- cross-posted to:
- us_news@lemmygrad.ml
- usa@lemmy.ml
- usa@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- us_news@lemmygrad.ml
- usa@lemmy.ml
- usa@lemmy.ml
But why?! The USA is a paradise for women! Isn’t that what Margaret Atwood taught us!?
But why?! The USA is a paradise for women! Isn’t that what Margaret Atwood taught us!?
Ha, down in Hubei?
Since you mentioned your salary twice, I’ll play without trying to pry. My guess is you’re doing scientific/industrial work, since there’s no way you could have taken that much of a pay cut if you were an English teacher these days.
Congratulations again on your reduced CoL; it’s the most salient fact about living abroad for most people and the one they find least credible until they’re actually living abroad.
Not having to think about money is the best.
Talking of cost of living, however…
In … I want to say 2007? … an old colleague and his wife visited my SO and me for six weeks. When he got back home he started going over their finances, cringing at the anticipated expenses.
They’d saved money.
They spent a ridiculous sum on airfare. They lived in a hotel near my home for the entire six weeks. We ate out for each meal daily. And yet, when they got home, between the drastic reduction in their utilities usage over the period and the zero cost in groceries for six weeks they came out ahead (by about two weeks, according to his analysis).
I more than believe it, that’s great! I lived in China for ~7 years, constantly taking trains around the country, buying scooters, gaming computers, going to restaurants constantly, new shoes, haircuts and massages, and literal boxes of 200 pc. nori or yak jerky, and just by saving what was left each month, retired by thirty. What are your favorite snacks in China? I miss so many of them!
The CoL savings are crazy. Twice I was offered housing for less than $300 USD per year if I paid annually. One mountain house, one beach house, very modern, utilities included, but slightly remote so 220 for the mountain house per year, 300 per year for the beach house.
Anytime I visited the US, my friends would be working in the same sandwich shop I used to assistant-manage or a bar, double the hours per week I was working, exhausted, with zero savings or in debt. I owned two english schools in China and told my friends all the time I would hire them the next day and they’d instantly be solvent, and nobody I personally knew took me up on it. I hired one girl from California with 30k of medical debt and she paid it off in less than 2 years, living the life the entire time.
English teaching paychecks are $3-10k USD now(250-400 RMB/hr) for 10-40 hr workweeks, so I keep wondering if I should go back for a year and generate some more passive income capital.
That’s got to be pretty fun to be the cultural expert, I had some friends in international sales who did a lot of trade shows. Are you fluent in both Mandarin and Cantonese? I never got good at Cantonese.
This is going to sound weird because of a vocabulary issue, but … sweet potato jerky. (“Jerky” is just the closest word I can use for what this stuff really is, but it doesn’t cover how tender, sticky, and oh-so-sweet that it is.) “Spicy sticks” are also a guilty pleasure of mine. I grab a pack every second day or so and just eat them over the course of a day at work. And there’s any number of street foods I love, with 锅盔 being my current favourite.
Nope. Never touched Yue, Wu, Gan, Min, etc. at all. Mandarin is rough enough for me, thanks!
No worries, I’m familiar with sweet potato jerky, that’s a good way to describe it.
Yea, Mandarin was enough for me as well, although while I was in Guangzhou I started picking up some Cantonese because like everywhere else, locals love teaching the foreigner their favored phrases.
There’s always such glee whenever they can get me to repeat a Canton phrase. I learned the equivalent of “sure, sure, calm down” in Cantonese and peppered that into a bunch of high-energy conversations to everyone’s delight while I was down there.
The closest I got to Guanzhou proper was Hong Kong, and that only to deal with visa issues before that avenue was closed. I’ve never lived anywhere with Yue as the dominant language. I lived briefly in a city (Xiamen) where Minnan was a huge influence, and lived for two years in a city (Jiujiang) where Gan was a major dialect, but most of my actual living here was done in Wuhan where a form of Mandarin (albeit a very loose form of it!) is the dominant dialect.
I was in foshan, which I liked a lot, still very chill compared to Beijing which has gotten a lot more strict in recent years.
Interesting, how is Mandarin loose in wuhan? The dialects have a strong influence?
武汉话 is a 普通话 dialect, but at its most extreme is incomprehensible (right down to having a fifth tone!) to 普通话 speakers. It is, naturally, also one of those dialects for whom “四十四是四十四十四是十四” comes out as “sisi si si sisi si sisi si sisi”.
I knew quite a few people who spent time in Foshan. They seemed to like it as a laid-back place like Shangrao in Jiangxi province for those I knew from there.
Oh right, I had trouble with shi becoming si occasionally while traveling. That story of the stoneworker was one of the first things I read that helped me understand tones.
Maybe it’s down to effort, but Thai is the tonal language that has me stumped despite how much time I spend there. I learned the alphabet and could even read some, but every time I try to learn the tones in Thai, or rather to employ the tones in practical conversation, I am baffled. on the occasion of rare success, they’ll reply and my brain will melt, plus their states are like those of china and every different city and town has their own dialects to contend with.
Yea, foshan was chill. Still tons of great bare-bones outdoor dining and tummy-rubbing inebriated stumblers in the alleys. I went crazy for zhachuan, the fried skewers, when i was there. and all the beer shops had some marketing game going on, so if you pulled your beer tab there was a chance you could win a free beer if the bottom had the right stamp, and i won a weird amount of the time!
No, weirdly. I worked in tech firms, but I did marketing. Switching to teaching English in China was a huge step down in my salary. Now I’m back in marketing, as of 2016, working for a local company as their “cultural expert”. (Officially on paper I’m a PA, but in reality I tend to lead all the stuff related to international things.)