It's Cold Here!

I'm sitting at my desk at the language center, looking out a deceptively sunny cityscape. Unlike the past week, the sun is shining brightly and warming everything in it's path. Just like the past week, however, the temperature is somewhere between the mid 30's and the mid 40's with a stiff cold wind.

When I asked my middle school students two weeks ago what time of year it gets cold in Wenzhou, every one of them said (emphatically) "It doesn't get cold in Wenzhou! It's warm all year!"

According to my research, the students are mistaken- it gets cold in Wenzhou at the beginning of January.

Our Neighborhood

Over the past few weeks, I've taken a few panoramic pictures of our neighborhood.


To complement the view from our front door, this is the view of our front door- it's on the top floor, in the middle along the far wall.

This is looking east at night from the window in the 8th floor by our elevator.


This is what we see when we look out our dining room window during the morning. The dining room shares the same exterior wall as the kitchen, so this is also the view we have when we're washing dishes.

This is the street that runs past the west side of our apartment- our dining room window is located in the middle of the picture, underneath the horizontal red neon characters - it's the top floor on this side of the building. This picture was taken from an overhead "pedestrian circle/crosswalk" at a traffic intersection. Moving from left to right, the first few buildings are apartments, the building with the vertical neon characters is a restaurant, next is an apartment building, then the vertical green lights (I don't remember what that building is), then there is a building with stair-step dark windows on a light tile exterior- that's our apartment building. Next to that is a nondescript light-colored building (another set of apartments), then a building with a diagonal grid of lights-a kareoke bar-followed by a building with a row of round lights, which is another kareoke bar.
You can't see the street level very well in the picture, but there are three bread shops, a music store, two electric appliace stores, a few small restaurants, and many small clothing shops on this section of street. We live in a busy neighborhood.


This intersection is a short (5-7 minute) walk from our apartment. If you zoom in far enough, you might make out on the left-hand side of the opposite corner (the North-West corner) the emblem of an internationally-acclaimed American tourist rendezvous point- a solid red circle emblazoned with two golden arches. It's our neighborhood McDonald's! On the right-hand (North-East) corner is a mid-to-upscale clothing store (Kai Tai), with a drugstore in the basement. Farther to the right, out of the picture, is the South-East corner with a typical small shop/Apartment building. Behind me on the South-West corner is the International Hotel, a upper-end clothing mall, and an underground Pizza Hut.

This is the Pizza Hut. The fact that it's in a basement is surprisingly non-evident.

A bit farther east (Another 20-25 minutes by foot) is Europe City. Europe City is home to an upscale clothing mall, a mid-scale clothing mall, McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Papa John's, Trust-Mart,* several other restaurants, and an import grocery store.

This is a picture at Europe City from outside the mid-scale shopping mall. You can see the Pizza Hut in the lower left-hand corner. The towers in the center are on the up-scale shopping mall. Directly behind me is the new Papa John's. It's delicious.

- Jonathan

* Trust-Mart is a Chinese affiliate of Wal-Mart. They carry a few of the Wal-Mart house brands, such as GreatValue and Mainstays.

Christmas in Asia

Working Video!

I just discovered that the video Jeremiah took at Wenzhou Wonderland is working now! It's at the end of the Wenzhou Wonderland blog post.

View from our New Apartment

Shannon and I went out on a date this morning. On our way out, I took this picture from the walk outside our front door.


It was chilly and foggy- perfect weather for Coffee and Pastry!

Squanto

In the days leading up the Thanksgiving Play, we noticed that every student participating in the play had an aversion to being cast as "Squanto." We wrote this off as being induced by role assignment, in the same way that none of the students wanted to be cast as "Pilgrim Mother," until one of the Chinese Teachers knocked over a bit of the language barrier. Apparently, "Squanto" sounds like the chinese "si kuan tou," which means "Dead Bald Person."

Language Barrier

"A Polar bear is a Cartesian bear after a coordinate transform."

Some of my jokes aren't translating very well.

Future Blog Posts

Due to Scheduling Issues, the following blog posts have been delayed:

Europe City
Bonus Post!!!! Flowers!
Traditional Chinese Dinner
Traditional Jessup Dinner
Blue Mountain Coffee
Breakfast at BreadTalk
Jessica's Birthday

Sincerely, The Management

Europe City

We found Europe City!

After an all-day excursion on foot (and in the rain) a few weeks ago, which completely failed to determine the precise location of Europe City, we set out early last week on a second excursion, armed with fresh information and a slightly improved sense of direction.

The second trip was successful- we found Europe City! It's not so much a neighborhood as it is a Shopping Center with western goods- high-end name brands, "exotic" foods like frozen pizza, butter, spaghetti, and the like, Pizza Hut, McDonalds, and many other semblances of modern civilization wrapped in a circular Romanesque plaza.


It's located about a mile and a half from our apartment, so it takes us about 30-35 minutes to get there. Did I mention they sell cheese and butter? We're kind of excited about that.

Surprisingly, the potentially odd juxtaposition between Greco-Roman architecture and Asian patrons was, well, not so odd. I think we're acclimating.

Flowers!

This isn't on my "Future Post" list, but I don't want to wait until I catch up with everything else to post it.




Shannon and I went out on a Breakfast Date this week (Details in "Breakfast at Breadtalk"), and bought flowers. I'm not sure if they're expensive or cheap by local standards, but we were able to get this bouquet for about $7 USD.



We're very happy with them.