Flavor of the week

I forgot all about this weeks Flavor of the week!
It was a tough choice, but here it is, the Flavor of the week:
*Drum roll*
Kiwi flavored chips!

So how does it taste? Like normal salty chips but with a touch of kiwi. It is really not as bad as it seems. No worries Jonas, I will bring you a sample when I come home.

I must also publish a picture of my latest shampoo, recommended by the good people of Ningbo and Jackie Chan.

♪♫ Everybody bought Kung Fu shampoo! *Didilidi didi li di diii* ♪♫

The shampoo goes perfect with my new Chinese haircut I got today. Maybe it will be shown in a picture or two later.

Today we will hit the city center in order to consume alcohol and practice dancing. Well earned if you ask me. I am very much looking forward to it. Cheers!

The plans for today and more

Good morning Europe and good day China!

The afternoon's lecture was canceled and we do not complain. The weather is beautiful and it was a long time ago since I saw such a blue sky. To good to spend the afternoon inside a classroom. I must study really, but I will skip it at head down town for shopping clothes with Armin. We are also in the need of a tailor's skills because Armins pants has a couple of extra holes and my pair is too long. The tailor charges 3 RMB per pants so it is really cheap, but usually we pay her extra for the good work.

The tailor and Hong Wan Peng, a friendly local

If there is time enough we will try a local tea house along with some of the other foreigners, and after that we will most probably go to a club for some drinks. Andy, a new Chinese friend will show us some places. I have been  to a few bars for foreigners but I do not really like it. I can visit such places at home and I really do want to connect with the Chinese people.

The past week has been filled with studies, studies and studies. I had an examination this Wednesday in Statistical methods and I think it went OK. There will be another re-exam in one month if I fail this one, and it will not be a problem. Due to all studies I put the blog on low priority as you may understand.
I will dedicate this weekend to fun activities, I could really use that now. Just working makes me a bit dull.
And oh! I got a job offer  from the international student coordinator which I accepted. The job is about teaching English to the local police officers during evenings. That can be challenging and fun! I can also learn something from it and the pay is really good. A full time English teacher can earn about 10 000 RMB a month. Compare that with a normal salary of 3000 RMB/month. China lacks of such teachers and the demand is very high. Some classmates teaches English to kids and are payed 200 RMB/hour.

I wish you all a wonderful weekend! Hopefully I will update the blog with new happenings, but have lots of catching up to do as well about old events. More things happens than I have time to write about. No complaining here, I love it!

Interviewed by Chinese TV

Last Thursday my friend Armin and I were interviewed by a Chinese TV-channel and it were broad casted the same evening on the 18:00 news. Of course there is a story behind this;

About 2 months before I moved to Ningbo I was reading about the city in forums on the Internet. On ningboguide.com I found a post with the topic "Can you help this girl?". I started to read the post and was caught by the story. Short version; It was about a girl who worked as a nanny for a British/Chinese couple. The girl became very ill and was dying. The nice couple took her in but could not finance her treatment by themselves. They turned to the citizens for help in order to buy a dialysis machine. The whole story about Penny can be found here:  http://www.ningboguide.com/node/5613

Kath, our international student coordinator, told us about the story last Tuesday and I thought it seemed familiar. The Wanli university and the Ningbo group needed 2 foreign volunteers to represent the school in a meeting with the girl. Since I have been following the story for 3 months I saw an opportunity to meet the girl, so I gladly signed up along with Armin. We were suppose to hand over an envelope with money, flowers and a fruit basket. We added some money ourselves. The bouquet of flowers was huge! And the fruit basket as well, it was heavy to carry. I couldn't help my self thinking that it might have been better to give the girl money instead of spending it on flowers and fruit.

On Thursday morning a car picked us up an drove us to the family's apartment. After the 30min drive we stepped out of the car and became a bit surprised. We were met by a TV-team and a photographer from a newspaper along with other visitors such as 2 kids from an elementary school and Craig, the founder of Ningboguide.com. In the apartment we delivered the load of presents and had a nice chat with Terry, the husband, and we exchanged a few words with the girl, Penny (Yu Ping), over a cup of coffee. The news team interviewed most people in the room, including Armin and me. It was kind of lousy and very hard to understand the reporter. I had to "freestyle" a bit and surprisingly a clip with me in it appeared on the TV-screen later that evening. They said something about the American student "Han Sen", hehe. You can watch the clip at this adress:
http://www.nbtv.com.cn/video/index.asp?channel=1&contentid=120100319062000
Story starts at 08:08 minutes and the part with Armin and I starts at about 09:20 minutes. I had problems watching it in Chrome but IE works well. The site is Chinese so the connection might be a bit slow.

I must admit it was kind of cool to be subtitled in Chinese.

If you have any interest in the story about Penny please read the forumpost on Ningboguide.com, and don't hesitate to contact Penny's family on friendsxofxpenny@gmail.com if you can help in any way.

Just for the show

I am not going to write anything interesting, I just wanted to show you how things are looking on my balcony now(08:03 CET). We have 29°C at the moment and it feels just wonderful, but I must study. Then I got the brilliant idea of moving my job out to the balcony. Imagine sunny 29°C, the fragrance of newly cut grass and a cold drink... This is how it may look like:

Tomorrow is a good day for purchasing real furnitures for the balcony.

Also, Simon took this picture while we were having lunch earlier today.

Taxi ride down town

I don't have that much time to write today but I need to update the blog with something. Yesterday my friend Armin and I took a taxi to Tiyanyi square down town of Ningbo for shopping. The plan was to buy a camera support for my Nikon, but we ended up with lots of clothes instead after 6 hours of shopping. Armin filmed the ride with my camera, and here is a short sample:


It was good to have Armin as my wingman during the shopping. He showed me different styles and I bought clothes that I am not used to wear. I am very much enjoying my new style and I do not think that my friends in Sweden would recognize me if they saw me now. It is amazing how you can surprise yourself. I must  upload a few pictures later.

A very exciting thing happened today. Armin and I were interviewed by Chinese TV and newspaper and it was shown on the 18:00 news. I will post the whole story tomorrow when the TV-station uploads the clip on their website. I must say it was kind of cool to be subtitled on Chinese TV :-)

Flavor of the week

Last week I wrote about a bag of blueberry crisps that I bought. This week is dedicated to the flavor of cucumber. How does it taste? Not to bad really. Like ordinary potato crisps but with the fresh taste of cucumber. I give it 4/5 toasts. But then again, I like almost everything here. But I am becoming tired of tofu. I do not think I can ever get used to the smell when it is being cooked.

What else is new? Today is my first class in Taiji. I am not sure if it is the traditional 'Tai chi' or the Kung Fu. Does not matter how many times I've asked about the difference, the only answer I get is "yes". For this event and for other sport activities, I went to the mall on the lunch break to buy a pair of running shoes. I found a pair of very comfortable shoes for the humble price of 129 RMB. 

The day started at 08:00 with International Business. The professor of this course speaks excellent English, which is very rare for this country. She is also very effective. What she manages  to teach us in one days is about the same as we learned in 3 days back home, so it is quite intense. We also have this teacher in Chinese Economy and International Trade Operations. However, I will change the last mentioned course to International Management, since there isn't much new for me to learn. Management will hopefully be more valuable. On the schedule for the rest of the day was Chinese intensive writing and speaking/listening. Quite hard but we learned a lot today.

I was planning to write about the trip to Hangzhou but I am leaving that to another time. You will need to satisfy with the pictures for now. I will start to write about Chinese culture, girls, food etc, but there is so much to write about along with many activities besides that. Mingtien jìan! (See you tomorrow)

Slightly disappointed

During our trip to Hangzhou yesterday I received a call from a Swede called Robert. He asked me if I wanted to act guest speaker at some seminar today. It may seem like a short notice but we talked about it one week ago. The subject I was going to talk about is connected to my thesis, attitudes about safety and cultural awareness. The audience is a mix of Swedish students, Chinese professors and professionals from the logistic industry, a total amount of about 40 people. A presentation in English felt like a challenge and an opportunity to learn something, so I accepted. Of course I felt a bit nervous right after the call because I must prepare some material and find a way how to angle it so it would suite the listeners. For this I only had a limited amount of time. We still had a few hours before arrival back in Ningbo, and I was suppose to get ready by 8-9 in the morning next day. Not very much time for a presentation of 30-60 minutes + questions. For this they would compensate me with 500 RMB, an sum that some Chinese earns in a week.

I fell asleep almost instantly when we got back home, around 22:30. The next morning, today, I woke up early and made lots of coffee. This is the 4:th night in a row without enough sleep.
They did not call me until 12:15 and I was told to get ready. Apparently some other speakers at the seminar talked a bit to long, but they had a spot for me at 15:00 at the latest. By now I had lots of time to prepare. I must say that I was very happy with my long power point presentation. It felt professional and I think it could deliver my message in a good way with interesting statistics and some minor humor. My approach was partly to compare culture of work in China with Sweden, since the audience was mainly presented by these two countries.
My nervosity began slowly to ease, because I was very satisfied with my preparations. I even had some time to rehearsal by myself. I was ready! Then the phone rang again, and the voice in the other end of the line told me that my presentation had to be canceled. Apparently, a Chinese professor changed his mind and were suppose to talk about something after all. I know that things changes fast in China so this did not come as a surprise. I totally understand that a Chinese professor is more interesting to listen at than me.

I am not that disappointed, I was just so prepared and felt very confident. This presentation would be a way to test my self in skills of performance. The plan was to film the event with my camera for later review and self improvement. They felt sorry and will compensate me for the time wasted. I told them that it was not wasted. I learned a lot from preparing the preparation so I am not left empty handed.

Enough whining. Today is a very nice day although it's a bit wet, but the fragrance of summer rain is nice. Simon took a sneaky picture of Viyaleta and me when we had lunch on the grass two days ago. I think the picture has a lot of summer in it so I will publish it here.

An oh, I will write some more information about the trip to Hangzhou later or tomorrow. Meanwhile you can have a look at the pictures here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=210411&id=692125169&l=4a9fac0529