I have been in the USA for almost 3 weeks and today marked the second full week of work, at my old job. A few weeks ago I was in Xian, China and I was an English teacher and now I do heating and ventilation. It is not too difficult to guess which job I like better. It was so much fun to walk in to the classroom and try and help the students to improve their speaking skills. At Xian everyone knows you are a westerner and that probably means you are a teacher, so you are special. The students would smile at you and come up to you to talk or ask to sit with you at the cafeteria. I enjoyed that interaction so much.
That does not happen at work now. No one has asked to have a picture taken with me. Imagine that. I also notice how empty to campus is. At Xian you had 16,000 students on the campus and they all were there. They lived there with no cars to take them away. The bells would ring and the students would empty out of the buildings and head to the cafeteria to eat and the place was just packed full of people. You would walk up the last few steps to the upstairs dining area and the hazy and smoke of the food vendors would hit up in the face and make you cough just a little. By the time you walked a few more steps you were OK and ready to eat. I notice just how empty everything is here. Where are all the people.
I also notice just how green everything is, how blue the sky is, and how fresh the air is. In Xian it is dusty and it is polluted. The trees are not as green and that is because of the dust and pollution. In Xian you could look at the horizon and it would fade to gray, but not here. You can see for miles here. The sky is so blue. I never really noticed just how blue the sky is until now.
Here people in cars only run the yellow lights. Motorcycles are not all over the place and they are not on the sidewalks. It is different here. No food vendors on every corner. Nothing to eat that costs 35 cents and tastes good.
I was thinking today that a few weeks ago I could say, "yesterday I was in China." Soon I will be saying two months ago I was in China and then six months ago I was in China and then it will be last year at this time I was in China, only when I say that I hope to be saying it to someone in Silver City, New Mexico. I have worked long enough to be able to retire and I do have other things to do that should be more interesting than work. I have applied for an opportunity to travel to Mongolia and help evaluate their vocational school system. That may happen but I will have to wait and see. I am also working on a solar coffee dryer for Guatemala. That project is in the works and we just need to build a system or two and then see how well they work and what improvements we need to make. We also need to see about how to design simple hot water systems for the people. So I have lots of things to do once I quit working and start retiring. I would still like to return to China and teach. I really liked doing that. I enjoyed the students and the faculty that I met. The Chinese people are so interested in the USA, they are so polite, and just darn nice to be around. The food is great and it is cheap. China is so different from the USA. We have nothing that is the same. We talk different, write different, look different, eat different, and yet we all seem to get along just fine.
I want to travel as much as I can in the short time I have left but I do not want to be a tourist and just ride on the bus and then see the sights. I want to live in the areas I visit, get to know the people, live like they do, and I hope to be able to help them so that their lives are better because I was there. I would like to think that my time in Xian did help some students to improve their English skills. I know they have the information they need and can improve their speaking skills if they will do the important stuff, study and practice. With a language you need to practice if you are going to improve. I need to get the Chinese language on my netbook so I can written in characters and improve my Chinese language skills. I also need to load pictures on my QQ zone so my students in China can see what I did in China and more important they can see what I do here. I got QQ for one reason, to stay in contact with my students in Xian. I also want to show them what life is like in the USA. I know they watch TV and movies but the USA is not really like the movies. No one is going to make a movie about the Eureka Fourth of July Parade. But things like that are what America is. So much of this country is small towns and farms and just common people. That is what I want to share with my students, just how boring our country really is. So come July 4th, don't disappoint me.
Actually I have had some culture shock the last few weeks. I did not have a lot of trouble with culture shock when I got to China. I knew it would be dirty, crowded and very different from here but I welcomed that difference and expected it. It has been difficult to transition from being an English teacher to going back to punching the time clock. Today was difficult because it was very hot, in the 90's, and you are in a work uniform, up on the roof, in the heat working to find a leak in the air conditioning system. I thought if I was in Xian, I would be inside a classroom with students, trying to figure out how to get them to talk, and it would be in the 90's, because it is hot in Xian and they don't have air conditioning. No one complains. Just for fun in my best Chinese I would say, comfortable, and smile. I always was comfortable in the classroom, even when I was very nervous.
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