Chinese Tea and The American Dream

Hey everyone! So not much new has happened here, but I thought I'd check in. Yesterday Laura was out all day (she went to the foreigners church and then met up with her teacher for something) so I did a bunch of things by myself, which I liked. It was nice to start to feel independent here too, but I could also feel everyone staring at me alot more because I don't have someone else to distract me or some of the attention. But anyways, I ventured out and went to the little grocery store down the street from us called Hu Hui. It's like a little corner market. There are also big huge supermarkets here, but they sell everything-like SuperTarget. I like going to the supermarket too, but it's a little far away. To get produce there are lots of little fruit stalls all over the place. All the little shops here are like garages. They are that size, or smaller, and have the garage door that comes down over the front when they are closed. They sell EVERYTHING in these little stores. There are restaurants, clothing stores, fruit stands, electronics stores, weird second hand stores, literally everything. So that is where we usually buy our fruit and I stopped there yesterday too. Vegetables are a different story. To buy good vegetables you either can go to the supermarkets, or there are these larger open air markets tucked in weird corners of the city that sell vegetables. It's like the farmers market, kind of. There is one of those a few blocks from our house too, but I didn't need vegetables so I didn't go there. After that I went to the tea house by myself and ordered tea. I tried a new kind called zi ye qian that was green and very fresh tasting.

Tonight we went to an American Culture class that one of our Chinese professors is teaching. It was very interesting to see how they taught American culture and what exactly they thought American culture was. He talked alot about American values. He identified three basic American values, these being individual freedom, equal opportunity, and hard work (self-made man sort of thing). I thought that was pretty accurate. For the second half of the class he asked us to stand up at the front of the class and make "speeches". We didn't really know what to say, so instead we just let the students ask us questions. They asked lots of questions about all kinds of things. They asked about basketball and what we like to do in our free time and what we think about all sorts of things in China and about homosexuality and the war in Iraq and what we wanted to be when we grew up. We also each said the largest difference we had noticed between China and the US. I said the thing that struck me most was the lack of diversity. Their teacher before had been talking about immigrating to America and why people wanted to go there from all over the world (freedom) so I said that because of that America has a huge range of different kinds of people celebrating different religions and cultures. I said that if they went to the US people wouldn't really notice, but when I walk down the street people more than notice. Answering some of their (especially political) questions made me realize what a horrible generalization any American culture class would have to be because of the huge range of different ideas in America. We all disagreed with the war in Iraq, but I tried to describe how not everyone did and it was a very controversial subject and some people liked the government and some people didn't and some people didn't care, but either way it was something people talked about. It was really hard to try to describe the idea of political and intellectual debate. What I've noticed so far in people's approach to the government is that most people really don't care. They don't have any choice in it and in most parts of their life it doesn't affect them much anymore, so they are just completely apathetic. I haven't had the chance to ask many people about this though, so that could change. It's just a first impression. But it was a very interesting class that made me think alot.