Before we arrived, John and I knew we would buy bikes here. We love to ride bikes and with our close proximity to our university they are perfect for getting around. It takes me 15 minutes by bike to my building where I teach and am officed and John about 5 minutes to his building. We actually share an office but I doubt John will come that far anytime soon. Our Mr. Chen who is the source for all wisdom for us—he provides us with bus routes to go shopping, with Chinese characters for everything we need to buy and for our address to get back home again, and gave us directions by bus to get to the bike market almost as soon as we arrived. The bike market is a total street devoted to bike shop after bike shop with bike mechanics out in front of each one. There we found lovely bikes for about $40 each, having bargained them down from double that price. Our next challenge was where to park them. Bikes are stolen with regularity in Xi’an so we realized we’d be risking it by buying bikes, but appealed again to Mr. Chen for guidance. He took us to a “bike garage” just a stone’s throw from our apartment where we paid about $3 each to have them guard our bikes at night from September through December. We check them out whenever we choose, anytime after 6:30 am and return them as late as we want to in order to ride to school, to the green grocer, or to Walmart—wherever we need to go. Across the street from Walmart is a kindly gate guard who I pantomime to asking him to watch our bikes. He willingly does so and refused to accept any kind of tip for his services (you do NOT tip in China). While I’m on campus I park my bike in my office! That is about all I use my office for. It is on the seventh floor but I wheel it in the front door, ride up the elevator with it, and lock it up—all under Mr. Chen’s direction. Pretty nice quarters for my bike really.

Our other modes of transport are by bus and taxis. Our bus cards are scanned as we get on and each ride costs us about 7 cents. Taxis, which we often use to get to Church, cost us less than $3 a trip. XiXu—another university where we meet for Church is about 15 kilometers away from us to the south. We come home on the bus for our 7 cents. The last thing I’d want in Xi’an is a car! We manage very well with these modes of transport. Nice to see how simple life can be.

Transportation in Xi’an

Before we arrived, John and I knew we would buy bikes here. We love to ride bikes and with our close proximity to our university they are perfect for getting around. It takes me 15 minutes by bike to my building where I teach and am officed and John about 5 minutes to his building. We actually share an office but I doubt John will come that far anytime soon. Our Mr. Chen who is the source for all wisdom for us—he provides us with bus routes to go shopping, with Chinese characters for everything we need to buy and for our address to get back home again, and gave us directions by bus to get to the bike market almost as soon as we arrived. The bike market is a total street devoted to bike shop after bike shop with bike mechanics out in front of each one. There we found lovely bikes for about $40 each, having bargained them down from double that price. Our next challenge was where to park them. Bikes are stolen with regularity in Xi’an so we realized we’d be risking it by buying bikes, but appealed again to Mr. Chen for guidance. He took us to a “bike garage” just a stone’s throw from our apartment where we paid about $3 each to have them guard our bikes at night from September through December. We check them out whenever we choose, anytime after 6:30 am and return them as late as we want to in order to ride to school, to the green grocer, or to Walmart—wherever we need to go. Across the street from Walmart is a kindly gate guard who I pantomime to asking him to watch our bikes. He willingly does so and refused to accept any kind of tip for his services (you do NOT tip in China). While I’m on campus I park my bike in my office! That is about all I use my office for. It is on the seventh floor but I wheel it in the front door, ride up the elevator with it, and lock it up—all under Mr. Chen’s direction. Pretty nice quarters for my bike really.

Our other modes of transport are by bus and taxis. Our bus cards are scanned as we get on and each ride costs us about 7 cents. Taxis, which we often use to get to Church, cost us less than $3 a trip. XiXu—another university where we meet for Church is about 15 kilometers away from us to the south. We come home on the bus for our 7 cents. The last thing I’d want in Xi’an is a car! We manage very well with these modes of transport. Nice to see how simple life can be.

Home Sweet Hovel

Well, John thinks you would be interested in seeing our home away from home. It is quite the place. We love it for its proximity to the university but not particularly for its palatial amenities (or lack there of). Actually it is very adequate and fun--kind of like camping out in style. Our kitchen is more like a porch, long and skinny. We have no hot water in the kitchen but are hoping to induce our friend Mr. Zhao to put in a splitter to divert some of our lovely hot shower water (which never runs out!) to the kitchen sink. We will see how that goes. Meanwhile we are delighted to have a hot-plate pitcher which heats dish water in just a few minutes, a great little toaster oven in which I am able to make a 3/4 sized loaf of no-knead bread, baked in a clay casserole dish. We also have a little dining area with a small fridge, two bedrooms, each with a desk so we have "private" offices a modest living room, and a shower/bathroom complete with western toilet (which runs constantly but we haven't yet been able to find the new internal workings to fix it and it doesn't seem bad enough yet to capture Mr. Zhao's attention.) I actually think pictures are worth a thousand words when it comes to our living quarters so I am going to stack up the pictures with little commentary. John and I have laughed for years that we could be happy in the city dump as long as we were together. We have had a good laugh about having spoken self-fulfilling prophecy since we have now arrived precisely there. The approach is less than appealing but we have a lock-out door and feel very safe and have neighbors who are wonderfully friendly and helpful to these two foreigners who speak so little Chinese it is embarrassing. We also have a number of foreign "experts" (teachers) like we are who are from Russia, Japan, Germany, New Zealand, and France, besides a couple from the USA. We all live happily in our humble homes--which I might add are very comfortable compared to what many of the neighboring Chinese families live in. We have no complaints. This last week we even added to the luxury of our environment by buying carpet runners to warm up our tile floors. It is now very crisp and cold autumn weather. The government doesn't allow any heat to be turned on until November 15, we hear. Yikes. Local shops will do a bang up business selling space heaters. I think that will be our next purchase.

Riding Around the City Wall

During Mid-Autumn festival holiday this last Thursday evening, just at dusk, we decided to do something that is unique to Xi’an so we went with Feng (John’s director) and the Dave and Julie Monson, another couple from BYU teaching at another Xi’an university, and rented bikes up on top of the city wall before riding around the entire perimeter of the city in that interesting way—some 13 kilometers. It was an amazing experience--rather like riding over German cobblestone streets so our teeth rattled by the time we finished but what an experience! The moon was full and lovely and the city sparkled the later it got as Xi'an turned on its night-time lights and lanterns. I am standing out in front of the South Gate of the wall with Feng and Dave Monson, just before going up to rent our bikes. John and Feng are riding along the east stretch of the wall and John looks very pictureque in his bright blue jacket against the tower guard house along the way.

Mid-Autumn Festival and Mooncakes

Wednesday was mid-autumn festival so we were off from school for three days (two of which had to be made up on the weekend). This is an important Chinese holiday that celebrates being together with family and watching the full moon while eating yummy mooncakes--lovely little pastries with a variety of fillings. The moon was absolutely stunning.

Each day in our classes we have the students take turns "Teaching the Teacher" about China in some way. It gives them practice speaking in English and teaches us about China. The kids are awesome. We are taught about their provinces, the food of China, the festivals. Here is a sample that one student presented in his powerpoint about mid-autumn festival;

Mid-Autumn Festival
The festival is intricately linked to the legend of Chang’e, the mythical Moon Goddess of Immortality. According to “Li-Ji,” an ancient Chinese book recording customs and ceremonies, the Chinese Emperor should offer sacrifices to the sun in spring and the moon in autumn. The 15th day of the 8th lunar month is the day called “Mid-Autumn.” The night on the 15th of the 8th lunar month is also called “Night of the Moon.” Under the Song Dynasty (AD 420), the day was officially declared for Mid-Autumn Festival.
Because of its central role in the Mid-Autumn festival, mooncakes remain popular even in recent years. For many, mooncakes form a central part of the Mid-Autumn festival experience such that it is now commonly known as 'Mooncake Festival'.

Xi'an--Central China with its 5,000 Year-Old-History

For those who don't know Chinese geography (we certainly didn't before being appointed to come here), Xi'an is in central China and is an ancient, ancient city which for some 1,100 years ruled China. It is famous for its Terracotta Warriors (which we haven't yet seen but will in October during the National holiday) and its city wall. It is, we understand the only fully intact city wall in all of China. Thus far, however, we have only been into the city once. That is something for us to see more of next week during the mid-autumn festival when we will eat moon cakes and have days off from teaching (which will then have to be made up on Saturday and Sunday!) My students often ask us what we like best about Xi'an and we always say "YOU" and that is true, but it also true that, thus far, we hadn't seen very much.

Teaching at Jiaoda

We have now been in the harness of teaching for three weeks for me and two for John, since the grad students didn't begin until a week after the rest of us started teaching. I need to return to the topic of our living quarters but will save that for another entry and instead will first tell you of JiaoDa, the nickname for Xi'an Jiaotong University. This is a top ranking Chinese University and the students who attend here are cream of the crop. It is ranked 12th among the 1000s of Chinese universities and the students are very aware that they are privileged to be here. We feel that we are privileged to be here too. We are especially grateful that we are so close to campus, living in what is essentially campus housing. Many of our fellow teachers in Xi'an who are at other universities spend nearly an hour on a bus getting to and from their campus classrooms.

Our specific teaching assignments include my two junior English writing classes and four sections of sophomore oral English. All my students are English majors and their language ability is pretty good. I'd love to have one of them in my back pocket everywhere I go:). John has one preparation with four sections of English writing for graduate students. He is a busy boy! We have been enormously grateful for a colleague with some 30 years EFL experience here from the University of Washington. She teaches the same class John does and has been wonderful to share with. She and I also help one another with the oral class ideas. We had a bit of a lift yesterday when Margy, who has been in China on two other stints and who speaks a smattering of Chinese, was chatting with the handyman who does the repairs (frequently needed) on our apartments told her that the word was out from the students that the three of us were wonderful teachers! That was a bit of cheer in our day. We had some inkling that we were being viewed positively since John keeps having students trying to sit in on or add his sections, which are all ready full to bursting, and I have had a growing number of visiting professors from another university taking up residency in the back of one of my sections of oral English. We are trying to do our best to make a positive difference and having a marvelous experience in the process.

At "Home" in Xi'an

We intended to start this blog nearly a month ago when we arrived in China on August 25 having flown from Salt Lake to Los Angeles to Seoul, Korea, and finally to Xi'an but a lot has happened since then and our intent has been delayed and delayed yet again. Not because we didn't want to keep in touch with everyone, but everything takes longer in China. Elise Britton, our branch president's wife, reminds us that whatever you thought you could accomplish in Utah takes at least ten times longer to do here. Ten times at least, we are finding. But goodness, what an adventure. Over the weeks and months ahead we will try to give you a few glimpses into our experiences if we can manage to keep our Internet connection, get past the Chinese firewall, and figure out yet another new electronic process--blogging. But at least we have begun.

Friends and family have emailed to ask our first impressions of Xi'an and of China. Now a month into our experience here we are still trying to put it into words. It may be a bit like the proverbial elephant and have to be described in bite-sized pieces so with that we'll start with our arrival.

We were greeted at the airport by John's director of foreign studies at Jiaotong University's graduate school, Feng Guangyi. He and John had had months of friendly email correspondence and it was delightful to meet him in person. He and a student got us and all our luggage in the van and drove us to our new "home" where we were met by another long-time email correspondent, Chen Libin, who it turns out is our angel caretaker for sure. Between the two of them they have watched out for all our needs right down to arranging--within the same hour we arrived--to hire someone to clean our very dirty, if spacious (by Chinese standards), apartment. Because our Chinese is limited to our saying ni hao (hello), du ba qi (excuse me) bu yao (don't want) tai guilia (too expensive), and xie xie (thank you), you can imagine the amount of help we require to get water delivered, provide addresses in Chinese characters to taxi drivers, to answering every kind of question regarding our responsibilities at our school, and so on and so on. Furthermore both of them have done all this and more with consummate grace and a ready smile. We feel very blessed to know them and are grateful to be under their watch care. My dean (of the English Department) has been equally friendly and willing to help, though less hands on.