Zhao Laoshi walking with Zhang Laoshi, an adorable little woman who helped introduce us to Nankai.
Our group in front of the building where we have our Chinese culture classes: The College of Chinese Language and Culture (unfortunately they cut the sign off in the picture...)
More of the scenes from our tour:
This is the place we can come order train tickets for our midterm break travels. Which will quite possibly be insanity because it happens to coincide with a Chinese holiday for which many students want to go home!
It goes without saying, but for the record, rivers really should not be this color.
Our tour ended in Xinancun (Southwest village), from where we could choose to head back to our sushe (dorms) with Zhang Laoshi or explore Xinancun. Most of us chose to explore, which was an excellent decision! Completely surrounded by food of all kinds, there are three main lanes to this market lined with stalls. The middle lane is actually a covered market with more stalls inside, so that was where many of us bought some basic necessities like a bucket for washing clothes, fruits (bananas are the easiest choice so you don't have to worry about washing), various snacks, small mirrors, etc.
I think people in Tianjin in general have seen fewer foreigners than Beijingers or Shanghainese, so people here are even more surprised when you can speak a decent amount of Hanyu. I had my first extended conversation with a maybe 60-year-old woman selling a huge array of school supplies whom we now affectionately "benzi lady" (benzi means notebook). I bought two really cute notebooks with Chinese painting covers from her, and she asked all about our studies. Discovering we'd be around for a couple weeks she insists we come back the next day (now we basically go to Xinancun nearly every day for a meal, so we always go visit benzi lady!). I also bought a few bananas and discovered asking for a "jin," the Chinese version of a pound, got me three bananas. But I also successfully bought some pretty good naicha, aka milk tea, aka bubble tea! It was yummy but I think it's whole milk, so I probably shouldn't do that again... I love the concept of buying fruit at a market though!
Liz discovered Wahaha brand water!
In the afternoon we then had a welcoming ceremony that commenced with a speech by the dean of the Chinese culture school. He talked about the university's long history with Zhao Laoshi's family (both his parents were physics professors here) and added, "You are now relatives of Nankai University - like our children." Our teachers were introduced, and our program's co-presidents Jake and Alex then gave a very entertaining speech as well. Then it turned to the rest of the tongxue (classmates) for us each to say a couple sentences to introduce ourselves. Our formal studies begin!
The next item of business was to tackle the cell phone issue. We all asked around about the best way to deal with what in the US is such a familiar item (and what is now definitely a popular commodity in Chinese cities too), so I ended up hopping in a cab with Kellianne, Alek, and James to go to Shoujicheng, Cellphone City. Its name was quite an accurate description. This place was huge! Another giant box with stores ringing the stalls upon stalls of phones and their sellers. The first item on our list was a SIM card, which ended up being quite a frustrating experience because of communication issues and the feeling of not quite knowing what we were buying. I'm waiting until we get to Shanghai to get a local SIM card there, but I tried to help the others as best as I could, and we think the ability to text and call and top up their minutes when they run out - we'll see how that works out! Buying the actual phones was the fun part because we got to peruse the huge selection from the numerous vendors, ask for their cheapest models and try to make them cheaper without compromising functionality. Alek was the first to snatch a phone and got his for 100 yuan - less than $15 - and it works! James drove everyone crazy by treating tanjia as a sport, so Kellianne and I laughed with the vendors in his wake as we tried to find suitable models for ourselves. James found a pretty awesome phone that looks a bit like a small robot but is kind of lacking in functionality and needs to be charged about every 10 hours. Kellianne and I had issues figuring out our perfect phone to serve our basic goals: 1) cheap 2) can contact people. At last we discovered an about 70-year-old woman who had what we were looking for, plus we just felt better about buying from a nice person (rather than others who scoffed at us when we asked for a cheaper price as deserved...). She had to do a few errands to help us get exactly what we needed, but we ended up walking away with functioning phones and chargers! Mine was 160 yuan and is super basic (and won't work until I buy a SIM card...), and Kellianne's does some crazy flashing lights whenever somebody contacts here! Stress but success.
Cell phones in hand, and thankfully all switched from Chinese to English, once the taxi dropped us off at the east gate, we discovered a most delightful treat: waffles! A woman had her vat of batter in her cart, made them on the spot, and dropped them into plastic bags to go (yea, that’s how to-go food goes around here). But these are neither Belgian waffles nor American waffles. No, these are distinctly Chinese and it’s kind of hard to pinpoint how. But by themselves they are sweeter than waffles we’re used to so no need for condiments, and they’re what James termed “inverse waffles” because instead of sunken squares, they’re basically circular puffs connected by batter webbing so you can tear them off and eat a puff at a time. We keep hoping she’ll be back!
And then it was time to celebrate Emily’s birthday! She had a hankering for Dairy Queen as we saw one from the bus into Tianjin, but we couldn’t figure out where it was, so a group of us wandered to the neighborhood filled with food on the other side of the gigantic street Weijinlu. Since she had a craving for American food, we searched for Alibaba’s, basically a restaurant/bar for foreigners we had heard about, but only after asking around and finally finding a couple guys who were going there did we figure out how to get there! We knew basically where it was, but it ended up giving off the appearance of a 1920’s speakeasy that was well disguised with the tiniest sign imaginable. Once you entered though, it was a decently sized establishment that seemed to be an explosion of everything China considered foreign – baseball on the TV, maps and flags from random countries as well as pictures of Bob Marley clothing the walls, and even Scattergories and other board games in the corner awaiting players.
Shiwu (foodstuffs) ordered: hamburgers, Americanized Chinese food, Chinesified Indian food, and pizza. Also a ping (bottle) of Qingdao, a famous brand of Chinese beer for Emily for her 21st! Something else inherently American arrived with our food: daocha! Forks and knives. Regardless of whether our food merited them or not. Hamburgers generally are not knife and fork food…
Getting into a routine kaishi tomorrow with our first Hanyu classes!
