Nuances of the China Life .....Round Two.....Hong Kong

Mum likes to eat fish head.

2010-05-07T05:09:00.000-07:00

My Chinese tutor and I are slowly working our way through a year 4 reading book during my weekly sessions. Most of the lessons in the book are magazine or newspaper articles that send some sort of didactic message. This week the story was called "Mum likes to eat fish head" and I thought it terribly apropos seeing as this Sunday is mother's day. In the story a little girl from a poor family noticed that every time the family ate fish, her mum would put the fish head into her own bowl and then serve the rest of the of fish (the fleshy bits) to her children. The little girl would cry out "mummy, you love the fish head"! The little girl thought the fish head must be the best part because her mum always took it for herself. She once asked her mother for the fish head, but the mother declined, giving her daughter the fleshy part. Once, when the girl's grandmother came to visit, she brought a fish for dinner. After cooking it, the grandmother placed the fish head in her own bowl and gave the fleshy bits to her daughter (the girl's mother) and to the girl. The little girl cried out "but mummy likes the fish head"! The grandmother smiled, but did not give the fish head to her daughter. The young girl grew up and had her own family. Once she had her own children she realised her mum had not actually liked the fish head. The mother took the fish head because it had the least amount of meat. She took the inferior part of the fish and gave the children the best part, to nourish them and help them grow strong. The girl now put the fish head in her bowl and gave her children the good part of the fish. She would sacrifice in the same way her mother, and her grandmother did for their children.

The story got me thinking about mothers in general. The little girl for her whole young life thought her mum was taking the best bit of the fish for herself, but really the little girl did not understand. The mother was sacrificing to help her children grow strong. Mothers do things like that all of the time; they do things to help family at their own expense. My mum gave up work to raise my sister and I. She made the ultimate sacrifice, putting the lives of two others ahead of her own for so many years. She neither blamed me for taking away her freedom nor accused me of forcing her to sacrifice. She took on the unpopular role of rule enforcer, making her often the one I resented when I could not go to a friend's house, or to a party, or get that new pair of shoes I "desperately" wanted. But really I should be thanking her later in life - NOW. Whenever she was in my eyes the one curtailing my fun, she was really sacrificing my adoration for her in order to make me a better, stronger, more moral person. In many ways it must be harder to say "no" in the aim of nurturing a better child but practically making the child angry, than always saying "yes" and be the mum that every child loves. For this weekend where we are thankful to our mums....I'd like to say thank you to mine, for "pretending to like fish heads" so that I'd grow up to be a better, stronger and more self-aware person.

2010-05-04T21:14:00.000-07:00

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

- Maya Angelou

Looking like you don't belong.

2010-05-03T07:12:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about about migration, both forced and voluntary. Part of that may stem from the fact that there is a Refugee law exam looming on my calendar, but mostly it is from the world that we all live in.

Recently the United States has taken another nosedive into another divisive topic......immigration. It seems as if the country goes from one polarising problem to another, politicians not gaining consensus but always blaming others for the problems of the world. Regardless, migration is an issue for every country in the world. Some suffer from emigration while other are worried about immigration. Push factors propel people out of regions (war, drought, persecution, famine, natural disaster), while pull factors lead people to seek refuge or asylum in particular areas of the world (family, common language, viable job prospects). It seems strange to me that while immigration has long been a popular topic when discussing the dynamic fabric of countries, migration has been rarely acknowledged. However migration is at the very root of immigration. America is a country almost completely filled with migrants and immigrants. It is only at present that people are analysing the reality of migration; what it means when protracted refugee situations become intractable, what it means to be an "economic migrant".

In the nation-state model of the world, people fit neatly into boxes. One person belongs on the left side of the border, another belongs on the right. But now our world is littered with families on either side of the borders, with traders straddling the borders, with borders gone, with borders razor-wired, with landmines "protecting borders". Reality is not neat. Reality does not fit into boxes.

The new Arizona law causing such a stir in America calls for a reasonable suspicion determination when deciding to stop a person to check his/her status in the country. I have been reminded over that last few days about what people seem to think suspicious means. I have never seen a white person asked for their ID in Hong Kong, but last week I saw a man in tattered clothes pushing a dolly of goods on the street get stopped. The police took his ID card and called in the number to check the authenticity. Did he look like he didn't belong? My flatmate was on her way to work the other day and she was stopped by the police and her ID details were checked. Did she, a HK permanent resident, look like she didn't belong? My flatmate's sister was boarding a plane in America last week to come to Hong Kong and officers at the airport stopped her from getting onto the plane to ask about her travel to Hong Kong, wanting all identification documents, wanted know why she was going, where she was staying, proof of return ticket, what was her occupation, how much money she had on her person.... Did she, as a dual HK and US resident, not look like she belonged? Regarding this last anecdote, it reminded me of something I read earlier this year. Many countries are stationing officers at foreign airports whose job it is to interdict persons who look like they are going to to seek asylum or stay unlawfully in the country they are going to. It's effectively illegal border patrol because it happens super-extraterritorially.

I understand the purpose of laws; I've spent the last four years gaining an intimate awareness of them. But to me I cannot understand what we are all afraid of. For all the talk on TV and in magazines about our "global world" there must be a real nascent fear about this very global world. How can I, you, a police officer randomly select a person to check their status in HK, in America, in another country....it's clear that there is a you don't belong look. The only problem with that look is that, as in the three instances that I mentioned, ALL do belong.

Migration makes people of the same nationality different colors, speakers of different languages, wearers of different styles of clothing, livers of different kinds of lives. That does not mean anyone belongs any less. And yet there is a pervasive fear of those perceived as not belonging, as infringing on your quality of life, as taking what is rightfully yours. If they are illegally present then I understand, but if you target them, look at them, fear them because they look like they don't belong...check your premise, because many of the people you think don't belong actually do.

When words are dry and videos painful......

2010-04-28T22:19:00.000-07:00

reality is unimaginable and worse.

We are lucky to live a life away from a conflict zone.

Fears and 饺子 (Jiaozi).

2010-04-09T02:19:00.000-07:00

This past week was another partial holiday week for Honkies. Unbeknownst to me, the whole city once again shut down for a combination of Easter holiday and the Qingming festival (清明节). The first holiday you Westerners obviously know the drill for (although I went to a Christian law school and we never got Good Friday off), and the Qingming festival, well that's a Chinese festival that may be sort of likened to All Souls' day. It's a day for visiting the graves of the departed and enjoying spring weather. For HK, this means five days of holiday. For me, I was supposed to be working on my dissertation. In the midst of hating on the crummy weather (sunshine where art though?) and doing other fun things, I did get some writing done, but perhaps the most enjoyable and biggest achievement was making jiaozi.

For those of you that know me, you'll attest to the fact that i don't like to engage in activities that I don't know ahead of time that I will be good at. This may entail practicing away from judging eyes or just altogether tossing the activity. I guess I have a fear of demonstrable weakness, which is stupid I know because every human cannot be a crack shot at everything he or she tries. However, for me, public failure is something I fear.

How does fear combine with jiaozi? Well, my chinese tutor invited me over to her house for the last day of the holiday. I had previously told her that I LOVED jiaozi (because in fact I LOVE jiaozi...funny that). She told me that in Hong Kong shops don't make them properly and she being a Beijing-er, she knows how to make them well. So she invited to come and make jiaozi with her. She said her daughter and the daughter's boyfriend would be there. I quickly agreed because 1) I did not have to time get into to my head and think about the implications of agreeing and 2) I LOVE jiaozi so how could I turn this down? However, once I had agreed and my tutor had left for the day I did some mental calculations....I would probably have to speak Chinese for 4 hours (which I haven't done since college probably) and I was going to bring my flatmate with me so if/when my language skills failed and I looked an amateur, she'd see it (she's quite the linguist). I'd be lying if I said this impending jiaozi-making scenario didn't plague the back of mind for about five days until I actually engaged in said planned activity.

Tuesday finally came, I bought some boxes of biscuits to bring as a gift and my flatmate and I were off for our adventure. And it was an adventure and let me say up front that I am SO GLAD that I went and that I didn't chicken out.

First, I got to go to a part of HK I'd never been to, a massive old housing development in the New Territories. It was great getting to see a different side of HK.

Second, My tutor's daughter and boyfriend were so kind. When words in chinese failed me they helped in English and even though they were probably just saying it to be nice, they said I had terrific command of Chinese for only having studied it for three years. They on the other hand had studied English for 20, but I demanded that our main medium be mandarin.

Third, making jiaozi was so fun....and fantastically tasty. My tutor made filling with pork and carrots. I'd never had that kind before and it was really really good. And the jiaozi I assembled actually looked like proper jiaozi...they stood tall and moon-shaped and didn't 睡觉, or fall asleep (aka lie down) on the tray. I'm pretty sure I ate a whole dish of them, and also ate these yummy giant pan-friend jiaozi-type creations that my tutor made herself that had spring onion and microscopic shrimps in them.

Forth, I ate raw garlic and I had never done that before. Apparently part of eating great jiaozi is first making great jiaozi, second is having great soy and vinegar sauce (my tutor lugged hers from Bejing in an empty red wine bottle) and third you must nibble on a clove of raw garlic while enjoying said jiaozi. I did just that...and my friends....it was good! I am now a garlic-lover of all preparations.

Fifth, my tutor is quite the accomplished opera singer and so she broke out into Chinese folk opera a number of times. You may think it a bit loud and cacophonous, but it really was a treat to have her share that with us. She even did a little traditional dancing for my flatmate upon request, ha ha. I think pre-Cultural revolution she was quite the looker.

Sixth, my 4-hours of speaking Chinese actually turned into a United-Nations style evening of multi-languages. My tutor's husband's great uncle came over after we made jiaozi for a glass of wine with us. He grew up in the French Concession in Shanghai and is a French citizen. He and my flatmate spoke French to each other, my tutor and I spoke Mandarin to each other, I spoke a combination of English and Mandarin to the daughter and boyfriend (only English because they asked me tricky questions about human rights and at that point I totally failed in chinese), my flatmate spoke Spanish to me when she wanted to ask questions that no one else would understand, my flatmate, the chinese-french uncle and the daughter spoke Cantonese with each other.....Basically there were about six languages whizzing about the living room and it was quite enjoyable.

I'm not sure if one evening of success will help totally overcome my fear of public failure, but I am grateful that fear did not keep me from going altogether. Life isn't about "getting it perfect" all of the time because that is impossible, instead life is about trying things out, experiencing things and I think, sometimes failing. I can't always be good at things, but I sure can continue to try to be better...in private or in public. Other people will not be the judge of my worth.

On that note, time for a leftover plate of jiaozi.

Perspective.

2010-04-01T00:31:00.000-07:00

For as much as I try to put myself in the shoes of survivors of conflict there are many things that I recognise that a person like me will never fully understand without having actually having lived through it. While we are all humans on this earth, we are humans with very different means and opportunities and outlooks. Justice comes in many shapes and sizes. The following is an except from a speech that Pierre Richard Prosper gave at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2002. He was a Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. His anecdote honestly made me cry; it reinforced the fact to me that legal terms and austere tribunals often poorly capture raw tragedy.

"Just to give you an example of the mindset of some of the victims and survivors, I recall I had a witness, Witness C, as in Charlie. He came from Taba, never left the essentially 2-mile radius. We took him out of Taba to Kigali, which is 45-minutes away. It was his first time ever going to Kigali.

Later that day, we took him at night and put him on our little 10-seat plane and flew him to Arusha, Tanzania. It was his first time ever being on a plane. I remember he said as we were taking off -- through his translator, he looked at me and said, boy, too bad it's night, you know. I was hoping it was daylight so I can see heaven".

Is an international court a place where this fellow will find justice? Legal proceedings are not where a survivor is going to find justice. Many other alternatives must be offered to heal a society in different ways. The legal path is too foreign for most.

The elusive succinct and neutral application.

2010-03-29T21:57:00.000-07:00

When I finally admitted to myself in college that I was not going to be a groundbreaking female biomedical engineer and that I would not end up in medical school (the fainting episode that I tried so hard to deny during my high school "shadow your future profession" week that took me to the pediatric ICU in Texas should have been my first glaring clue), I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. Not just any lawyer mind you, I had to be a lawyer that was going to do something to help people, and not just help them divide their assets or fight over children (though to be honest those jobs are equally as taxing and draining on the soul but maybe more financially rewarding). At that time, at that turning point in a 19 year-old's life as it may have been, I used the phrases human rights lawyer and advocate of humanitarian law interchangeably as a way to describe my future aspirations. It wasn't until a few years later that I learned there is a fundamentally important distinction between the two, a distinction that may in the future wedge the two further and further apart.

Both come not without controversy, perhaps mostly directed at human rights law most cynically described as a sort of flimsy and lofty set of rights and entitlements that are supposed to yield a better life. Human rights describe those things to which every person on this earth should equally be able to seek or achieve.... a fair trial, freedom of speech, freedom to exercise religion (not controversial in western countries), access to clean water, access to education, (more controversial in countries like the united states).

Humanitarian law governs the treatment of hors de combat or those not taking up arms in armed conflict. During the late 19th and 20th centuries there was a recognition of the barbarity of war and the damage that it wreaks on all portions of society, not just those in a combat zone. The Kellogg-Briand pact attempted to outlaw war in general, but as the Greek gods predicted, conflict is part of the human world as run by gods. What gods you ask? Well for the Greeks it was their 12 Olympian gods, but take your pick these days and the God of Christianity, Judaism or Islam would probably concur. Instead of banning war, there are now Hague laws and Geneva laws that govern the means and methods of warfare, and the treatment of persons involved (intentionally or unintentionally) in combat activities. These are not lofty "be the best that you can be laws". An Australian humanitarian lawyer Helen Durham said it in a way that has stuck with me: the laws of war are "pragmatic documents which relate to bare survival during the most horrific condition humans can manufacture - armed conflict". (Helen Durham wrote a fascinating article on the Athena/Ares modes of warfare for the Melbourne Journal of Int'l Law in 2007, to which I credit my thinking for this entry). It is these laws of war that allow killing with impunity.

The right to life is at the heart of human rights law and the thought that killing another can and legally will result in impunity juxtaposes the two regimes of law and begs the question, can they be reconciled? Arguably in some aspects yes, the laws of war set out restrictions and narrow circumstances in which taking the life of a combatant is legal. Laws of war permit killing under certain conditions only; indiscriminate killing with weapons yielding excessive harm are banned. The rules and the following of the rules is what makes human rights law marginally compatible with humanitarian law, while still recognising that there are aspects of both making them fundamentally at odds.

However, in our world today, states choose to selectively apply the universally ratified Geneva Conventions. Somehow there is a belief that a legitimate or a just conflict privileges the wagers to hold themselves to a less restrictive legal regime. Is that right? Is it right for global precedent to thumb ones nose at laws that make the most banal instances of human existence minimally protected? To me (albeit a person on the outside of conflict zones and outside the rooms where orders of attack are launched) it seems detrimental to any sort of international harmony or just shear human co-existence (harmony/peace is likely an unascertainable and inadequate aspiration for the global community), to draw different rules for different interventions. After all....who gets to decide what is just, whose measuring stick will be used in judgement?

Human rights law applies at all times, even during armed conflict. Certain aspects of the law are deemed derogable, while others such as the right to life and right to be free from torture are absolute. Humanitarian law applies in times of armed conflict, modernly this has been made to encompass both international and non-international conflict. When I changed career trajectories from doctor-who-would-save-people-who-were-ailing to lawyer-who-wanted-to-save-people-from-suffering-and-help-achieve-a-more-dignified-life, the spirit of altruism stayed. I didn't understand the difference between human rights and humanitarian issues, I didn't understand the level of suffering to which people daily endure (I still don't think I can fathom it), but I have a fuzzy understanding of fairness. Human rights law and humanitarian law as overlapping concepts and as a means of protection bring to light a crucial notion of fairness: how to find a fair balance between military necessity and principles of humanity.

We live in a world where states choose to selectively place themselves under the ambit of international law. International humanitarian law is neither applied succinctly nor neutrally in any conflict. But it's universal law, why not??? I've never been a real rule-breaker (the one time I missed curfew by 5 minutes I got grounded) so maybe it's easy for me to say follow the freaking rules! If a state signs up to a set of rules and laws....follow them! Don't personally decide what is just, don't make up rules of impunity for one group and actively prosecute others. If the world continues to selectively fashion itself in that way, then human rights law and the eventual incarnation of humanitarian law will be forever at odds instead of both protecting the human being, however small that protection may in fact be. If human rights law and humanitarian law were meant to be selectively incorporated, they would have been called "selections for states to choose from at their whim and convenience" and not "law".

For all those rule-benders out there....bending rules may be fine, but when you bend the rules and that bending infringes on my rights and legal protections as a person, you've bent too far. Your rights are not more important than mine, or more important than those of a woman in Bosnia, a man in Burundi, or a child in East Timor.

A community for surviving....barely.

2010-03-23T01:25:00.000-07:00

Often words fail me, but pictures can tell a much more effective story about the things I am learning, studying, confronting, mulling....

There are currently almost 2 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan. This is after the UNHCR and other int'l organisations worked on voluntarily repatriating over 3 million refugees that were in Pakistan back to their home state of Afghanistan. The irony of this was that the UN originally estimated that there were only ever 3 million total Afghan refugees in Pakistan beginning from when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in the late 1970s. Somehow nearly 2 million people went unaccounted for. Think for a moment, aide that has arrived over the years - based upon a belief there were 3 million - barely covered the 3 million that were thought to be there; what about aide for 2 million more people? Criticisms lately go that refugee camps in the region are harbouring terrorists, that people are "economic" migrants, that moving out of their home state b/c of drought is not a legitimate reason. While the official "Refugee Convention" definition does not include persons moving due to natural disaster or for reasons of making a livelihood, it is undeniable that suffering is ubiquitous in the region. As humans we may in theory all have "equal human rights" but the reality is that conditions in many areas of the world make it nearly impossible to realise a majority of human rights without help.

even with all of this aid from America, the UN and MANY other countries.......

.
.....this still happens.

Check out other photos from this series.

Visual injustice is a funny thing....it makes people FEEL bad, or sad but few are propelled to do anything. Why?

I suppose a more telling question would be if your neighbor was suffering like this would you help?

Or even MORE potent in this world: do you even know your neighbor? Are you so convinced of the infallibility of the individual that it's not worthwhile to make your neighborhood a community? These people in the photos would not be surviving, albeit by a thread, without a community.

Where is your community?

The reluctant leader.

2010-03-11T22:58:00.000-08:00

Someone told me last night that the best leaders are the reluctant leaders, those individuals that don’t walk with puffed chests, but instead move more slowly and deliberately and with a limp. It got me thinking, what our world needs is not the self-assured and overly-charismatic to take center stage, but for the self-assured to encourage those they believe can change and lead, to take a step forward. That step out of obscurity could be the first one to change. Martin Luther King Jr. was a reluctant leader; he was a father, a husband, a preacher in a small Southern town and did not see himself as the one to lead a charge for equality. And yet during the March on Washington he spoke to over 250,000 people crammed shoulder to shoulder and delivered what was the greatest speech by an American of the twentieth century. This reluctant leader showed that dreams are not impossible and to call a dream impossible is to utter an oxymoron:

Washington D.C., 28 August 1963:

“Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

MLK, the reluctant leader of the 1960s helped the United States break down racial barriers, and helped reduce to the law that which was supposed to be self-evident and was long overdue…that every man IS equal. America and the world in general still need the “leader with a limp” to fight for injustices against women, minorities, castes, gays and lesbians…anyone who continues to live a life where oppression is the status quo and equality is still the dream. All you flashy and swaggering leaders, find a reluctant leader and convince her or him to take a stand; we are always in need of change.

The beauty of Culture.

2010-02-25T20:53:00.000-08:00

I had the distinct privilege of attending a Burmese Culture Night with some of my colleagues this past week. One of my classmates is from Burma and he invited us to another uni in Hong Kong to experience an evening all about Burma. It was a wonderful presentation of photos, information, songs and food. It made me wish for the 1,003,200th time that my home country had more of a distinct culture. It reminded me of being a child in Indonesia. At the international school that I attended, United Nations Day was the biggest holiday (bigger than days such as Halloween or Valentine's day). Students came to school in their national costumes. The mums of the children would cook yummy food from their home country and at lunch there would be a "great hall of food" in the gymnasium and we would sample food from all over the world. I loved and hated that day. I loved it because I loved all the international food and I loved seeing my friends in their costumes and I loved going to the assemblies where national dances would be performed. But I hated being me on that day for while everyone else had terrific national costumes, I had a tshirt from Old Navy with a US flag on the front, and one year I wore a man's tie with the American flag printed on it. What a terrible national dress. There are so many wonderful things about my home country...the freedom and relative tolerance of religions and beliefs, the whole melting pot concept, the opportunity....but as a 10-year old at school...I wanted to be from a country with a long rich history and a national costume. I suppose that will never happen, but now, 16 year later...I'm ok with that. I can travel the world, live for long periods in other place, and learn about other countries and appreciate their culture and custom and hope someday, many years from now, my country will have a lengthy culture so that a little girl may wear her national costume proudly (and leave the flag tshirt at home on UN Day).

Below is a song that I heard at the aforementioned culture night. It sounded lovely in Burmese, but the English translation is also beautiful:

Let's make the world beautiful

(1) How majestic are the rivers, the valleys and the mountains
Teeming with sweet and colourful flowers
Making the whole world look beautiful

(2) Though we are entrusted with the task to maintain its beauty
Our misdeeds make the world ugly
Now where are love and kindness

(3) Many plants and flowers have withered in the scorching sun
But let's take the task of a gardener
And let's revitalise and beautify the world again

Chorus:
People are hungry, they thirst for love
People are mourning and perishing in the darkness
They are dying in wars of hatred
Now our world has become ugly
Let's revitalise and beautify the world again.

- I want to thank my colleague for sharing part of his culture with me for an evening.

from:http://www.everyculture.com/Bo-Co/Burma.html

It happens even where freedom and opportunity are coveted.

2010-02-23T01:06:00.000-08:00

As seems to be a consistent trend lately, I head to class in the evenings and something thought-provoking is said during the lecture and I am consumed by it for the next twenty-four hours or so. Last night I had the pleasure of attending the first of four lectures being given by a distinguished professor who advises multi-ethnic countries in drafting constitutions and bills of rights. Constitution-drafting is already a daunting task, meant to enshrine principles and protections that will be the cornerstone of law in a country, but the whole process becomes infinitely more complex when undertaking the task in a multi-ethnic country. Group rights and individual rights must both be considered. Anyway I digress from my blogging thought of the moment. A classmate of mine mentioned last night during this lecture that the “ethnic minority” that are the Native Americans in the USA seem to be doing pretty well in America, so the theory goes, that our Bill of Rights adequately protects them. This got me to thinking, for all the things I know about minority groups or poverty or suffering of people outside of America, I know very little about that which goes on inside America. I went home and spent a couple hours on the internet reading intently and watching various documentaries on the Native Americans.

I certainly do not pretend to be an expert in this field (in fact I know VERY LITTLE) but I was impacted by a number of things that I saw and read. First, when people think of Native Americans a couple of visions may pop up: teepees and headdresses, or casinos and gaming facilities on reservations. After doing some reading, I reconfirmed that neither are really ubiquitous when it comes to Native Americans any more. Surely culture is very important to them and rituals are remembered and passed down generation to generation, but they do not live in teepees anymore. Additionally, this vision of Indian reservations being prosperous b/c they allow gambling is also somewhat misguided because that is not a source of income for most reservations and it often leads to grave gambling problems amongst people living on reservations.

Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota struck me as somehow a failure on the part of the people and government of my country. It is one of the largest reservations in the country, larger than the state of Delaware, is home to about 50,000 people, most of which are Lakota Indians and is almost the poorest area of America. Life expectancy on this reservation doesn’t exceed about 50 years, teen suicide is 150% higher than the American national average, unemployment stands somewhere between 70-90% depending on the time of year, an estimated 80% of people there struggle with alcoholism (it was decided that the reservation would be a “dry” reservation once the alcohol situation reached such dire levels, but a tiny town next to the reservation with a population of just 22, has 4 liquor stores and ostensibly just exists to serve the people and their disease on the reservation) and average annual incomes may be as low on average as US$3000. To put this into perspective, a life expectancy that low is right up there with countries like Ghana or any other third-world country not suffering from an epidemic or in the middle of war. How could this be in America? Families of 17 or more live in tiny trailers, not insulated from the cold, holes in the floor and black mold in all of the walls. Many are homeless. Many live in cars. A particularly poignant image for me was from an Al-Jazeera news clip: it showed a man pushing a car that did not work and had a tv in the backseat, he was taking the tv to the pawnshop to pawn to get money to feed his family, it was too heavy to carry and the car didn’t work so he and his family had to push the car with the tv all the way to the pawnshop.

The professor reminded me last night that poverty is a constant sense of vulnerability. The Lakota are living in serious poverty and the tragedy is two-fold: on the one hand it is tragic because America is a wealthy and developed nation, and on the other hand it’s terrifically tragic because America used to be only their land. Over the course of 150 years, they have been marginalized to “reservations” amounting to about 2% of the land area of the United States. Initial reservations “reserved” for the Native Americans were reduced in size because the white people in America thought the land grants were “too generous”.

It was suggested to me that while this phenomenon that I have described is tragic, it is partly on the onus of Indians themselves to change their current situation. It was suggested that they could just leave the reservations and seek a better life in a different place where employment and suitable housing could be found. But to me, the answer is not just as simple as: pick up and leave. Reservations are what is left of ancestral land, maybe leaving is effectively abandoning part of who they are. I do not really know, but to me it just seems woefully inadequate to see this state of life for anyone, especially native americans. It seems that somehow dialogue has broken down and the governance of the country as a whole and the somewhat autonomous governance of the various Indian nations are not working together for solutions – for if it was working, surely there would not be this disparity of economics and quality of life. For me, my lasting thought is: how can you resolve a situation where values rooted in the ancestral land, modernity and a lack of reconciliation over a feeling that America is built upon stolen property, are all clashing against one another exacerbating the conditions of a large group of Americans? How can history be embraced, atrocities be acknowledged and a plan for a better future be crafted? Opportunity should not only be available outside a reservation.

For beautiful and haunting photos of Pine Ridge Reservation see Aaron Huey's NYTimes photo journal from last year: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/behind-22/

Fair weather weather lover.

2010-02-16T18:27:00.000-08:00

The lunar new year holiday is underway here in Hong Kong and for most children and parents it meant at least a 4-day holiday and at most a couple of weeks away from school. For me, there is no class this week and while I had grand plans to read for my dissertation all week....just me and my books and papers on war crimes trials....but the chilly and rainy weather has made me motivated to do little more than watch the Olympics on TV and stay in my warm bed because there is not indoor heating in HK and the temperature was 9 degrees C last night.

In a 24/7 city such as Hong Kong, it was amazing this weekend to see life come to a standstill....few cars on the roads, almost no people out walking about, and most shops closed. The South China Morning Post (leading English newspaper in Southeast Asia) even shut up shop for two days and did not publish a newspaper. The got me to thinking....I don't know of any other major newspaper that stops publishing for say New Years or Christmas, so lunar new year must be a fairly important holiday. Afterall....good and bad things do not stop happening merely because it is the lunar new year.

When I was living in California, I craved days where the sky was cloudy. Those days were few and far between. However ever since I came back to HK from winter holiday, the skies here have been so gray and the weather so grim. Now all I want is some sun! When my flatmate and I went to the flowermarket over the weekend for new year celebrations, we got completely soaked in the rain....no one wanted to stand next to us on the subway-ride home! I guess my cravings for first clouds and now sun make me a fair weather weather lover - always seeking something I cannot have. At this moment I want sun, and LOT of it.

An unjustified reason not to feel.

2010-02-12T00:44:00.000-08:00

In a lecture last night I learned about perpetrators of grave crimes: of the people that took part in the holocaust, of those in the Rwandan genocide, and other massive human rights violations. As much as we as outsiders looking in on the history want to paint the perpetrators as something other than us, extensive studies show that perpetrators are ordinary people. They are ordinary people that owing to a number of factors in a high-stress situation come to do extraordinarily evil things. But the common misconception that must be dispelled is that they are not extraordinary people.

I sat in class listening and believing both what I had read and what I was hearing about these ordinary men, but I thought in my mind that gosh, if “I” was ever confronted with a situation like that, committing atrocities would certainly horrify me and surely prevent me from inflicting pain onto others. While I do sincerely believe that my moral compass would not be lost, a colleague of mine reminded me last night of the somewhat frail nature of the human mind. She mentioned that she used to give beggars money when she would see them on the street. But after awhile there were so many and after awhile she just stopped, and stopped acknowledging them. Well, her simple admission struck a particularly powerful chord with me. I remember living in Shenzhen a few years ago and every time I would walk down the main street in the city, Shennan Lu, I would see so many beggars and seemingly homeless people. They tore at my heart because many were missing limbs or holding frail children in their arms and clothed in winter in tattered tshirts. I wanted to help. I would put change from my pocket into their bowl or their hat and try to look them in the eye. I felt that even if I could not lift them out of their desperate situation, at least I was trying to do something. This continued for a few months. Then a friend of mine living in the city told me a story. She asked if I had seen “all those deformed” beggars on Shennan Lu. I said yes I had seen people in need of help on the street. She told me that they were all being exploited by a particular gang or group in the city whereby the gang would go to the countryside and kidnap people with physical disabilities and bring them to Shenzhen, place them incrementally along the main road and then snatch all the money that people give them each day. I was appalled – how could this be? All the money I had given them, taken by greedy gangs? I still felt I needed to do something. If the money I gave them was just going to be stolen by a gang, then maybe if I gave them food, at least that would go into their malnourished stomachs. So for awhile anytime I bought baozi on the road for myself, I would buy a few extra and place them in a bag in the bowls of some of the beggars. But then something happened. I kept hearing the voice of my friend in my mind and how the beggars were all part of a scam. A scam…..in my mind I began to think that because my friend told me it was a scam, then it was ok not to give them anything anymore. Soon I gave neither money, nor food, and I made every effort not to look at the beggars as I walked past them, sometimes almost stumbling over them and still not looking them in the eye. I did not think twice about them and their awful situation in life. Sometimes they even seemed to me a nuisance when I was trying to traverse a crowded street and they were laying on the pavement where I needed to go.

What had happened to me? In my mind I was compassionate and caring and thoughtful and I cared about human rights. But over a period of mere weeks, I used an uncorroborated story told to me by a friend in order to justify not giving money or food to people in desperate need and even feel scorn for them! I, a self-professed compassionate person had conditioned myself not to feel for these people.

I could have tried to check to see if the story was true, I could have tried to talk to the people on the street. I did nothing. I stuck my hands in my pocket, my music into my ears and I drowned out the pain around me. I recognise now what I did and I am saddened by it. If I could so easily become insensitive to people in need based upon one story from one person, imagine what thoughtless and vengeful remarks told over and over again might do to other ordinary people.

Despite me realisation of my narrow-mindedness, I do not presently know how I should have acted. I should have kept trying to look them in the eye, for not doing so implies I think of them as something less than human, and surely they are not so. But giving them change might have helped them – maybe they were not part of this scam. But giving them money might have also aided this scam whereby people are plucked from their homes and hopelessly exploited to no profit of their own? Maybe giving food would have been best? What I do know is how I managed to justify doing absolutely nothing was wrong.

So in a lecture on how ordinary people can perpetrate terrible crimes, I was humbled in realizing that I, in the past, had managed to condition myself not to feel emotion for those in desperate need of help. I am ashamed that I chose not to feel.

It's been 15 years.

2009-12-16T05:14:00.000-08:00

About 15 years ago late night stopovers in Taipei were normal. The once a year trip home usually included a plane change in Taiwan and such stops usually coincided with fairly inconvenient times. Usually it was a 5am arrival from the US. Nothing was open, the airport was empty, and I am fairly certain my sister and I were not wonderful traveling companions so early in the morning for my parents (and usually just my mum). The trip from America back to Indonesia at the end of every summer usually started in Los Angeles. My sister and I, and likely many other expat families doing the same thing, slept on luggage, sat on carts and waited in sunny CA to check in our two bags each, 80 pounds a piece (oh how times have changed....hoarding Americans can no longer travel like snails with everything we own in tow). After checking in, and eating one last meal of American fat and grease (I seem to remember Pizza Hut personal pan pizzas having a special place in my heart) we were off to drape ourselves over chairs and sometimes sleep on the floor until our plane left for Taipei at the convenient hour of one or two am. Sometimes the plane took off an hour later than planned because the tailwinds were so favorable that we would have arrived in Taipei before the airport opened. I loved airplane rides back then. I was still small enough and Asia was still untrendy enough of a travel destination (again how times have changed) that rows of seats were often empty. I just spread myself across a couple of seats and I was good. Now I am taller, empty seats are a rarity, and as I'm a human rights lawyer without cash flow the airlines I fly on do NOT give passengers extra legroom. They charge you for that now. If you want economy class legroom in 2009, you now must pay extra for "super economy" tickets. The regular economy tickets should really be called "not for people over 5'10"" tickets.

15 years ago seems like a long time. There were times even farther back than that where a friend of mine and I built a fort in first class by hanging blankets from the overhead compartments and we pretended we were living on a desert island. Outraged as you may be that I partook in such an activity in first class, I offer two qualifications for making it less of a big deal. #1: It was a Garuda Indonesia flight on an ancient plane and there very well might not have been a single other person in first class besides my family and my friend, and #2: this was back in the day where there was still a "smoking section" on the plane portioned off by only a curtain (so smoke wafted underneath the curtain and into our section), so really my extra blanket hanging from above was shielding my small lungs from 15 hours of second-hand smoke. There was another time when I was older that another friend and I convinced a poor unassuming stewardess on Eva air that we were diabetic and therefore needed an extra piece of chocolate cake. Ha, we'd have needed a doctor after that cake if what we told her was true.

I still love flying. I love airports; there always seems to be positive and electric energy. Usually people are going to wonderful places or have come from somewhere that was a happiness-maker. And in the event that it's sad travel, in Asia that solved by buying your way through duty free --> retail therapy. Never have I seen so many luxury stores in airports or so many trollys filled with shopping bags than here in Asia (the two carry-on limit seems to be malleable if 9 of your extra carry-ons are Ferraga, Bvlgari, and Fendi bags).

15 years ago I'd lived in Indonesia for almost four years, I was an old pro at the around the world travel (or at least I thought so). Back then virtually no one I talked to in America knew what or where Indonesia was. For all they knew, Indonesia was in Africa. Times are different now; the world is becoming more aware of itself and technology has made it smaller. Global travel is common, if not required for business. I wonder what I would see if I came back for a late night stopover in Taipei in another 15 years...what memories would come back? What elements of the exciting plane travel I grew to love as a child would remain?

Where is home?

2009-10-18T05:55:00.000-07:00

"Where are you from?" and "where is your home?" have always been difficult questions for me. The first one seems easy enough as I am American by birth and passport, but at the age of 26 I have spent almost half of my life outside of the United States. The time spent in the USA was divided between four different states, but more perplexingly I felt the most connection to a state I never actually "lived" in (North Carolina). How does this work?

Then, to add insult to this serious geographic injury, proclaiming that I am American is recently not the best friend-maker here in Asia as most of the world dislikes us "free" Americans for our lack of rules and morality and our arrogance and our overt excess in the way we lead our lives. For me it is easier here to say yes I am American but originally I was from Denmark, Germany etc. which is technically true. However it's not as if my family came in a boat to Ellis island twenty years ago with nothing but a couple of suitcases in tow. The United States of America by construct is a nation of immigrants, but people seem to overlook that truth when I spout my Scandinavian heritage and immediately I rise a few places on their list of worthy people. They overlook the "American" part and focus on the fact that my heritage is Danish and that I "look more Danish than American" (whatever that is supposed to mean, can one "look" American? ... not in the Hawaiian tourist shirt, poor grammar, fanny pack and camera kind of way).

I've noticed that lately people also get their feathers a bit ruffled when the USA is referred to as "America" because in truth there are two continents with dozens of countries that comprise parts of an America. It is just another excuse for people to think Americans are arrogant ... acting as if the USA is the only part of the "America[s]" that is noteworthy.

Is "home" where you are currently living? For me that would be Hong Kong, but that doesn't seem quite right. Is "home" where your parents live? Most likely yes, home is where family is. But what if you don't necessarily identify with the area where your family lives? Is it still home? Often people have called me a "citizen of the world". It is a strange phrase to me. On the surface it appears to encapsulate my life quite well .... I've lived on three continents and multiple countries in 26 years. But if my citizenship is the world, does that mean I do not belong to any particular part? And if I do not "belong" then where is "home"? I don't know that I have any sort of answer to these question. At the end of this long rambling process I suppose I would have to just admit that "home" is the USA and leave the details for someone else to jump to conclusions over as to lay "home" in what state.

One final query that I really have no answer to .... can you be glad to be from somewhere but at the same time be very ashamed that you come from that place?

The measure of a quality city?

2009-10-09T17:33:00.001-07:00

On Thursdays here in Hong Kong I do not have class. I often spend these weekdays exploring different areas of of the Island, Kowloon and the New territories. Having this "free" weekday is a sort of luxury because the parks and attractions around the city are not as crowded as during the weekend. It is on these days that I put down the human rights reading, stop trying to come to my own conclusions about the world, and explore the world for what it is.

Over the last six years I have lived in six vastly different cities and I came to love each one of them for their uniqueness (St. Louis, USA; Shenzhen, China; Malibu/Santa Monica, USA; London, England; Den Haag, Nederlands; Hong Kong, SAR). On thing that ALL of the cities have in common is the concept of a park. Parks are places where communities and families thrive amidst the bustle of modern life, and parks are places where an individual like me can go to feel included in a community.

In St. Louis I spent countless hours a week running, walking, reading, exploring, and daydreaming in Forest Park. It is a park that I will always love what with its rich 1904 World's Fair heritage. Before I started university my grandmother took me to Forest Park and gave me the "grand tour" by car showing me the museums, the massive glass greenhouse ("Jewel Box"), the outdoor theatre, golf course, pavilions and the grand basin. It was a place she loved as a child and she spread that love to me.

Parks in China are places that I also happened to love. Since grass is at an extreme premium in populated cities such as Shenzhen, the grassy areas of the park are always cordoned-off and signs in Chinese and imperfect English tell you to keep your feet and bum off the grass. Instead of grassy knolls for patrons to sit on, chinese parks have ponds and bridges and many benches. Old men are seen liuniar (walking with caged birds), playing the erhu (two-string upright fiddle), practicing qigong, playing majong, or writing beautiful Chinese characters on the pavement with a giant water brush and comparing the quality of calligraphy with others engaging in the same activity. Perhaps my favorite thing about Shenzhen parks was the kite-flying. On Sundays when there are fair skies and a breeze, perhaps the only free day for families each week, many city parks are carpeted with patrons flying kites. I love watching families fly kites; they look happy and carefree.

In Malibu, I shall call Zuma beach my "park" - technically it is a part of the LA county parks systems. I used to love running or walking on cool winter mornings at low tide when only the locals could be found at the water's edge. The beach becomes almost private once the labor day crowd drives down the PCH one final time.

In London I fell in love with first Hyde Park, then St. James Park, and finally my heart was left in Regent's Park. Regent's park is up near Russell Square/Euston and is an amalgamation of football pitches, fancy educational institutions, ponds for rowing and paddle-boating, cafes for tea, an outdoor theatre for summer plays, a japanese garden, and my favorite spot ... Queen Mary's Garden. During the spring and summer months meticulous groundsmen ensure that flowers bubble over from every pot and planter and that the water in the fountains flow crystal clear. I distinctly remember spending a lazy summer afternoon with Adam reading books in Queen Mary's Garden, our noses constantly filled with the fragrance from her roses. I was at peace in Regent's Park.

When I arrived in Den Haag it was August, the height of summer. Before acquiring my bicycle to get me around everywhere, I walked nightly home through a string of three parks. There were no restrictions on using the grass and often fellow law clerks at the UN could be found in the park playing football until dark. I also love another park that skirted the beach near my house in Scheveningen. Serious cyclers used to pedal through there and I had to be careful not to get mowed down on my cheapy bike only meant to get me from point A to B.

In Hong Kong, one of the first "Thursday outings" I took was with a new friend to Kowloon. Without really intending it, we ended up wandering through two of Kowloons nicest parks: Kowloon Park and the Walled City Park. The Walled City Park is very new. It is located in Kowloon City and covers a stretch of land that used to be filled with highrise slum buildings that were notorious for triad (Hong Kong mobsters) activity. The government finally had enough of the crime in the area and pulled down all of the buildings and ironically built a park full of serenity. The park (see above photos) is fashioned to be like a Chinese park and it is a lovely sanctuary to stumble upon after having traversed the bustle of Hong Kong to get to it. We saw few people in the park; not much of a sense of community in it, but still it was beutiful and peaceful.

While I adore museums and greatly appreciate quality architecture and historic monuments, for me, parks in cities are the places I love to be. They are places where you can watch life go by, but at the same time feel very included in life. Parks are places where you can watch children grow up or grandparents grow old. I believe parks reinforce community and I am grateful for every community in which I have belonged.

Universal human rights or regional human rights ... acceptable contradictions?

2009-10-07T17:48:00.001-07:00

Are human rights universal???

I came to Hong Kong this fall to learn more about human rights. To me, talking about human rights has always been an exercise in passion, me believing that since no person was chosen to be born, that therefore each person has some sort of inherent protective rights. While many of my fellow colleagues came here with strong notions of their beliefs of human rights, I am still finding my way. In a field riddled with contradictions and being a subject that pulls on the heartstrings of most, I am trying to make sense of this subject of human rights.

There are many arguments that human rights are purely western constructs, that human rights are used by the north to control and admonish the south, that countries like the United States are “above human rights”. It is true that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is the foundation of much of international customary law and the impetus for subsequent UN Conventions was created in the wake of World War II and largely out of a fear of what Western nations might do to each other again in the future, but does that make it only applicable to the west? China’s P.C. Chang was very instrumental in the document’s drafting. But say for a moment that the Western notion of the UDHR holds water, then must we believe that human rights are really a regional set of beliefs, that each region of the world should have different rights? If that is true, then there is no universality of human rights at all. But then, is regionalism good enough? After all, technically Asia consists of the majority of Russia, the Middle East and China, India and Southeast Asian nations. Can a “regional” set of human rights really encapsulate all major world religions found in Asia as well as Russia ….? And if that answer is yes, then arguably that’s a point for the universality of rights and not for regionalism.

While I learn more and more on a daily basis, I am still yet unsure how to ultimately weigh all of this knowledge. I think my curse is that I can see both sides of the human rights issues. I see the contradictions, I recognize the weakness of some ECHR cases whereby the rationale is deemed to be based upon self-evident truths rather than historical legal maxims, I can detect frustration with the south being bullied by the north through means of human rights, and yet at the end of each day I come back to the notion, perhaps a naïve one, that every person matters. No person chose to come into this world and in that sense we are all equal, not matter what we produce or do not produce, no matter if we live under a tyrannical dictator or in a free society (which some would also consider a tyrannical prospect). In that sense, if we are all equal, should we not be equally protected? But then does equal protection require regional sensitivities? You see, I come full circle and cannot decide if regionalism flies in the face of a belief of the universality of human rights.

Hopefully my beliefs will crystallise in the not too distant future, or I will decide that the contradictions are not fatal.

Durios.....

2009-10-04T00:45:00.000-07:00

I have been most remiss in blogging lately. I've been in more of an "experience" mode than a "reflection" mode.

One thing that caught my eye a couple of weeks ago in HK was a yellow package of cookies. Now if any of you know me well, you'll know I am a cookie fiend and even got grounded in middle school for sneaking cookies from the kitchen and stashing them under my bed to eat while reading books late at night from the comfort of my sheets. However, as undiscerning as I tend to be about cookies, I cannot decide if this yellow package of cookies is worth trying. You see, they are Durios. Much like Oreos, Durios are sandwich cookies with a creamy filling. Only instead of that uniquely-flavored white Oreo filling, Durio cookies flank durian flavored creme.

I pride myself on being an adventurous eater and once even ate a fried scorpian on a stick in Beijing. But durian sandwich cookies, masking themselves as Oreo wannabes may just go too far for even me. But you say...it's only a cookie? Well you see my memories of durian started in grade school in Indonesia. First came the tshirts sported by 10-year old classmates from Singapore with the slogan "Singapore is a F$NE city" and one of the fines included bringing a durian into subway cars for fear some tiny lady would drop the scorned fruit and the odor would noxiously waft throughout the car. Then, as a child in 4th grade my classmates and I studied "things from Indonesia" (handy b/c we were all living in Indonesia) and my mom offered to help with "fruit day". She and I went out to the markets and collected starfruit, dragon fruit, rambutans, jeruk bali (think giant grapefruit), mangos, jackfruit, and......DURIAN. When my mom cracked that fruit open in our classroom, we all ran for the door. I would have rather stuck my nose in my gym shoe than have to continue working in that room with the durian smell.

So the question of the moment is: am I finally over my durian phobia? I have many friends that adore the stinky fruit, shamelessy eating it in the form of popcicles, freezed dried slices, hard candy, and right from the spiky rind. If so many others can get over the smell, why can't I.

Will the cookies smell like durian?

Stay tuned for the post-taste-testing sentiments.

Like an old friend some things never change.

2009-09-02T12:06:00.000-07:00

3 years and 3 months. It has been three years and 3 months since I last posted anything to this blog. A return year to China has prompted me to dust off the old passwords, look for the defibrillator paddles and see if electricity can prod anything of substance out of documenting a year in Hong Kong. Three years wiser, a little tanner and a post-graduate degree to boot, I return to China for a final year of education ..... yet another post-graduate degree, or will life's experiences in Asia educate me more than any professor will ever do?

Goals for the year:

(1) Return in July with a job that I feel strongly about

(2) Brush up on my Chinese language skills (translation: relearn)

(3) Be open to any and all experiences that may cross my path and seek out those experiences that will enrich my life.

(4) Be brave.

There is a certain amount of trepidation swirling around in my brain, but I hope that will be quickly replaced with confidence and a renewed sense of adventure when I set foot back on the Asian continent.

For the next 12 months I will be more or less studying human rights law from all possible angles: national interpretations, international understanding of the phrase, impact on refugees, historical context ..... the list goes on. What will I do with all of this knowledge? I'm open to ideas if you want to leave any. All I can hope for is that all I've learned in my short life can be used for the betterment of the world and that the world might be a little bit of a better place when I leave it as compared to when I entered it.

As I sit here in the Vancouver airport awaiting my lengthy cross of the Pacific, I find myself already feeling as if I am in China. I am certainly already the minority and English is not the language of choice. I almost feel at home; ironic is that feeling where "at home" is somewhere between fitting in and being totally out of place, that awkward position where the heart feels at peace but others question how you could be happy somewhere so "foreign". Haha, I guess that just reinforces how much I like China and Chinese people. I think I'm headed to the right place.

I had to get a new passport for this journey b/c my old one expires next July and the HK immigration department did not want to issue me a 12 month visa on a passport that was not going to be valid for 12 months. The pristine new passport got a stamp from Canada today and it is no longer empty. While it does not have the 25 pages of Chinese immigration stamps pressed every-which direction one on top of the other from previous trips to the continent, I'm confident that many exciting journeys will be documented within the pages of the new passport.

Welcome back blog......let the new adventures unfold forthwith.

doctor, teacher, policeman and......Mrs. Claus?

2006-06-06T21:00:00.000-07:00

Colleen from Junior 1 Class 8 made my day today. During her oral exam with me she answered the question "What jobs do you think are most important in the world today?" with "Scientist, Doctor and Mrs. Claus." Now you might find this quite unmiraculous....but when I've heard 300 students say "doctor, teacher and policeman"....mrs. Claus becomes quite wonderful. Colleen liked Mrs. Claus because her primary school teacher asked her to dress up as Mr. Claus' wife when she was 8 years old and she liked wearing the white hair and thought it was important the Mrs. Claus be a good cook to keep Mr. Claus looking fat so his suit of red would fit. Hahha.

Ewww Bugs and Yummmm Zongzi

2006-05-30T22:40:00.000-07:00

It's raining....again.

I have bed bugs, or dust mites or some other random invisible bug that bites in a series of three in my room and my school thinks that a can of Raid will solve the problem. I yelled and they're working on an alternative solution; until then I am staying with Andy and Barbara at their apartment across from school. My mom was nice enough to remind me that any and all of the above insects can carry Hepatitis B....awesome.

My contact teacher told me air out my bedding in the sun....convenient as it hasn't been sunny here in 13 days. I also read somewhere that you need to wash linens in 100+ degree water to kill the insects and then dry them in a dryer. That kind of thing just doens't fly here.....washing machine works on cold water only and my dryer....it's a metal pole on the balcony...quite novel, hanging up washing.

Exams are going good with the kiddos.....some of them really surprised me and prepared well. Perhaps my threat of an F scared them. I told each class that if they walk out to their exam and say "Uhhhhhh Ms. Nelson, I uhhhh don't know uhhhh what to say," then I will respond with "Uhhhh Snoopy (Light, High, Cornelia, Fish, K, No Name #1, No Name #7, etc) I'll uhhhh just uhh give you an F." They all laughed and seemed to remember to prepare something.

I'm going to miss my Chinese tutor....I'm just going to have to hang out in LA's chinatown this fall. However I was shocked and saddened to find out during my visit to CA last spring that the chefs in the kitchen in Chinatown that make jiaozi are Mexicans.....resourcing, outsourcing, alternasourcing everywhere!

The Dragonboat festival is today, but the big races are in Shatin in HK on Saturday; I'm thinking of going. I've been eating lots of zongzi here lately in deference to the holiday. It's a treat of glutenous rice and sometimes meat and sometimes sweet, wrapped in a triangular shape inside of a bamboo leaf and then steamed....yum.

I got the photobook/brochures of the mattress company I lent my face to earlier in the spring. They aren't too bad....tooo much makeup, frumpy clothes and the proclivity for choosing the worst photos to stick on the cover were all part of the finished product...but hey....who is ever going to really see it?

Does that mean I've been in China too long?

2006-05-27T03:14:00.000-07:00

The calendar on my wall indicates that I've got under three weeks left in China which in reality translates into increasingly busy days trying to get in "one last time" of just about everything around here. In addition, since I have left souvenir shopping to the very end, I find myself busy scouring shops and markets for unique presents to bring family and friends back from this great nation. This also means that my luggage accumulation is becoming somewhat substanial....ooops.

It would seem that my kiddos are getting sad that I am leaving, for the most part. I've had some criers, some asking for my phone number so they can call me in the states and some that are even cuter. We studied time capsules this week in class and I showed them ten or so things I would put in "Ms. Nelson's" time capsule (truly important things like a passport, peanut butter and M&Ms) and then asked them to make a list of the contents of their own time capsule. One kid said, "and last I would put Ms Nelson in my time capsule and bury it in the school garden so she will not leave us." They're super great....sometimes. Then I finished the week with a class who is usually my favourite, but this week 13 out of the 30 students were missing....they ditched my class to stay with Mr. Bowdoin's half of the class to watch movies. I was really angry, plus I was explaining the exam format for next week, so they missed out. We'll see how they do next week. The annoying part is that they have the best English of any Junior class and so even without studying I am sure they will still get close to full marks.

I am currently questioning whether or not I have been in China too long, b/c my gross-out factor is reaching an all new threshold. I met a bunch of friends for Indian food last night after I spent the afternoon bargaining for pearls and pashminas (I got exact copies of necklaces that anthrolpologie is selling for $298, for the insane price of $8....now who in the US is pocketing all that profit). So we did dinner....yum yum arabic salad, palak paneer and chicken tikka and as we're finishing a cockroach scurries across the table. One of my friends screams, but the other 7 at the table make a motion to kill or corner it without the extra blink of an eye. I smush him with a napkin and we continue the evening. However, he revives himself and starts his table scamper again, Meagan then traps him under an ash tray and we finish dinner and leave. Later this same evening I'm on a 2 hour bus ride (50 cents) with 4 other pengyoumen and cockroaches are coming out of the window jam in force and I'm just sitting there watching them and squashing them as they approach striking distance. Now, someone back me up on this....that's gross right? To not be bothered by a roach army? These last two weeks have been the beginning of the real feel of rainy season......it has rained every day for the last 9 days. And by "rained" I do not mean a once a day and then clearing in the afternoon type of situation. I mean where it rains and pours all day and all night long. The slick pavement has caused all sorts of unfortunate situations as well. I have wiped out in front of the school guard house twice in 5 days as well as my finest moment which resulted in me having to go to class pulling twigs and bark out of my hair. To clarify on the last point, it was raining quite hard last wednesday so I thought i would be smart that day and wear sneakers with my dress to class (however unattractive that visual may be, the thought of falling again was even more grim to me). As I'm walking across the tile and granite quad (totally logical building materials, yes?) I felt my foot begin to slide and then I was sort of doing a Saturday Night Fever type boogie in attempt to regain my footing, but before I knew it, my umbrella flew out of my hand and I slipped and slid into the school flower bed (hence the twigs and bark). The upside of the situation, the students were really nice to me.

I've got one class now that wont speak English to me....I guess it's good that it took them a year to figure out I understand them, but it really hampers the teaching of English now.

I started text-messaging my Chinese teaching colleagues in Chinese recently instead of using English and boy....I've made like 100 new friends. Now all of the teachers who don't know English want to send me messages and be my friend. Perfect, three weeks left and now everyone is pleasant as pie :-)

I'm going to miss it here. As odd as it seems and as fatigued as I am sometimes with China, I fit in here. I love it here; I have to come back. But.....I am jumping out of my pants with anticipation for law school; reason enough to spend three/four years in Southern California.

"No school madam....the Typhoon...it kuai daole (comes soon)"

2006-05-17T02:10:00.000-07:00

As a little girl in Jakarta I remember leaving school early and not returning for a number of days because of bomb threats. One time a real bomb was even delivered to the US Ambassador’s house and school was dismissed for almost a week. As a third grader, these impromptu holidays were amazing as I really had no grasp of the concept of being sent home because someone had called claiming to have planted a bomb at an international school with 2000 kids on campus. Even the bomb-sniffing dogs that darted amongst students as they piled on buses headed for home at 9:30 in the morning didn’t phase me.
Well today I can add a new kind of “day-off” to the repertoire that formerly consisted of snow days (in Dallas this was really more of a “threat of snow and perhaps a bit of ice” day) and bomb-scare days…….today is “typhoon day.” Apparently Tai Feng (Typhoon in chinese) Pearl is swirling her way between HK and Taiwan at this very moment aiming to smack into Guangdong province (where I live) this evening. I had heard some hoopla from teachers and in the newspapers here, but didn’t really take it seriously especially not to the extent of school cancellation because lets face it, Chinese kids go to school 7 days a week now, when are they going to make up this day (possibly 2 days) of school? I got up this morning and as I brushed my teeth and got ready for my 8am class I heard the headmaster over the loudspeaker and despite my diligent efforts at Chinese I continue to have a fiercely difficult time understanding anyone speaking Chinese over a loudspeaker….it gets really garbled. What I did catch were snippets of going home, safety, typhoon this evening etc. didn’t catch the “class is over now” part apparently. I head to class and my kiddos are sitting in the dark with the head teacher in the front of the class. A few words exchanged in Chinese (much to her surprise….apparently word does NOT travel around school that I speak Chinese….but that’s good though, only a few classes know that and the rest diligently speak English to me all the time instead of a steady stream of Chinglish just b/c they are lazy and know I understand) and I learned that class was cancelled. It’s all very strange to me. The storm isn’t supposed to come until after 8 tonight, I walked around my neighborhood this morning and it was truly business as usual at every store. I suppose time will tell as to whether or not it was worth sending the kids home or not. All I can say is that the administration will make me really mad if they try to get me to make up the missed classes on Saturday and Sunday this weekend, b/c my 3 close friends and I have planned a birthday (mine)/engagement bachelorette (not mine) outing to Macau for those two days. We want to see the gardens, architecture and eat Portuguese cuisine…..not visit the caninedrome (dog races), formula one racetrack, or the casinos.
In other news, I met a really interesting fellow last week. I went with my friend Andy to teach an English Corner lecture at the University here in the city and I happened to meet the university’s president (a good friend of Andys). But…he is not just a university president, he is also the equivalent of a Senator for Guangdong Province and……he’s a world champion Scrabble player. Yes that is right….world champion, apparently there are competitions on a scale greater that your kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon. He has this idea that he can further English education at the university level by teaching students to play Scrabble. If not for the typhoon, Andy, his wife and I were going to head out to the university tonight and Scrabble it up with the English students.
I had the most wonderful holiday in Beijing at the beginning of this month. At the start of the holiday I was ready to admit that I was ready to go back to America. But after a week in Beijing with my good friend Tammy, I have now changed my jig…..I don’t want to leave here. There is so much China has to offer and while I don’t think I will return to live in Shenzhen, I certainly want to come back and live somewhere in China (hopefully Beijing, Shanghai or HK, but Kunming where all the NGOs work out of is also wonderful). After talking with the University Pres, Ben, for awhile I felt that there really is a place for me here. He asked me what kind of law I was going back to the states to pursue and to be completely honest, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to tell him about aspirations for practicing human rights law in China, but I was feeling sure of myself that day and so I told him. He laughed and then said that would be a good job for me. He said that there are many people who know a lot about China, and conversely many people that know a lot about America, but very few that understand both and can speak both languages. But he seemed to think that I did and thought that people who understand both sides can do a lot more good.
Writing about leaving China reminded me of a funny episode in Beijing. Tammy and her friend Kevin and I were hanging out downtown and we decided we wanted Korean food for dinner (Kevin and Tammy are originally from Korea). Well Tammy decides that we need to check out this North Korean Restaurant in Wanjing (just northeast of downtown Beijing). The place is one of two restaurants owned by the North Korean government outside of their country and whenever gov’t officials from NKorea head over to Beijing, they eat there…even Mr Kim Jung Il. The fuwuyuan are brought in from North Korea as well. The food was wonderful and not expensive…the ambience was completely over the top and the evening ended with a 4-woman North Korean “rock band” belting out Korean tunes while wearing sparkly green tops. In the middle of the meal Tammy and I felt compelled to make a little small talk with the fuwuyuan and turns out they don’t stay in China too long, the gov’t keeps sending over new servers every few months, and…..I was the only waiguoren (foreigner from western country) that had been in there in months. That led me to think for a moment that perhaps CIA peoples were camped out in the apt. complex across the street, seeing what kind of rifraf came and went in the restaurant and that would make them suspect me as a spy or something, haha. Hmmm, we’ll see if the US wants me back in a month when I attempt to return via LA. Also, in the middle of dinner Kevin’s mum called on his cell, from NJ to see how he was doing. When he told her he was in a NKorean restaurant, boy she gave him quite an earful. She told him not to go the bathroom alone otherwise someone might bang him over the head with a pot and take him as a prisoner back to NKorea. We really had our wild imaginations going that evening.
I am in the middle of reading an excellent book at the moment called “My Country and My People” by Lin Yu Tang (Last name is Lin, in Chinese the last name goes first). I was written in the 1930s but does much to explain why China and the Chinese are the way they are. It got a lot of criticism in China when it was first published b/c it did point out elements of Chinese culture that were perhaps slightly unfavorable but he defended his work by saying that he could criticize b/c he still had immense faith in his culture. I strongly recommend it.
For some reason I’ve only recently put my college classes on China to use in debunking why things in this country are done is such a gosh-darn illogical manner. Then I remembered that the President (Hu Jintao until 2012) is the head of the Communist Party as well as the government, which would be kind of like having the head of the church in the US be president for ten years. While people argue that this really isn’t an issue b/c gov’t postings are open to people not in the Party, the reality is that the Party is indelibly intertwined with every element of the gov’t. What is even more unique is that for every post in the gov’t there an equal ‘shadow post’ in the Party….a behind the scenes fella. Then what becomes even more astonishing is that a Party member with a lower ranking than a gov’t official of a particular province, prefecture etc. will always outrank the gov’t officer despite the officer having a technically ‘higher’ post. Thus education and rising in gov’t ranks is not terribly important; it remains that Party affiliation is the most prevalent marking of power.

Subway and Sandstorms

2006-04-30T16:33:00.000-07:00

It's May 1st and that means that it is the start of the 7-day Labour day holiday here in China. My friendly, neighborhood Party friend (and by this I mean person working for the Communist Party and my school simultaneously, whose job it is to spy on my and report back to the government...making sure that I am not touting some negative information to students or something) sat down and had a meeting with me to tell me that the Party wants me to be safe over the holiday and to watch out for thieves. Her speech fell on deaf ears though b/c that's my daily life here.....making sure to be smarter than thieves...... otherwise I'll be down another Ipod and that would just be monumentally unfortunate.

I was having dinner in Shekou (where all the foreigners in the city seem to live, esp. those with children b/c the two International Schools are there) with some friends last week and was witness to the very reason that Americans have a terrible reputation as foreigners. We were finishing up at Subway when a boy of about 15 strolls in with a friend. He's on his cell phone practically yelling into the speaker that he is about to get a "free soda" and that he is "so thirsty he could drink all the soda in the store." He tears the phone away from his ear to tell the person behind the counter that he'd like a da (word for big in chinese) coke "give me a da coke now." The kid got the cup, filled it up, drank it down in one gulp while spilling soda out both sides of the cup and onto the floor and then repeated the disgusting act b/c according to him "We're in America if we're eating in Subway and that means FREE REFILLS." Then he yelled to his friend across the store that they should get going. But.....not before the final atrocious act. The kid sees that in Subway there is a sign that says "Baked Fresh Daily" and by this they are referring to the sandwich bread. He then goes on about how he loves the smell and taste of fresh bread. So instead of ordering a sandwish to taste said wonderful fresh bread like the rest of us patrons did in the restaurant....he reaches behind the counter to where the display breads are housed (a glass case of the 5 bread options that patrons can see and choose from ie not meant for eating) and picks up a loaf, takes a big bite out of it and leaves! In what universe are things like this ok to do? Jenny and Tim and I were thoroughly appalled!

The deluges that characterize southern China spring have finally arrived in full force, meaning that it rained for 48 hours straight this week. I happened to be downtown buying a carry on rolling suitcase (looks like a real Swiss-army suitcase, but I paid $16 for it....let's hope to gets me to and from Beijing and back to the US) and the case and the rain created an interesting trip home. It was rush-hour and I decided to wait for a bus that usually isn't as crowded as the main bus into my part of town. I stand under my umbrella trying to protect the suitcase and keep an eye out for the 311 on the road. Well I wait 50 minutes and no bus....not one 311. This is monumentally strange b/c during rush hour they come every 2-5 minutes. By this point i'm soaked b/c the sidewalks are flooded and then people entering and exiting buses are squeezing by with umbrellas and the run-off is getting my clothes all wet. I trudge down to the next stop and cram on an overcrowded 113 bus and head home. But oh the evening isn't over. Some little kid is eating a hamburger near me and crazy bus driver makes 1 of 90 sudden stops and the kid's burger flies from his hand and lands ketchup side up on....my skirt. Awesome. What a long evening.

My classes at school have been cut in half because the Junior 3's are now studying full time for their high school entrance exam, so I have a lot of free time during the day, but my evenings are still busy. I take chinese lessons two nights a week, tutor a corporate exec two nights a week and starting when I get back I am going to teach an English corner at Shenzhen University.

I'm heading up to Beijing tomorrow to see Tammy for a week and am very excited to be going back to my beloved Beijing. Though....I'm not so excited about the massive sandstorms the city has been suffereing from. 300,000 tonnes of sand from far western Xinjiang Autonomous Region 'fell' on the city on Monday two weeks ago! My friend said it looks like yellow swirling fertilizer in the air and forces daily dry-cleaning of work clothes if you're out walking in it for even a minute or two. You can blame deforestation for this problem; there aren't forests to prevent the sand from sweeping across the north of the country. Apparently the sand was seen as far east as Tokyo.

Keep your black cowboy boots and stripey underpants under wraps lady!

2006-04-16T19:23:00.000-07:00

Time for catching up on a lack of loquaciousness in recent months. Last night, after classes were over and errands had been run, I found myself with an empty Friday evening. What better way to presumably fill such a chunk of time than with a movie or two for my local dvd family. I hadn’t been there in quite a time and so there were so many new films to choose from. I ended up with 5….A movie with Antonio Banderas where he plays a ballroom dancing teacher who teaches detention students in NY how to dance, Goal, The Pink Panther, Match Point…a Woody Allen film with Scarlett Johanassen, and Spanglish. I watched two last night…..the one with Antonio Banderas and Spanglish and I really liked both and I think part of the draw is that are movies that mum and I would love and Dad and Adam and any other male specimen would absolutely abhor.

After a Nyquil knock-out sleep I arose and went out for a run. 5 minutes into the run as I was going up a hill I hear “Kristen Kristen Kristen!” Now this is seriously peculiar seeing as no one who knows me as anything other than “Ms. Nelson” lives in my neighborhood. It was my friend Xiaosha and some of her teaching colleagues. They were going for their now weekly trek through the hills and mini-mountains of Shenzhen. Xiaosha thinks it will make her slim (she’s 45 and looks perfect to me, just FYI). Well she begs me to join them since our mutual friend Qingling couldn’t go this morning and she wanted a friend to talk to. I agree, thinking we will following the major road up the hill, go down by the reservoir and be done. Oh how I was wrong. We make a sharp right at off the beaten trail and don’t turn back from there. We climbed up steep orifices, walked under some serious sets of high tension wires skirting the side of the mountain, and went down near-90 degree drops by only holding on to trees. We ended up inside Fairy Lake Park after jumping down off a 15-foot ledge. Xiaosha and I spent some time tramping up and down the manicured hills of the park before we headed home. The park was beautiful; I had never been there before. It’s one of the main tourist attractions of the city and costs 20 kuai to get in. I have just been frequenting all of the free parks lately. However, because of our sneaky death-defying manner of trekking earlier….we ended up inside the parks gates without having to pay….we cheated ( and all I had to do was risk my life). It was a nice surprise for a Saturday morning.

I went down to the tailor today to pick up a shirt and a dress that had to be altered after the initial fitting. I am hoping to wear the dress to Easter church tomorrow, if the temp. Doesn’t continue to fall towards freezing (this is after 7 consecutive days of 80+ degree weather with 90%+ humidity). When I got to Molly’s shop there was a lady inside being loud and obnoxious and throwing clothes everywhere. She was there to pick up clothes as well, except she refused to put on the garments behind the cloth in the corner that is the makeshift dressing room. Instead she was taking skirts and pants on and off in front of a large glass window that 100s of people walk by every 5 minutes, not to mention the other tailors sitting outside their shops waiting for business that were very much distracted by an overly-fake-tanned foreigner in black cowboy boots and stripy underpants who could seriously benefit from a daily regiment of crunches. I took a breath and walked into this madness and told Molly’s son Tarly I was here to pick up two things and Miss Cowboy-boots proceeds to spit out to me that “I’m going to be awhile dear….sit down and wait awhile.” I coughed…ok. I sat outside for maybe 5 minutes and listened to the other tailors a) talk about me and b) talk about the crazy lady in the underpants in Molly’s shop and then Tarly came out and had my clothes to try on. Luckily they fit perfectly this time and there wasn’t a need for a refitting that would have cut into Miss Fake-and-bake’s private fitting time.

Alex Trebec...you are my hero

2006-04-15T23:31:00.000-07:00

A Grab-bag week of events. Sometimes there are just those weeks in China that fly by with no real coherent thread of logic, but instead are driven by days filled with random moments and memories strung together. The utter randomness of life in Asia was a distinct characteristic of this particular week.

In order to properly contextualize the week of April 9-15,you must understand that in three weeks, during the first week in May, all students and workers (technically speaking) have a 7-day holiday….called Golden Week (7 days only…not 5 work days and two weekends; they make you work thru one of those weekends leaving 7, yes 7 days of holiday and not 9). This means that over that last month people that I know have been batting different destinations back and forth from India to Singapore and when it was all said and done, Bali seemed to be the preferred destination by the majority. Awesome, that’s the one place in the world that my mum and dad are vehemently opposed to me revisiting for the 6th or 7th time in my life because of the unstable political nature in Indonesia. Well, it seemed that all of my friends had decided to cash in a some great round-trip ticket/hotel in Bali deal and those who didn’t were planning on visiting the terracotta soldiers in Xi’an, something I had already done and didn’t really have a desire to return to see once again. Thus, I talked to people around here, both foreign and Chinese and asked them if they had to choose a place to go by themselves for 5 or 6 days, where would they go. The overwhelming answer was hands-down……Bangkok. Now I’ve been to Bangkok before, but I was in 5th grade and my overwhelming memory aside from the royal palace and a sampan ride was the butler who would bring Carly and I movies at night while we stayed in Bangkok’s Dusit Thani…..my first viewings of Showboat and Singing in the Rain were viewed during that week. Ostensibly I thought, hey maybe it’s time to return. Apparently it’s really easy to get around as a foreigner and things are really cheap….and (here’s a major draw)…..they’ve got banana pancakes served as 10 cent street food….who could pass up an opportunity like this? Additionally…..the Thai demeanor is terribly friendly and many many people speak English. Ok, so this is Tuesday that I’ve decided that I will mosey around Bangkok and N. Thailand for a week and I decide to not run this idea around mum and dad asking for permission to travel, but merely send them an email outlining my plans. Wellll……no more than 5 hours after this email was sent, I got a wake up phone call from mum telling me NOT to go. She claims I’ll be ‘stolen’ and sold into slavery! Then she tells me she’s conferred with other members of our extensive international friend contingency that we’ve developed over the years and everyone agrees that a female such as myself cannot go alone to Thailand. Then, no more than two hours after this wake up call, I go down to my classroom and check my email. Dad has been alerted by mum of my travel plans and from the oil fields in Shreveport decides to use his Treo to send me a message saying ‘ok Kristi, you’ve called our bluff….Bangkok is the WORST place in the world to go by yourself….we’ll let you go to Bali with friends.’ Ha….what a stir this has caused. By this time my opportunity to go to Bali cheaply has come and gone, so Wednesday rolls around and I’m still without a holiday destination. Mum is pushing Taiwan…b/c hey at least I speak the language. I finally decide to give my friend Tammy in Beijing a call and see if we can make our holiday plans mesh…and voila! After bouncing between Phuket (too expensive), Taipei (she’d been there), Cheju Island in SKorea (too expensive from HK) and Shanghai (I’ve been there)…..we settled on Beijng. I’m going to come up and see her, see some friends that I haven’t seen in two years, see some fellow Washu alums and just relax and have fun. The weather is beautiful in May in Beijing (think cherry blossoms in DC kind of weather).

Alright, destination Beijing leads me to my next interesting moment of the week. I have two travel agents that I work with, one in HK and one in SZ. When I decided on Beijing I emailed both and asked for price quotes. Both were roughly the same, except it costs way more for me to get to the HK airport and if I were to fly from HK I would end up going through customs 8 times in 7 days (1. leave Shenzhen 2. walk over stinky sewage moat and enter via HK customs 3. go through customs at HK airport as I head to Beijing 4. Upon arriving at Capital Airport go through customs again….repeat in reverse on the way home) and I just don’t really have the need for 24 more passport stamps…..so not worth it. That means that my Chinese travel agent friend, Jackson, who works downtown got my business this week. He was so funny, after I emailed him he responded with an email that had some sort of goofy stationary template that that said “I’ve missed you” and had hugging caterpillars on it. In his note he said that he was very glad I emailed him and that he’d tried to contact me various times since the end of lunar new year (I moved apt). Jackson was able to get me a decent deal and I told him I’d be downtown to pick up the tickets on Friday afternoon. I received a confirmation email…this time on “I’m so excited” stationary with smiling daisies on it. At the end of it he asked me ‘for a favour.’ He wanted to know if I would be willing to take a photo with all the people in his travel agency. Ok…kinda weird, but whatever. I head down to Tehang Air Company today and as soon as I step through the door the man at the front desk yells in Chinese “Jackson your foreign friend is here” and Jackson come sprinting out and shoots front-desk man a death-ray laser eye look and says, “she understands you.” Then as we walk back to his office to get the tickets he reminds all 20 people in the office to put on their uniform jackets…kinda strange? After I pay for my tickets and get all the business squared away, Jackson positions everyone in the office (all twenty of them) around me, in front of the company sign. One minion-like man had the job of standing with one foot in the hall, one in the bathroom in order to take the picture. We took 5 or 6 and everyone at the office looked so happy. Nothing like a semi-mandatory photo-op in order to get tickets to Beijing.

I had fun teaching all of my classes this week and that is something I don’t think I’ve ever said in China. We played Jeopardy; thank you Alex Trebec. Barbara had downloaded a PowerPoint template for Jeopardy and she let me copy it and I made a couple easy ones, then one about jobs (because last week’s titanic lesson focused on listing many different jobs), one about China, and one about Arts and Humanities. We went over forming questions and I told them that you couldn’t get points unless you spoke in question form. We played boys v. girls and goodness it got really competitive in some classes….almost too competitive. There were some close calls where boys and girls almost got a chair in the face (no worries….they’re childsize chairs without sharp edges). I also learned something with my China Jeopardy. What is the tallest mountain in the world? Anyone from America or any other English-speaking country would undoubtedly say Mount Everest. Well there is another accepted English name for it…. Qomolangma Feng. Heated arguments about this in various classes that resulted in having to look up the truth on the internet. In one class I got some funny answers during the Jobs Jeopardy. The clue was “I work in a bakery and I bake bread and make cakes.” One student came up with “What is a Caker?” …the whole class chuckled. Then there was a set of questions regarding clothing and the clue was “If I work outside and my hands are cold, I put these on to keep them warm.” This one kid swore up and down that “What are Sloves?” was correct and when he found out that “Gloves” was actually the correct answer….he turned a funny sort of purplish colour. By the last class today (Friday) my voice was gone. I’ve caught the cold that’s wafting through school and between the weather change and yelling over the dim of 16 classes of 50+ students, I was bound to get sick with something.

….That however was not going to keep me away from Andy and Barbara’s on Thursday night. They invited me and 4 other people they work and tutor with over for a Western dinner at their place. 7 of us managed to fit around a table that’s snug for 4. They really, truly outdid themselves. Barbara made deviled eggs for appetizers (lovely thought, but will someone sometime please explain to me what is so gosh-darn great about deviled eggs….they smell kinda funny and really to me are only good for maybe egging someone’s….envision that smell on an enemy’s car). Dinner, ah, yum yum. We had ribs, steak fillets, potatoes au gratin, asparagus, salad, and mushrooms. Then for dessert we had cherry pie. I thought I died and went to heaven. I hadn’t eaten like that since mum and I were in New Zealand months ago. There was a really nice couple there, the husband works at the Training Center at school here on Saturday and his wife is a pediatric doctor at one of the hospitals downtown. They are both quite witty and have excellent English. Jack asked me about where I was born and when I said Alaska, he instantly said….’oh that’s the states where don’t forget me’s grow. I chuckled and said forget me nots. I think he knows more about Alaska than I do. I helped Barbara clean and clear, just because it was a lot of dishes and no one else was helping (I don’t think that’s custom here) and today she told me I was the best dinner guest ever and that I have to come over for dinner more often. Andy cooked the steaks medium and they were really so good, but Anna made a funny comment about them. She said “Now Andy, these steaks are half cooked, yes?” I suppose literally speaking they are half-cooked, but how often would you walk into a Morton’s and say “Hey…give me a half-cooked fillet please”

I met an old man in the park on Tuesday….well no, I got hunted down by a nice old man in the park on Tuesday. I was walking through the park after my run and smiled and two cute little boys and they waved and then I waved back. Then according to me….the moment was over and I walked on. Well there was this old man teaching them “Wushu” or martial arts and the kids were no longer paying attention to him, they were just sort of running wild. About ten minutes later as I’m leaving the park, this Mercedes van rolls up and the old man jumps out and starts talking to me in Chinese…It’s nice not to be presumed an idiot all the time. He asks me if I would like to take Wushu lessons with those boys on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays from him. We chatted for a bit and it was decided that I would come watch on Sunday (I have no intention of being shown-up by two 5 year olds who aren’t even 1.5 meters tall collectively, but I don’t mind watching).

I’m having a little respect problem with my male students lately in Junior 3. Ever since I moved onto campus they’ve been kind of hard to handle. In class they are marginally polite, but outside…..I get a lot of “Hey sexy” and “Hey pretty lady” and it’s really discomforting. I’ve explained in class a number of times that it’s not polite to say these things, but none of that seems to have stuck. Additionally I caught two boys boring holes in their notebooks so that they could be placed in front of their camera phones to take photos of me during class. Honestly upon going to America in Juen, I will NOT miss anything remotely like that. It’ll be nice to walk around in the states for days at a time without turning a single head….whereas here….it happens every 5 seconds or so b/c I’m a laowai (friendly foreigner) or waiguoren (foreigner) or waijiao (foreign teacher).

Only room for 7

2006-04-09T18:09:00.000-07:00

Ten weeks from yesterday…I’ll be back in the United States of America. It seems uncanny that 9 months have passed already and that Easter is next weekend. However, seeing as religion is still somewhat of a taboo issue to speak of publicly, not much will be happening in the way of Easter festivities. That being said recent weeks have not been devoid of entertainment.

This past week I taught a lesson on the Titanic. This was a direct result of a student asking me if we could view the movie Titanic during oral English Class. I had to say no based on two reasons, one being that the movie is almost three hours long and would take up almost all of the rest of class time this term to watch, and two, there are scenes of nudity and suggestive sexual nature that aren’t appropriate to view at school. However, I liked the idea of the Titanic, so I did a little research, found out when it sank, how many people were on board, how many survived and what kinds of people were on board and voila…..a lesson for 12 classes. I gave the students some info regarding the ship, and we worked on how to say fractions in English by deciding what percentage of people survived the shipwreck. Then I asked them for a list of all the jobs they knew how to say in English. This list varied in length and creativity depending on the level of English in the class, but they usually came up with about 30….the most interesting of the week being 1) Churchman 2) Terrorist 3) Counterterrorist 3) Pig-feeder 4)Toilet Cleaner 5) Spy and 6) Thief. The usual doctor, lawyer, teacher etc were in there and I taught them some new professions such as architect, construction worker, and president. Then I showed the class a slide of a lifeboat and said that there were only 7 places in the last lifeboat on the Titanic and there were 30+ people left having those 30+ professions that they previously came up with. It was their job to come up with the 7 most important to save and give me reasons why. With the sporty boys, the famous basketball player was always the first one to be saved. In one class a group came up with saving a model b/c she would be ‘light’ and then they could take someone heavy in the boat and eat him first. Then in one class the students knew the word butcher and asked that the butcher and headmaster be in the lifeboat so that the butcher could cut the headmaster up into pieces (oddly enough I got this response 5 times this week…people really don’t like the headmaster). One group said to save the churchman so he could talk to God and ask for help…how righteous. Then there were the ‘cool’ boys who learned that adding ‘ess’ to most jobs made it a specifically female job, so they wanted to save the waitress, the stewardess, the model, the wizardess (yes that’s the female version of wiazard), the butcheress, the hostess, policewoman and actress. They wanted everyone that was saved to be female and ‘good to look at.’

I finally got an office at school …..with 9 weeks left of school. It’s on the 5th floor, has a great view of the school, a water cooler with no water bottle and no computer. If they ever managed to put in a computer, I’ll spend some time up there, otherwise it’s merely an extra key on my keyring.

My Chinese friend Abby got me a tutoring job downtown for this month. Her boss is going to America in May and wants to improve her English. It’s nice to teach someone who really wants to learn, versus kids who verbally assault you in Cantonese and you cannot do anything about it.

It’s amazing how my mood here is dictated so much by the weather. On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday the weather was beautiful and walking to tutoring (mine in Chinese or Ella’s in English) was pleasant and I was able to run in the park by the reservoir and see all my usual ‘friends’. There is the man who rides his yellow bike around this circular path for 45 minutes everyday around 5pm. Then there is the cheeriest lady who carries an open umbrella (rain or shine), a plastic bag with her shoes in it, and proceeds to walk the whole of the park paths backwards and barefoot. There is the posse of old men who sit at the lake and fish all day long and catch heaps and heaps of fish and keep them in this tank and then at 5pm everyday they toss them back in so they can repeat the same action again tomorrow. There’s the woman who sits in the ticket booth at the entrance of the bonsai garden all day long, smiling and I honestly don’t know how she can do it….no one ever pays the 10 yuan to get in. On the weekend there is a man who always plays tennis with himself in the parking lot using a long piece of elastic tethered to his racket and the ball and there are also an uncountable number of fan dancing groups. Awesome. However the last four days it has rained. It’s depressing, and slippery. My quality of life takes a nosedive on rainy days.

I’ve got a holiday coming the first week in May. In China it’s called Golden Week. All of my good friends are going on a cheap package trip to Bali, but I’ve been discouraged by the higher Nelson powers that be not to go….plus I’ve been there 6 times. So, that leaves me with few other options. But I rang up a friend in Beijing and I think the two of us might be bound for Thailand….Phuket to be exact to have a similar beachy-type holiday. Lack of funds and the expensive nature of Japan have finally ruled out my thoughts for Tokyo and Osaka. I think, on recommendation by Jenny, that I will go with maybe 3 or 4 other friends to Macau for my birthday. I think that could be a lot of fun. Some fellow male teachers are there this weekend doing a farewell to one of the guys because he is heading back to the states the beginning of next week. They all have had suits made at the train station and wanted an excuse to wear them. The plan was to go to the casinos in Macau all decked out. Ha, as if they have any money to spend. This week seems to be a week of leavers. I think 4 or 5 more people will leave before the 15th of April.

The wonders of crayola

2006-03-30T15:30:00.000-08:00

It's once again been awhile since I've posted...the blames is squarely on the fact that I do not have internet in my room and will not have internet there before I leave as the school has erased the operating system on my computer once already while trying to plug in high speed internet. I have decided not to take further chances with them messing up my computer and will settle for using a classroom computer for these last 12 weeks or so. Am I really down to that little time? It seem surreal. I'm just getting to the point where my students are really comfortable with me and they joke (usually appropriately) with me and the class periods go by rather quickly.

This past week has been fun at school because I have been teaching a lesson about monsters and using vocabulary that is new to them: eyebrows, eyelashes, spots, horns etc. and after week look at many powerpoints of monsters I break them into groups of 4 and give them paper and some crayons and they must draw a monster and then either answer questions about the monster or write a story, depending on the level of english in the class. I think the kids like the crayons the best, as they are from a box that I brought from the states, Crayola in fact. Crayons from the stationary shops here are much more waxy and don't have such brilliant colours. Some of the students are really very good artists, while others, not so much. I can't fault them though; in their 7am-6pm school day they don't have any art classes. In fact the one art classroom that I used to see students in at night doing still-life portraits and really enjoying themselves in, was turned into a book-storage room last week and so there is no more room for special art classes. I guess schools here and ones in the states have that in common, the arts programs are the first to be cut when budget-shaving occurs.

My class schedules of recent have been changing almost daily b/c of testing that is going on and mock-testing for the Junior 3's who will be taking their high school entrance exam on the 15th of June. I had to work on Sunday last week b/c apparently the J3's did so poorly on a full mock test the preceding week, that the school had a meeting about their terrible performance and deemed it necessary for them to re-take the same test on Friday, today. Thus, the Friday schedule was moved to sunday and instead of being able to visit my friends in a district north of here last weekend, I had to stick around and teach two classes beginning at 8am on Sunday. Fun.

It's also a bit ironic that their exam is on the exact day that my contract goes up. All the classrooms have a blackboard in the front and the back of class and the one in the back is keeping track of days left until the 'zhong kao' or 'middle exam' which means so much to them. Thus, in an inadvertant manner its a constant reminder of how much time I have left.....78 days, that's no time at all.

I haven't made any final plans about where I am going to travel during my 7 days off in May, but I am beginning to lean towards Japan b/c the tickets are cheap, even though travelling around there will not be so cheap.

The weather has been beautiful the last couple of days, which is nice b/c in recent weeks we have seen quite a substantial amount of rain that will put even the cheeriest of people into kind of a sullen stupor. I've had many near-falls on slippery pavement, but not wipeouts this month.

I am glad to have come to China and I am glad to have time left here, but I have also realized that I don't want to live alone in a foreign country in the future. It gets a bit lonely when there isn't another person to laugh with while killing swarms of mosquitos in your room, or washing your clothes in the shower b/c there isn't a washing machine.

Living Colonial Style

2006-03-08T00:43:00.000-08:00

Living in China has made me something of a tolerant person I would like to think. However my patience has been pushed to the limit in recent weeks, but instead of snapping, I think my demands on living conditions in this country have just gone down to the point where the fact that I have no internet, no hot water in the shower and most recently a washing machine that doesnt drain, doesnt seem quite so bad anymore.

This past weekend was event-filled, most noteably that for one day and one day only, I was a model for a professional photo shoot of nifty Italian mattresses. I was paid a gold mine in China terms and mere peanuts in US terms (so I’m sure some European Model Union is at this time using my head for a dart board realizing that they could have made $8000+ dollars off of a shoot that was outsourced to China where a sucker like me would do it for 1/16 the price). My friend Tim and I were in the photos (they needed a ‘couple’ for some of shots, but really he was in maybe 20% of the pics). We had to travel to the town of Shunde which is two hours away from Shenzhen, so Mr. Luo (the China manager of the Italian mattress company, whose name escapes me right now) picked me up at 6:15am on a Sunday and promised to have me home by 8pm. Ha.

Upon arrival in Shunde, I realized that the city was pretty much entirely furniture, carpet and draping factories and showrooms. As we got out of the mini-van I looked across the street and on a large billboard there was an advertisement for the new summer “Poop Collection” for a leather furniture factory. Either that was a serious typo or some translator really screwed over the company. Though…the color of the furniture was oddly close to uh, poop colour, so maybe that’s really what the company was going for.

Anyho, back to the story. I was ushered up to a really top notch photo studio, mostly for furniture scenes I think and the makeup and hair artists that came with us set to work on my person. It took 2, yes 2, uh huh, 2 hours to do my makeup. That was totally astonishing. I think Mr. Makeup Man spent 45 minutes meticulously covering up every one of my freckles under my eyes and on my nose. He then inquired as to whether he could pluck my eyebrows and I made him show me what he intended to do….he wanted to make my eyebrows about 1 inch long, ha ha ha. I said no, no plucking, but he was allowed to trim. I gotta say….amazing job really. I now have nicely arched eyebrows and they’re still full eyebrows which is wonderful. After 2 inches of makeup was applied, I got ready for him to apply mascara and instead, he pulled out a set of fake eyelashes. Actually, not that’s a lie, he pulled out multiple sets of lashes and tried them out on me before deciding on the right pair. I had never worn fake lashes before…..you have to glue those suckers on !!!!! They were actually glued and then reglued about 9pm that night as shooting began to go way overtime. They looked lovely on camera, but I’ve never felt anything stranger on my eyes before. It almost felt like I couldn’t open my eyes all of the way.

Then came my hair. They decided that my long long straight hair needed to become long curly hair. It looked beautiful, one hour later and through the course of the day had to be redone no less than 5 times. Crazy. Mr. Curling Iron man would set me down between set changes to recurl.
I told them no scandalous or relvealing clothing would be worn by me, so my ‘outfits’ included some rather bizarre elements: a long enormous bath robe with grosgrain ribbon trimming, joga pants and an exercize shirt, and white cotton long underwear….full bodysuit-like. These were all purchased in China, meaning that they were the largest sizes that could be procured b/c I am so much bigger than people here.

The photographer was awesome and his adobe photoshop was even cooler. Almost a second after the photos were taken he went to work on photoshopping out my scraped knee or some errant string on the duvet cover. The resolution was so astonishing….the holes in the foam of the pillows could be picked up on the screen and made to look like swiss cheese.

By 11:30 I was exhausted and cranky and felt myself becoming one of the primadonna models from reality tv. I just wanted to go home. Luckily, shortly after we were able to wrap and be done.

After not having eaten for 13 hours, Mr. Luo wanted to take us for food…..Tim and I were thinking the enormous Mc Donalds that we had passed. Even though I had not eaten Chinese Mc D’s since arriving I felt the evening warranted a hamburger. However, instead we went to a congee (porridge) restaurant. Now, mind you I don’t really fancy Chinese porridge food in the first place, but apparently at midnight the selection at the restaurants goes way down…go figure. The waitress says that they have chicken porridge and snake porridge. I quickly say chicken while everyone else including tim says snake (tim says I should live a little). Well, never fear, the women quickly comes back to say that there isn’t chicken, only snake. So alright snake it is. I’m guessing that cook just didn’t want to make a pot of chicken porridge for one person. Well twenty minutes later a giant cauldron of steaming something or other comes out and the waitress starts to ladle it in our bowls. The porridge part tastes alright….kinda like salty oatmeal….then tim digs his spoon into the bottom of the bowl and pulls out….the jaw, yes the jaw of the snake. Then mr luo spoons up the eyeball, then makeup man takes a mouthful of reproductive organs and I think that I’m going to be ill. I choked down maybe a third of the bowl but honestly, after seeing every bit of the snake grinded up and stuck in that bowl….I really forgot all about being hungry.

Three am I arrived home to my school. I didn’t make it into bed until after 4am for two reasons:
1) I was once again starving so I found it necessary to make some peanut butter toast.
2) I had to wash the 2inches of makeup off of my face (incidentally wearing that makeup into a restaurant at midnight gave me probably my closet feeling ever to being a lady of the night, so to speak). Because the makeup that so thick, I was going to have to use hot and some major scrubbing to get all of it off…..problem….my hot water only worked on Tuesday last week and since then it has been broken. The man came on Saturday with a new hot water heater, but not man for installing. So I am now just sitting around looking at the nice box with the hot water heater in it. Thus, in order to get the makeup off of my face, I had to heat up water in my hot water pot, pour it into a basin once it boiled, added some cold water to it, and voila, warm water. (Incidentally, this colonial-style wash basin showering is how I’ve been doing it for a week since the hypothermic termperatures of the water coming out of the faucet were just too much for me after three showers. When I showed I usually have to heat up 4 pots of water and use the big basin. Just call me Laura Ingalls Wilder….i feel like I should be churning butter or wearing a bonnet while doing all of this too).

3 hours into my well-deserved slumber, I was awoken by pounding on the door. Conveniently, at 7:30am on a Monday, the telephone company decided to arrive to install my phone line. I was mad and happy at the same time…..at least I was going to be in touch with the real world again! However it was strange…in theory they had to install a brand new telephone line because the old one had been ripped out, but really they just cut into the plastic of the tv cable, cut a few wires, twisted them around a wire leading out of the phone and then….my phone worked! Awesome.

I figured since Monday was a good and productive day, then so would Tuesday. Water heater man was supposed to come at 3pm, but oh wait….he never came. I decided that while waiting I might as well get some laundry started. That meant I had to unplug my computer and lamp from the power strip I was using as an extension cord (only one outlet in my apt/room works) and then take it outside, plug in the washing machine to the strip and then plug the strip into the plug in the outside kitchen that is 5 feet up the wall. I pull my clothes in and decided to go for a run.

Upon arrival home (after having fallen on the pavement for the 6th time in china…I’m beginning to worry about myself), I went to hang up my laundry only to find out that…it never got past the wash/agitate cycle. The stupid machine won’t drain. I tried all the different settings and none of them could get past the first of three parts….no rinse, no spin. So…..I got the giant basin, took all of the clothes out and took them to the bathroom to be rinsed. They were….and still are….full of soap. I turned the shower on and spent 30 minutes rinsing and wringing out all of the laundry, but when I went outside to see if they were dry this morning….they felt like they had tons of soap still in them…..kinda yuck. The machine incidentally still has an alarmingly gross coloured water in it.

Other than that, life has been pretty quiet. Im going to a Ball sponsored by the Foreign Experts Bureau on March 18 and had a dress made from a JCrew picture. The dress in the catalogue cost $450 and the copy I had made out of the same silk material cost $20. Amazing. Hopefully that should be a good time.

The school has changed our schedule again. The Junior 1 and 2 students now must do morning exercizes on the field for 20 minutes before school begins, so classes are pushed 10 minutes later, meaning the students get 10 minutes less for lunch each day. Pretty unfair if you ask me. I am teaching a lesson on differences between American schools and Chinese schools this week and some of my students are funny by make me feel sad that the same time. I asked if they have singining, or band, or drama or art classes and they said no. But then I said that I have seen the art room on the bottom floor and they said it is just for show, for when parents or Party members come to visit. I then asked what they do before first period at 8am (they must be at school by 6:50) and they said it’s reading hour, but it usually isn’t reading hour reading…its and hour for the teachers to yell at them. Then they were telling me how easy it is to cheat on tests because the desks are so close and the teachers, when they give the exams, usually fall asleep in the front of the rooms, or put a newspaper on their head or read a magazine. At some of this stuff I just had to chuckle really hard.

Oh China….

In other news, I’m headed back to Dallas on June 16, which means thanks to the good ole international date line….I’ll actually be back in Dallas on the 16th….after 20 hours of flying and a 14 hour time change. 3months….time flies.

The Resume Answer......

2006-02-26T20:20:00.000-08:00

My friend Tyler responded to a listserve teacher question yesterday with the following funny response and I thought I'd share. The question was 'how do I correctly document my year in China on a resume?' The results from Tyler follow and are sure to humor:

1. The honest entry:

English Speaking Clown
Shenzhen Education Bureau
09/05-06/06

> Duties often entailed daily public humiliation and embarrassment, as well classroom and occasional birthday party entertainment.

2. The Slightly exaggerated and overly sophisticated entry:

Expert Facilitator of Spoken English Acquisition
Shenzhen Education Bureau
09/05-06/06

> Duties included: extensive and arduous lesson planning, daily lecturing, and school administration responsibilities.

3. The outright, but still feasible and defendable lie:

US Department of Education Foreign Spy
Shenzhen Education Bureau (cover)
09/05-06/06

> Duties included: foreign teacher impersonation, regular maintenance of hand to hand combat and numb-chuck skills, as well as the occasional "elimination" of students deemed as potential threats.

Note: Anyone who actually uses any of the above entries on their resumes can thank me when the said entry lands that dream job as CEO, Corporate Lawyer, Stripper, etc... Thank Yous will be most appreciated in the form of generous financial contributions to the Make A Wish And Make Tyler Rich Foundation (MAWAMTRF).

Hakunamata the desert snowboarder

2006-02-24T01:33:00.000-08:00

Friday afternoon.....another week hath been survived. However I must admit that however lame and 85-year old womanish it may be, in order to survive today I had to go to bed at 6:30 last night. I taught 6 full classes yesterday and this week I basically lectured on the Olympics and while the students really liked my dopey demonstrations of jumping in and out of the bobsleigh and doing shooting for the biathlon, lecturing over the voices of 65 children in each class was sometimes a strain on the voice. Then yesterday as I was walking out of the school gates to go home for lunch, I was corned by an admin lady asking me to take part in English Corners (english speaking club) after school that day and that my topic was school rules. Ha, what if I had told her no? Of course I wouldn't turn it down; I get paid extra for it, and it was with my favorite little junior 1 kiddos. But...this meant staying at school well past 6, talking and handing out prizes (provided by the school in the form of pens, erasers and little sweets) to 12 year olds for answering questions such as: "Tell me three school rules," "Tell me two rules you would make if you were a teacher" etc. The most popular prize was the eraser (Bill Yi (aka Bill Gates)) told me it was because in the shops that eraser costs 3kuai and the pens and candy were less than 1kuai.

I came home, contemplated venturing out for dinner...b/c yes I am still living on my couch and will be until oh Tuesday...but instead I grabbed and apple and yogurt and crashed before the evening news came on. I normally teach at 7:45am on Fridays (and all other days now) but today Jack, the English teacher for Junior1Class2 (the 7:45 Friday class) asked if we could swap times b/c he was giving his students a test and some wanted to start early before school. So, of course i said fine and I was able to sleep until 8 and then teach at 8:40. Do no worry, I didn't actually sleep 14 hours last night....i woke up about 3 for a bit which coincidentally coincided with the live coverage of the ladies' figure skating finals. I watched a bunch of women fall, and one beautiful Japanese girl not fall and then popped back to sleep.

My last two classes of the week were attended by 4 or 5 Junior 3 English teachers who had heard from my friend Qingling that I have interesting classes. Alas, I got to make an idiot out of myself in front of my 15 year olds and their teachers today. However the activity I ended class with made teaching each class this week worth it. I asked each student to write a short story about being an Olympic athlete. I made an example: I stuck my face on the body of Ice hockey star Mike Modano and made a story about my name being Hildy Sveldma from Sweden and how I was 39 years old and competing the Turin Olympics. I got some wonderful responses but my favorite was from a student named Abner: "Hello, my name is Hakunamata. I come from South Africa and I am playing snowboarding for my country in the Olympics in Italy this year. I have never seen snow, but I am going to Italy to play snowboarding. My father and I practice the snowboarding on the desert for 15 hours every day. We go home at night and my mother cooks potatoes. I think snow will look like mashed potatoes. Go South Africa" See...sometimes teaching the kiddos is rather rewarding.

Here's my debunking of common thought for the moment: I've heard from many people, as well as on many movies that if you exude confidence and look someone in the eye, then they're not going to look down and see what you are wearing. Well I chose to extend this little saying into including personal footwear. But, in China, for me, it's oh so wrong. I smile brightly at just about everyone I see...it order to melt those leers into smiles on passerby. They usually smile right back but I can't keep their gaze; it goes down to my feet. I think this is becuase people here are not used to seeing women my height and they figure that I must be wearing heels. But, much to their dismay I am wearing flat shoes and not just flat shoes, flip flops. In case you didn't know, flip flops are 'poor mans' shoes here and so in their head, my passing by had caused quite a conundrum....why is she tall, why is she a foreigner wearing the poor shoes? So much for blending in and being smiley....it doesn't prevent the double, triple and quadruple take.

Speaking of takes, my friend Tim and I are going to be in mattress ads here in Shenzhen! Hahaha. One of my student's fathers own a mattress factory in the SEZ and the student asked my good friend Xiaoxia (his English teacher) if she would ask me if me and a 'tall, handsome' friend would be in the adverts. Xiaoxia has assured me that it is legit, we'll be sitting on mattresses, fully-clothed etc. hahaa. Xiaoxia is 45 and is my Chinese mama, so she's looking out for us and will be our translator (i dont know much mattress lingo in Chinese). This all transpires next week. The money is great....for 3 hours tim and I get 3/4 the amount we're paid for teaching each month. Super!

Love for Handsome Lake

2006-02-22T01:54:00.000-08:00

I cannot count the number of times my colleagues who teach oral English at other schools tell me how much they hate teaching junior 1 students (about 12-14 years old). *Quick aside: The reason for the large age span in any given grade of students has to do with their professed ages being based on the lunar calendar. See, when a Chinese baby is born he/she is already one year old and then will turn two on the lunar new year. Sooooooo, if child was born a day before the lunar new year, then he'll be two when he is merely two days old. Conversely, if the child is born a month after the lunar new year, he will not turn two until he is 11 months old in our was of customary counting.* Well I love my Junior 1 students. This term I am teaching 8 classes of them: 4 small classes where Barbara and I divide big classes in half, and then 4 large classes. The large classes are Junior 1 Classes 5, 6, 7,8. Classes here are ranked, Class 1 is the best, and Class 10 is the worst. So by logic you'd think that these would be the bad classes. Admittedly, their English is not quite the same as Classes 1-4, but what they lack in skill, they more than make up in eagerness....except for Snoopy, who spent 30 minutes standing outside of class because he thought "fuck you" to be terribly funny to shout over and over. Today I found my favorite student of all time and his name is Handsome Lake. Yes that is correct, Handsome Lake. He's adorable and funny and loves to speak English and he is a member of Class 8, my new favorite class. They were full of energy and eager to learn; a teacher's dream quite frankly.

News on the less meritable front:
I was supposed to have been moved out of my apt. last weekend, but due to 50,000 things that are wrong with the place, I am still sleeping on the couch of my old empty place, bringing clothes back and forth from my new school apt. via backpack each day. Yesterday, after they still had done nothing to fix anything, I went through the place and found the following things wrong:
1) No phone line (has phone and lots of holes in the wall that could maybe in the future house phone wires)
2) No place for internet (in my contract)
3) Refridgerator doesn't chill (kinda key factor for said contraption)
4) No water or power to washing machine
5) No hot water (that was fixed this morning)
7) One (1) electrical socket that works (that means lots of extension cords and a monster power strip will be needed to plug in tv, two lamps, water cooler, fridge, washer, and internet.....haha does it sound like they need to do something)
8) Toilet doesn't work

Addressing the last part: I went in yesterday between classes to use the toilet only to find upon test flush (i do these kind of things now b/c i've been in china long enough to know there is about an 1/7 chance it's not going to work) I find that no water fills the toilet bowl. So, I go down to admin, tell my boss the problem and say that I cannot move into this place until the toilet at least works...i mean the rest can be dealt with after if NECESSARY. Well he says no problem, no moving until the apt. is all ready (wonderful that he says this after it was demanded that I move all my effects out of my old place last weekend). This morning I go up to the room at school to get a roll of TP (for a clever game for my Junior 1s) and am overwhelmed by a smell I can only liken to vomit coming from the bathroom. I open the door and where the non-functioning toilet was yesterday, today there is just a hole in the ground. And later I find out that all of the dorm toilets were backing up into said hole in the ground in my bathroom today....hence the horrid smell. When I told them the about the toilet problem, I would have thought that a new U-tube or a couple cranks of a pipe would have put it back in order, not take the whole darn thing out.

The only thing to do on a day like this is to remember that my students are awesome, the weather was perfect to run by the resevoir, and TIC (this is China) and I've come to expect the illogical and idiotic to happen on a daily basis.

Never Underestimate the power of.......

2006-02-18T17:12:00.000-08:00

......a Safety Pin.

Yesterday morning at 6am I made a trip to the bathroom in my all-packed, chilly apt, only to find, that in addition to the bathroom light being burned out, the kitchen light being on the blink, that yes indeed, there was no running water in my apt. I hammered time after time with my hands on the flusher button and to no avail; there wasn't any water to be had. And in addition to aforementioned said drama, I broke the chain on the toilet....again. So at 6am, in the dark of my bathroom, i had to stick my hand down the slimey, mildewy, tank to reconnect the chain with....a safety pin. What a totally, utterly comepletely useful contraption.

4 hours later the water came back on. Yah! Two more days of hot water showers (the hot water in my new room doesn't work).

However, the day was made wonderful with Mexican food and good friends. There is always a silver lining to any rocky start.

P.S. I get to feel like a princess for 4 months in my new place. The bed is topped with a canopy and mosquito netting draped down to the floor. (Granted, the whole thing is made out of aluminum piping and is tied with raffea to the headboard).

500 People doing "The Lawnmower"....I know you're jealous

2006-02-17T03:36:00.000-08:00

And so….after 6 weeks of jam-packed traveling and visiting, I return to Shenzhen for 2nd term (albeit a shorter term than last – MidJune will be upon us before we know it. There are stories to be told about every moment of my travels, from the beauteous Shanghai that Adam I and encountered, to the crazy travels of three ladies in Sichuan that landed us on top of a mountain where no tourist had tread for probably months, if not years where we huddled into a makeshift king-size bed (two twins pushed together for purposes of body head) and savored the incremental wafts of warm air from the heater on the wall, and finally to mum and I taking on some of the world’s finest real estate, New Zealand. Those stories and many more will be added in due time, but for now, I return to the present.

The new term started Monday, and as the first school bell rang I was sitting, and perhaps half dozing in a cramped airplane seat aboard a flight from Auckland to HK. I had informed my school in December that ‘gee, I didn’t book the tickets, they were a gift and I can’t help it if I miss the first day back.’ In actual fact, I booked the tickets myself, and I wanted an extra day in NZ, haha what can I say. I must admit, flying was much more glamorous when I was more of a pint-sized person (ie 10 years old), b/c man the airlines are scrimping space right, left and center and then before you know it someone like me who is 6 feet tall, begina to lose circulation in my legs as soon as 23B right in front of me decides it’s time to recline his chair. And when I was a kid, children’s meals were leaps and bounds better than the regular stuff served; oh how I wish I still fit into that ‘under 12’ category.

Arriving back in HK mum and I were greeted with…..the worst pollution in town since September. It was so bad that it sent 200 of the 40,000, yes 40,000 runners from the Standard Charter marathon in HK the day before to the hospital and one person actually died! It made me want to jump back on a plane and head back to NZ. The ONLY thing that was undesirable about NZ is that they only let you take 20kg of weight per suitcase on the airplane (JAL and China Airlines lets you take 32kg internationally). The 20kg severally hinders purchasing power.

I’ve got a great schedule this term….no teaching on Mondays or Friday afternoons. This means I have the potential to travel, but instead I think I’m going to take a job with a tutoring firm that finds tutors for CEOs and important people in Chinese companies who need to learn English for their jobs. It might be very different teaching people who really want to learn English, vs. some of my students who are just there to take up space in the classroom.

That said, I love most of my students this term. I’ve got all my junior 3s back and they’ve been wonderful this week and I’m teaching 8 classes of junior 1s. I love them; they’re still small and innocent and want to please the teacher.

Also upon arrival back at school I was greeted with the crew for the tv show that has been filming at our school for the last 4 months. (side note: Wouldn’t you think that if your school was the grounds for a tv show, that they are probably getting paid a lot for this use? I think so. So…..why do I have to move out of my apt. and into this closet type “apartment” (think big room with tv, bed, desk, outside kitchen, etc) b/c me living outside school is just ‘too expensive’ for the school. Haha, oh well). I walked out of class yesterday and the courtyard to the left of me was dry but as I peered straight ahead, I saw a deluge of water coming down. I was perplexed, thinking that a raincloud over a mere part of the school was unlikely. It turned out that they were filming a rainy scene for the tv show and the local fire truck was out there creating rain for all these people to stand around in with umbrellas for the show. Today there was a ‘track meet’ at school for the show and kids from the local primary school down the road, were recruited to be the opposing teams for the meet. There were even cheerleaders which are totally out of groove with what really happens in China. I would bet money that 90% of kids don’t even know what cheerleaders are (the other 10% are the basketball obsessed students named LeBron, Carter, MJ, McGrady etc. that watch NBA on TV). I mean the closest thing that any of my students do to cheerleading is something called ‘morning exercises.’ This is a routine that is done in formation in synch with some dude at the front shouting numbers out to the group. While the students usually utter some dopey half baked answer about morning exercises ‘making you healthy,’ it can be assumed that the corporate masters in Beijing are the masterminds behind such formational exercise. (Incidentally, these Corporate masters probably spend the rest of their time playing with their magic Yahtze dice, rolling them to decide when public holidays occur….i swear it’s that arbitrary……”doubly sixes…..ok no May Holiday until June 21”). Now what is morning exercise you say? Just picture 500 students in perfectly straight lines doing 70s dance moves like the shopping cart or the lawnmower…without music of course. If you can envision this, then you’ve got a fairly accurate grasp of the daily scene around my school. They do lots of spins; there’s a move where they rotate their fists really fast around one another like a spinning wheel, and they take the spinning wheel fist thing up high, and from side to side to down low… im surprised there’s no between the legs or behind the head either. Personally I think they would be better off doing the ‘Hustle’ set to nationalistic Chinese propaganda.

Good to be back. I missed my polluted-taking-years-off-my-life-air-and-hygeine-quality city. Oh yes I did.

No words to express.....

2006-01-17T00:01:00.000-08:00

Well, after three weeks of no blogging, I'm back for 12 hours before I head out to Chengdu and Chongqing with a good friend of mine here. We're off to explore the wonders of Sichuan: pandas food and all.

The last two and a half weeks have been filled with vacation time. Adam came to visit me and we made 17 days into a most fantastic holiday. We spent a week in Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou. These three cities for all who are unfamiliar with China encompass the spectrum from European Imperialism all the way to quaint garden cities that are the basis of Chinese myth about the West Lake. We ooohed and ahhhhed over the mix of modernity and 19th century European influence in Shanghai and then jetted out to garden cities of Suzhou and Hangzhou to stroll along the banks of the West Lake, climb the stairs of the Linyin ancient Zen Buddhist temple and meandered through the secret gardens of Suzhou. I introduced Adam to all kinds of Chinese food....from classy to hole-in-the-wall establishments, while he cultured me on the fine dining of Indian food.

We spent time in Hong Kong and I tried to convince him of HK's "top 1 city" status in my book. We gazed at skyscrapers road the midlevels escalator, walked the avenue of the stars and ate Indonesian food in Causeway Bay.

I spent a week showing him my personal stomping ground: Shenzhen. We walked parks filled with kite-flyers and families and ate chinese bbq.

At then end of it all Adam may have gone home with a pair of worn-out shoes (we walked and walked and walked literally everywhere all day long), but I am here left with the feeling that I love showing people the country that I so dearly love. Travelling and experiencing China all over again made me love this place all that much more.

I'll be back in a week armed with backpacking adventures and hopefully pictures of pandas.

China Fatigue

2005-12-29T23:02:00.000-08:00

I've been in denial about this for about a week now, because I didn't think that it would ever happen to me, but I think that being human, I fall prey to the normal cycles of life. In China as an expat there seem to be three general parts to the cycle, adoring China, tolerating China and being fatigued by China. Now, as a professed China afficcionado, I assumed I would hover somewhere in the adoring China area forever, but recently it seems, a country that I love so and have such admiration for its culture and history, has done everything possible to try to make me not like it. I still love my students, my Chinese friends, my daily life, and the parameters of my once in a lifetime experience, but I am exhausted by the concept of NOWISM that I think i explained earlier this year. I'm tired of being the foreign puppet in a school that now has no real interest in foreign teachers even though the name of the school is Luohu Foreign Language School. See my school used to be the best in the district according to the standardized tests that are given to each grade every year (these are the end all be all to any student's existence). Well last year they didn't perform as the best school and so, 4 of the 5 principals were fired or something and the new people in administration feel that oral English is no longer important, and stdized. test prep is what should occupy 12 hours a day, 6.5 days a week for each student. That is why I sit here on December 30 realizing that i am on vacation 2 weeks earlier than planned, b/c the school cut out oral english class for the students to prep for semester exams. I was told last Friday night, at a Christmas dinner hosted by my school that i was to test every one of my students this week, give them a grade and then i was done. It's VERY difficult to test 30 students during a 40 minute lesson and I found myself using up every spare break of both mine and the student's breaks to test. But even my grades are superficial, the other foreign teachers say that if the head teacher of the grade doesn't like my scores, they'll change them to be more appropriate (aka 7's become 8's or 9's). Haha, pretty crazy. However, I got it all done and felt relatively good about the job I did. In between all this testing I've been running around town trying to plan and arrange tickets and trips with three different people over this 6 week break. With Adam, I'm going to Shanghai and Hangzhou, with Jenny, I'm going to Chongqing and Chengdu and with mum i'm going to New Zealand, yah!!!! However, planning takes so much time!!!! I now have a profound appreciation for all the family holidays mum planned for me as a child. Then I needed to clean my apt. from top to bottom and the mop just wasn't doing a good job on the floor...so Cinderella style I washed every floor in my apt (both bedrooms, living room, bathroom and kitchen are stylin' in tile). So as I was leaving school last night about 5 (45 minutes late b/c I had to meet students after school to test) on my way to meet a friend in Nanshan to plan the details of our Chengdu trip I get a call from the secretary in my contact teacher's office and she tells me this, "uh Kristen...haha.....Mr. Yang wanted me to call you and tell you that you are moving out of your apt. tomorrow and moving into the school dorm, ok? Can you pack your things?" I came unglued. I called Mr. Yang and didn't yell but professed extreme anger, which i'm sorry to say spilled over into a few tears. I have no problem moving in to school, many teachers live at their schools, but it was the way in which it was handled....giving me 24 hours to pack and leave and creating the bigger problem of: where wiere adam and mum going to stay when they came to visit. Mr. yang said "no problem, they can stay in a spare dorm bed." I didn't know what else to do but go home and start packing. Well my two teacher friends who are also foreign english teachers (in their 50s) heard about this and came over with boxes to help me pack. i think they were more upset that me and Andy called the school and talked about this being "crap" and "unacceptable" and even threatened quitting. But at the end of the day, it was 7pm and no one was around to make and changes or give an explanation. So I packed for 5 hours, went to bed at 2 on a sheetless bed and prepared to move. I'm pretty sure I came close to having an anxiety attack, but this morning Mr. Yang came through for me. The school is allowing me to stay in my apt. until the first week of next term in feb....after all my company leaves. Somehow it all worked out. But I cannot put into words what it feels like to be an educated person trapped in a bureaucracy that is completely crass that expects things to happen at a moments notice and most of the time what they want to happen is entirely illogical.

My thought for the moment: How can a country have such deeply rooted traditions of propriety(no shoes beyond the door of the house, no boys and girls dating until they're 18, the sacredness of tea drinking) be the same country that runs itself completely devoid of courtesy.

Current Mood: Confused; I love China, but like I said, it's doing a lot to try to make me hate it.

Merry Christmas Everyone

2005-12-24T18:47:00.000-08:00

My friend Hayley organized a group to go carolling this past week. We attracted quite a few crowds around town and I'm fairly certain there are many photos of us off-key, slightly off-kilter singers floating around the city. What good fun it was.

A Perfect Sunday

2005-12-18T03:03:00.000-08:00

I decided to leave Hong Kong well enough alone this weeked. The SAR already has enough "visitors" (aka detainees) for awhile. My tickets for mum and my trip to NZ are awaiting a pick up on my part but there just wasn't any logical reason that I needed to go traipsing around HK Island when South Korean farmers, Greenpeace and anyone else with anguished protesting dreams that include jumping into Hong Kong harbour, were creating problems for the police and the WTO Conference. I suppose this meeting as compared to ones in Cancun or Seattle, has been relatively mellow. However, border patrol between the Mainland and HK was seriously stepped up and many parts of the city were shut to pedestrians. Perhaps next week I will go and see Tammy! who is going to be staying there for 5 days.

This weekend ended perfectly and started quite well, but was frustratingly dissapointing in the middle. On Friday Jenny and I went down to the train station market to visit our neighborhood tailor, Molly. Jenny wanted a suit made and I was just along for the ride, or so I thought. Jenny picked out great fabric and on our way out, in the usual quite unplanned fashion, my eye was caught by a blue and yellow stripe broadcloth fabric. I decided quite impulsively that I could spare 80 kuai and could get a new button-down shirt with proper LONG sleeves. Well once Jenny and I become excited about the fabric, Molly and I inquire for the price of 1.3 meters of fabric. I have to admit that I wasnt' doing a whole lot of paying attn at this point b/c Mr. fabric-selling man had this mole with 4 extremely long hairs coming out of it and it was honestly difficult not to do just a little staring. It was determined that fabric man would not sell me 1.3 meters, b/c it was the end of the bolt and there were only 2.5 meters left and no one would want the 1.2 meters that would be left. Grrr. I wanted that shirt. Well, Molly, being a good tailor negotiated with the man, and for 5 kuai more she got the man to agree to sell me all 2.5 meters. I took the deal. Then, Molly spent the next 45 minutes trying to convince me that in addition to the long sleeve button-down shirt that I wanted made, that now there was enough fabric to make a matching pair of long stripy shorts....with a draw string - apparently that was a key part. Ha ha. I finally convinced her that I just wanted a shirt. The extra fabric could be returned to me. I'm hoping this shirt is awesome....I just want something with honest to goodness long enough sleeves.

Jenny and I then most amazingly happened upon the most perfect present for a certain soon to arrive houseguest and that totally made my day, b/c lets face it, men are impossible to shop for. We then headed to Dongmen for some great noodles for dinner and found an awesome hole in the wall store that honestly must have had 100,000+ scarves and an equal number of hats. For 50 kuai I got a wonderful pink scarf and a crazy blue plaid one. Before you ask to see them, let me save you the trouble.....I no longer have them. See, I think my poor luck in the city had yet to wear off. The lady put my scarves in a bag and I carried it in one hand along with my other bag with Christmas presents. Somewhere between the time I left Jenny to head home on the bus and my house, the scarves went missing. At first I was furious at home; I assumed i'd once again been robbed by someone slashing my bag, but no, this time I am forced to blame the bag. It was a nice thick plastic bag with a heat-sealed seam on the bottom, only on this bag the seam came undone somewhere and my scarves got left behind. After I was done being mad, I realized that in US$ it was only 8 dollars, but still, it's the principle of it. From now on, I'll BYOB....Bring your own Bag. My canvas bag won't get a magic hole in the bottom.

I had planned my entire weekend around a birthday party for Barbara's husband Andy. I slept in Saturday morning, did some cleaning, went for a run and then......at 4pm i get a call from a very ill sounding Barbara, informing me that the party was cancelled due to food poisoning. I felt terrible, being ill is never fun, but also frustrated at the same time. I am tired of feeling like a marionette puppet here, always at the mercy of someone else. Im not sure anyone who doesn't live here can understand fully just how often plans fall through. Once or twice is fine, but when I waste an entire Saturday or a weekend that I could have travelled for that matter, it's annoying. Another example, the education bureau is hosting a HUGE banquet for us for Xmas, but it's a week until Xmas and we still don't have a date for it, and on that weekend I also have three other things that people would like me to do: A dinner hosted by my headmaster, visit Tammy in HK and Christmas with my good friends Qingling and Xiaosha. Well, seeing as the Bureau is the most important thing in my life....they pay me, I cant do anything until the dinner date is set, but that also means I'm leaving three other parties in limbo. GRRR.

But......

Sunday made up for all of my weekend frustrations. Jenny and I decided to go in search of Deng - Deng Xiaoping that is. He is often awarded the title of founder of the city of Shenzhen, as it was his idea to create this city from a wasteland of a fishing village 25 years ago. His memory is etched in stone on top of Lianhua mountain in Lianhua park. So Jenny and I went....and came away with so much more than just a gandering at Deng. The park is easily the most amazing thing I've seen in Shenzhen. Now I'm a sucker for parks, but seriously Lianhua is wonderful. There were thousands of HAPPY people roaming around. There were fields filled with people flying hundreds of beautiful kites, children blowing bubbles, an old man doing cartwheels. It was surreal. This scene doesn't happen on any normal Shenzhen road. It made me happy seeing and watching others be happy. Fields were filled with kite-flying families, where else in the world does that happen? I now make it my mission to return there on a regular basis for it is an oasis of happiness in a city ostensibly driven solely by money.

Are you ready for your close-up Ms. Nelson?

2005-12-15T03:37:00.000-08:00

Well, I've done it. I finished my very first hat ever and I must say: it's really not bad at all. I however will learn from some mistakes that I made....next time use round needles and make pom pom larger at the top.

OK, so my apt. has been relatively warm (in the room in which i choose to drag the orange-light-radiating heating fan into) for the past few days. So long as I keep reapplying chapstick and keep my sunglasses on, this method of heat is fine. I'm beginning to wonder however if this light is UV friendly or not. If not, my living room might be akin to a life-size microwave and something from 8th grade science class suggests that such living conditions are not prudent. Ha, oh well, it's China and I totally take what I can get.

That said, yesterday, the coldest day yet, the power in my entire neighborhood was shut off from 8am until 8pm for what reason i am not quite sure except that there have been rumors of power shortages in the city so maybe this is a systematic conservation. Yesterday I had no power and today my school and all of the shopping streets had no power. I swear there were more policemen in the hypermarket monitering shoppers shoppings in the dim emergency lights than there were actual shoppers. But...i get ahead of myself. Yesterday no power, my apt. was freezing, and on top of that, I was actually stuck in my building with 30 or so other angry tenants for about twenty minutes at 8:30 on my way to work. See, the main door to my building is electronically locked and then boltetd into the tile floor, so when the power went out, so did the apparent ability for us to leave and enter the building b/c whoever had the manual keys was no where to be found, go figure. Finally three police officers and the mail man kicked open the door, shattering the tile floor. Some sort of brawl ensued afterward, i assume over the broken floor, but i couldn't stay around to loiter (such is the popular passtime aroudnd here) b/c i was late for class. I am lucky that I live on the 5th floor b/c the stairs are still manageable, but if i were on the 15th floor, whew, that'd be a whole other story. All the grandparents on my floor were pretty much housebound yesterday too. Usually they take the grandkids out in the strollers and push them around the neighborhood, but without elevators, getting 80-90 year old people, strollers and infants down to the ground floor becomes a real chore. The lady next door spent an hour yesterday pushing her granddaughter in her stroller up and down the corridor on our floor. After I got home from running errands in the evening the power was back on. Good thing i don't really keep perishables in the fridge...that would have been trouble.

Today I was surprised upon my arrival at school for two reasons: first Barbara's classroom was taken over for a meeting so one of us had to teach a full class of 70 (i love surprises) and second, there was no power. Hmph, well since i usually teach the students in their own classroom, i told barbara i'd take the first two classes of the day and she could take the last two. The first class of the day were Junior 1s (12yr olds). This week I am doing a Christmas lesson. I asked them what they knew about Christmas and really they know quite a bit. I had to do some minoring correcting...Santa says "Ho ho ho" and not "Ha ha ha" like my student Abner thought. They thought it was hilarious when I demonstrated a good "ho ho ho, Merrrrrry Christmas" and repeated it after me a good many times. Then, on the worksheet i had given them were the words for Santa Claus is Comin' to Town. In all the rest of the classes earlier in the week I've had different students read the various stanzas and we go over words like "pout" and "goodness" and then we listen to good ole' Frank Sinatra sing the song via MP3 file on the computer. Only.....yes that's right, no power today. So, for one day and one day only Ms. Nelson sang in front of her 70+ person classes. I asked if they would rather just read the song one more time, but NO, they HAD to sing it. So I then apologized for having the world's worst voice, cleared my throat and belted out the song. Thank goodness I teach clever children and they caught on after one time through and my creaky voice was able to blend into the rest after that. However, my solo performance ellicited a classroom full of cheering and clapping - oh how they patronize me. It was much worse when I had to sing for the class of 15 year olds. My voice was scratchy and the high part of the song: he sees you when you're sleepin' he knows when you're awake he knows if you've been bad or good.... that part...man i really sounded bad....I even had the boys who usually sleep in the back were paying attn. just so they could laugh at me. All in all it was good fun and it was a good segue into my activity for the day: helping santa decide if three particular children had been naughty or nice this year and what they should get for christmas.

Speaking of segues, here's a blunt one: I was robbed on Monday. I am now part of a Shenzhen statistic, and am now minus an ipod and a little pride associated with being someone who was stupid enough to have something stolen, except I wasnt' really stupid. I had gone downtown to meet with a travel agent to check on tickets for Auckland and i brought an empty backpack so i could go grocery shopping on my way home. I had nothing in it, b/c thieves easily steal from backpacks. Instead I had my wallet in one zipped pocket of my jacket and the ipod in the other (you're supposed to split your goods in case a thief slices your pockets he'll only get half). Well on the but i kept one hand on my wallet and the other hand held on the raill; the bus was packed solid. My ipod was zipped in my pocket and my earphones in, but somewhere on the way home the earphones fell out of my ears, but I didn't notice, it was hot and crowded on the bus. Well I get off at my stop and my earphone cord is hanging out of my jaket and my pocket is unzipped.....someone stole my ipod. I'm really very angry about it and I think it's b/c I find myself walking around now looking at everyone as a thief. I carry nothing on me now, not books, no electronics, just money to get me where i need to go. I hate that feeling of distrust, but it won't get better for awhile. There are articles in all the papers lately about thieves being bussed into Shenzhen for the up and coming chinese New Year b/c tons of visitors with money will be in the city. Yuck! how crummy is that?!

The twisted part is that i still love it here....does that mean something is wrong with me?

Two weeks until Adam comes.....6 weeks until mum comes and in between that, perhaps a trip to Chengdu for the Chinese New Year. Five more weeks of teaching in this semester. Next week the kiddos are going to LOVE me....I found Home Alone on VCD to show them. They deserve a film....Barbara shows her students films all the time, I never do. Next week, yes, they'll love me. It'll make up for the earsplitting singing I did

On the third week before China Christmas the Foreign Language School Higher-ups Gave to me.......

2005-12-11T06:40:00.000-08:00

......an oscillating Chinese-style mode of heating an apartment.

After freezing for 5 nights in a row in an apt whose temp was down below 50 degrees, I walked in to my bosses office on Wednesday and asked if there was anything he could do to make my apt. a bit warmer (ie a space heater) b/c I was really miserable. I came to school with pantyhose on under my pants and then wool knee socks over my stockings, then a sweatshirt, a fleece, and a north face jacket on top, and mittens. I taught all day long in this apparel b/c classrooms are concrete and not heated. Last week I was confiscating NBA magazines in class, this week, knitting needles, from both boys and girls. So, Thursday I get my heat! It is an oscillating heating fan....basically looks like a cooling fan except it gives off heat reflecting in the form of bright orange light off of a huge silver dish in on the backside. It makes me warm, but I fear this bright orange light is bad for my skin. Friday morning as I watched the news and ate breakfast at 7am, I felt the need to put on my sunglasses, for i fear the light from the fan is too bright and drying to the eyes, hahah. Though, an additional plus is that the orange light kinda feels like the glow of a christmas tree in my living room, makes me feel a little more festive.

Below are random elements from the last week:

The Christmas ornament that I made for Jenny for her Birthday. I finished this last week while huddled under blankets wearing fingerless gloves and wishing that I had finished knitting my hat. I was so cold!
He's a skating penguin. I gave him to my friend and "Chinese Mother" XiaoSha b/c she invites me to her house to eat almost every weekend.

In Kristen's free time she's been doing what? Making ornaments!

I was in charge of making the roll-out sugar cookies ie, I had to use the cane-like stick to roll out dough that did not want to be rolled out. But the result was amazing angel and tree cookies that you'd never ever otherwise get here. The pastry chefs at Meg's school were entralled by our method of cooking (dough mix in a bag). We had to do some improvising.....melting the in metal bowls in the industrial oven, as there wasn't a microwave. We also did not have a proper rolling pin and I had to instruct meagan how to convert farenheight temperatures to celsius by using her cell phone calculater. But....two hours later we had over 150 cookies. Yum Yum, talk about a sugar high.

Meagan, me, Hayley and Patty stopping to pose for a photo as people arrive for the holiday festivities in Longhua. We had carols, we had holiday beverages, we had a gift exchange....we even had a visit from Santa!

Here's the kinds of Christmas decorations that line my city's streets. Here on Hongli Lu is the Christmas Pumpkin! At night is quite an electrified site on the the corner of two bustling streets, however I would have to argue that the two blue monkeys riding on the golden dragon outside of the Hilton by the train station are a slightly cooler holiday decorations than this pumpkin.

December and Hong Kong....just me and 900 million-zillion of my closest tourist pals

2005-12-03T14:26:00.000-08:00

The Christmas tree in Central, complete with guitar-playing mechanical Santas surrounding the base of it.
Here are the ladies looking all perky after realizing that the Starbucks in HK serve Gingerbread Lattes. Caffeinating on the train was the name of the game.

Me and Julia rocking, literally on the Star Ferry...for those prone to seasickness, today was not a day for you to harbour cross on the Star Ferry.

Cute little loquacious boy who sat in front of for the 5 minute harbour crossing.

Mere and Julia aboard the Star Ferry on our way over to Central from Tsim Sha Tsui

Italian Lunch (my first Italian food since July) at Fat Angelo's.

Garden next to the Bank of China Building

Wouldn't it be most amazing to work here and argue against human rights injustices? Give me five years or so........

One of the Ocean Liner's whose port of call is HK. The fruity cruise yuppies disembark and go shopping in Harbour City....men with pink sweaters tied around their necks and women with piles of makeup on. What are they trying to prove?

HK Convention Center. Take note, you'll be seeing a lot of this on the news in the next two weeks with the WTO Conference being held in HK. When they talk of farm subsidies and world price supports, I guarentee good old HK Island will be in the background.

Just a little gander over to the Island side. It has been reallly hazy in this here part of the world recently...no rain. But, it is going to get cold b/c of the monsoon kicking up trouble southwest of us. Bring on the lows in the 40s...without a heater in my apt. i might add. If you don't hear from me at all in the next two weeks it's b/c i'm buried under three thick duvets and hibernating in my bed/

Welcome to HK in the winter my friends. This is me standing along the avenue of the stars in Kowloon. (incidently in this photo I was mere meters from the new bronzy glory of Bruce Lee, the most recent statued addition to the Avenue)

Empty the brain of all things random

2005-11-30T14:08:00.000-08:00

Well folks, it's December in Shenzhen and after 4 months of being away I found myself telling mum today that it's not America that I miss right now, but my family and friends. If I could just sea freight all the people I care about into the PRC, then I'd be just fabulous here indefinetely. I also kinda miss limitless news sources at my fingertips and Crystal Light, but other than that.....

A friend of mine went to Shanghai a couple of weeks ago from Beijing on a business trip and was humbled by the fact that overt censorship was still present. She'd be watching CNN and then the TV would go all blue and silent when EU or US members of parliament/gov't would begin to talk to of the necessary opening up of China and the dreaded word, democratization.

Mum asked me today if I thought that China was going to end up being the feared nation that the US is painting it to be in the next decade or so and even though I remain largely uneducated on the matter, I would hazard to guess that no, it will not pose the threat to world hegemony that the US predicts. I say this for two reasons. Number one: While China is no doubt turning out 6 times more engineers each year compared to the US (350K vs.75K and in that 75K in the US 25K of them are foreign-born) each year which is completely worrisome, the R&D and innovation in the US is unparalled. In America it seems to me that alternative thinking and imagination is praised and even incouraged from a rather young age. Children are taught to put words to their dreams and create stories and build models. This translates, I think, to later in life men and women being great innovators. In China, creativity is not strengthened as a child. You are taught through repetition and copying other's thinking. Thus, the Chinese can become great engineers, but I don't think they are as yet great innovators. I joke that China may be one of the only places in the world where a degree in reverse engineering might actually be an option. B/c if some poor guy spends 9 years creating something groundbreaking in the US or India or wherever, I guarentee some guy sitting in a garage here can take apart said apparatus, put it back together and in three months know how to copy it exactly. I came to this rationalization while teaching middle schoolers here. I highly encourage the use of imagination and creative thought in my classes and finally, after three months, my students get it. They understand that they don't have to stand up in class and give me a response from a book they've read, that they are allowed to let their mind wander and engage the fantastic. My mother then said to me, well if 25K people are coming to America each year to obtain higher education, then they're no doubt coming into contact with great innovators and therefore will learn to become an innovator. I agree with the first part of what she said, that overseas students will be in the presence of innnovation, but I don't think it'll awaken some innate force of innovation inside themselves. I think innovation and the creative mind comes from years of development and 4 years of advanced degree study will not yield the same kind of R&D that 25 years of progressional development will. However I could be wrong; time will tell.
Point Two: Everyone and everything here is too darn disorganized and unplanned for it to be a serious threat to the world at this point. The concept of Nowism would not fly too well for a nation aiming to be a hegemon.

Here's another random observance of mine of recent. I was running the other morning, incidently falling and tearing my sweatpants and doing some serious scraping of one knee was also part of this run, and I run about the time that 500 or so women walk to work in the factories near the highway where I live. They are always very pleasant to me and smile and move aside while I run, however I noticed yesterday their apallingly messy eating habits. Roadside breakfasts are usually baozi of some sort and they're put into little plastic baggies and you eat out of the baggie so your perpetually (and i do mean perpetually) dirty hands dont screw with the sanitation of your breakfast. Well the access road along the highway that I run on has trash cans about every 75 or so meters....very nice...one for recyclables and one for reg. garbage. Well not one of these smiling polite women ever manage to get their bags into the trash. They finish off their breakfast and toss the bag on the ground, or leave it on the chest-high bushes to the right of the pavement. The same happens at lunch with bamboo chopsticks and styrofoam containers. It's a bit disheartening really, no one ever throws anything into the trash can.

On the topics of trash cans, I was talking with my tutor last week about the beggars in the city. I had heard a rumor that all the deformed people asking for money downtown were actually bussed in from far away and that all their money went to a company. John told me that this was true. You may be astonished at the commercialization of begging, but it was the same a decade ago in Jakarta while I was living there. The old women with babies who would tap the windows of vehicles at stoplights in the Jakarta suburbs were part of a large money-making scheme. The old women would rent out the babies from poorer younger women, then proceed to starve the child such that it would elicit more heartache from car passengers and thereby increase the likelihood of giving money. Well here in Shenzhen most of the beggars downtown are deformed...missing arms, legs, many appendages twisted into very unnatural positions etc. They apparently come from two regions of China and bosses will go up there, find people with physical disabilities and bring them to Shenzhen, b/c there is money to be made here. People are rich; they have a greater liklihood of making money here than in some village in the countryside in Central China. Often these bosses will further disfigure the beggars by pouring scalding water on their bodies so they will have pocked and burned skin. They are placed in about 500m increments along the 'beautiful road' that runs through the whole of downtown. I realize that some foreigners here feel very sorry for them and give them money, but you have to understand that the beggars don't get that money...it goes back to the laoban or 'boss' who lurks in the shadows. That money will just finance the bringing of more disfigured people into the city, the laoban don't care whethere these people live or die. If you all saw the scene it would become obvious to that someone works behind the scenes.....how could a man with no legs and only one arm climb up two flights of stairs to lay down at the top of a pedestrain flyover? It's really sad. Sometimes my friend Jesse will give them his baozi if he has extra. At least with food there is a greater chance that it will benefit the beggar and not the boss.

However, there is a rather interesting 'beggar' who literally resides in front of the trash can on either the north side or the south side (depending on the day of the week) of the KeXue Guan metro stop downtown. She sits in front of a trash can from morning till night eating from the trash can. Now I've seen this many other places in Shenzhen, but this women does not look like a beggar....there's not other way to say it but she's fat...therefore she eats...alot...not the mark of a starving homeless person. Every time I walk by the metro stop she is there eating, but she doesn't have a cup for money, so she's not your typical street vagabond. Well I didn't notice this, but friends of mine have....she's a fake beggar. You see, when you pass her you notice that she's only ever eating white rice and the rice is along the front panel of the rubbish bin, not actually touching anything in the garbage....she dumps her own rice into the garbage only to eat it out again herself! It was documented by a friend of mine who saw her open her bookbag and take out a container of rice, dump it in the garbage and slowly feed her and her child. I've seen men with fancy cameras snap photos of her and except for widespread recognition, I'm not entirely sure what she gets out of being the Garbage Can Woman at KeXue Guan stop.

Final odditity for today. I noticed in a class of 30 students yesterday that 21 of them were wearing glasses and the 9 that weren't were sticking their fingers in their eyes (do i know anyone like this CARLY?!) while watching the American Commercials on the overhead that i brought in for a class on Advertising. That seems like a wildly large percentage of people who cannot see, and that class isn't special, it's the norm. The glasses industry here is HUGE! Incidentally, it also seems that every single woman in this country has bangs too.

Oh wait, one more. I was in Wal-Mart two days ago and all their christmas stuff was out and they had Santa hats. I was going to buy one to wear to class this month, but all of them have these stupid blonde braids sewn onto the side. I say stupid for two reasons....did Santa have blond braided hair? and 2.....who in this country actually has natural blonde hair? The workers in the store, men and women alike were all sporting this braid-hats with their naturally black hair sticking out in all directions...ho ho ho...Merry Christmas China!

While you shopped on Black Friday, I saw Jackie Chan!

2005-11-27T20:43:00.000-08:00

That's right folks. For one night and one night only, I was a VIP in China. I, along with 50 of my closest teacher friends were taken to Guangzhou to attend the opening ceremonies of the International Culture and Tourism Festival. We sat in a special section, row 2, yes that close! We travelled to Guangzhou on coaches that were lined up with police escorts on all sides, man I felt important. We had dinner in town and then came the ceremony...think Olympic Games Opening event folks, there were fireworks, there were lion dancers, there was flamenco dancing, there were pop-stars, there were the finalists for the Miss World Model Contest, there were men beating water drums, there were acrobats, there were unbelievably ostentatious costumes......and best of all...there was Jackie Chan! He was wheeled in on a big float and sang a song. It was awesome and totally made my night. So yes, I can truthfully say I live in China and I have seen Jackie Chan. Though, the most entertaining part might have been the giant 150 foot long dragon that shot off fireworks b/c it was being carried by a battallion of fellas wearing....well wearing only little white boxers. I couldn't quite understand it, maybe it was because there were sparks flying everywhere and they wanted the carryers to wear fire-retardant clothing, but one would think they could have made a little more a covering garment with said fire-retardant cloth.

All that for only one cup of coffee?

2005-11-26T12:38:00.000-08:00

I've been rather lazy lately about posting updates on goings on here on this side of the world...many apologies; the creative juices have just not been flowing.

Last Monday night, when we were in the middle of our cold front....the lows were in the upper 50s and highs near 70...I was absolutely freezing and decided I desperately needed to have a cup of coffee. Coffee contains the perfect percentage blend of warmth and caffeine so that I can finish my scholarship essays for law school, you know, to keep the blood flowing in my caffeine system.

Quick aside: you are probably laughing when I say it's cold in Shenzhen knowing full well that i reside just north of the equator, but when you live in an apt. that doesn't have a heater and is covered by stone floors...you'd be surprised at just how chilly it can feel. When the outside temp is 58, my apt. temp is probably no warmer than 60. Thus, I donned sweatpants, a fleece, some snazzy patterned socks with pigs or flamingos and slept under three blankets. Now i've got a huge incentive to finish the hat that I've been knitting; it'd be a great addition to my I'm freezing cold clothes, muhaha. Fortunately for me, it's warmer this week before it turns cold again.

Anyway, back to my coffee. I had been doing the China life (ie street food, noodles, steamed bread, chinese tea) pretty seriously for the past few weeks and so I decided I'd hop a bus downtown to starbucks and not only drink my overpriced yet amazing cup of coffee at said bastion of all things America, but also use their free wireless to research some scholarships as well as reading their free copy of the South China Morning Post. You see, I was going to get my moneys worth out of that $1.25US large cup of coffee (that's completely expensive here...that'd buy me 36 baozi (steamed buns) from my favourite street vendor (on a HUNGRY DAY I could eat 3)).

Once again returning to the point, after classes are over for the afternoon I walk into one of the swanky malls along Shennan road that houses a HagenDaaz (sugary liquid gold to Chinese) and a Starbucks. I order my coffee and oddly enough I have to wait for it longer than the man who smugly ordered a 'zhong bei' cappuccino in front of me (I'm damn convinced that 'midsize cup' is the only thing that man knew how to say in Chinese, besides 'fapiao' or 'receipt' so he could charge it to his corportate expense account).

Apparently not many people order coffee here, b/c the other time I came in to have a cup, they had to make it fresh too...odd. Everyone is too busy drinking Green Tea Frappuccinos or something. As i'm putting in milk and sugar (they import their 2% milk from the US b/c all they have here is whole milk) a man comes up behind me and uses the following astonishingly lame line on me: "excuse me, but I just really must tell you that when you smile, your face has the most breathtaking look." Good thing I wasn't actually drinking my coffee at the time, b/c I would wager a fair bet that I would have spat my coffee all over him, perhaps scarring him beyond recognition. I smiled said thank you for the comment and he continued on his way. However, no sooner I had replaced the lid on my freshly-brewed cup of coffee...but cheesy compliment man was back. He asked if I wished to have my drink with him and his friend who were sitting outside. (By the way, this was not in Chinese, he was a foreigner).

I had come to Starbucks to work, but I don't often talk to forgeiners here and I thought...15 minutes...sure why not. I sit down and learn that the man with the line was Lounis, from Tunisia, and his friend was from Canada. We chatted about life here for awhile and they told me they were both partners in startup joint-venture companies here. Lounis' friend Karim come up a bit later and he joined us. Karim is from Morocco. Thus, besides the fact that the whole scenario began with a horrible pickup line that I am sure Lounis uses on every woman here in Szn, the afternoon was rather pleasant. See, we ended up talking about world politics and it was most interesting. In America it is not often that you get viewpoints from three different enthnicities, rooted around three different religions. We shared stories of childhoods...I at least felt I fit in with Lounis and Karim b/c i grew up in Asia and Europe while Ian....he was a Canadian through and through. We talked about terrorism and Karim told me of a bombing near his home in Casablanca in 2001 that nearly killed his father while he was playing bingo. It was a suicide bomber out to target Muslims. None of these men were self-professed academians, none of them spouted out pompous theoretical matter in order to back up points that were weakly posed. Karim even drew a clever analogy between UAEFA cup footballing in Europe and terrorists and suicide bombers, truly priceless. An older man from England joined us later and put in his two cents on world politics. While I did not use the free wireless, nor did I read the free newspaper, my $1.25 spent on coffee that afternoon was more than recouped via enlightening conversation. Plus, each of the fellas proposed to me at least once during it all. Boys....

Were you mugged or was your wallet stolen?

2005-11-25T05:38:00.000-08:00

Happy Black Friday. While all of America parttakes in what is called the biggest shopping day of the year, but in truth really isn't (december 20-24 usually owns the true biggest shopping day) I will be teaching and attending the opening ceremonies of the Chinese International Culture Festival in Guangzhou this evening. I am a guest of the education bureau and my colleagues and I will be accompanied by police escorts to Guangzhou. This makes me feel rather superficially important.

This last week in has been rather action-packed, beginning with the events that unfolded on Friday-Saturday. First you must think, which is worce, to be mugged or to have your purse stolen? In actual fact, the two have the same meaning, but for some reason here in China, people say "oh, you've had your purse stolen" while in New York for example, you would say, "I was mugged." On Friday, three friends and I went to Bao'an (one of the 6 districts in Szn, but it is one of the two which lies outside the SEZ (Special Economic Zone)) to visit Meredith for the night and stay at her school. Friday was quite a bit of fun, when we got to her busstop, we all took motorcycle rides to her school which was about 1km away down a desolate road. That was only the second time in my life that I had ridden on one, the first being with my dad in Phuket when I was about 12. We then were invited to a dinner by her headmaster and vice principals which was very kind of them, but also rather strange as it was 4 twenty-something girls and 4 forty-something fellas at this dinner. They all just assumed that we all didn't speak Chinese b/c Meredith doesn't, so while they were chattering away about us on the other side of the table, I was the fly-on-the-wall and proceeded to tell the ladies what the guys were saying. For some reason Chinese people are obsessed with talking about my "gao bizi" or "pointy nose." They got a lot of time and mileage out of that one, yeesh. We spent the rest of the evening wandering down a local shopping street. It was hilarious; our mission for the evening was for everyone to buy something for under 10 kuai (1.25). We were getting close to the end of the street and only meredith had found a 5 kuai shirt....honestly at that point I couldn't see myself coughing up even 60cents for a shirt that I could have made with a Bedazzler when I was 6 years old. But....we happened upon a 5 kuai bin of shirts that was filled with cotton tshirts with a mushroom applique in the left corner. We decided that each of us needed one in a different color and here was the criteria for the winning shirts: find the ones with the fewest stains and the least amount of snags and holes! Ha, have you ever decided upon shopping goods that way? Thus, 10 minutes later we were each in possession of a holey-moldy-mushroom shirt that each of us willingly sported while playing euchre and choking down 1 gross bottle of chinese beer between the four of us and the outside "jungle bar" by Mere's school.

After promptly falling asleep at midnight due to exhaustion, we awoke by 9:30 Saturday morning and were ready for the highlight of out trip: a 10kuai hair wash at Mere's local salon. It was lovely, for one hour I got a scalp massage, back massage, and they even loosened the joints in my arms (think made them tingle to the point where I couldn't feel them). On our way out to the busstop from the local market street afterward was when our perfect weekend turned into the worst weekend. The four of us were walking one direction and apparently 2 men came up behind us on a motorcycle, slashed jenny's purse strap with a knife, yanked it from her and drove off. They were too far away for mere and I to run and catch them. I yelled at a police officer across the street and said in chinese "look, the thief took her purse" and I pointed to the direction they went, but the officer did nothing, just continued peddling on the bike in the opposite direction. I couldn't believe it, hundreds of people saw what happened and yet did nothing! Jenny was beyond distraught and rightly so. The thieves had cut her under her arm while stealing the bag and she was bleeding and they also had stolen quite the loot. She had 800kuai, a US$750 camera and a bank card in her purse. Julia and I got Jenny on the bus and we headed home, while meredith headed back to her school.

I got a call later that afternoon from Mere telling me that as she was walking home, Aaron (her boyfriend who is with here here) called and she pulled out her cell phone and as she did so, another man on a motorcycle zoome by and grabbed her purse. Luckily since emotions were already running rather high due to the previous incident, she flipped out, yanked the purse back and started screaming, so the man just drove off without the purse.

What a saturday. So, my best friend here had her purse stolen, but if that had happened in NY, you all would have called it a mugging. It's the same thing, however stealing here happens much much much more often. Jenny was lucky not to have been hurt. Over the last week I have heard other more unfortunate theft stories like where motorcyle thieves don't actually cleanly cut the purse away from the victim and the person is actually dragged behind the motorcycle for hundreds of meters until the strap or purse actually breaks. Pretty bad huh.

Basic chinese policy is to mind your own business. This translates into watching people get stolen from and do nothing about it. My tutor John told me on Wednesday that last week he prevented a little child thief from stealing a women's wallet at a downtown busstop, and pretty much everyone at the stop scorned him afterward for getting involved in business that was not his own. I found this interesting, b/c john paints shenzhen people as people who keep to themselves and mind their own business and yet as I walk down any road in china, I can hear people talking about me, I can see men who ride their bikes into tree trunks b/c their head is screwed so far backward b/c they're staring at me. Thus, I have yet to marry these two forms of thinking. Time will I suppose.

Toasters, Regulations and Cooking a Gorilla

2005-11-15T19:53:00.000-08:00

Ooof, it's been awhile, but alas I am back....and not really ladden with any comical stories of the present. Unless......you find it funny to be 'taught' how to do things by 12-15 year olds as I chose to do for English class last week. It was their midterm prep week and I wanted it to be light-hearted, so the gist of the lesson was that the students had to break into groups and teach the class how to do something. We practiced with "how to make rice." They told me step by step how to make the rice....elementary level classes told me to 'fire the rice' instead of heat it in the cooker, while the advanced classes told me how to first plant and harvest the rice. The presentations of teaching were priceless...among the mundane How to make a cake and how to plant a tree (in their english book) were splendid presentations on How to capture and cook a gorilla, How to ride an eleophant in the city, How to cheat on an exam, How to copy homework, How to rob a bank (complete with ladies stockings to be worn over your face to shield your identity), and my favourite....how to kidnap an airplane. Now, before you get all worried about terrorism, it was all in good fun. There were four funny guys in that group and they claimed that in order to properly procure said plane, you would need a thin man, a fat man, a short man and a tall man (coincidence....these 4 boys fit the bill just right). The fat man would drive the plane, the tall man would scare the people, the short man would play with the children so they wouldn't be afraid and start crying and my favourite....the thin man would count the money and drink the coffee. I encourage the use of imagination in my class....otherwise i'd die listening to 16 classes all teaching me how to plant trees. They got the biggest yuck out of me sitting at one of their desks while others presented. I pretended to be an annoying american student waving my hand really high and back and forth and yelling 'teacher teacher teacher, i have a QUESTION!' I'd make the 'teacher' call on me, then he'd make me stand up and I'd ask some stupid question pertinent to what they were teaching, just to make sure the actually understood what they were saying and weren't just reading someone else's words. It's coming back to haunt me though....my students now wave their hands furiously and exclaim.."TEACHER TEACHEr, I have a question!" So long as their not shouting though, I welcome an inquisitive nature, even if they're really just secretively making fun of me.

This week I've started teaching a class on Celebrity TV interviews.....we all watched students pretend to be everyone from Yang Liwei (first Chinese astronaut) to Eminem, to Lei feng (product of propaganda in the early 20th century) to Bruce Lee. It was great. My students are finally relaxing and talking more freely in class...without chaos ensuing.

Random thought.....I think I've figured out the key difference between China and Hong Kong...Imperialism struck the territory (i.e. the formidable British in the 19th century) and basically punished people for breaking rules, hence....order! Thus the main disjunct between HK and China....besides a lack of business regulation on the part of the Chinese, is that there is order in HK. People stop at cross walks and wait for the little green man before crossing the street, people line up on the right side of the elevators to let people pass on the left, heck....people actually form lines, people follow rules printed on signs. In China, if a sign says there is no spitting or public urination, i gaurentee that aforementioned sign is peed and spit on daily, thereby fully neglecting the importance of printed rules. Ha. Back to crossing the street. I was walking across Dongmen Lu the other day (main shopping road in the city), and around 4 in the afternoon, gov't appointed traffic assisters come out to make sure that pedestrians are following the traffic patterns. This is actually useful, b/c when 1000 people are trying to cross the street at once, as well as 1000s of cars going all directions, chaos can ensue, mainly b/c daring pedestrians try to cross when the little man isn't green. Well public safety man gets a red vest (think Wal-mart blue vest, only in this case..it's red) and a whistle and his job is to whistle at people to deter them from illegally walking across the street at the wrong time. On this particular afternoon, a daring man on a Flying Bird bicycle crosses the street at the wrong time and turns a deaf ear to 4 traffic men and their whistles. When he gets to my side of the road, traffic man is waiting for him, grabs his bike and gets ready to send him to the policeman standing behind me to get a ticket or something. Well the dude on the bike has a girl sitting on the back and she promptly bolts down the street. The man then begins to verbally assault the red-vested whistler, and when he does not let go of the bike, bike man punches red-vest man in the face. A full on brawl breaks out, and everyone just watches; such is the mentality here. People just watch others be pick-pocketed and i'm sure are just silently thanking god that they weren't the one being pickpocketed....in this case everyone was thinking that were lucky that the cops didn't catch them.

I bought the most amazing addition to my apartment yesterday. I went to meet a friend for dinner and procure a toaster. This toaster is the best use of US$7 ever! It's waaay cute...white and green, and it makes toast. That was a key part. The only problem here is that bread is very large and square (comes in bags of 8 large square slices) and thus when I pull the lever down to begin the magical toasting process....about 1.5 inches of the bread sticks out of the toaster....so a little 180 degree bread rotation is necessary mid-toasting. However, despite the extra work, the toast and jam is amazing.

Oh and for the most random element of the last two weeks.....no I haven't found a job yet...but...for all of you who think Customs officials are scary and official and have power to keep you in and out of particular countries.....just learn the native language..apparently that's the way to their heart. On my way back from HK last Thursday I wrote my address in chinese on my arrival card as sort of a knee-jerk rx..i'm not sure how to write it in english to be honest. The customs officer reads it aloud and then I tell him that's right, that I am a teacher at the school next door to my building and that I was in HK b/c my students have midterm exams. Well that sent his eyeballs out to Jupiter and back...what?!?!!!! the blonde speaks Chinese? So then he, the customs officer...highest upholder of the Chinese law, asks me for my phone number. I told him i didn't know it...like hell I want to give out my number to a stranger, let alone someone who could change my address to "cell 2 Chinese Jail" at will. Then he asked me for my address. I played stupid foreigner and told him i didn't understand. He was very persistent. What is the world coming to? Last time I left the country the customs man didn't believe my passport photo bore any resemblence to the actual me...this time he asks me out. Strange!

The temperature dropped 30 degrees today...it was 65 and raining, completely depressing. Can it really be the middle of November already?

Paper Hats, Pearls and Parties

2005-11-01T21:32:00.000-08:00

Mere, Me and Jenny at the beginning of our evening.

Awwww, these witches don't look scary at all

Beijing teacher partners reunite.....Tom was off-duty by this point...no giving out citations.

Tom and Mike being off-duty PSB men at this point...totally stealing the party

My three favorite Shenzhen ladies....Jenny, Julia and Meredith looking mighty snazzy in black .

Fellow WashU Alum and Beijing Summer 2004 friend Melanie and I. Wasn't she the most perfect Corpse bride ever? I think so .

Tyler being a rocker....after a hard day of attempting to "Rock it" on the tennis court with me....we failed. And Chris, who claimed to be someone from the Big Lebowsky...but I've never seen it...I'll take his word on that.

Andrew in his most clever costume of Chinese Calligraphy...minus the imperative mop at this point in the evening.

Julia, Meagan and I all in black and all different characters....gotta love the chopstick cigarette...and LOVE how all my friends are soooooo much shorter than me, ha. Look Dawn couldn't even fit my head in the pic.....it's almost as if my mom was taking the photo...she used to do that to dad in photos all the time :-)

After a week of playing Monster Mash, doing crossword puzzles with words like eerie and coffin, creating pretend Costume Shops that inevitably all sold Harry Potter costumes (you must all know that ALL Chinese middle school students are totally over the moon with some element of the movies and books...oh yeah as well as the NBA) and accidently pelting tons of kids with candy due to poor aim....the weekend before Halloween finally arrived. So what, you say? You're living in a non-western country where peoples don't celebrate Halloween you say? Well to you all, I say HA. Saturday, there were Halloween parties to be visited. But let me back up to earlier in the week.

About Tuesday I received and email from a friend of mine here asking if I'd be interested in playing in a tennis tournament in town sponsored by the Futian Municial Gov't. I laughed and responded that if it were for fun, and if someone would lend me a racket, sure I would play. Well, I got a call from my director on Thursday saying she'd worked out the racket issue and that Tyler and I were going to play mixed doubles on Saturday and Sunday. I'm thinking sure....I've never played mixed doubles, and hey, I've played tennis twice in 4 years since Varsity in high school....this'll be fun. And oh it was, it so was. But that doesn't overshadow the fact that for the first six games we played (and lost) I sucked! But Tyler, being a nice, polite partner (or just versed in the philosophy that if you berate the person you're playing with, only bad things will happen) was very encouraging and by our second match we had gotten into a rythmn and darnit....we almost won our third match...we were getting good and I was hitting that ball like i was back in hs in England. The funny part of it all was realizing that really Tyler and I weren't playing two players on the opposite side of our net....Mr. Opponent would stop at NOTHING to make sure that Mrs. Opponent never touched the ball. Mr. Opponent would fly, leap, bound, hurdle and dive if necessary his way 40 feet cross-court to take a shot that would have been mere inches from Mrs. Opponent. Then whenever Mrs. Opponent would miss her Drop-serve (for all you not in the know, this is an underhand, technically illegal, dinky, get the ball in play serve), Mr. Opponent would yell, point, and stop match play to give his poor wife a lesson in serving underhand.

After all this festive atmosphere on Saturday, I found myself dealing with the fact that it was already 7:45pm by the time I got all the way back to my apt. Part of me just wanted to shower and call it a night, but it isn't often that I have the opportunity to celebrate Halloween, so I showered and got dressed and became the world's tallest and blondest rendition of Audrey Hepburn. The most daunting part of the evening by far was walking out of my building, dressed in a black dress, hair piled high on my head, pearls around the neck, Huge black sunglasses perched on my head, and a chopstick make black by a permament marker that doubled as Audrey's famous long cigarette holder.....and having to board a city bus. Now I normally get stares when I ride the bus, no big deal. But this time, it was fixation, wonderment, astonishment, sheer perpextion....what was this chick doing? Then I got off the bus, boarded the Subway at 9:30 at night and the same thing happened, there was even a clever little kid jumping up and down behind me trying to 'be as tall as me.' Once I met up with my friends at a pizza place, I felt much better...i was in the company of witches, cats, goblins, and a favorite...the PSB Men (my two friends who dressed as Public Security Bureau peoples)....when I got the restaurant i originally thought my friends were just chilling with two cops at their table. They sure had me fooled. But the all-time best costume went to my friend Andrew; he was Chinese Calligraphy. He dressed all in black, including a pair of pantyhose on his head with the empty leg parts hanging down. Now he had a mop, that he taped into the shape of a paintbrush and drawn a black tip on it like it was a chinese paint brush and then he'd give it to someone and told them to wave it and then he'd move his body into shapes of chinese characters (this is where the pantyhose come in handy...they served as extra appendages for characters). I really was oh so ingenious....it won him a prize at the costume contest.

The party itself was really fun.....Ibiza was completely packed full of costumed people...from sunflowers all the way right down to a guy who looked like he should be KGB, but was dressed in a Red Guard outfit. Finally around 3 I made it home...to the questioning looks of the security guard in my neighborhood...I'm sure it's b/c everytime I walked past her that day, I was dressed totally differently. At 9am I passed her in Pjs going to the corner baozi (bread dumpling) lady to get breakfast....at noon I passed her in tennis clothes....at 9pm I passed her dressed like a million bucks...no wonder she was confused.

The weather has finally gotten cool here and this week I'm teaching the kiddos about News and Newspapers and I'm teaching them to fold newspaper hats and forcing them all to wear them in class....This only works if I sport my own paper pirate hat...essentially I get to look like an idiot for one week. I was walking between classes with the hat on and one of my students, Sphere, came by and said...."OOOOOh Ms. Nelson, so beautiful"....I really need to work on increasing their vocabulary....b/c there is no way that darn paper hat was beautiful. Then as i'm walking around the classroom yesterday soliciting responses to what I might find in a Features section of the paper, the Principal walks by the classroom, reverses and looks a my powerpoint and my stupid hat and the stupid hats on all the kids, and walks by again i think laughing at me. I hope he was laughing all in good spirit...and not because I'm an idiot teacher.

The first four classes I did it with got pieces of newspaper that I had in my apt...it happened to be the copy of the South China Morning Post from HK. They didn't want to fold it..they just wanted to keep it to read b/c there isn't really an English anything here...no books, and only one rinkydink english paper that is printed on tabloid-size paper. But I made them fold it into a hat nonetheless and wear it. I told them it would make 'em all more clever (they love this word in china...smart means nothing....clever means everything). I'm sure they all unfolded the hats and kept the paper afterward....except for the 3 or 4 delinquents who decided to make wadded paper balls and airplanes out of their hats..and for them I just took the newspaper away.

The kiddos have midterms next week and there's a 50/50 chance that during that time i'll get to go up to Beijing to visit some friends, otherwise, barring an outbreak of H5N1 here on the Mainland, I will be in HK for a few day trips....though maybe I ought to aim to be on the HK side of the border when they finally admit to having the virus on the Mainland....It's totallly a call of which side of the border I want to be sealed on...HK or China. Hmmm decisions, decisions.

Yup...It's my ultimate dream city

2005-10-25T17:53:00.000-07:00

Hong Kong island as viewed from the Star Ferry
The Star Ferry....the most picturesque 10-minute crossing between Kowloon and HK Island
Busy busy.....it's not just me that loves HK....look at all of these peoples!
Me and Jenny on the Star Ferry looking all fresh and ready for adventure.....12 hours later we would look much more tired, and yet totally content with our first of many HK Saturdays (the first picture was zoomed waaaay in and only got our nostrils, but alas I am getting better at this 'taking pictures of myself' type photography)

Hmmm, so it's been awhile since I've posted.....what has been going on? Well....it is the week before Halloween in Shenzhen and you must know what that means...Halloween lessons for the kiddos...ergo...I go to class armed with A) music such as the theme to Ghostbusters and the Monster Mash, B) pictures of crazy foreigners in costumes like Genie from Aladdin or Elvis or a Pirate girl...even costumes for dogs...zorro dog, cowboy etc. C)worksheets with Halloween vocabulary and most importantly D) CANDY and voila! the week is destined to go well. I've been using the second half of all of my classes to have my students make up their own Halloween costume shops replete with name, goods, prices and a drawing of their best-selling product. The boys seem to think that "rubbish shop" or "rubbish clothes" are terribly appropriate for Halloween. I even had some clever girls make up an edible costume shop where the blood is spaghetti sauce, hair is made of liver, and a ghost costume is made entirely of meat....creative but ultimately....gross.

Life in Shenzhen is at a lull right now....November is nearing, the weather is cooling, students are prepping for midterms. Everything seems pretty routine, until........

I added Hong Kong to the mix. I know know exactly where I want to live after I finish law school. See, Hong Kong is a blend of my two favourite aspects of the world: London and the East. Hong Kong is essentially the eastern version of London and I love it I love it I love it. In Shenzhen, no one offers you help, in fact, you're much more likely to get spat upon than to ever get help from anyone. But in Hong Kong, the two times that Jenny and I pulled out my map to figure out how to get to our next destination....people promptly came up to us and asked us how they could help. And these weren't foreigners, they were Hong Kong people....so wonderful. And while i'm on the topic of foreigners, for the first time since Beijing, I wasn't stared at all day long, in fact I wasn't stared at all b/c there are people from literally all over the world living in HK. In addition, not everyone there is aenorexic looking like they are in Shenzhen, people actually come in all shapes and sizes, lovely! Plus....I swear that everyone in HK is gorgeous...maybe the friendly demeanor heightens this plausibility, but seriously, compared with Shenzhen...oh wait, you can't compare. In Hong Kong you can buy diet 7up....amazing. In fact, for prices slightly less than what they are in the US, you can get pretty much anything western....which is cool. However, since I'm paid in Chinese rmb....I feel very poor in HK. Also....they've got English bookshops, with English newspapers and magazines....it was like Christmas taking the South China Morning Post and the latest copy of the Economist back with me across the border.

Speaking of the border....I went through customs and immigration twice in one day in order to get in and out of HK. On my way out of China and into HK, the immigration officer didn't think I was me, and had his friend come look at my passport, made me sign my name twice...it was kinda funny b/c that's never happened before. My day trip into HK added 6, yes 6 passport stamps into my passport....no wonder people have to get additional pages in their passports so often here. It's actually not all that pricey to actually get onto HK Island from China. It's about $33HK which is a little less tha $4.50 each way on the lightrail. It takes about 35 minutes once you cross the border to get into Kowloon. The border crossing is what takes time....maybe 45 minutes or so, b/c you have to a) leave China and then b) enter HK.

Jenny and I just spent the day poking about Central and Causeway Bay on Hong Kong Island, really just trying to get our bearings. We joked that we were seeing HK 'one bookstore at a time' b/c our English word-starved brains were craving new books and we thus sought out 3 or 4 different bookstores in our 12 hour day on the island. We also went to Victoria Park...where all big things public happen, and rode the Star ferry across the harbour from Kowloon. Unfortunately the day was hazy and so pictures, the few I took, came out terribly sub-par. We decided to save the trip up Victoria's Peak for another weekend b/c of the haze. Never fear.....if I can be frugal during the week....there will be many, many, more trips to HK. Especially since you can buy cheese there, and cheese in my favorite form...with tomatoes and basil on a baguette...mmmmmmm, yum. Plus there are limitless museums to see, and even some very interesting sounding temples.

In short....if anyone can procure me a job in HK for the indefinite future; I would love you forever and ever.

Say "Qiezi"

2005-10-16T19:02:00.000-07:00

This picture is from our last day at Beida (Beijing University). Meredith and I were wanted for photos by the lake.....the children were soooo adorable. In China, you don't say 'cheese' when you're about to have a photo...you say 'qiezi' which sounds like 'chee-aaaaa-zuh' which is eggplant in Chinese. Awesome.

It was the cheese, the violins, the bargaining for the mini-bus....that's how I fell in love

2005-10-09T20:40:00.000-07:00

Gorgeous and serene Huating Temple. If I ever decide to become a monk, you'll find me here.

Sword Peak Pond in the Stone Forest
After dark the Stone Forest is more like an Enchanted Forest. We stopped at the top here to play a round of Euchre and enjoy the scenery.
The cradle of life, ha, no not really. This is in the Stone Forest. We crawled on our hands and knees over precarious high rock passes to get to this 'secret' spot that few others know of. However we had to wait our turn to get photos, as we began to realize that it wasn't so secret, just dangerous and dangerous doesn't deter many apparently.

Here is me on the Heavenly Platform....carved into a mountain and most precarioulsy perched over Dianchi lake, a lake that looks lovely until the sun shines upon it and then it bears an uncanny resemblance to a nuclear waste dump with its radioactive green color. Oh yeah and just to my left was a clever little girl who dropped her pants and pooped in the corner.....yes, that is very typical 'round here.

The night we learned to play euchre....oh yeah and the night I learned to eat sunflower seeds (but I refuse to crack them in my mouth, and really they're too much work to be worth eating....but at the Western Hills, there were vendors selling the whole sunflower top with the seeds in it, so if you're in to the sunflower seed deal and really like the prospect of fresh off the flower seeds, then you had better hop on over to China quick)

The East Pagoda....we later found the West Pagoda to be more beautiful, despite what our trusty Lonely Planet Guide had to say.

Our two-story garage restaurant
The infamous goat-cheese that we ooooooed and ahhhhhhed over

Hmmmk. It's Sunday night and I've just gotten through teaching both weekend days and I've got five more weekdays to go before I get another break....holidays don't come pain-free around here. But I might reiterate that Kunming was more than worth a little 7-day work week pain. What's so great about Kunming?
1) It's the city of Eternal Spring - what cannot be great about that? 65 degree days and 50 degree nights....that's 30 whole degrees cooler than the sauna I am living in now.

2) The people. Everyone was just downright pleasant in Kunming. We walked down the street one morning and an old man was pedaling a bicycle down the road with his wife in a side-car attached to the bike. How often does that happen anywhere else? What about a man pedaling down the road with a bunch of about 100 balloons trailing behind him on his bike? If you want one, just flag him down. Shoe shiners set up work on street corners, next to men who make fresh kettle corn, who park next to the peoples making satay and fried tofu, and steamed yams, and boiled corn. Then at night a particular group of men come out with their special granola to sell, that is truly irresistible. Then after you've had enough food.....men on street corners make animals out of banana leaves to buy for 60 cents.

3) I was obsessed with churches when we lived in London; here I am in love with temples. The fact that there are temples means that there is religion in Kunming...not so much so in Shenzhen. We must have seen four or five temples during our short stay in Kunming, and while I loved them all....I fell in love with one. Huating temple, about half way down the Western Hills Mountain was the most beautiful temple I have ever seen. It was absolutely serene....carved into a crevice in the mountain, impeccably well-kept....it was perfect. There were six or seven buildings that surrounded a little pond where fish swam and turtles...well they sunbathed. It almost made me want to live in solitude right there with the monks for awhile...think about how many books I could read, or scarves I could knit :-)

4) Speaking of books.....we went to a most excellent English book store in the university district. In the Let's Go guidebook it was written up as the "most eclectic" variety of books you'll ever find in China and the shop didn't disappoint. After me having asked two different chinese people to direct us to the particular road....we found it. On the second floor of a tiny shop, English books, both old and new, fiction and non-fiction, classics and self-help, were stacked from floor to ceiling. It was amazing. The books were priced relatively close to their US price, as they were imported, but I found them all compelling enough to but two...and let me tell ya, it was hard to narrow it down. Henry James and Hua Guixin won out in the end, the latter actually being a banned book in this country.

5) Green Jade Lake Park was magnificant. Okay, there might be parks as beautiful in Europe or America, but the park "culture" was unparalleled. On this particular Saturday, in addition to other touristy people and families etc, there were violin players, erhu players (two-string intrstrument), ballroom dancers, multiple pagodas by the lakes filled with impromptu opera singing groups, fish feeding frenzies, children chasing bubbles blown by parents, and some serious games of majon going on. It was a captivating experience no doubt.

6) Where else in the world can intructions like "take the number 6 bus to the end of the line, switch to the 5, take it to the end, get out and catch a minibus" lead to a monumental adventure? This was how we got to the bamboo temple. As soon as we got off that #5 bus, we were bombarded with ladies holding signs with various locations listed in Chinese. Luckily I had looked up the words we needed for the temple and was able to negotiate with a lady in a Little House on the Prarie-type bonnet. She and her husband agreed to drive us the 30 minutes there, wait for us and then take us home for 50 kuai......about 4.50. We figured that was a bit steep...but it looked like it was about to rain and we didn't want to risk being at the bamboo temple indefinetly. The return back to the #5 bus lot proved wonderful too...I got one of the tastiest baozi (bread dumpling) for lunch that I have ever had....all for the pricey total of 7 cents...can't beat that. I also bought some delicious apples.

7) Cheese takes on a whole new meaning in this city. In China....cheese is really not a common commodity..actually in Shenzhen it really can't be found in the store unless you want to buy imported stuff. But....in Kunming they are known for Ru bing, or goat cheese. Man is it tastey. So tastey that the two-story garage restaurant by the eclectic book shop was visited by us twice while we were in the city b/c it's fried goat cheese and stir-fried beef was sooooo good. Mmmm. The first time we ate outside..the second time, we were ushered to the second story of the garage where I had to duck up the stairs and duck to get to our midget-sized table. We were served tea in tin cups....think what prisoners clank on the bars when they want to be served their food :-)

8) I learned to play Euchre. One night, while we drank our case of Snow beer under an umbrella-ed table by the river, while we no doubt entertained all Chinese parties around us, Tim taught us ladies how to play Euchre...and it was all downhill from there. From then on, whenever there was an idle moment, whether it was in our hostel room, or at the Stone forest sitting amongst enchanted trees after dark, or on the train bunks on our way back to Shenzhen....we were playing Euchre. I cannot say that I have any skill, but what I lack in skill I make up for in enthusiam. I think Jenny and I are addicts now, and we made Julia play, b/c four people is compulsory for the game to work....I don't think she shares our crazy passion.

9) The Stone Forest was way more than just a rock garden.....it was downright beautiful. Us ladies found ourselves chasing after Tim all afternoon as we climbed up countless stairs, climbed down into secret passages and took sport in getting lost over and over again.

.....basically I cannot put into words what I beautiful and perfect place this is. Anyone reading this really just needs to see it for themselves...and quick!

*More pictures to come...the ones above are truly random..but blogspot is being difficult at the moment.

Do you believe in love at first sight......for a city???

2005-10-07T19:09:00.000-07:00

Hmmm, so in the past when I said that "I love China" I really had no idea how much more I could love China. what this past week in Kunming taught me is that I do not love Shenzhen, but I love China and especially the China that is reflected in the city of Kunming. Friday Sept. 30 I sprinted out of the gates of school after a confusing morning of where I was told another teacher would pick up my last classes because I taught 2 full 60 person classes in the morning due to lack of a spare room to split the classes, only one foreign teacher was needed per class. Well in paranoid Kristen fashion, I waited around until the last classes were to start to make sure Barbara showed up in the room as discussed to teach the students. I waited and even after the final bell had rung, she wasn't there. Thus, even though my brain had already departed from work mode and was sailing into vacation mode, I taught two more classes, as per usual.

I then ran home just before noon, jumped into my jeans, tied my sweatshirt around my waist, picked up my hiking backpack and set off for downtown to complete my mission of procuring the last missing piece of my vacation necessities.....the passport. Yes I realize this is an incredibly tight time frame, but there was no other way. The Bureau had only returned the passports on Thursday and I could not go and pick them up that afternoon b/c I had a 'surprise' English Corner that never actually took place, funny how that works, TIC. Hmm, so I get on the bus, hop off downtown, walk 25 minutes (closest bus stop) to where we meet for Chinese class on Fridays and pick up the passports of the 4 members of the Kunming travelling group aka the smartest people in the world b/c we picked the best city in the world to travel to. At this point I was sweating b/c I was wearing 100 times too many clothes for 95 degree weather, but this was how I needed to dress for the forthcoming city....plus I didn't have room in my backpack for jeans and a sweatshirt. It was really a matter of space. I raced back down to the main downtown street, hopped on a subway and headed out west to meet Jenny, Julia and Tim by 2:30. We then caught a bus from Windows of the World (Epcot Center-like theme park in Nanshan) up to Bao'an district, where the airport is. We arrived in plenty of time. In fact, we couldn't even check in yet. That gave us plenty of time to procure a snack...for Jenny and me it was a Diet Coke and Mentos (my new sin of the moment....they're sooo addictive...esp. the red-orange kind).

When we finally got up to the counter, people were shoving in front of us, apparently we were throwing enough elbows. The man at the ticket counter couldn't find Tim or Julia's reservation and so all four of us were pointed over to another counter. Minor panic among us ensues.....we just want out of town...yeesh! After talking to another lady it is found that their names were put in backwards and the man was looking up their first name and not their last. It was all straigthened out, but it led me to think....what kind of nut job is working at the counter such that he doesn't think to try flipping the name order around, esp. when we had paper tickets and proof of reservation. Hmm, whatever. The Shenzhen airport is rather nice and I was surprised to learn that South Eastern China Airlines actually flies to Paris from Shenzhen. The flight was really one of my most pleasant flying experiences I think I've ever had, and I'm honestly not exaggerating. The plane was well kept, instructions were in english and chinese, the dinner served was actually much better than what i am served at school....what more could I have asked for? Nothing you say? Oh but there was more. When we were about to land, the flight cadets (that's what they're called here) passed out free duffel/shoulder bags with the airline logo on them. These were perfect, I mean totally perfect for us psuedo-backpackers, who by the end of the week had acquired more stuff than we had space for. Thus, last night on the train home from Guangzhou, four tired, slightly dirty (30 hour trains will do that) foreign teachers could be found toting the Eastern China Airlines bag. Even more funny was that the fellow in the bunk across from me on the from Kunming to Guangzhou had the very same airline bag with him.

Ok, back to the beginning of the trip. Upon arrival in Kunming we had to shove our way through the arrival hall and the people who thought it appropriate to walk -2 miles/hr in a zigzag fashion out of the airport and hold up all pedestrian traffic. The taxi driver understood my Chinese and in a mere 10 minutes we were at our hostel, which was attached to a hotel. The hostel was actually wonderful. The bunk beds were far better than anything I had at boarding school and except for the hard mattress would have been better than the ones in college. They were even extra long. So, for a mere $3.50 each per night, we had a room for four to ourselves for as long as we wanted. The showers we hot, there was even a dryer attached to the washing machine...and all the ladies working there spoke English. It was a huge backpackers hostel and while some were nice, there seems in general to be a mutual disdain between foreigners in China. It's like I should be the only one travelling in this country, not you. Haha, oh well. We live here. They don't. Oh back to the dryer comment. Julia and Jenny and I almost paid the 2kuai to wash our pants b/c in Shenzhen there is no way to shrink pants back into shape, everything is washed in cold water and hang-dried....thus pants and jeans just keep expanding and stop fitting. I think we ultimately forgot about that initial thought as we were enthralled immediately with the city.

As soon as we stepped off of the plane and onto the tarmac, we knew there was something wonderful about this city in Yunnan. The air was cool and crisp. Tim had made the thoughtful point that there is something great about not walking on a gateway to the airport and instead actually walking and placing your feet on the tarmac after getting off of the plane.....it makes you feel comfortable with the place you're visiting.

That first night, even though it was 9:30, we were all eager to explore. Since we were staying downtown, we decided to peruse the streets a bit. I was immediately struck by a huge difference between Shenzhen and Kunming. In Kunming there was a generation spread. There are old people in Kunming, and I don't mean people who would just qualify for AARP, but I mean 85, 90 year old couples walking around with the most pleasant of expressions on their faces. In Shenzhen, everyone is young....it's a city devoid of old people. In the parks at night in Kunming, people go dancing. There were vendors pushing carts of food standing at every corner. One could buy satay, fried potatoes, roasted sweet potatoes, peeled youzi, kettle corn, boiled corn and fried tofu from vendors near the park or the river that ran parallel to Qingnian road (yes we got to know all the streets of downtown in a mere matter of hours). As we walked along the river we saw little bars with groups of people huddled around umbrella-ed tables, drinking beer and playing cars. We vowed to do the same one of the nights we were there. In one of the parks, fountains were lit up with magnificant green lights. It took us all, oh maybe 20 minutes to fall head over heels for this southwestern China city.

....and after a week, the feeling didn't change. More to come.

Do you like "Ancient" Music?

2005-09-29T19:56:00.000-07:00

hmmmm, so after hearing from everyone, and their mother, or was it my mother, that I haven't updated my blog in eons, I am back to do the cursory news overview before I head on my way to Kunming. I am on holiday for 7 days....yes in China, they don't give you the two weekends flanking the holiday week off...you only get one. So in fine eastern style I will be back at work on Saturday October 8th to begin a seven-day work week wooohooo. When I inquired of my contact teacher, whether I needed to be back by the Saturday, he said "why Kristen, we do not work on Saturdays and Sundays, that is the weekend!" and so I responded, "ok Mr. Yang, so you mean that I do not have to be back to teach until October 10th?" and he said, "no Kristen, we will see you on the 8th." For all you calender-challenged, the 8th is Saturday. At that point I was unsure that this whole conversation hinged upon misunderstandings of language....I really think he was just trying to make the whole holiday concept seem better or something.

I am teaching my junior3s about music this week and today (Thursday) and I learned (after teaching 4 other classes the same lesson earlier in the week and having them tell me that I'm weird) that when I say I love country music, my students took that to mean I love Chinese country music which can basically be likened to how a cat sounds if he were to die hung upsidedown via toenail extraction. But when I started giving them samples of different music in class today, they understood what "I" meant by Country....they call it Cowboy music. I was the world's most popular teacher this afternoon for using a clip of the Backstreet Boys "Incomplete" song for the example of pop music, b/c that CD hasn't actually come out here yet. A couple students asked me where i bought the CD b/c they want it and they cannot find it anywhere. By the way, these were all boys that asked me for the Backstreet Boys CD. Then I had to explain 'Oldies' b/c when my students were working on an activity to make their own band, a couple called it ancient music. When I asked them to elaborate they say, 'you know Ms. Nelson, music that is 20 or 30 years old.' I had to laugh. This class followed my Junior 1 class where when I asked students how they could travel on vacations they told me among normal things like planes and buses, that UFOs, brooms, elephants and submarines were good modes of transportation. I love the imaginations of children - they make life interesting

Our principal retired officially today. He drove his car onto the tiled front plaza of the school after lunch. I think it was so when he left, everyone would feel rather obligated to remove themselves from their offices and fawn over the outgoing leader. Apparently the new principal is a real sharp fellow....they're all fellows here....all males in all of the important positions, and all women in the copy room, bah! We still have 5 asst. principals. What the heck can 5 dudes possibly be doing? On a random note, I went into my makeshift office ten minutes before afternoon classes started today to print out a document and I woke up one of my colleagues that was sleeping on his desk. I'm fairly certain his grumpiness for the remainder of the day was linearly related to my having disrupted said slumber. Teacher naps at lunch are a big deal here. There are two hours for lunch and every teacher will take a nap until that class bell rings for the first afternoon period. It's weird, however if I were one of the teachers who acts as RAs on campus for the 1500 boarders, I would be taking a nap too. Their days mimic the student's day and go from 6am-10:40pm and they are only allowed to leave campus for one hour during dinner. I just might go nuts if I was a student.

It's 95 and humid here and today the school passed out the winter track-suit uniforms for the students (they only have to do the fancy plaid skirt, tie, pressed blouse uniform for special occasions). I was standing there thinking that the school is being VERY optimistic wrt to the weather b/c I wouldn't be caught dead in a polyester track suit until the temp drops oh, about 30 degrees. Though I was also standing there thinking that I really like the outfit and I wonder if I could get one....I mean I could use the bottoms as capris.

It finally stopped raining here....a week after the monsoon/typhoon arrived, thank goodness. However, the rain left and now my lovely neighborhood smells like a public toilet and I'm not sure why. Mmmmm, I love the smell of garbage in the morning. However, it has given me something to talk about with the security gaurds around campus....man, every little bit of Chinese practice helps.

Awww....I'm so excited about this. I found a yarn store/garage near to where I live, so this winter I'm just going to knit things....my next thing to learn is how to make mittens :-)

I'm off to Kunming for a week with three friends starting tomorrow night. We've got our plane tickets to Kunming and will buy tickets for the 30-hour sleeper train home, when we get there. However, if they are all sold out, it will be a 30 hour bus ride....God help us! The train is a smooth ride, the bus ride....a 30 hour vibrating butt massage. I'm soooooo excited to go travelling. I'll bring home stories and photos.

In a garage....buying what you say??????

2005-09-18T18:26:00.000-07:00

Angst of the moment:
Feeling like my feet are going to fly out from under me with every step I take. No my friends, I am not referring to an ice skating experience or one involving alcohol, rather one of daily life of recent at home here in Shenzhen. So, for the 180 days a year that it doesn't rain in this city, marble sidewalks are completely fine, even breathtakingly trendy. However, for the other half of the year when it rains, pedestrians are at the mercy of their footwear. I blame this feeling that I am going to fall all of the time partly on the type of pavement, and equally on my favourite people in the country, the spitters. Their saliva on the sidewalk makes the rainy marble that much more slick.....so if I break my back, neck, front teeth...again, arm, knee, or any other part of my body, I will completely blame those individuals who expectorate all over public space.

Ok, enough of that...Friday evening and Saturday were quite, no totally amusing by all standards. Friday's entertainment was due to an east meets west phenomenon. My three girl friends and I decided to walk around the city a bit after our TEFL meeting at 2 on Friday. We ended up at the Mix shopping mall, the largest and swankiest mall in Shenzhen with AMAZING kong tiao (AC) and 5 floors of high-end shops (one store has the new ipod nano....I'm not gonna lie - it was love at first sight) and an ice-skating rink on the 4th, yes the 4th floor. I'm thinking that is just to prove the intellectual prowess of Chinese engineers or something; they could not have possibly done it the easy way by situating the rink on the ground floor. Anyway besides a thai restaurant, an italian restaurant and Starbucks in this mall, there is a Taco Bell Grande, the only place in town for Mexican food. Now, despite the striking similarity in its name to Taco Bell, the fast food restaurant in the US, this is not a fast food joint. It is a formal eating establishment where all of the waiters and waitresses sport sombreros. However, these sombreros are very strange looking.....the part that goes on top of the head is very very tall and pointy, and a usual sombrero has a very wide brim, but these do not. It's hard to look at these chinese women in sombreros and not laugh....they look ridiculous. Dinner was good....tortilla soup was really good - however, I have a sneaking suspicion that pieces of sausage (think the taste and consistency of stuff on a pizza) aren't really supposed to be in tortilla soup. Oh well. What really cracked me up about the evening was that two Chinese ladies in tiny black mini-skirts and skimpy little shiny sleeveless tops come and sit down adjacent to us and ordered dinner. I'm engrossed in conversation at our table and then I happen to glance over in the direction of the ladies and I notice that the 'look at me' outfit that one of them was wearing was now covered in a monster-sized Mexican ponco-blanket deal (think Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa). I am unsure if the uh, poncho, was for purposes of warmth or that maybe that is how the restaurant makes people who have birthdays there feel special, like the cardboard crown at Burger King. Who knows, or cares, it was hilarious.

Saturday was a day of pampering for us ladies. We all stayed at my apt. Friday and watched Must Love Dogs on dvd and then crashed early. Saturday we got up and decided to venture down to the train station in Luohu....where there is a 5 story market that all peoples from HK go to buy cheap stuff and have stuff made. I managed to get all of us down there without any troubles....yah! Our goals for the day were to get cheap manicures and pedicures and maybe a hairwash. As soon as we get into the bottom floor of the market we see a nail place. I ask the woman how much it costs for a manicure and pedicure and she tells me 60 for both. I laugh and tell her where I live I can get it for 30. Speaking Chinese helps, and soon we were all sitting in a row getting our nails and toes done for 30 kuai. There was only one nail person in the shop when we arrived, but no more than three minutes later, four other nail ladies (and one nail fella just for effect) arrive with their tool boxes and stools....amazing how quickly the forces can be rounded up. I hadn't had a pedicure or manicure since my senior year in hs, so this was fun. The shop owner kept talking to me in Chinese and kept trying to get us to have more treatments...nail buffing, foot scraping, foot massage. I almost went for the foot massage, but there was a guy across from us getting one....and i swear the massager was beating the snot out of his foot; maybe I'm strange but that doesn't seem relaxing to me. In just over an hour we were clipped, filed and painted and on our way back into the market. It was quickly decided that for 3.50 US, we could indulge in this activity once every two weeks, nice!

The other goal of the day was a hair wash. These are common here and Meredith's boyfriend had one the other day for 10 kuai, so we were thinking that was quite a deal too. Plus, he got waaaay more than he bargained for. He has really curly/wirey hair the kinda sticks out about 5 inches from his head in a very curly fashion. Well, the man washes his hair and gives him a great scalp massage and then starts to blow-dry and straighten Aaron's hair. Aaron doesn't speak Chinese and so the beautician was unable to understand that he didn't want his hair straightened. In less than 15 minutes, Aaron's hair went from wet and curly to straight and his coif was shaped like a Q-tip! Hahaha, China,china. Welp, Saturday we didn't hairwash, but in leiu of that experience we had another fabulous one.

We were walking around being followed by people trying to coax us into their shops (when 100 stores sell all of the same things in one place, advertising via annoying people who grab you is apparently a key and winning strategy). Well, Mere wanted to buy a dvd player and a man showed her is card that said "electronic equipment trade" and so I immediately think, ok this a man dealing in stolen goods, great. We follow him to shop nearby....ha, nearby. It was all of the way on the other side of the market; he'd been following us forever. We get to a stall where the garage door is down, so the man escorting us knocks and the door is lifted a crack, a hand emerges with a key and then the door goes down again. We follow the man to the next stall where golf clubs are being sold and he ushers us all in, then pulls the garage door down. I'm thinking super, we're trapped in a stall and might die. He pulls out four stools and makes us sit down and then produces large binders of dvd covers. He's a counterfeit dvd salesman, and dealer of stolen electronics and golf clubs. We look through the books just to humor him, but he's actually got great movies....really really new ones and lots of boxed tv series sets. I ask him how much a movie is and one man says 15 kuai, so we get up to leave. I can buy ones for 5 on the street in dongmen. I tell him this. They're all patronizing me now b/c i speak chinese - oh, miss, your chinese is soooo good, you are sooooo pretty, etc. I tell him i'd like to see one of the movies b/c he claims that they're actually dvd9s (ones that will play in US players) and he says oh no, no worries, you make a list first and then we show you. So the four of us come up with 8 dvds and then I happen to see the West Wing season 5 in one of the pictures. I'm surprise b/c it doesn't come out in the US until Dec. so I ask to see that too. As soon as we tell the young guy that that is all the we want, he stands up, picks up a walkie talkie and starts rattling off our list to someone on the other end. Then some guy nudges him and he remembers something. The young guy gets a stool, stands on it and moves one of the ceiling tiles in the roof, rustles around in the ceiling and produces my West Wing series 5. He replaces the ceiling and then gives me the dvds. They aren't copies, they're originals from HK, certified stolen property. Five minutes later, three knocks are heard on the garage door, it is lifted about 6 inches and voila, there are our movies. We end up getting them for 8 kuai each b/c sure enough, they are dvd9s. I got my West Wing Season 5 for about $9 US....not bad considering it'll be 50 dollars when it comes out in America. One of the guys at the store, after talking with me for awhile in Chinese asked if I would teach him English since I am an English teacher. I told him I would come back next month and if he still wanted lessons, it'd be 150kuai/hr (a fair price). He said he'd wait for me, hahaa.

See what you all are missing in America; come live here where stories flow like water.

Random thought: when i come back to America I'm going to need a peanut gallery to continually stroke my ego. Reason? Well here, when I am not being stared at, I'm being told that I'm beautiful, that I should be a model, that my language skills are amazing, that I look like Kirsten Dunst, that I'm smart (b/c I taught at Beijing University for three weeks, ha) etc. I have a feeling that well is going to dry up as soon as I return stateside. I wonder if some laowai (foreigners) stay here just b/c they feel like a big fish in a small pond.

Your tea ma'am.....in a Thimble

2005-09-18T08:17:00.000-07:00

It is Sunday and my my my, the weekend has been rather full already. I have once again transformed into I Love China Kristen, though there are some qualifications for such a statement. I do Love China, however the babies with the buttless pants, hmm, they just need to stop that. I was in Walmart in Nanshan last Wednesday visiting friends for dinner and all of a sudden a mother and her son are in an aisle and the mother holds the child out in front of her and the kid just poops on the floor of the candy section! Are you kidding me? Can they not at least take the kid to some bushes or something? That led to a conversation with my friend Eddie about the same phemonenon on Friday and he said he was in Jussco (Japanese grocery/dept. store) last year and a little kid with the same 'special kind' of missing fabric in the butt pants was sitting on one of those black leather massage chairs that was a floor display and the mom just let him pee in the chair. The store attendants just smiled! This is a NICE store....that is gross! Basically it's a safe assumption that every thing, I mean every thing you touch has already been peed on. Take the hand wipes with you my friend.

Nanshan is an interesting area of town, think Orlando meets Las Vegas in China. It's very lush and tropical...full of flowers and palm trees and a monorail, yes a monorail! It runs around the whole area and past my friend's apartment. There is an amusement park called Windows of the World right off of the last subway stop as well. It reminds me a lot of Epcot Center in Orlando because it is a theme park centered around miniature versions of places such as the Louvre, the David, sculptures by Rodin, The Eiffel Tower, etc. It's cheap at night...only 30 kuai, but its 150 during the day. There's also an indoor ski slope too. For 85 kuai/hr one may partake in skiing and that includes pants, shoes, poles and skiis. Nice! Though, I am guessing if I pulled on a pair of Chinese ski pants, I would find them to be ski capris on me. For the truly avid skiier in South China, a yearly pass can be purchased for a discounted price, haha.

I took the 311 bus home that night from Nanshan all the way across town to where I live in Liantang - I had originally taken the subway out there, but had to change to a bus, so I was going to compare the two amounts of time. Well the 311 bus is much faster, but dude, the people who ride buses at 9pm at night are so very strange! I get on the bus, talk to the ticket lady about how much it costs to ride the bus to my area, sit down, turn my music on and start to read my book. Well ten minutes later I look up and the whole, I mean the entire bus is staring at me. Two guys next to me are even making a whole conversation out of my feet; they're pointing at my feet and laughing hysterically. So, curiousity gets the better of me and I pull out one earphone and start listening to what they are saying. The gist of it was that they had never seen a woman with feet as big as mine or toes as long as mine for that matter. They called them "monster feet" and "finger toes" and then commented that I was wearing "poor man's flip flops" - they are the $2.50/pr ones from Old Navy. Sometimes I almost wish I didn't understand Chinese - then I wouldn't know for sure that people were talking about me. I made it home in 50 minutes though....much faster than the Subway/Bus combo.

Teaching this week was for the most part pretty great. I've decided that 12 year olds are totally my favorite. They respond to the bribing via the use of stickers. We play games at the end of each class where it's either right side versus left side or boys versus girls and the winners get stickers. Huge motivator! Also, I tried an activity where the students toss a wadded up piece of paper from one person the another to answer questions......well the little bums don't really want to answer questions, so they dodge the paper ball and instead of people catching it, it falls on the floor. Hmm, or maybe it's that their eye-hand coordination is terrible. The guys started to use each other for target practice, but.....they were using English and not being too obnoxious, so I declared it to be a winner. With my junior 3s this week we were practicing using lots of adjectives to make a sentence more interesting. For example I wrote the sentence "The cat likes milk" on the board and then expanded it to the following "The large, gray, clever cat, who lives with my 98-year old grandmother in her 3rd floor apt. on 54th street in NYC, really and truly on likes to drink slightly heated chocolate milk on every third Sunday of the month." So then I made them make the 5 word sentence, "the boy loves the girl" into a 25 word sentence. I really got some good ones out of the students, though 'blue-haired' and 'looks like Michael Jackson' seemed to be the favorite comments for the boys oh and the smartasses in the back found it monumentally amusing to use the word 'sexy.' Mature fellows they are, ha.

When I went out to Nanshan, I met up with 7 other teachers and we spent the whole evening talking about teaching and we all came to the realization that our diction has changed since coming to China. We all have elimintated contractions from our spoken English and we speak very very slowly and repeat people's comments quite a bit (a clarification technique we use while teaching so that all students understand what their classmates are saying). Additionally, we all use the word "must" a lot b/c Chinese people who speak English use it instead of saying 'should.' Hopefully none of these changes will be too permanent.

Anyhoo...Thursday night Jesse (teacher here for a second year who lived in my apt. last year and taugt at my school) and I had an authentic Chinese evening. We went to his friend's teahouse (it's actually a large polished teak log about two feet high with 4 stools made out of stumps that sits in the back of a grocery store near my apt). Zhang Tianfu (name means "Zhang who adds fortune") and Jesse became good friends last year while Jesse was teaching at the school I am at now. So we sit down and start drinking our thimble-sized cups of tea and talking with Mr. Zhang and the two other folks there. We spoke Chinese for about an hour while becoming 'wired' off of heavily caffinated tea, and the old man wearing his undershirt and slippers sitting next to Jesse kept complimenting me on my Chinese skills and how easy I am to understand. Ha! I love being patronized by old people. The lady sitting with us spent 13 years in Bangkok, and she was telling us how much cheaper it is to vacation there....good to know. I'll have to go back and visit. So, from the teahouse, I bid my new friends goodbye and headed back to the factory district in my neighborhood. Oh by the way, Jesse's little escapade to the teahouse foiled my former status quo with the people in the grocery store. Everyone in there before Thursday night was convinced that I didn't speak a word of Chinese, now everyone knows I speak and understand it. While we drank tea, all of the workers surrounded the teahouse and listened to our conversation. So I will be speaking Chinese with them for the rest of the year. Before, they would just point at the numbers on a cash register like I was an idiot or something in order to tell me how much my groceries cost.

We walked down little alleys lined with gray, crumbling cement buildings that were 'decorated' by the colorful laundry hung out on hangers to dry on each balcony. As the sun set, it looked truly beautiful. Jesse took me to his favorite hole-in-the-wall restaurant where for 3 kuai (35 cents) we had an amazing bowl of 'ba mian' or noodles with a peanutty sauce. I will definetely be a regular at that woman's restaurant from now on, the noodles were out of this world. The evening finally ended at a restaurant off of the main road where we got vegetable curry and tea. Yum yum....gotta love the progressive dinner that only costs a dollar and we even picked up a dinner companion at the final restaurant. A man from Hong Kong asked to join us (very common thing for people to do).

On a side note, the final count for mooncakes this year: 4 boxes. That means I am the proud owner of 16 mooncakes, each one with more calories than a double quarter pounder with cheese, and each having enough preservatives to withstand nuclear fallout. Mmmm, tasty. Come visit and have one or 16, seriously. Today is the actual mid-Autumn festival day, so the 'for real' mooncake eating and moonwatching night....but there is a problem. This year, festival day happens to coincide with a holiday of rememberance of when the Japanese beat the Chinese at some battle, so I it is considered almost sacreligious to celebrate on such a day. Thus, the vast majority of mooncaking and ogling at the moon was done on Friday and Saturday.

My paradise

2005-09-13T04:16:00.000-07:00

- My apartment -

Organized in an illogical fashion here b/c it's hard to move photos around on my blog. Apologies.

The Kitchen....check out the shiny fridge!

Guest bedroom....kinda tiny. It's only really big enough for the big bed and the wardrobe behind the main door. Drop your eyes to the door knob....it's about to fall off....again. There is no backing on it. When I got here it was just a hole in the door. I've placed the knob there for aesthetic purposes. Yes the sheets have cartoon liions on them. And no, the boogie board is not mine.

Bathroom straight ahead (little blue can is for your toilet paper, you can't flush the paper here - unless you want to become best friends with the plunger). To the right is my bedroom, to the left is the kitchen.

Living room view with Balcony...notice the lovely gate that goes across the sliding doors..it's my Chinese security system.

This is my living room....lovely TV and comfy comfy couches. And....I even found the missing part of the coffee table in the guest room wardrobe, so I was able to put that out last week!.

This is my entryway with a lovely dining table and 'sturdy' stools

Muahaa, here is my bedroom. The stool is one of my 'dining room' chairs - one that doesn't have a broken leg and will indeed support me. Like my lamp? Mr. Yang and I picked it out at Shirbu, the neighborhood department store. I wanted Mr. Yang to pick it out b/c I wasn't sure how much I should be spending on it, b/c the school was buying it for me, but he insisted that our tastes are probably different and so I had better pick it out. I think I did a good job. And after I selected the lamp.....he insisted we go and open up a department store card so when I go shopping there again I can get a discount. I laughed, but on the bottom floor is a really nice hypermarket (grocery store) and so I've been using my spiffy "VIP" card lots after all. The bed is totally amazing, and the duvet set is new....I'm happy camper. See the bear on the bed? His name is TJ. Mum bought him for me before we moved overseas back in 1991. He's old. Carly threw him on the marble floor in Jakarta and one of his eyes popped out, so he can only see out of one eye now. Most of his stuffing is in the left leg and no where else.

Nowism and the Evil Eye with the Long Fingernail

2005-09-12T21:24:00.000-07:00

Today, I was popular Ms. Nelson for one class and unpopular Ms. Nelson for the next. Andy and I split classes today and in the first, everyone cheered when I walked in and all wanted to stay and attend my class and not leave to go with Andy. However in the second class, just the opposite had happened. All the Junior2 Class1 students had Andy as a teacher last year, so when we split the class down the middle, some from my side snuck out the back door to attend Andy's class. Ha, I guess we cannot all be popular all the time.

Class was good today though, the kiddos really suprise me at what they know and how they'll try to outdo each other. However, everything has to be a competition. You can only imagine the cheers that students give each other when they beat me at RPS (Rock Paper Scissors) so that they do not have to answer questions. However the cheering only lasts until they realize that I have twenty questions and even if you don't get called the first time around, I've still got all the questions and they all must be answered. Some of the boys even tried to cheat today, waiting until I put out my rock or paper etc. to put theirs out so that they would win. The funny part is that they are my best students and even if they had lost they could answer my questions, and eventually they did. Hopefully I was able to show them that being in my class will not be as painful as they had earlier made it seem.

Hmmm, let me now let you become acquainted with a concept in China called Nowism. It's the idea that nothing is concrete until the very moment before. I shall elucidate with a most telling example..... Three weeks ago when I came to Shenzhen I was told I would not have a curriculum for any of my classes and that there would be 60 students per class. That changed 2.5 weeks ago. I was still to have no curriculum, but I would only have 25 students per class. Excited, I began to tailor the first months lessons to a tinier class. Then, two weeks ago I was told that the last foreign teacher had not arrived back, so I needed to teach 60 person classes. A few days later I was told that I needed to produce an outline of my entire year's curriculum for all three grades I am teaching. So I did that. Then the day I turn it in, I am told that I need to go to Book City downtown and come up with a curriculum book that I want to use that has a student workbook and after I buy my copy, the school will pay me back, then buy copies for all the students. Thus, last Wednesday I bussed it downtown and spent a lovely afternoon selecting textbooks and found some really great ones. Then, on Thursday, two administrators come and sit in on my classes and at the end show me a book they have selected for the classes and tell me that every student will be getting copies in a week or two. Soooooo, my curriculum planning is all null and void. But, I figured since we won't have the books for a couple weeks, I'll do my own thing and teach about families this week. Then, I run into the prinicipal's asst. this afternoon and she gives me copies of the books and says the students have them too and that I should start using them tomorrow. Then.....I had been told from the beginng that my Junior3s will not have a textbook b/c they are more advanced and I'm excited by this, b/c I have some great discussion topics and things they can learn. But apparently someone told Barbara (lady I teach with) that we need to be assisting the students in prepping for their big standardized exams by putting scenes on powerpoint and having students write about what is going on in the photo. No points for creativity there. Hmmm sounds enthralling. ..........and that my friends......is an example of nowism. You must do as everyone says now but know that everything will ultimately change. Everyone deals with it here.

On a more um....gross note....I almost slipped on the pavement today AGAIN b/c in truly Chinese fashion a mother was having her son in his buttless pants pee all over the pavement. No one should EVER EVER EVER sit on the pavement in China. Every square inch of it is has been spit and peed on....it has got to be a spore's paradise.

Hong Kong Disney opened today. All the Disney big-wigs were there for the day. It didn't rain for this grand opening event, but it was the most polluted day of the year thus far. Soo....no blue sky behind Sleeping Beauty's castle, just the signature China grey. Of course they had to interview the crazy American tourists who flew all of the way to the other side of the world just to go to an amusement park that has two, I repeat two branches in the US! Why not go to China and see the Three Gorges Dam, or Daliang, or the Ice city in Harbin? At least one crazed American tourist clad in his Disney-pin-covered safari jacket and his waistpack(talk about trying to blend in) had his annual pass for Japan Disney around his neck and said that is where he is off to next. At least he'll waste a boatload in more than one Asian nation, gotta share the wealth.

I was on a bus this afternoon and was literally glared at for 30 minutes by one fella sitting in a chair, that he stole from me mind you, b/c in China, men are more important than women in all instances. So he's sitting in his chair and proceeds to feel like he needs to eyeball me every 30 seconds for all of my 30 minute bus ride. I almost, almost asked him in Chinese, dude what the heck is your problem, but I held my tongue....I probably would have said it wrong anyway and he'd have busted out the death-ray eyes and then i'd have smoking holes bored into my head. But back to my comment on the female-male pecking order. It has gotten to the point where I cannot even count the times that I have been on public transportation and a man and his very pregnant wife get on and the men will always take the last seat and the women, looking like they'll go into labor if the busdriver finds one more pothole to run through, will have to stand and hover over the husband. Yeesh! I know some people have trouble with chivalry, but this is nuts! I think I also got some addtional nasty stares on the bus today too, b/c when some man got off I did the China push and plonked myself down in a seat. Maybe I should have offered it up to the business man spitting on the bus floor and picking his nose with the one exceptionally long finger nail he had. Lovely.

However, going back to my Sunday - that was really lovely. My friend and fellow teacher who lives two hours away in Nanshan, came by bus and subway to just hang out and chill for the day. We ate good street food and walked around and got sunburned....just a bit. It was a good way to start the week I think. Oh and I love going running by the resevoir.....everyone is so friendly - only downside...I feel like i have to smile the whole run otherwise i hear comments about the 'grumpy foreigner' from passerby.

Tardy Beijing Pics

2005-09-11T19:50:00.000-07:00

Photos from August in Beijing... Better late than never!

Yup, that's me and the Great Wall

Mutianyu

A slightly disheveled traveller upon the Wall.....

Mutianyu in August...aren't you jealous you weren't there?

Me up at the top of the Wall....don't I look tired and hot?

This is what we call an ancient Stairmaster......to the top of the Great wall at Mutianyu (read: tourist section of the wall)

Lovely sign on the Great Wall

Pagoda at the Summer Palace in Beijing

Summer Palace on a novel blue sky day.

Mooncakes and Lucky Draw

2005-09-10T13:32:00.000-07:00

So....Saturday morning. I am awoken from my red wine stupor (more about that in a minute, i promise it's innocent) at midnight on Friday by excited parents and a sister who have just figured out how to make cheap calls to my phone here in China over the internet. I stumble into my living room, I think, speak with them for a minute and then head back to bed hoping that the next time I wake, the numbers on the clock will read at least 9am. But oh, meter-reader lady, you messed up everything!

At 6am this morning I am again awakened, this time to a banging on my door. I sit up thinking, well I just talked to the family on the phone, could they possibly be here or something, did I miss phone details indicating they would be on their way to China now??? Oh no, I open the front door and it's a women in bright green overalls with a clipboard and a funny stopwatch looking contraption around her neck. Before telling me who she is, she proceded to give me a 'talking to' about how my doorbell doesn't work, ok, it doesn't work, sue me. I live in an apartment with less than 800sq feet, I think that if you knock on my door, I'm going to hear it! After that, she lets herself in, maybe she said she was the gas meter-reader insano-woman who comes at 6am on saturdays, but i can't understand her. Instead I just follow her around my apt. She finally stops by the right wall of my kitchen, writes down some numbers and the bolts. Man, what a start to a weekend.

Ok, back to the red wine. Hmm, well red wine might be a really liberal use of the term, as China's national Great Wall wine can, I am sure, also double as furniture surface remover. I can only imagine what it is doing to my insides at this very moment. Anyway, yesterday was teacher's Day and aside from getting lovely little flowers from my kiddos, and a couple of cards and a wind chime from one of my Junior3 girls, and reduced amounts of smartass comments from the backrow misbehavers, there was also a banquet. Now dad, you know how Asian banquets go, so you must be thinking....Kristi, I bet there was a Lucky Draw! You are correct! All the teachers could talk about all day long was the Lucky Draw and the Lucky Draw prizes. First place was 1000rmb...not bad. I didn't win anything...no surprise there, but we all got mooncakes, b/c the lunar festival is next week. From what i hear most of them are pretty gross; all have a raw, sugared egg-yolk in the middle. And they're heavy, super heavy! The NHL should contract China to make their hockey pucks out of the leftover cakes. My box of 4 must weigh over 4 pounds...and they call those personal cakes...tsk tsk.

So dinner. I had a meeting with my program at 2pm downtown, so at 1pm I hop on a bus, get the usual 'weirdo' stare from the ticket-taker (esp. weird b/c I'm in business attire at the time b/c I am going straight to dinner after meeting) and I am on my merry way. I meet up with the other teachers and hear about the problems of the week...students throwing books at each other, throwing paper at the teacher, my trouble with the primpers and the straightening iron etc. The head of the Education Bureau comes and talks to us about how education in China works. Basically in so many words he admitted unfairness. A teacher asked about having to rank each class' behavior from 1-10 after class and how we've all been told to give classes a 10 regardless of whether or not they were rude. Well some of us foreign teachers would like to give them the 8 or 9, but the Head of the Bureau said it won't have an effect, the head teacher will just tear the paper up and make a new one with a new mark of 10, where we had written 9. Hmm, can't win them all.

Ok, from that meeting I had to leave early at 3, to take a bus back home to meet Crystal (my contact teacher's asst.) and Andy and Barbara b/c we're going to go together to dinner. I had asked Crystal if i could just meet them at the hotel downtown, b/c it was SUCH A WASTE taking a 45 min. busride home, only to take another 45 min. ride back into town for the dinner. Additionally we decided, no, actually Crystal decided and Andy was vehemently opposed to, to ride the mini-bus. The mini-bus drivers are the kind of guys who drive like they've been bitten by a rabid dog....luckily our driver wasn't really foaming at the mouth and our ride was relatively free from worries about dying.

Dinner started at 6....that was after we all logically lined up to collect our lucky draw tickets (ie. it was bloody mayhem)! The ticket table was set up in a corner! Thus, not only were there no lines to get the tickets, but you had to step over people who had already gotten their tickets who had stopped mid-trek to talk to friends about the obvious luckiness of their particular number, yeesh. Though, it may seem annoying, this whole evening was so much fun. I love Chinese people when they party. I sat a table with Mr. Yang, Crystal and Andy & Barbara and then 5 of the most beautiful teachers and administrators, that's at least what Crystal told me and I'll agree. Steven sat by his wife Jane at another table, but I caught a gander at the hair the whole school has been talking about. He must be going through a mid-life crisis, b/c last week he bought a bottle of Chinese auburn-colour hair dye and tried it out. Well, it only takes a pair of eyes to see the obvious differences between western and eastern hair.......Steven's little 1 inch formerly brown, western hair and a good part of his bald scalp is now eggpant coloured. It's truly ridiculous.

The food was amazing, but totally overshadowed by the Chinese love for drinking each other under the table. They love the toast. And when you toast you say 'ganbei' which informally means 'darn it you had better drink the whole glass otherwise you will shame me.' sooooooo even though our little wine glasses were indeed little, after about 15 toasts, everyone in the room, all 250 teachers and administrators, were toasted, no pun intended. Such a funny evening. Mr. Yang kept wanting to ganbei people, but he claimed he had kidney troubles so he'd only let the fuwuyuan fill his glass 1/4 while the rest of us had 2/3! The pretty women at our table were on a mission to outdrink me, which isn't hard, but they kept challenging me...it was really funny. Mr. Yang at the end of the night (8:30) told Andy and Barbara to make sure I got home safely in a taxi with them, and then he whispered to me that he thought Andy was drunk, and my Chinese is good, so i better do the talking to the cab driver. Haha.

So funny - I love China

What's that in the back of your throat?

2005-09-08T20:20:00.000-07:00

Whew! The school/work week is almost over. Tomorrow is Teacher's Day here in China where the kiddos write nice notes to their teachers and give them flowers and stuff. We'll see if I get anything, see if my teaching and their smiling little faces around campus really translate into liking me or that I am just a crazy foreigner and they're just messing with me. I got tons of mileage out of three games today in my Junior 1 class, Rock Paper Scissors, Hangman, and Tic-Tac-Toe. There is so much more incentive for the little boogers to learn when it is turned into a competition, sucks to be the kid who made hangman complete by guessing the last wrong letter which resulted in me putting the foot on hangman. Haha. Kids were good today...I got the visuals going with the Junior 3s...thank god for CNN.com and Powerpoint, I was able to turn Hurricane Katrina into a lesson and speaking activity.

Travel aims for the year:
Cambodia, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, Inner Mongolia, at least 8 new cities in China (shouldn't be hard: HK, Macau and Guangzhou are within two hours from here by train). If you're reading this and thinking 'hmmm, Cambodia in the spring sounds nice,' then come on over and visit, I've got a guest room.

Along with travel aims I've got aims for modes of transportation:
Train
Bus (the overnight kind maybe...i hear that's the adventure of a lifetime)
Camel
White Horse (dude, if no prince on a white horse is going to ride my way (no need to find a white horse Adam) I am going to be the feminist on hop on one myself)
Elephant (though I've already ridden on one near Mt. Krakatoa)
Plane (pretty standard)
Subway (check)
Bus (check)
Crazy City Mini-Bus (check - I'm glad I've got insurance)
Ferry
Bicycle

Angst of the day:
Tired of being stared at like I'm an endangered Panda at the National Zoo in DC. Dang it, I'm a foreigner, I've got haltering knowledge of Chinese, yes I walk around town and don't have a chauffeur like all the rest of the snotty foreigners living in Shekou, yes I ride the bus, yes I eat from street vendors. yeesh, get over it - I live here, I get the gist that you talk about me every time I walk by, I GET IT THAT I'M TALL, even EXECPTIONALLY TALL!

Have I ever mentioned the lack of manners in Mainland China? (courtesy of my observations of the Shenzhen public) Perhaps it's all relative b/c every culture has diferent standard for etiquette and there is no international guideline for etiquette.

My TA for the class I taught at Bejing University told me it was b/c people are only taught to study here, and not how to be humans - that's a little harsh, ok way harsh, but there are some huge! idiosyncracies of the area:

Anyways, so it's not considered rude to ...
- pick your nose in public (ie: in the office while grading papers.. on the bus... while waiting in line to check out at the hypermarket)
- to answer your cellphone during a meeting, a government ceremony, or a movie...
- to cut in line b/c in China there really IS NO LINE!
- to throw elbows and hips when in crowded situations...
- to spit mucous and other junx FREELY... literally they spit on every available place other than themselves, unless they have no sense of aim or have poor spitting techniques and then the personal space is spit upon (note: there is no such thing as personal space here)! No place is ever quiet, there is always the faint sound of someone clearing junk out of their throat and leaving it on the pavenment. (This may be the only thing that really gets me about this China....everything else is merely conversation, but the spitting, well you come and see what you think). Apparently the gov't is working on putting a stop to 'tutan' aka. spitting. There's a campaign about it or something... TIC :-)

And you think your life keeps you chuckling.....

2005-09-06T16:13:00.000-07:00

I think an update of sorts is in order. It’s Tuesday afternoon, and with any luck, this evening I will have DSL in my apartment. For all back in America who take internet of any kind for granted, don’t ever! You’d be surprised how cut-off from the world one becomes when he/she no longer has internet and only has two channels on TV that occasionally spout out English. My main source for news lately has been the ABC evening news with Charles Gibson that is aired at 7:30am my time; so Monday-Thursday when I do not teach class until 9:30 I can watch thirty minutes of news from the US. The Chinese evening news is also relatively helpful, but it takes me awhile to get the gist of it….so if I watch the 5pm, 6pm and 7:30pm updates in Chinese, by then end of the third showing I’ll have gotten about half of what they were talking about, gotta weigh the opportunity costs of watching the same news three times…..

Someone asked me the other day what I missed about America, and besides people, I couldn’t think of much else besides a bathtub, maybe. However, it turns out that a friend of mine has a bathtub…might have to borrow it sometime. But I just thought of something else I am going to start missing, and kinda already do. A dryer. I am sitting on a couch in my living room, looking out the windows to the balcony and I can see some of my laundry drying on hangers as well as my towels. I think the towels are the sad sight…. I had to really crunch them to get them hung thru the hangers – they’re just never going to be as soft as ones out of a dryer. However not-as-soft is still miles and miles better than non-absorbent, which is what they were before I washed them the first time. I tried to dry myself off with a new one last week and it was like toweling off with a rain slicker….the darn thing was completely waterproof!

Saturday evening three of my girl friends and I met up at my place (they’d traveled two hours across town to get to me) and then went out the beach to meet other teachers from the program who live out there. Four of them live in apartments in a hotel! I still like my apartment better; it feels more like home and my friends really seemed to think I have gotten one of the nicest set-ups and schools. Anyway, that is neither here nor there. It was an off-and-on rainy day so we didn’t feel bad about not making it out to actually sunbathe. There are these really cool bbq pits by Dameisha beach and for 50 kuai ($6.50) you can rent one and buy all kinds of uncooked meats and veggies on skewers and cook them over the pit. I think we’re going to try it this weekend. I was really surprised at how touristy the beach area is. There are many lovely-looking hotels (totally a China phenomenon really – 5 star lobby with 3 star rooms) and many peddlers selling tacky suits with the granny-style bottoms and inflatable rafts. The beach is only a 20 minute bus ride (a precarious one where the driver has a proclivity of overtaking vehicles in his lane by swerving into oncoming traffic while going up winding mountain passes) away from where I am. I had not realized that I lived on one side of a mountain tunnel and many of my friends live just on the other side. Lovely. As the sky opened up and it started raining while we were bargaining for cheap beer and ice creams, a situation shall we say, walked down the road and I had to just laugh. Here it seems that women are allergic to getting both wet by the rain and tanned by the sun – so rain or shine the umbrella is up. Well on this night, three ladies must have been caught away from home without the umbrella b/c they were walking down the street, the three of them together under one of those large, striped umbrellas that cover outdoor tables at restaurants that had "Heineken" plastered all over it. The umbrella had a diameter of about six feet and the women, no one which could have been over 5 feet tall and 100 pounds where hoisting the umbrella up and strolling down the road. Only in China.

Teaching has thus far been really good. I think I like my Junior 1 and Junior 2 classes the best (12 and 13 year olds). By the time they get to Junior 3, they’re less focused on impressing the teacher and more determined than ever to be smartasses. Also, apparently the competition to get into my school’s Junior 1 class (they’re the youngest middle schoolers) this year was incredibly stiff and as a result these kids are extremely smart. I was talking to a teacher who taught here last year and he said while he taught, the Junior 2s were really bad and full of ADD cases and that makes sense, because my now Junior 3s are the bad ones. The junior 1s and 2s always remember at the end of class to give me the clipboard where the teacher signs off and writes 1-10 in a square as a testament to how well behaved they were. The junior 3s however try to hide the clipboard from me. Barbara, the lady who will be splitting the classes in half with me is still not back, so I am teaching 50+ students at once – call me a policewoman, b/c crowd control is my new specialty. However, do not ever underestimate the power of toilet paper in this case. I have had a HUGE success with a game involving a roll of TP. I get 10 boys and 10 girls to stand up in front of the class and then, starting with the boys I ask them how much toilet paper they use when they go to the bathroom…..the boys really go to town on it. One boy even asked me for the whole roll today; I decided to be ‘nice’ and only let him take 15 sheets, b/c after all the students had taken their amount I told them they had to come up with one thing to tell me about themselves for every square of paper taken. The girls on the other hand are either smarter, or more economical wrt to toilet paper usage, b/c most of them only take 2-3 sheets. I think they’ve hear about the game from other female students in other classes.

In a completely China manner I have been asked to turn in a complete lesson scheme for the term by Friday and of course they don’t have a textbook for me. It’s a good thing I’ve got many many ideas, but I am going to head down to Shenzhen Book City tomorrow during my afternoon off to actually pick up a ‘textbook’ that I will loosely follow wrt to some new vocab and grammar.
Oh, almost forgot my latest tangle with bugs in China. After cleaning the apt. from top to bottom a couple weeks ago I hadn’t seen any bugs of a sizable magnitude meandering around the place. But….over the weekend I meet up with fellow teachers and hear about how their place is crawling with insects and I think to myself, ‘heh heh, not me.’ Then I come home and on Sunday I start to see a few of these tiny gnat/fruit fly looking bugs around – and there aren’t many, but they are annoying enough to do something about it. So yesterday during my lunch break I had to mail post cards at the post office (successful trip, I think – let me know if you all get post cards from me) and I decide to pop into the supermarket and buy some spray. I come home; spray all the door frames and floor boards and head back to class. Well upon arrival home late yesterday evening I find three dead cockroaches on their backs around my apartment. Apparently until then I was oblivious to the fact that apt. 503 doubles as mine and a roach motel. In this case ignorance is bliss and I wish I hadn’t found those dead suckers. Plus I don’t think Raid did that stellar of a job on my gnats.

Two hours later…..I’m back from last class and before I post.....Penny this is all for you in memory of last year…..there were two girls in my Junior 3 class today trying to ‘covertly’ straighten their already fried hair with a straightening iron at their desk while we were doing an activity! Ha, I spoke tooo tooo soon when I said my students were good. Plus there were two kids with names, “Hey Man” and “Onion” in the class. They might just be my worst yet.

Kaishi Shanke (Class Begins!)

2005-09-01T14:26:00.000-07:00

Hey hey my friends.....long time no blog. Apparently the "Net bar" that I have been frequenting in my neighborhood does not support the use of blogs.....no fun for that place. Well I made it to my apt. and wow, last Friday was quite an ordeal for me. We all got up, got pretty (that was a very important stipulation of the program...must look pretty for the government and schools who are paying you and taking you to your free living accomodations, hahaa) and signed some contracts. It turns out that while many, ie "most" other teachers in my program are in groups of at least 2 and up to 5 teaching at the same schools, I got "lucky" and am the only teacher from my program teaching at the Luohu Foreign Language school. So I am sitting there talking to myself saying, "self, you can do this, you can teach by yourself." Others were wisked away in groups in school vans to their school, but I get into a taxi with my contact teacher and with the promise that I am really lucky and going to the second best school in the city, I set off for Luohu, the 'old district' of Shenzhen (by old, i mean 25 years).

We drive up to the school and have a poke about, and I've got to admit...I'm pretty impressed, the buildings are white and expansive (covered in white tile of course....it's Asia) with cascading vines from potters on each of 5 floors....I'm thinking, ok, no problem. Then we walk across the street to my apt. building and sure enough, the buildings and the neighborhood are nice, so hey, no problem. So then....I get to my apt. and I almost start crying.....there is dirt all over the floor, pots in the sink, sofa cushions not on the couch but instead on the guest room bed, incense sticks everywhere and a gross duvet on my bed. My contact teacher said he would leave me to 'have a nap' and then we'd go shopping together in an hour.

Well I sure as heck wasn't about to sleep on any of that until it was clean, so I busted out a broom and got to work before I started feeling too sorry for myself. Mr. Yang (contact teacher) took me out and bought me cleaning supplies, new sheets and a duvet and a desk lamp. So Friday night I did my best impression of Cinderella and cleaned the darn place up. The kitchen is still a bit ummmmm, yucky, but substantially better than before. After Friday night I came to love my apt, amazing what a little cleaning does to a place. It turns out that I think I've got one of the nicest living accomodations of all the teachers, so I feel bad to have thought it so crummy to start off with. There are some teachers living in the student dorms acting almost as RAs, yuck, and people who have only concrete for floors. That's actually pretty bad considering that Shenzhen is a VERY rich city..kids at my school roll up in Porche SUVs!

Saturday I decided to fire up the washing machine on my porch....ha! I sat on my three-legged stool with my dictionary in hand looking up all the characters on the washing machine to make sure I didn't press an 'add red dye' button or something while trying to wash my clothes. I figured out that i shouldn't have to worry about any colours 'bleeding' in my laundry, as there isn't a hot water option...it's all just kind of outside temperature water. My first load took 2 hours, but that was my own obsessive complusive fault....I kept checking the clothes (pulling the accordian folded plastic lid back) to make sure they were still the right colour and it turns out that when you do that, you must press the power button again, otherwise the spin cycle won't start. Learn something new everyday..... Oh and then at the end, all the water is dumped out the bottom, so there had better be a floor drain down there somewhere....

School started today...I am currently in my temp. office between classes, well actually I thought I was supposed to teach now, but instead my 'students' have English reading class instead, go figure, the schedule is still messed up. I am supposed to be teaching 25 students in each class (the big classes of 50 are divided into 2 and I teach half and Ms. Barbara teaches the other half) but Ms. Barbara is still in America and doesn't return until Sunday and then has to go work on a visa problem in HK on Monday, so I'm teaching huge classes of 50 until she returns....woohooo.

My students this morning were pretty good....I gotta say, the gals are much much better at English than the fellas, maybe that's only true in Junior 1, we'll see in 20 minutes whether the boys in Junior 3 pick up the slack.

Tiny FYI

2005-09-01T06:02:00.000-07:00

I cannot actually access my real blog in China...they block the blog websites, so while I can post updates, I cannot read any comments that people might add to the page. Once again, TIC...this is China :-)

It'd only happen to Kristen....

2005-08-24T20:03:00.000-07:00

Shenzhen met me yesterday with open arms.....24 hours on a train and 5 minutes in the city and my upper lip becomes target practice for the first flying fire ant that I have ever set eyes (or fingers) on. As I'm waiting for my luggage at the back of the Shenzhen Railway station and taking in the thick, tropical air of my new home city, the ant goes to town on my lip and bites it. Because of my cat-like reflexes I was able to get ahold of the creature and put him out of his misery, but not before my lip started to swell. Yeesh....I had the 'fat lip' syndrome for about three hours last night, but then it began to calm down. I couldn't take any benadryl because we had our medical exams this morning and we weren't allowed to take any medication or eat or drink after midnight.

The train to Shenzhen....who would have thought that 24 hours on a train could go by so quickly, granted I did sleep over half of the time, but still....the trip on the train seemed substantially better than my airplane trip to China earlier in the month. We slept in the 'hard sleepers' (ie not first class as we were previously promised) but that was not a problem. I am of the mind that the hard sleepers were much better. They were sectioned off into six-person compartment (3 bunks up each side of the walls), but there were not any doors to the compartments so it felt sort of like an orphanage on wheels, for everyone was able to peek their heads around the corner and see everyone else. The first class compartments actually get a bit claustrophobic, and they were decorated in frilly Pepto-bismal pink. There was much poker to be played, many conversations to be had and uncountable numbers of instant pot noodles (called 'convenient noodles' in China) eaten. When we disembarked we had to go collect our luggage which was thankfully sent ahead of us on Monday afternoon. Had I been forced to drag my suitcases through the Beijing West Rail Station, I just might not have made it to Shenzhen in one piece. My friends and I were quite the site without the luggage in tow.....my backpack was around my front, so that I could protect the goods from thieves and my computer was slung sideways over the backpack. Then, even though we were at the station 3, yes 3 hours before the train departed, there weren't any seats to sit in. So.....in total Chinese fashion, Shawn broke out a newspaper, gave everyone a piece of it, and we sat in the middle of the waiting room on paper and waited for the train to board. Next to us a beggar was soliciting money and at the other end of my eyeshot was a little boy peeing on the floor near the window.....I'm telling ya, the diaper market in China has yet to be tapped.....little kids merely sport shorts with big pre-cut holes in the butt.

Back to Shenzhen.....I think I'm going to LOVE it. Even though it's very new, it screams "Jakarta" to me with its tropical allure and buildings built largely of tile (all the better to be cleaned by rainstorms). At 7:30 this morning we were wisked by the bureau to the Port hospital to be poked and prodded sufficiently until it was decided that we weren't teriminally ill and were not bringing wonky diseases into the country. I started off with the chest xray....and b/c of it I got to experience all kinds of radiation. They didn't put the lead guards on us and as soon as I walked into the room, I could see my lungs on the screen in front of me; so that means the xray machine was running all the time...interesting. After that I waited in lines to have my blood drawn (grumpy nurse lady b/c I didn't know what my blood type was...i think that's why she moved the needle around as she pulled it out so that I would bleed more or something...for her...mission accomplished). Then I had an ultrasound (not for pregnancy mind you, for the function of the pancreas, spleen etc.). Then I had my teeth checked for black gums, then an ECG, then height and weight and bp and heart listening. Then, because X-ray man was an idiot I got to get radiated some more. He forgot to take the actual chest photo of the first 30 of us, so I went back and gave them a picture of my lungs. Fun fun...I got a free can of Coke out of it though...they figured we were all about to fall over and die from hunger, so the sugar helped.

The food here is amazing! The Education Bureau has put us up here in high style! All the weight people've lost in the last month will be back in days eating the buffets like we are...i've not seen this much food since i left America....yum. However, I'll be glad to get back to Chinese food soon. At the moment (this very moment, I am taking advantage of my western ammenties) here I am using in-room DSL and listening to CNN for the first time in a month....kinda nice...but I'd like my apt. even better. All in good time. Friday we move 'home.' The school we had meetings at today was beautiful, reminded me of Pattimura (an elementary school in Jakarta). I wish I could teach there.

Just a week?

2005-08-12T22:03:00.000-07:00

Hmm, already a week has passed in one of my favorite cities in the world and at the same time I feel like an eternity has passed.....hmmm 'like sand through an hour glass, these are the days of our lives'. It seems as if it were forever ago that I was in Dallas feeling moreose over the loss of a particular piece of brown luggage. That was about a week and a half ago. I've got about a week and a half left in Beijing before the south of China beckons me to my home of the next year.

Today was my fake Saturday (ie. it is Friday, but I didn't have to work). To make this seem more logical...I teach Sunday-Thursday here at Beida. My students truly made the week completely pleasant and made me not fear that I am going to be a crummy teacher. They took my teaching partner and I out to lunch on Wednesday for hotpot. For any of you who have never had it....it's amazing Chinese food. We each had little cooking pots filled with water and spices and seasonings. Then a fire was lit under the pot and we cooked a wide range of raw meats and mushrooms and greens. Then once you cook your meats to your liking you take them out and dip them in a heavenly sauce...mine was chive and peanut sauce; quite quite tasty really. Our students seemed to have a great time. They liked teaching us drinking and toasting protocol...really I think it was just an excuse to get drunk at noon on a wednesday. I think one of the funniest parts of lunch was my teaching partner Tom getting suckered into eating garlic cloves. One of our students was popping them in his mouth like candy (there was a plate of them on our table's lazy susan) and I made some comment like "Gump! are you eating garlic....you'll have stinky breath!" and he responded by saying in Chinese that it was in fact sweet and good. So Tom tried it....it was pickled garlic indeed. No worries though; after some truly interesting facial expressions, I had his back and gave him some gum....no need for me to suffer the afternoon through just b/c he chomped garlic.

I think this is the first time in my life that I have experienced 100% humidity without it actually raining. Yesterday walking around Beida it was like going swimming. Jenny and Jess and I ended up feigning idiocy and ate lunch on the air conditioned steps of the mini-mart even though no one is supposed to sit there, b/c it was toooo hot to be sitting anywhere outside.

Oh, the other day we had to get visa photos taken. No one in America has grounds to ever complain to me about passport photos, b/c in the US, you only get 4. Here in China we had to get 12 photos for our work permit. That translates into 12 photos of me with a frozen look of heat exhaustion (100 of us had to wait in a line outside the photo shop in order to get the photos taken). Lord have mercy for all who must gaze upon that look once, or twelve times for that matter. Haha, only in China.

Last night, since it was 'friday' for us, we went out to Houhai and took a stroll around the tropical-like manmade lake that is this bar-laden tourist attraction. Don't get me wrong though, I do like it. Some of the people I was with were having trouble spending 4 dollars US on a drink since we've been living on about a dollar or two a day total for food thus far. I maintain the mindset that if i'm pleasantly frugal during the week, the weekend can include a justifiable splurge....hopefully everyone else will figure that out b/c there are only a limited number of nights where I can stand outside fun bars and drink 30cent liters of Tsingdao whose bottles are washed in fermaldehyde, yuck while others inside enjoy yummy beverages and comfy seats

Today was a day akin to fun days of Beijing summers past (read: last summer). I met up with Tammy and her Swiss friend Ziggy in Wudaoko for lunch at a cafe. We were also joined by some random American businessman who was doing his own laptop thing in the corner of the cafe (it's got wireless) until we got our lunch and then he inquired as to whether we'd be okay with some company b/c he'd been working away all morning. Of course we said it was fine and he never actually gave us his name...just kinda chatted, but that's just fine too. We jetted down to Sanlitunr afterwards to do a little perusing of the markets....we watched with moderate humor in our eyes as foreigners got royally ripped off buying just about every kind of knock-off and junky object known to man. Ziggy bought a couple of things and tammy and I bargained for her. It was nice speaking Chinglish and Chinese with Tammy....I haven't gotten to do a whole lot of that here as yet.

The most 'harrowing' part of the day involved the cab ride back to Haidian following our stop for gelatto. After waiting almost ten minutes for an empty taxi to roll by (yesterday was chinese valentine's day and i think some fellas forgot or something so they were taking their ladies out for dinner and dancing etc. tonight and so every every taxi was filled with tanlianai ren (lovers, daters etc.)) and finally this crummy blue taxi rolls by, but he's going the opposite direction. I start to make a comment about the shabby condition of it...ok, really I was mocking it, and sure enough it turns around and stops for us. We get in b/c it's rush hour and we'd been waiting a long time. Well as soon as we get in and he goes tammy and I notce that of course he's not a licenced taxi driver b/c he doesn't have his beijing permit on the dashboard like he should. Then comes the shadiest part.....as soon as we get near the highway, he puts his hand on the top of the car and peels off the lighted "TAXI" sign on top of the car! He must have done so that the police wouldn't pick him up for illegal taxing. He weaved in and out of traffic like nobody's businesss. Yeesh! But eventually I got home, and in one piece.

I love China!

2005-08-12T13:02:00.000-07:00

Right, so I was thinking that maybe my last posts might have sounded like I wasn't liking China this year....but I've figured it out. I don't like American groups. I've spent my last two days off in small groups of people, speaking Chinese and going to all the great places in Beijing and I've been loving it. Today I took Tim and Jenny to a tiny French-like cafe in a building by a bookstore in Wudaoko to use wireless internet. I love it. And what's more - the coolest thing happened to me. So here i am in Bejing....a foreigner...haven't been here in a year and about five minutes after I sit down in a cafe that i haven't been to in a year, a teacher of mine from Shoushida last summer strolls in, not only remembers me, but calls me by my Chinese name. It was awesome! We got to chat for a bit....I was ecstatic.

Additionally, I went into a totally great Chinese bookstore today and bought the first Harry Potter book in Chinese.....the lady behind the counter probably thought I was off my rocker....but I talked with her for a little bit and she seemed to think it was cool that I was going to read it. Her comment was that 'people who look like you don't speak Chinese.' Ha, whatever that means.

I think we might go to the night market off of Wangfujin dajie tonight....scorpian and chicken heads on a stick are the specialty, good thing I had a super lunch today.

2005-08-09T21:26:00.000-07:00

I think my hubris regarding not getting mosquito bites caught up with me, b/c for every bite I got during my first day teaching, i've gotten one right next to it, to match of course. There is a guy on the program who claims he never gets an mosquito bites....his blood must be haggis-flavoured or something....and mine mint-chocolate chip.

Chinese class is shaping up to be pretty hard and I feel like I am not able to give it my full attention (read: any attention) b/c I'm really focused on teaching right now. However, the only thing that makes me feel better is that everyone else in my class feels and is doing the same. The morning class, with the distinguished professor is great, it's just the drill class in the afternoon that is truly terrible. We all just kind of sit there sometimes and stare blankly, part out of not understanding and partly out of being tired, haha. I'm guessing I didn't realize just how esteemed this particular professor was until yesterday. There is a girl in our class who is not going to Shenzhen and I asked someone about her and her story and this is what I found out: she is Chinese and her parents live in America and she goes to an American university but has been teaching here in China this last semester. Well she is staying on as a TA for our program in Beijing in exchange for being able to take our two hour lesson with this particular professor each morning....kinda cool that we've got him for three weeks I'd like to think.

Tomorrow Tom and I are going with our students to hotpot for lunch....should be good, as they are very excited. It's weird thinking of them as students b/c some of them are law students at Qinghua (think Yale or Harvard) and others are equally intelligent. We're teaching i think the oldest class, so we're having to tailor the lesson plans to cater to a higher level. We spent today talking about newspapers and using new vocabulary like columnist, editor, financial section, news flash and my favourite, scoop. Scoop was kind of hard to define, but fun no less. We also taught them about the 'advice column' of the paper b/c there was an example in their textbook and decided to make an activity out of it: We started a letter to "Stella" for them and they had to finish it, creating a problem for Stella to solve. It was: Dear Stella, My name is Frank and I recently bought a brand new shiny truck.......Their problems were quite creative and finally at the end of the period we as a class came up with a classified ad to sell the truck in question, as it was causing 'Frank' too much trouble. Hahaha, teaching is pretty fun. tomorrow i'm teaching them about American holidays and they're going to work in groups to develop their own holiday b/c "the government has found a surplus in the budget and can afford for its citizens to take some additional time off." They're going to petition the gov't to pick their holiday...I think it'll be fun. Tomorrow will be my first day teaching on my own and being observed by instructors....i hope it'll go well.

My favorite student picked his English name yesterday. His Chinese name is Gao and so he decided that Gump, after Forest Gump was a good name. We have a new student in our class too, he joined today and is attending the Police university here in town. The class helped him pick the name Arthur after King Arthur (one guy really wanted him to be Lancelot, but he could not pronounce it). However, the best names have come out of some of the other classes, like "Superman, also known as Hercules and sometimes Hero" teehee. His best friend was Cinderella.

Well, there must be two bazillion people on the Beida campus right now, b/c the time Tom and I got to the front of the lunch line after teaching today, all the good food was gone...all that was left was steamed lotus root in a ketchup sauce (mmmm tasty minus the freakin ketchup, gross!) and rice.....so I quite astutely supplemented that interesting lunch with a Magnum bar afterward.

We had a guest lecturer come and speak (woohooo for making my day even longer) today. He is actually a student who was recently admitted as a freshman at Beida for the fall and he came to give us insight about the life of chinese high school students. It was actually a really cool lecture.

So on to my adventure. I met a really awesome girl here from Hawaii who went to UVA and she's been running here every day and she heard that I used to run a lot in America, so she asked me today if I wanted to go with her on a run after we got home today (today was perfect running weather b/c it had been raining all day and the temp. was low). I agreed and we set out and ran for about 25 mintutes and came upon this beautiful park in between some really awesome buildings and posh apts. and so we ran through it and came out the other side and figured we'd just make a huge square and run home. So we kept running and running and running and nothing looked familiar. So finally we admitted that maybe we didn 't know exactly where we were and so we asked a women how to get back to the beida medical campus (she speaks chinese too). Well the lady didn't know, but she said that the regular beida was in the direction that we were going, and that's good, b/c theoretically we'd hit our campus first and then if you went on further you'd get to beida. So we kept going and about 15 minutes later we were still facing unfamiliar territory. So we asked a security guard and he didn't know, so he radioed his friends to ask and they had an idea but weren't sure, but then he said to ask the taxi driver who was getting a soda from the street vendor. We asked and he immediately knew and we asked him to point us in the direction and he asked if we realized that we were kinda far away. He said he'd take us there but we told him we didn't have any yuan on us, but he said not a problem...he'd take us to our campus and one could wait with him and the other could get the money. We agreed even though we were still convinced we were close to where we lived. Well, it took us 15 minutes by taxi to get there....somehow instead of going in a square, we ran in some sort of weird trapezoid. But we were never worried as we both spoke Chinese and were together. As it turned out...our dinner party (who we were supposed to have met at 7:30) were outside the campus and a friend of ours lent us the money to pay the driver right away.....needless to say we probably won't live down our adventure for awhile...haha, oh well....it sure was fun and I made a great friend out of it.

The first of many for the year to come

2005-08-05T16:06:00.000-07:00

Well, after cruising over Siberia to the tune of a 135 mph headwind, I arrived in China yesterday evening. This time all my bags came with me; though for a time there, standing and staring at the baggage turnstile, I was afraid that once again I had arrived in China minus my total of wordly goods. However, finally the little machine spit out my suitcase and I was on my merry way.

I can't explain the feeling I had getting off of the plane and glancing around at the buildings surrounding the airport. It was a sort of euphoria really, like I was back to some place familiar. It is just as I remembered it from last summer, though I suspect there are more construction cranes dotting the skyline, as the impending 2008 Olympics requires quite the building necessity.

I am staying at the Beida Yixiao bu (Beijing U. Health Center) ....so not actually the main Beida campus itself. The group I am in China with all went to the Summer Palace today...it was sweet to go back and see it; esp. since today was a blue-sky day, owing thanks to the storms of the previous evening.

The one difference of being in China this time is that people are relying on me for translations and aide getting around, versus last summer where I had no qualms about letting someone else figure things out for me. For the most part my fellow teachers-to-be don't speak Chinese and are feeling on quite unfamiliar territory here in China. Hopefully that all will change. I've clued many into the subtle nuances of Beijing life...for example: despite the fact that we're staying in 'luxury' university accomodations (translation: shower curtain, sit-down toilet and AC) there are still things that foreigners don't understand. The toilets, even though they've got running water in them cannot handle toilet paper, the pipes here aren't made for that. So that is why there is a little basket next to the toilet to toss away the TP when done. Well my roommate learned that from me, and some others learned by walking in our room....but many came to breakfast this morning with stories of clogged toilets. haha, welcome to china. It's always something.

Classes start tomorrow, yes on a Saturday!

Stolen Time

2005-08-02T15:15:00.000-07:00

Well, it's August 2 and the next time that I post I will be living at Beida in Beijing.....scary thought huh. The 'i'm going to china' comment is actually becoming a reality whether I am ready for it or not. I have spent the last week shopping (guh), in a feeble attempt to reclaim all that was lost. I realized last night that the missing suitcase had my retainers as well and after I relayed my recollection to my mother....it was decided that early this morning I would have to go in and have new ones made. Bah.

So this morning, this very last morning that I am going to be in America, I had to get up at seven and take myself down to the dentist....again. I swear he must think I have a weird obsession with the dental chairs or something because this morning was my third trip there in five days. They made molds of mouth and I was on my way, with the promise that I would return later this afternoon to have them fitted. No sooner had I been home ten minutes when "USAirways" pops up on caller ID. I'm in shock, maybe I was dreaming. Maybe I was still asleep on my last American morning and the dental chair was only a sick joke. Nope, it was no dream. They had found my bag; it had been here the whole time. Geez. So apparently (as of now I have yet to capture a glimpse of said bag) it's coming this afternoon. So this means, that all the receipts and tags must be placed back with all the items bought this week and returned. Man, so not cool at all. I knew my week in Dallas was going to be busy, but I had wanted to spend quality time with mum and dad (i never get to see him) and adam, and instead I feel like the bag debacle robbed me of every last bit of family time. That's the part that really hurts. I don't mind having to return everything....i like my old stuff way better, but time, time you cannot get back, and right now, at this very moment I feel like my time was stolen. I've only seen my dad for maybe six days since Christmas and instead of hanging out with him (i don't care if we just sit in the same room and read) I had to go out and spend my time shopping for what was apparently lost (and apparently found). So at the end of all this what have I gotten.....nothing really, except a stressful week in Dallas, that is buttressed against what will be a full and stressful month of study in Beijing. Hmmm, Chinese neck massages here I come....maybe acupuncture too, or taichi????

And so on this last day in America, after procuring strange Texas type gifts for my headmaster (to the tune of Armadillo Droppings (pralines) etc.) I find myself with only time for one last run in America, one last dinner, and maybe one last quality tv show (that isn't going to be a bootleg copy purchased on the pedestrian fly-overs in Beijing....quality dvd sellers there no doubt).

It's 100 in Dallas today...it's 90 and raining in Beijing, go figure. I'm excited to be back in Beijing; I've got some friends there now and hopefully on one of my two days off this month I'll be able to meet up with them and catch up on life. I can't wait to see the campus of Beida; I've heard it's breathtakingly beautiful and I have no reason not to believe it, after all it is only minutes from the Yihe yuan (summer palace) and it's really beautiful there (minus the ominous grey sky of course...but that's always there). Hmm, maybe on the 18 hours I've got from San Fran to Beijing I will have to read my new camera manual so I can start taking pictures as soon as I get there.

I've yet to decide whether or not I am going to make the "no eating at American chain restaurants" pact with myself like I did last summer in Beijing. I think in a year I might crave a little bit of home (even if it comes at Christmas as a quater-pounder with cheese). So I'll just say that I am going to attempt to stay away from the American food, after all....Chinese food is rather delectable and I've had visions of street vendor food in China for a whole year.

Operation Mad Shopper

2005-07-30T07:38:00.000-07:00

Alright, so last time I posted the airlines had 'found' my bag and it was being sent to Dallas via Philadelphia. Well after about ten more hours of being on the phone with USAirways (9.95 hours of listening to the elevator-type hold music and .05 hours talking to someone with questionable competance) it was concluded that no one knows where my bag is, so all of my pants, jewelry shoes and shirts that were in there now must be replaced in four days. Sitting here reading this you're probably thinking, gee, what fun, a shopping spree that will be backed by claim checks from the airlines and the credit card the ticket was purchased on. Oh wait, no it's not fun. Adam and I spent all day yesterday looking for stuff and and much to my dismay, did not find very much that will replace the lost items. I am finding it difficult to go out and try to buy all of my clothes over again in 48 hours. I had been collecting that stuff for years and there were new things that I had just gotten and never even worn from the store I worked at in NC.

After being sad for a long time, I began to realize that what I lost is just 'stuff.' I am still the same person with or without the quirky earrings and fun clothes. Thus....bring on the shopping. (I have always hated shopping in general; at the end of all this, I am going to despise it). However I wouldn't have gotten through the last few days without my dad and Adam being the rational ones. What I am going to do without the 'men' in my life? Hmmm, a survey would probably conclude that I would become more self-reliant. We'll see if that happens over the next year.

I've got to get presents for the principal and head teacher of my school in Shenzhen. Someone suggested a themed gift based upon where you're from.....so what do we think, a lasso and a cowboy had maybe...I think international aviation law might have a problem with me bringing to sets of spurs with me, so scratch the addendum to the costume.

Bah, time to get up...the workmen are here pounding away at the additiont to the house already...good thing I never sleep late or I might have been redused to tossing water balloons at them from out the window in an effort to stifle the noise.

Dallas...trouble

2005-07-28T06:43:00.000-07:00

Well gee....I can't even get out of the United States without losing luggage. I already was having major qualms about leaving the island (b/c hey it's an island) but upon arrival in Dallas, only one of my suitcases arrived. The giant brown rolling suitcase (which now seems to have a proclivity for losing itself) was not there. This is incidently the same case that was sent to South Korea last summer when it was supposed to arrive with me in Beijing. Tsk tsk. I am seriously considering this to be a message from a higher power that the brown suitcase is not to go with me to China.

The airlines has really been less than than competent in helping me get my bag back. Alex, the electronic voice for the USAirways lost baggage line and I are pretty tight right now. I called him about 20 times yesterday and in all his automated glory he did not tell me where my bag was. Finally I got to talking to a real person (though I have a sneaking suspicion that USAirways outsources their tech services calls to people in India (but that is neither here nor there) and finally this fella tells me that my bag is coming in from Philadelphia on a 9pm flight....so darnit it better be here today, b/c I don't have any shirts and I desperately need underwear.

I went to the dentist today....I abhor the dentist. Actually going to the dentist is fine so long as they don't take pictures of the teeth. That's when they always find a cavity for me. They weren't going to take pictures yesterday, but stupid me said that I was leaving for China for a year and wouldn't be gettting my teeth cleaned for a year, so welp they snapped the photos and guess what...I've got to go back today and get a cavity filled. Boooooo....hisss....

In other news, I might be on Walmart's watch-list for nutty people. I bought a gajillion kinds of medicine today for China and I think the lady thought I was going to peddle them to people. Then I explained I was moving to China....so I think now she just assumes I'm a pathological liar, because hey...who would want to move to China. Well lady...I WANT TO. So there.

Getting it started

2005-07-16T07:51:00.000-07:00

Welp, for being one of the world's most unsavvy computer users I think i've finally got this blog up and running. I only hope that it will actually work in China (that's kinda the point). I cannot possibly keep up in lengthy email contact with everyone I know while in China for the next year, so I figure everyone can come here and find out what life is throwing at me while I'm in my favorite country of the moment, China! of course.

I can't believe that I leave America in less that three weeks; it's more like 2.5 now. I've got so much to do. I am working here on BHI for another week attempting with all my strength to keep from buying clothes I don't need from the store that I work at. Basically I must stay away from the dry-clean only section and anything white, unless I plan on not wearing for my year in China. We Americans really must not take for granted the great quality of water the US has to offer......I mean for real, white clothes don't turn grey here.

Ever since graduation I have been looking forward to the beginning of July and seeing Adam. That is what got me through the lonely part of June where I was living here by myself and pretty much working all day every day. Well I can't believe that my time with Adam has come and gone. Upon his departure I analyzed the following changes: while he was here I was happier, I laughed more, I bicycled more and I most certainly became much tanner. All in all the most wonderful two weeks of the summer.

On to another random thought: I am going to miss my family gobs and gobs. We are so close and get along so well and I rely on them for advice all the time. In Shenzhen, I am going to have to rely on myself.

Wilmington, NC

2005-07-16T04:17:00.000-07:00

A glimpse into the perfection of the beginning of July