and I was going to take the bus but because of the 4 AM sunrise I couldn’t sleep so I decided to try and walk there because my Lonely Planet guide said it was about 12 km away which for me is about an hour walk

Well I checked the taxi fare just to make sure it would be worth my while to take a taxi but they wanted 60 RMB and I said screw that so I started walking down a road

Yeah, it turns out it was about 29 km away from Dandong and Lonely Planet was wrong out of their rear-end
I walked for an hour and didn’t see a single sign so I asked someone in Chinese how far is it and they said about 15 km
Well I hailed a taxi and it turns out it would have taken me about 3.5 hours to walk there from my hotel and I ended up only saving 10 RMB on the taxi fare

The stair climbers that they have at American gyms have nothing on these steps at the Great Wall

Sometimes they didn’t even have stairs and it was more like rock climbing with two hand-rails on either side of you which made it really fun (no sarcasm, it actually was pretty fun to do some rock climbing on the great wall of China)

If you have my proficiency or less in Chinese, I’d say skip the museum and save the RMB because the picture below basically sums it up. (It’s supposed to say “green”)

Even took a photo of a North Korean soldier guarding the fence like he was expecting an attack from an American imperialist at any second

It was funny in that he saw me took a picture of him, I waved and screamed out, “HI!” and he squatted with a pen and a piece of paper and took notes

So my negotiation skills are improving in the fact that even though I’m a foreigner and pretty easy to rip off, I actually made a pretty good deal for this North Korean currency souvenir
This little old lady by the North Korean border was selling some Won (North Korean currency) in a spiffy portfolio and she wanted 50 yuan for it
I said, “Ehhhh” and she said, alright, alright (I think) and said 40 yuan, so I took the deal thinking I got ripped off but at least I got a good souvenir

On my way out of the Great Wall, for the first time since I’ve been in China, someone asked to take a picture of me

I felt so honored because for the longest time I thought that I was so ugly that even the Chinese that haven’t seen a white guy before don’t want a photo of me
The funny thing is that it was Yang Yue took the photo with me and Qi held the camera, well Qi looks like a boy and Yue is definitely a girl, so I thought Yue was just going to keep her distance because I thought they were dating or something, but Yue she got really close to me and so I looked at Qi and I made a hand motion like, “no”
And of course, Yue was wearing an English shirt that wasn't quite right

They were really nice and Yue spoke really good English so we had a chat and she helped me find a bus to Dandong for 6.5 RMB which saved me 90% of what I was going to pay by taxi to get back
They took me to this really awesome restaurant called 石锅拌饭 which basically means stone pot restaurant and it was absolutely delicious

I did get a chance to show them my lack of chopstick skills and they got to practice English so I think we’re even

Then we went to the tourist wharf which is home to the bridge that goes from Dandong to North Korea

That’s where I told them about American customs like how in China if two women hold hands it means they’re best friends but in America that means they’re lesbians
She laughed at that and said, “No, me and Qi are not lesbians” and it took me that long (about two hours) to realize that Qi was a girl

Plus I was surprised that she knew the word “lesbians” but not “salary” or “earnings”

This museum was awesome in the fact that it was in English and there was just enough things to go "what?" to make it funny

Plus I got more of my pictures taken which I won’t lie, it did make me feel really good

The thing was that it was about 12 old women all in a row owho wanted to take pictures of me and the last one I think has a white guy thing because she was all up on me and I think she got a picture of me giving her the stink eye

And by the way, they think they won the Korean War, but based on the fact that this kid was wearing a US Army t-shirt at the museum, I think capitalism (or should I say imperialism) is gaining the upper hand