Yesterday we had a school trip to a local museum, the Shi Family Mansion (Shijia Dayuan), which was a preserved old style home like you might see in kung-fu movies. A couple families brought their kids. Oscar and Toby (blond, glasses) have lived in Tianjin for about two years, and I think they’re handling their pseudo-celebrity status rather well:

Poor guy on the left… wonder what he’s thinking.

It can actually be pretty tough for kids when they have to deal with this kind of attention, but these two have come through the woods and are in the process of working this to their advantage. I almost died laughing when a bus load of uniformed school kids, led by a guy in an army uniform, came marching past us and these two suddenly jumped into the middle of it and started dancing around. The museum wasn’t bad, but I think that was the high point for me.

We have a ton of photos that I just haven’t had time to upload yet. We’re busy getting the apartment up to shape (sealing the windows, putting in U-bends so the sewer gas doesn’t flow up the kitchen and bathroom pipes and wake us up… again, etc.) I’ll try to get them up this week so you can see the neighbourhood. April is a really beautiful month in Tianjin.

社会治安大家管综合治理保平安
shè huì zhì ān dà jiā guǎn zōng hé zhì lǐ bǎo píng ān

“Everyone manages society’s stability/order/security;
comprehensive management guarantees peace/safety.”

We moved apartments this weekend. Four trips in a borrowed electric powered three-wheel cart (thanks Tim and Helen!) was enough to get all the worldy goods we own in Asia into our new neighbourhood. We’ll have photos and stuff once it’s clean and everything’s put away. We’re really happy with it – it’s definitely ‘Chinese,’ in an average neighbourhood, but not so different that living there will make us suddenly freak out from accumulated culture shock in a few months (there’s plenty of other things that can help us do that!).

A guy took pictures of me today – it may have been video. I’d just pulled out of the bicycle bunker where we park out bikes overnight and stopped to put something in the basket, looked up and there he was, standing in the middle of the path aiming his camera at me. I smiled, got on the bike, and started to ride off thinking, “So this is how it feels…” and he followed me with the camera. Can’t say I blame him; it’s only fair, considering the amount of Tianjin photos I have stored on this computer. I know that at least one other foreigner has lived in this neighbourhood before, but I don’t think there’s any there now. This makes us a little bit of a novelty, I guess. Good thing I shaved three days ago.

Tim and Helen and their two young boys get it worse; apparently a whole family of foreigners in a sān lún chē is a big deal. They’ve had people roll down the taxi window to get take their photo with camera phones.

Here are some photos from a nearby park tonight, taken on the way back from Home Depot (yes, it’s only a bike ride away).

Pronounced: di�n d�ng s?n l�n ch?
Means: electric powered three wheel cart.

整洁家园人人有责
zhěng jié jiā yuán rén rén yǒu zé

“A tidy neighbourhood is everyone’s responsibility.”

I couldn’t decide which photo to use, so I decided not to decide.

Pronounced: b?n ji?
Means: to move house (change residences)

The Olympics are coming. The world will focus it’s media on Beijing, Tianjin, and Qingdao. You can’t walk these streets and forget these facts. It seems like the city skyline is changing overnight. Construction literally goes around the clock, and it seems like there are half-built high-rises and cranes in every direction you look. But changes are happening on the ground as well, in the side-streets and alleys and street corners: street markets are on the way out.

These photos (above and below) were taken roughly a week apart, from the lane near the JHF office that used to be a market street. It’s the first clean up that we’ve personally witnessed since we’ve been here. The rubble was laid where people’s carts used to be. Now there’re only two or three bicycle repair guys left for the whole street. About a week after these photos, they started digging trenches and laying pipes. We don’t know for what yet (fire hydrants?), but while apartment hunting this last week we noticed legions of migrant workers digging trenches and laying pipes in several neighbourhoods in our district.

Street food vendors and street markets are some of the things we and a lot of other foreigners love about Tianjin. We loved that about Taipei, too. Aside from being so convenient and cheap, these things (to us) seem to give the city much of it’s character, much of it’s “Chinese-ness.” That may or may not be fair, and I know it’s a rather unrefined outsider’s perspective, but neighbourhood street markets and night markets are part of what many foreigners who live here love about China.

Maybe if we’d grown up with unregulated markets crowding the streets of our own neighbourhoods, and if we associated such things with the old, poorer way of life that we’re determined to leave behind as we rush headlong into the wanton consumerism enjoyed by the West, we’d feel differently. I don’t know.

But the Olympics are coming. So that, together with crime, traffic, and sanitation concerns, are why, we’re told by locals, that street markets are being cleared off.

Pronounced: niú zǎi kù
Literally: cowboy pants
Means: jeans

Some of the feedback on this name list has come in. Here’s what the latest person said:

Be honest to you I like none of the names on the list, the problem is I can not think about one I can satisfied myself as well. Be honest to you again, I even not satisfied my own Chinese name too.

And he (very helpfully) gave his reasons for why he didn’t like each name:

…too religion …too simple …very famous movie star’s name …a famous political guy’s name …usually use in girl’s name …too popular …too rare to use in normal people …I just do not like it …if you are a government officer, this may be a good one …too political …I do not know how to say in English, in Chinese is 太俗了 (“too vulgar”?).

That, with the other feedback, has let me cross some off the list.

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[Update]
And a new one just came in:
陆望林 (lù wàng lín)
望 wàng means hope
林 lín means woods or forest

I might actually be able to live with this one, as both characters have plenty of positive meaning for me personally… but I haven’t bounced it off our Chinese friends yet. You never know what kinds of connotations there are… “Oh, that’s the name of a well known toilet paper company,” or something.

In class today we were having a practice dialogue, and I told my teacher that I ate Hong Kong for breakfast. I meant to say banana. It was one of those classes, where you get your 香蕉 mixed up with your 香港.

And the other day I was “talking” to an older guy on the bus, as is our custom, asking him where he was going and where he was from (Hebei) – basically trying to make a conversation by patching together different phrases from our lessons.

I thought I’d told him I was going to school (学校 – xué xiào), which is on Zǐ Jīn Shān Lù (紫金山路 – the street name). He seemed a little puzzled, and when the bus came near the water park (several stops before mine), he started trying to tell me I needed to get off. He eventually got off himself and was replaced by an older lady with white hair (there are a lot of older people in Tianjin).

How bad is my accent: I tried to say “xué xiào” and he heard “shuǐ shàng” (shuǐ shàng gōng yuán = 水上公园 = water park). The bus was noisy. That must be it.

————

Still stalling on picking a Chinese name. But we managed, with our Chinglish powers combined, to hunt down an apartment and arrange the meeting to negotiate with the landlord. We called in reinforcements for the negotiations on Sunday night, and it all went great. We move in to a hopefully more permanent place this weekend!