Here’s some random photos of stuff we’ve recently stumbled over while innocently going about our daily business. Click each photo to see big size.

Hungry? I’ll give you one guess: What is this restaurant selling? (This is not a trick question. And Grandma Neil, you may not want to look):

It’s the “Qiān Lóng Shùn Specialty Dog Meat House” (千龍顺特色狗肉馆). The door advertises boiled dumplings and fried veggies, and the window lists dog meat hotpot (狗肉火锅), red-simmered dog meat (红焖狗肉), and two regular noodle dishes.

Two guys who detest shopping went shopping for Christmas presents last Sunday afternoon in Tianjin’s dà hú tòng (大胡同) daily shopping torture/madness. See if you can find James – he’s wearing a hunting toque, and the pinyin for his Chinese name spells “dingle”:

This is one of our first floor neighbours stacking a winter’s supply of dà bái cài (大白菜) on top of our gate. The older folks still stock up on veggies for the winter – it saves a little bit of money, and as recent as six or seven years ago there was hardly any variety at all in the markets during winter.

Coal is the number one heating source in our area, and most smaller restaurants cook on it. China is the kind of place where people who drive snazzy status symbols and people who pull coal carts like mules live in close proximity:

When you spend a lot of your time on a bike, you learn to make the most of it:

This is the dirty sunset we often see from our kitchen yáng tái (阳台):

These are some our neighbours – that’s our apartment building in the background – sending money and winter clothes to their dead relatives in the underworld by burning paper money and paper clothes at an intersection last night (see a little more about this practice here). A few piles of ashes are to the right of the flames:

A lot of trees and bushes here get wrapped up on the windy side for the winter. Makes no difference to the fishermen, who, we’re told, will just cut holes in the ice and fish all winter:

This last one doesn’t have anything to do with winter, but I had to include it. Right next to a window selling chicken biscuits that we frequent at lunch time is this dentist shop. They make teeth, right alongside all the unregulated, filthy (by Western standards) first-floor lunch windows (which we love). I guess they thought putting the throw-aways on the windowsill would make good advertising, judging from the stack of business cards in the middle:

In Tianjin, we have “centralized heating” with Chinese characteristics. So do our neighbours and everyone else on our block. On Nov. 15, the local government fires up the coal stacks and the heat comes on. On March 15, it goes off. They use a network of pipes (above-ground in our neighbourhood) to heat the apartments, and you pay according to how many square meters your apartment is (in some of the older apartments you have your own stack of coal to burn yourself). Aside from phoning the heating place and complaining that they aren’t burning enough coal, you can’t turn up the temperature.

But it’s still October, so they haven’t turned the heat on yet, even though the temperature is down in single digits. The “Guide to Living in Tianjin” suggests that during these unheated cold weeks of the year, you can stuff cardboard in the window cracks, wear toques to bed, and imagine how hot and uncomfortable you’d be living in Singapore.

It’d be easy to go buy an electric heater, but most people just hold out for the heat to come on. During the day some students find coffee shops or other places to study, since their apartments are so cold. In the evenings, we curl up on the couches wearing multiple layers of clothes and a few blankets, sipping hot drinks and trying to write our Chinese homework. This is our first winter in Tianjin, so we’re gonna try and hold out ’til November 15th. Only two more weeks to go!

Language exchange is common here. You meet with someone for a specified amount of time and spend half of it in their language in half of it in yours – that way each gets to practice a foreign language with a native speaker. We’ve been deliberately turning down these opportunities because speaking English half the time doesn’t compare to practicing on the old people in our neighbourhood who don’t care about English and couldn’t speak any even if they did. People who are only with you for your English don’t make the best Mandarin teachers.

And yet, today we had our first afternoon of language exchange session. How did this happen?

Step One – decide that you definitely do not want to do language exchanges, and make a habit of declining the inevitable offers.

Step Two – move into an apartment three floors above a family with a university student and a pushy, overbearing mother.

Step Three – get ambushed in the park/back yard by aforementioned pushy mother and her (embarrassed, apologetic) son/translator, whom she harasses in Mandarin throughout the conversation, alternating between “Use English! This is a good opportunity!” and “What did she say? Tell me in Chinese!” After half an hour of barely avoiding committing to the woman’s cleverly delivered request, use the “I have to talk to my husband about it first, and he’s busy losing a chess match to old men at the moment” maneuver.

Step Four – get ambushed three weeks later in your apartment by the son and his nice, friendly and probably-badgered father at 9pm as you were heading out for a walk with your friends who are moving to another city in the morning. After refusing to speak English for free several times a week at the father’s university classes (dirty trick!), agree to Sunday afternoon language exchange.

We chose to avoid language exchange because if you don’t need it, it’s not really worth it to spend half your time in English. But, we also chose to live in a regular Chinese neighbourhood on purpose, and if we want to be a part of this community, we can’t just blow people off. Well, we could, but in cases like this it probably wouldn’t be worth it. We don’t want to be English teachers, but we don’t mind being decent neighbours.

The son, “Shine Far” (if we translated his Chinese name… which we don’t), showed up today for our first session with a tea set as a gift from his family. He and I went for a walk to get my hair cut on the street corner a few blocks away, and it turns out he’s more comfortable using Chinese with us anyway. We set an alarm clock to go off when it’s time to switch languages, and it worked pretty good. I like him; he seems like a really nice guy, and grew up in this neighbourhood. I’m already glad we got sucked into this deal. Plus, he leaves for grad school in Beijing in a month, and we’re already working to pass him on to some American friends studying Chinese there (haha… foreigner 关系!).