About Me

Greeting strangers! If you are reading this right now you most likely fall into one of these categories: family, friends, teachers, or fellow Juniata College students. If you are not one of the above by whatever misfortune or luck you have stumbled upon a college's student study abroad experience in China. Please stay and enjoy. My name is Jasun. Now to interject two disclaimers. One, this is my blog and I will speak my mind and sometimes, unfortunately, this may cross your comfort's threshold - and for that I apologize. Two, as much as this blog belongs to me, I am writing for you. As such, if there are any questions (I mean any) that pop into your head that you want answered just send me an email at Moyjf08@juniata.edu and I'll answer it on this blog. One more thing. I can't seem to upload pictures here. So I will most likely be uploading pictures on my facebook account. If you are interested in seeing these pictures and are not a facebook friend by all means add me - just leave message saying something of the sort that you follow this blog if I do not know you. Best wishes throughout the year, and I hope together we make it a fun, educational, and safe year.

Friday, November 19, 2010

Very Robust Guanxi 101

So I must sound like a broken record when I say I’ve just been so busy that I didn’t have time to write a blog post lately. And yes, I know I promised to write more often – I’m working on it. It’s no matter though, because I was unsure of what I wanted to write about anyways until recently. What I want to touch upon is the notion of civility in China. Speaking in general, you can’t trust the average Chinese person - at least those you don’t know. That’s because every Chinese person is out for their own self-interest and they don’t truly care what happens to you if they don’t know you that is. Take for example this situation that I was in. I was walking down the street to get lunch and I hear screaming. I look around and in front of me there is this little girl being crushed by a table that accidently fell on top of her. All the other Chinese people just kept walking past her minding their own business. Luckily I was there and rushed and picked up the table. That is my own personal example. Danny has plenty of similar examples, but I think you get the picture.

This brings me to something that happened quite recently to me. It was raining outside and it was early on a Saturday morning, I figured most people were asleep so I decided to go out and get something to eat on my own. Once I arrive at the cafeteria, I order food, then sit down and wait for my food to be cooked. Eventually, my order is called so I get up – but I leave my umbrella on the table – I get my food I turn around and my umbrella is gone. Now to be honest, I was simmering with anger. I left my umbrella unattended for maybe a minute at most and someone had the courage to steal it. And of course, the week before Danny was lecturing to us about civility in class so my initial thoughts were damn Chinese Guanxi (relationship) culture.

I finished eating, still angry that I didn’t bring my umbrella with me, and was getting ready to go until one of the cleaning staff came up to me talking in Chinese – so for simplicity, I didn’t really understand what she was saying – she eventually gives up and tells me to follow her; I do, and we walk towards a pillar. At this pillar was my umbrella, apparently she thought someone forgot the umbrella and she set up her own lost and found box. This made me feel good inside. Because for all the rhetoric about how China is corrupt, selfish, etc, it showed me that there are some “good” people in China and that everything must be taken with a grain of salt.

On a different note, I’ve uploaded more pictures to facebook. The pictures continue in album one: China1; and then moves into album two. And think, in less than a week it’ll be Thanksgiving. Even though we’re in China, we’ll still be celebrating. Next post will be on Thanksgiving dinner. Peace.

Monday, November 1, 2010

Rural Farm and misc.

Hello again, so I have three things I want to get through this evening. We’ll start with what everyone probably wants to know, how was the farm??!?! Then move to pictures and finally heat. Basic itinerary: We left by plane to Qingdao – yes, where the beer Tsingdao is made; unfortunately we didn’t have time to sample any – at 7:30am (way too early) in the morning on October 22nd; then took a four hour van-ride in a much too small van out into the countryside to be greeted like the circus came to town; finally leaving and heading home around 9pm on Sunday. A great excuse for not doing any homework that weekend!

So what did we do?...well what is there to do but work? Not much, so work was what entertained throughout the weekend – how sad for a birthday weekend I know. Putting that aside, we did three different activities: gathering sweet potatoes; digging up the roots of corn stalks; and peeling off the pieces of the corn on the cob. After a few minutes of trying to get the sweet potatoes out of the ground, we found out that we pretty bad at it. This is because sweet potatoes are quite fragile and sticking a pitchfork like tool into the ground slices the potatoes when wielded by inexperienced hands – which is bad. After we finally got the potatoes out of the ground, we separated them into the good piles which consisted of large potatoes that had very little damage and the bad piles which well had everything else.

After we killed enough potatoes they figured making fuel for fires would be better suited for us. We then moved to their corn field where we spent our effort digging up corn stalk roots and then beating them with sticks to get the dirt out. Thus, we didn’t have to worry about destroying it.

But what did for the better part of the weekend was pick off corn kettles from the cob. This type was for animals so it had to be de-cobbed? It is kinda hard to explain, so you’ll just the before and after pictures.

Talking about pictures…I think I found a way to get pictures up on the blog so hopefully you’ll see some soon! And the farm pictures have some interesting pictures of the local cuisine…

EDIT: Uploading pictures to the blog would have taken forever with a 8mb limit per post, but I have uploaded the first batch of photos on Facebook.

I don’t want to spoil it too much, but if you have to know we ate…hah, you’ll have to scroll down to the bottom of this blog.

Now on to the last subject, heat. So yeah, it is really cold in China and really really windy. It’s kinda horrible actually. But I’ve survived so far…I’ll let you know when we reach the coldest month: January. The interesting though is we have no heat. Yes, NO HEAT. That’s what I would have been saying, but national turn on the heat day was actually today! So the heaters all over China have started to turn on. Unfortunately it isn’t very warm yet still. But yeah, the heat in China is governed by the government. And no has heat until the government decides to turn on heat. This is called National Turn on the Heat Day – unofficially. Supposedly it doesn’t turn on until November 15th, but it is especially cold this winter (China doesn’t have fall L) and so they turned it on. What was especially interesting though was that every class sent two representatives to meet with government officials and voice their concerns.

So the interesting we ate were: grasshoppers, rabbit, and chicken – we got to see them kill the chicken. Enjoy the pictures when they go up.