Bank Account II...
I'm now the proud owner of a second Bank of China bank account. Let me explain.
Before leaving for Xi'an I wanted to get a bank card, which is much more convenient for getting cash when the bank is closed (i.e. during a holiday or in the evening). When I originally opened an account, they didn't have any cards in the bank (meiyou!), so I was told to go back again. I decided to hit up a larger branch today figuring they would have cards in stock.
I guess I went into the wrong part of the bank, but the lady understood what I wanted and told me to go through a door into another part of the bank. I evidently didn't have the correct type of account to have a bank card, so they gave me some papers to fill out. I have a "Savings Account", but I need a "Passbook of Savings Accounts" to be able to have a bank card. So I opened a second account, paid another 15Yuan, and transferred money back and forth until I got a Great Wall Card, for use in China only.
They were quite efficient, the lady behind the counter even serving four people at the same time! Yes, there were four of us squished up against the glass, pushing paper back and forth to the lady, and entering our PIN codes multiple times.

Happy Birthday Confucius...
Today is Confucius' 2557th birthday, if he was still alive that is. It's believed that he has around 2.5 million descendants in China, 100,000 in Korea, and many more in the overseas Chinese population. The China Confucius Foundation has recently trademarked a 'standard image' of the philosopher to be used in China and abroad to reduce confusion over the various images in different parts of China. Of course it has raised a lot of debate as to which painting/drawing/statue is the closest to the original man. I wonder, what does Kong FuZi say?

Xi'an...
Here I come! I'm leaving for Xi'an (西安) for a week during the National Holiday. I'll be leaving the following Saturday, which is the Moon Festival. The festival is celebrated on August 15th of the lunar calendar, so the date on the western calendar changes every year. Normally the festival falls in September, but this year there's a double 7th lunar month so it's in October.

Busy Weekend...
It started on Saturday with a visit to the Ancient Lotus Pond (古莲花池), first started in the 7th century during the Tang Dynasty. After being ransacked by the British, French, Germans, and Italians at the end of the Qing Dynasty (early 1900's), it was rebuilt to match the ancient style. There are many pavilions, a stele from 740AD, and many huge lotus leaves in the middle. I actually have no clue how many hours I spent in the park just wandering around.
I met an English teacher from the university and two students for dinner at a restaurant in another park, overlooking a pond. It was a beautifully warm night, and the food was excellent (except for the bitter melon which I'm not a fan of). I even loved the sticky black rice, which looked less than appealing.

I was out all Sunday, getting groceries, visiting friends, and eating (China's pastime, along with playing pingpong). In the evening I went for dinner with some Chinese friends at a cool restaurant that was done up with old communist stuff (Mao posters, red stars, and waitresses dressed in mock military uniforms). Amongst the dished I had one of Mao's favourite, which I nicknamed the "Mao Burger". It was pork in a sauce, eaten on a steamed bun. I loved it, though it was quite fatty.

German Terracotta Warrior...
I read an interesting story in the Yahoo! Oddities section today about a German art student who dressed up as one of the terracotta warriors, and jumped into the pit containing rows and rows of them. His disguise was so good that the security guards had a hard time finding him. They released him eventually, after a lecture, since he hadn't damaged the warriors.
In related news, things are shaping up for my National Holiday trip to Xi'an to see the terracotta warriors for myself.

My version of that MasterCard commercial...
-Instant coffee to survive next day 7:30 class... 75fen ($0.10CDN)
-Bus ride to Heda... 1kuai ($0.15)
-Taxi ride back after missing the last bus by over an hour... 10kuai ($1.50)
-Rooftop/outdoor Chinese dinner with way too much food, split 20 ways... 20kuai ($3.00, my share)
-Meeting almost every Westerner in Baoding (20 or so), having good, natural conversation in English and French, getting tips on China... Priceless

Chinese Wedding...
I just got back from a wedding reception for one of the English teachers at the school. The wedding ceremony was yesterday, and early this morning (around 3:00AM), the groom picked up the bride from her house. Needless to say they were a bit tired around lunch time when our busload of teachers stopped by the reception which had been going for a couple of hours already.
We got there at 12:30, just in time for the most important part -the food and the toasts. There were about 10 people at each table and countless tables. The food started with a few small dishes, pop, baijiu, and sunflower seeds. The dishes slowly got bigger and more elaborate until the mutton, whole chicken, whole fish, and huge hunk of ham for each table arrived. The food was really good, and the piece of small intestine that ended up on my plate wasn't too bad either (a piece of meat from a Sichuan dish that I didn't realise was intestine until I put it on my plate).
Of course there were many toasts too. The emcee went around to all the tables singing and toasting into a microphone. When he came to our table, he zoomed in on me saying "Hello! Welcome!" and putting the microphone in my face. When the couple came around I gave the bride a hug (Canadian tradition). The other people at the table said I must be brave for hugging a policeman's wife (though I think he had enough toasts of baijiu to notice too much). We made it back to school for the 2:00 afternoon classes.

Laowai Hunting...
As I've probably mentioned before I haven't seen many laowai ('old outsider', or foreigner) in Baoding. OK, so I've seen one before yesterday since I arrived 3 weeks ago. As nice as it is to meet Chinese people, I think it's good for my sanity to have a few foreign friends as well. Friday night one of the English teachers showed me where the foreign student and teacher dorms are at Hebei University, so yesterday I decided to wait outside the dorms until a foreigner walked by.
You might call me a stalker yes, but how else do you meet foreigners in a city with so few foreigners?
In any case it worked and I met a foreign teacher and a foreign student. The one laowai I had seen previously, at the bank, was the foreign student I ended up meeting yesterday. We went out for dinner a bit later in the evening, and had a great fish and winter melon soup (we approved the fish flopping in a bucket before it went into the kitchen, and the soup included the head and tail of course).

I'm Legal...
It's official -I received my "Residence Permit for Foreigner in the People's Republic of China" from the PSB (Public Security Bureau) today! It took less then three weeks to get all the paperwork, medical tests, and translations finished. And to top it off, I got payed yesterday. A big wad of red 100Yuan bills in a white paper envelope. Needless to say I got one of the teachers to help me open a bank account so I don't have to hide the money under my bed.
That's much faster than the 3-4 months it took in France to get paid and receive my carte de sejour.

House Call...
On Saturday morning there was a knock on my room door. One of the ladies who works at the entrance of my dorm building started saying something frantically. I had no clue until she said "lai lai" (come come), and I followed her. It turned out that the main dorm phone was for me, and it was one of the cousins of my Mandarin teacher back in Canada calling. My prof let her cousins know that I was in town, and where I was staying.
Half an hour later a lady came to pick me up, and whisked me away on the bus. We bought some groceries for lunch, and she bought a bag of sweets for me to take back with me (moon cakes, crackers, and cookies of all kinds). Lunch was a big affair with various family members and friends showing up for the feast. There were all sorts of food -home made mutton dumplings, chicken, sausage, tofu, veggies, ribs, beef, etc.- and many toasts (including some welcoming me to Baoding and to their house). I even tried a chicken foot, which doesn't have much meat on it in case you're wondering.
The other cousin then invited me to their house for the afternoon. I met the grandparents, and was plied with even more food! It was the first time that one of the cousins had a foreigner in their house. Apparently as little as 10 years ago foreigners weren't allowed to go into common Chinese people's houses.

Teacher's Day...
September 10th in China is Teacher's Day. It's not a stat holiday so nobody gets the day off, but students sometimes give flowers to their teachers or sing them a song. Maybe I'll have to bug my students on Monday to sing me a song.