T.J. in China

Aunt Ant

2010-06-26T20:26:00.008+08:00

Two days ago I went for a run on the track here at the school. I brought my phone and my keys with me to the track and set them on the ground while I ran. Afterward, I headed back home, and I went to check one of my text messages when I noticed some curious movement on the screen.

Turns out an ant had somehow crawled its way into my phone and was now stuck in between the LCD display and the plastic outer layer, with seemingly no way to get out. This was quite an interesting turn of events in an otherwise ordinary day, so Jean and I took some pictures of the little critter:

Over the next couple hours she remained in my phone until she somehow finally made her way out.

Mmmm... Thousand Island Dressing...

2010-06-26T07:01:00.018+08:00

A couple weeks ago, Web International English (a school I work out part-time) was having some sort of promotion with BMW where some students and staff would take a weekend and go to a place called Qian Dao Hu, or "Thousand Island Lake." They wanted a foreign teacher to come along, and they asked me if I'd like to go, saying that all the expenses (travel, hotel, admissions, etc) would be covered. Since Jean had only just returned from a week visiting her best friend in Beijing, and having been gone for a month with her parents in Harbin before that, I wasn't really sure I wanted to spend a weekend without her. So, I asked them if it would be alright if Jean came along. It might not have been totally appropriate to ask that, but I figured, the worst they could say is "No," in which case I wouldn't go, and instead spend my time more happily with Jean.

To my surprise they said yes, and so we went. When leaving the group of us crammed into 4 BMW vehicles and began the three-hour drive to Chun An, the town that Qian Dao Hu belongs to. We arrived on a Friday night (I guess that would've been June 11, because the first game of the World Cup was that night), went out to dinner, and then went back to the hotel, as we'd be getting up early the next day to sight-see.

There's not a lot to say about the trip, but there was a lot to see so I'll put some pictures up here.

There are literally 1023 little islands or "islets" on this lake, and some of them are specialized. For example, there is a Snake Island:

(In these two pictures above, if you look closely you'll see there are a lot more snakes than at first glance.)

There is a Bird Island as well:

Also during the tour, on the snake island, we saw a show of some women dancing and singing, but they weren't exactly "women"... they were Thai lady-boys. It was a little weird (no photos allowed, unless you paid) and at one point one of them was singing a song, performing both the alto female part, and the tenor male part... disturbing.

In all, though, Qian Dao Hu was one of the more beautiful places I'd seen in China, and I'm glad we had the chance to go.

I did though come across a couple interesting instances of "Chinglish."

This was in front of the elevator in our hotel. Just a little incorrect grammar, but it still gets the message across.

This was taken on the boat on Qian Dao Hu. This one is not technically wrong. I looked it up in a dictionary, and "to speel" means "to climb, ascend, or mount." But I'd never heard it before and it sounds really funny.

(I came across a similar situation to the one above when I visited a Dinosaur Theme Park last year. There was a notice that said "Burgling is Forbidden Here." Not wrong, just sounds funny.)

This was in the bathroom in our hotel. Consume the Green!

This one we saw in the downtown area of Chun An. Many western stores' names becomes "Chinese-ified" in China. For example Adidas becomes "A Di Da Si" and Armani becomes "A Ma Ni." The store is supposed to be Manhattan (which in Chinese "should" be "Man Ha Dun") but as you can see here, its a far more hilarious transliteration.

This was not taken at Qian Dao Hu, rather in Huzhou. This is the name of a chain of stores that sells leather bags. I will make no comments.

Sing It!

2010-06-25T22:38:00.002+08:00

So, about a month and a half ago I got a call from one of my Chinese friends named Annie. Annie is woman in her 40s and is married to a Canadian man named Paul. She has an 18 year old daughter named Susan. Anyhow she called me telling me (in Chinese first, because her English is so-so) that there was going to be a singing contest the next day at the TV station, and wanted to know if I'd like to participate together with her daughter. I wasn't exactly sure what this contest was about, but I said sure.

The next day Susan contacted me at about noon saying that the contest would be at the local TV station at 2. At least we needed to be there at 2 that is. I met Susan at the Huzhou Teacher's College (about a mile from my school) at 1:30 and from there we walked the remaining half a mile to the TV station. On the way I asked her what exactly this competition was about. She explained to me that they would play part of a song, perhaps 30 seconds or so, and then they would stop the music and you would have to sing the next couple of lines. You didn't have to sing on key, only the lyrics mattered. I asked her if we'd be competing together and she said she thought so. She had a list of the 30 or so songs that they might give to the contestants to sing (about half English songs, half Chinese songs), but unfortunately I didn't have enough time to really study it. I only had even heard of maybe 4 or 5 of the songs, and beyond that only knew the words to 2 of them (Poker Face by Lady Gaga and Venus by some-band-in-the-80s-that-I-don't-know). I wasn't very concerned, however, because Susan knew the songs fairly well.

When we arrived at the TV station we discovered that it was in fact NOT a team competition, but an individual one. Further we found that it would only be me competing and not Susan. Then I started to get worried because I had no idea about the vast majority of these songs and further I still wasn't clear on what exactly the format of this competition was. I did, however, learn that this would be broadcast on local Huzhou television that Saturday evening (this was a Tuesday), and that it would be posted for viewing online the following week.

Then we entered the studio and I realized this was not some low-production, one-off competition. This was a real TV game show, with a full set and live studio audience and everything. This upped the ante a bit as now if I embarrassed myself, it would be in a more formal setting. There we learned there'd be a total of 8 contestants. As it turned out one of the planned contestants didn't show up, so they let Susan compete after all. When the show began we went back stage and they called out each of the contestants one-by-one to do a short introduction with him or her and the hosts. On a side note, I wasn't the only foreigner competing. There was a Filipino man also competing. I learned that he was a musician and had been living and working in China for about 5 years. He was currently working (with his fellow Filipino group) as the entertainment of a Southeast Asian style restaurant here in Huzhou. His English was great, but even more surprising, his Chinese was unbelievably good. Not only fluent, but really authentic sounding as well. My Chinese is alright, Ellis's Chinese is much better than mine, but in either case we still sound like foreigners speaking Chinese. This guy didn't.

Anyway I was contestant #5 and Susan was contestant #6 and when I went up for my introduction Susan went out with me. There was a brief back and forth with the hosts and us, and... normally my Chinese is not bad, or when listening maybe I need a moment or two to process what was said to me. But in this on-the-spot situation, needing a moment to process instead looks like I didn't understand, and so Susan did a brief spot of translating for me (this ended up getting cut, thank goodness).

When the competition began they had all the competitors standing in a row at about mid-stage, and whoever's turn it was would come up stage. At this time, standing there, I became increasingly aware of my hands, realizing I didn't know exactly what to do with them. This in turn reminded me of a scene from a movie called “Talladega Nights” where a character wins a race and is being interviewed and he keeps raising his hands to his face because he doesn't know what to do with them.

When my turn came, I had an English song, but I'd never heard it before and thus had no prayer of being able to finish singing it. On my 2nd turn, it was a Chinese song, and I do know a select few Chinese songs, but this was not among them, so strike 2. On my final turn I again was given an English song which I'd never heard and thus failed again. After telling them I didn't know, the host asked me in Chinese “You really don't know?” to which I was thinking, “No, I've been holding out on you,” but actually replied, “I really don't know.” That was that and I was done. The most face-losing part of it was not that I didn't make it to the 2nd round or that I got all the songs wrong. In fact there were 3 other contestants who didn't make it to the 2nd round. The difference is that when the other contestants would answer incorrectly, at least they had a decent guess, something very close, but was perhaps off by a word or two. I was the only one who was completely ignorant on every try.

Anyhow, I was done and off and my friend Susan actually ended up winning the whole thing, for which she was given a 2000 yuan prize. I received a stuffed “Haibao” as a parting gift. (For those that don't know, “Haibao”, literally “Sea baby”, is the mascot of the Shanghai 2010 World Expo. If you haven't heard of the Shanghai Expo, it's basically a World's Fair, except modern and the most expensive one by far in the history of World Fairs. In fact, setting up this expo in Shanghai was more expensive than the Olympics in Beijing.)

Now I intended to post about this outing shortly after it happened but I was hoping to be able to provide a link to watch it. In fact, I didn't bother watching on TV, because I figured I'd watch it online a few days. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to watch it, and then ended up procrastinating on getting this post done. I'd asked some Chinese friends to help me find it to watch it, but to no avail. Finally today I asked Susan if she knew how to watch it. Turns out I had found the right link, but you can ONLY view it with Internet Explorer. So without further ado, here is my not-so-spectacular television debut:

http://www.hugd.com/vod/2010-05/17/cms103710article.shtml

Remember you can only use Internet Explorer to view this. Also, to play it, there is an image that shows a hand pointing to a play button and it says "PLAY" next to it. You don't click that, you click the Chinese words next to it, “我爱红歌汇 (十七)” to play it. The whole thing is in Chinese, and its kind of long, but I made my first appearance at 17:20, so if you want to skip forward to that, feel free to. Furthermore, I have no idea how fast or slow this will stream out of China, so if it's unplayable stateside, sorry.

Careless

2010-05-09T14:21:00.004+08:00

Several months ago, shortly after I had bought my bike here in China, I regretted not having spent more and gotten a multi-speed bike. Since going downtown from my school is a 5 km affair, I figured having a multi-speed bike would speed things up nicely.

I secretly told myself that I wouldn't mind if my bike got stolen so that I could splurge and get a new one. However, after 19 months in China, it was never lost... until now.

Thursday evening I rode my bicycle to Web (the English training center that I work at part-time) and parked it near the exit of the grocery store in the center of town, since I had a few things (like milk) that I needed to pick up before I went home. However, my plans changed because my American co-worker at Web, Brandon, would be leaving China in a few days. I decided to go out with him and have a few drinks. Afterward, I decided to go back directly and took a cab home.

The next day I went to work at Web again, but took the bus to downtown since I didn't have my bike. Now at that point, it IS possible that my bicycle was still there, but I neglected to check. Anyhow, after work he and I and a few others again went out.

When I went into town on Saturday to finally get my needed groceries, I found that my bike was gone. At first, I had looked in the wrong place, as I don't usually park outside the exit of the grocery store, but near the office building Web is in. But after tracing my steps, I went back to where it should've been, but still (maybe still isn't the right word... again? actually?) my bicycle was lost.

So, in total, my bike was out in public for at least two nights. I shouldn't have been as careless as I had been. I had occasionally left it out for one night before and hadn't lost it. But on those occasions I had parked it in a somewhat more secure area. That's what I should've done Thursday night once I realized I wouldn't be riding it home.

In any case, with just under two months left, I can't NOT have a bike, so now I'm gonna have to go buy a new one. The only other ways to get around are buses and taxis.

Taxis would actually be a reasonable option (for two months) since the taxis here aren't terribly expensive (basically anywhere from $1 to $2 per trip depending on where I'm leaving from or going to). The problem is, my school is just on the outside of town, and finding a taxi isn't a very reliable proposition. Often the only way you can get a taxi leaving the school is to take one that had just dropped some returning students off.

The buses are more regular, but the problem with them is that it's not so convenient. If I need to go to the center of the city (where Web is) and I take a bus, I need to allow about 35-40 minutes, because of walking to the bus stop, waiting for the bus (hoping I won't JUST miss one), going through traffic, taking an indirect route, and stopping at several stops in between. Conversely, riding my bike I can make it from my front door to web in 18-20 minutes (depending on traffic lights). Furthermore the buses stop running at 9 pm, so the evenings I work at Web, I'd have to catch a cab home anyway.

But truth be told, perhaps the most significant reason I need a bicycle from where I'm living is this: The distance from my apartment door to the front gate of my school is about 0.65 km (about 0.4 miles). And that's if you wanted to catch a cab. For the bus stop the total is about 0.9 km (about 0.55 miles). Now I have to traverse this strip at least twice if not several times daily and if I had to walk it each and every time... It's not that I'm lazy; it's that I'm impatient. I'd get sick of wasting nearly ten minutes retreading this path so many times every single day. With a bike, even if I wanted to take a taxi someplace, I could at least hop on the bike and and park it at the front gate with the guards.

Anyhow, I don't want spend a whole lot of money on a new bike because I'll just leave it or give it to someone after two months, but on the other hand, it's just WAY too inconvenient for me to not have it. And I don't want to buy a cheap one and have to suffer it for two months.

A new bike will run me about $50 American, so it's not like I am going in to financial straits because of it... just not a wad of money I want to spend on something that I will be getting rid of two months later.

On a lighter note, a student sent me an instant message today, just wanting to practice his English. However, at the time he was chatting with me I had gotten up to make a sandwich. During that time, because I hadn't responded to his message, he guessed I was busy and typed, "Your excellency is very busy?"

Haha, now he just wanted to use a respectful address, and the equivalent translation of "your excellency" (阁下 ge2 xia4) in Chinese can be used to show respect with teachers, but he wasn't aware of the formality or "royal" tone of it. I told him "sir" would be just fine.

Kids on the Bus

2010-04-25T08:34:00.003+08:00

Well, last Friday Jean left for Harbin to visit her parents for a month before she leaves for America. In the meantime I've pretty much been going on business as usual.

The World Expo begins in Shanghai today. If you haven't heard of it, it's basically a World's Fair kind of deal... except they really are doing it something special. I read they spent like $44 billion dollars preparing Shanghai for it... that's more than they spent on the Olympics.

I'm not going to see it this month, A) because Jean's not here and won't get back till near the end of May, and 2) because it's going to be SO crowded. Shanghai is already a pretty busy, crowded city, and I don't want to think what it's going to be like for the early part of this Expo. In any case it lasts about 6 months so Jean and I should be able to go in June before we leave.

Other than that, nothing really interesting has happened recently except something on the bus few days ago.

So Jean and I were sitting on the bus heading for downtown Huzhou. As we drew closer to one of the stops along the way, a little girl, maybe 7 years old, got up from her seat and waited in front of the door so she could get off.

While she was waiting she noticed me and said to me (in Chinese, in fact this whole exchange took place in Chinese): “Excuse me, are you Chinese or a foreigner”

At this many of the other people on the bus around us chuckled and I replied to her: “I'm a foreigner.”

She then said somewhat indignantly, “Then why have you come to our China, huh?”

Everyone around us laughed again, louder this time.

“I teach English.”

And finally, with a sense of doubt about her she responded, “But... you don't look like a teacher.”

As she finished her sentence the bus came to a stop and she hopped off, leaving the remaining bus passengers laughing; the woman sitting in front of me laughed and commented, “Naughty little kid.”

I thought it was pretty funny, but Jean disagreed.

C'est la visa!

2010-04-09T13:47:00.004+08:00

In February Jean got the letter of approval for her visa to come back with me to the states, which left only the "simple" matter of collecting the visa.

As it turns out this is not as simple as it seems. She had her interview at the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou back in January. To get an idea of the geography here, if Huzhou is a town about 60 miles north of Atlanta, and if Hangzhou is Atlanta (large city with an airport), then Guangzhou would be Miami. Not exceedingly far, but requires one to fly.

Anyhow, the consulate "can" mail the visa to the visa applicant IF you live in select large cities (like Shanghai or Beijing), but if not you have to go down to Guangzhou to collect it yourself. Neither Huzhou nor Hangzhou can receive these visas, but Jean DOES have a cousin who lives in Shanghai who could receive it.

HOWEVER

Even if you have it mailed to you, you must FIRST go down to the consulate in Guangzhou in person to fill out the forms to have it sent to you. Then why, you might ask, would you ever choose to have it mailed to you? Well I'll tell you why. It's because after you go down to Guangzhou there is still some processing and then they mail it to a local post office, so you'd have to stay for at least 4 business days in total.

That being the case, since we'd have to go down to Guangzhou anyway, we decided just to get it all done in one fell swoop, and have a nice long weekend vacationing in Guangzhou to boot.

Jean actually left before I did, because the consulate is only open Monday through Thursday. That Monday was actually a Chinese holiday (Tomb Sweeping Festival) and so was only open three days that week. She left early so that she could get the processing started as soon as possible. I left a day later because I had to work, and was already taking off two days for the long weekend anyway.

On a side note, my flight to Guangzhou was scheduled to leave Hangzhou at 3pm and arrive two hours later on Wednesday the 7th. Because I was starting out in Huzhou, not in Hangzhou, and because I was dependent on buses and bus schedules, I had to leave my house around 8am to be there in time. When I arrived at the airport, I was about 3 hours early, so I had to kill some time. As the time got closer I found that my flight was delayed to 4:30pm. No big deal, just more time I had to wait. We finally began boarding the airplane at 4:30, which would've put us in line for a 5pm departure, but unfortunately, even after everyone had boarded the plane, we were told that due to inclement weather in Guangzhou, we hadn't yet been given landing clearance in Guangzhou, and so would wait to take off.

Flash forward to 8:10pm and we were finally taking off. Oh yes, about 3 and a half hours sitting waiting ON the airplane. You know it seems to me that nearly every, and I'd have to say all but maybe one domestic flight I've had in China has been delayed by some time. Maybe as little as 20 minutes to as much as 2 or even in this case 5 hours. The only flights that I haven't had this problem with are the international ones I've had going home. Then again, those were American air lines, not Chinese ones.

Eventually I arrived in Guangzhou and Jean and I went back to the hotel.

Getting back on track from that diversion, Friday the 9th, Jean and I headed to the particular post office where the consulate sends the visa packets are sent. We weren't sure if it would have arrived yet, but it would've been possible. To our delight, it was there! It'd actually arrived the day before according to the mail stamp.

So finally, Jean has her visa and we'll be flying back stateside this summer!

Let's Go Fly a Kite!

2010-04-09T13:40:00.005+08:00

A couple weekends ago Jean and I went to the grocery store for a few things and as we left we sawr a park across the street where some people were selling and flying kites.

Having been in China this long (almost a year and a half now) and having not flown a kite here yet, I figured no time like the present, so we bought one, went home to put the groceries away and then went out to the school's field to have a go.

One normally annoying thing about Huzhou is that it's often quite windy. If it's cold outside the wind makes it colder, and if you're riding a bike and can add quite a resistance to your ride. But for flying a kite it makes for pretty agreeable conditions.

Here are a few pics and a low-quality video taken with my phone of our gusty goofiness:

If the above video doesn't load correctly, you can also see the clip at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DFyXp2XYFk

Harbin, at Last

2010-03-31T14:01:00.007+08:00

For those that have been following my blog, it has been awhile since I’ve posted an update. I got back from Harbin a little over a month ago, and that week after returning I did have some time, but just got lazy about posting and updating. The following week however, the new semester started and since then I have been fairly busy.

But I do need to update this before I forget. On a side note, I never did finish posting about last summer’s travels with my uncle, aunt, and cousins. The difference between that and this, however, is that at that time I did Write the posts, I just didn’t take the time to edit them and upload and insert the pictures. BUT, those writings are saved, not merely lost to the abyss that is my memory. The Harbin trip however, is now a month gone, and I need to get it on paper, or on disk as it were, before the memories finally blend together into an ambiguous memory blob.

So the flight was scheduled for Saturday, February 13 to go to Harbin. That day was actually itself Chinese New Year’s Eve, so we’d be arriving just in time. We bought the plane tickets well in advance, back at the end of November in fact, so that we’d have it squared away. Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year as many of you may know it, is the largest movement of people on the planet. Some millions of Chinese people head home for Spring Festival. It’s their BIG holiday, like Christmas to us in the West. The tickets to Harbin from Hangzhou ran a little on the expensive side for domestic flights in China, 3800 RMB for two tickets (about $560), but it was what it was and in buying them nearly 3 months early, we wouldn't have to worry about it later.

Flash forward to February 9, four days before our scheduled flight, and Jean suggested to check and confirm the flight. After a discovering that our tickets were for a flight two days later, we scrambled to call the airline and find out what happened. As it turns out, that Saturday flight had been canceled and we were bumped to a Monday flight. What's more, this had happened back in the middle of January and no one had ever contacted us, either by e-mail or phone (the two contact methods available). The airline wouldn't refund the tickets because they weren't bought directly through them, so we contacted the online vendor through whom we purchased the tickets. The woman that Jean talked to said that if the flight had indeed been cancelled without notifying us that they would refund our tickets. The only problem was that the seller said their accountant had already taken leave and wouldn't be able to process the refund until after the holiday. In the meantime we searched for some other tickets to fly up to Harbin on the 13th. We did find some tickets, and despite the time being so short, the tickets were actually a great deal cheaper, 2800 RMB (about $415) for the pair. This was actually good news provided we could get the refund on the first set of tickets, because we'd save money. Fortunately, the return flight tickets had no such problems.

So Friday, February 12 I left for Hangzhou and the next morning Jean and I made our way to the Hangzhou airport. We arrived that afternoon in Harbin without incident. We hitched a cab to Jean's parents and arrived some 45 or so minutes later. I met her mom for the second time and her father for the first. Her mother had bought some pajamas for both Jean and I so we could wear something warm and comfortable around the apartment.

That night we all ate dinner together. Her father and I were the first ones to sit down and he offered me a glass of bai jiu (literally “white liquor”, pronounced “bye joe”). There are other variants of this stuff with SUPER high percentages of alcohol (70%), but luckily this variety was only 35%, not dissimilar to the alcohol content in vodka or rum. As it was served in a shot glass, I mistakenly thought that we were to begin with a shot, so I downed it one gulp, as did her father right after me. Walking into the dining room at that moment, Jean scoldingly informed me that it was to be sipped at, not shot. She asked her dad why he drank it like that, and he said he did it because I did it. I was actually kind of relieved to hear that it was to be sipped, especially seeing how quickly her father refilled our glasses. After that I sipped at it, drinking when her father drank. Near the end of dinner I had finished off my third glass and her father went to re-fill it yet again, at which point I had to decline. In all our subsequent meals (except breakfast) I drank with her father, but had to limit myself to only one or two shot glasses of the stuff, while he usually drank a little bit more. Bai jiu isn't the harshest or most terrible liquor in the world, but I'm not a big drinker to begin with, so it was something I had to adjust to. The Chinese, however, are generally big drinkers.

On a side note, Jean's mother was such a generous cook; she had prepared so much food, and Jean and I ate so much at every meal that at no point during this trip did we ever feel even remotely hungry. Whenever the next meal time would approach, both Jean and I still were still kind of full, didn't really feel like eating, but did anyway. I think finally the 5th or 6th day we were there we (Jean and I) finally ended up skipping one meal, because we both had no room for food, and were fairly tired.

After dinner the first night I hooked up the Wii to their TV, and we all played it for a little while. Jean's mom seemed to enjoy it, but I'm not sure her father has as good a time. After that we tuned to the TV to the “Spring Festival Celebration Gala,” an event held and televised every New Year's Eve, and is also a sort of modern tradition in China. It's a show where they hold skits, sing songs, and put on dances, and is watched by almost all the Chinese on New Year's Eve. As a result, the live viewing audience for this program is higher than for any other event on television in the world, including the Super Bowl. As the time grew later, we all made dumplings to be cooked and eaten. Eating dumplings (also known in the states as pot stickers) on Chinese New Year's is a tradition, meant to bring good fortune, and are eaten often throughout the holiday. At about 11:30 Jean's parents said they were tired and were going to turn in. Jean asked me what I wanted to do, and although I was tired, I felt we were too close to midnight to go to sleep. So, we stayed up and rang in the new year, followed by a steady cacophony of fireworks going off (maybe at least 15 minutes straight).

The next day Jean and I went to downtown Harbin, saw the completely frozen solid river, did a bit of shopping, and ate some “bing tang hu lu”, something lik candied apples except there are a variety of fruits (grapes, bananas, strawberries, or most traditionally, Chinese hawthorn), and they are cut into small pieces and skewered. Also, they're not coated with caramel, but some other sugar-based liquid that hardens around the fruits shortly (like 10 seconds) after being heated and poured.

Here with a strawberry and a banana "Bing Tang Hu Lu"

We walked along one of Harbin's most famous (and touristy) streets, Zhong Yang Avenue, and saw some ice carvings there, as well as a “hedge” maze made using blocks of ice instead of hedges.

I was fascinated by the ice blocks since they were so clear and so hard and so DRY. It's not as if I've never seen ice before, but whenever I see ice it has already begun melting, so at least the exterior is already or beginning to get wet. So, call me a bumpkin, but seeing such dry ice was a little unusual to me, as if it was just the solid form of any chemical we'd use in a chemistry lab.

While out Jean and I also made our way to a Wal-Mart so that I could get supplies to make spaghetti as Jean had suggested to her parents previously. I didn't make it that night, but we wanted to have the stuff ready.

When we got home we got we ended up watching the beginnings of the Winter Olympics, something we did quite a lot of during our stay, because it happened to coincide.

The next day we spent most of the day warm inside at home, but that evening Jean and I left to go see the Harbin Snow and Ice World, a park where they had dozens of enormous and elaborate ice buildings, ice sculptures, and snow sculptures. It was quite impressive and my words will do it no justice, so here are some of the pictures. There would've been more pictures but both Jean's camera's battery and mine ended up dying on us while there.

The structure behind me here is made entirely of ice blocks.

An ice terra cotta warrior

An ice sphinx and a beautiful girl.

These were two GIGANTIC snow sculptures

On the giant icy chess board

Mutual Photos through a Block of Ice

This one we saw on the side of the road in downtown Harbin.

The day after that the four of us went out to a restaurant for lunch as we were going to meet with some of Jean's mother's aunts. All total there were 9 people, Jean's mom, Jean's father, Jean's mother's eldest aunt (on her father's side) with her daughter (40s) and granddaughter (perhaps 13), another of Jean's mother's aunts (again on her father's side) with her husband, and then Jean and I.

An interesting point to note about Chinese is that while it is slightly complicated to explain these relationships in English (due to the ambiguity of the words “aunt” and “uncle”), in Chinese there is a different word to describe a variety of different relationships. There's a word for aunt who is your father's sister (gugu), a different word for an aunt who is your father's younger brother's wife (shenshen), and yet a different word for an aunt who is your father's OLDest brother's wife (dama), let alone the terms for your mother's sisters (ayi). While difficult to learn all these different terms, the nature of one's familial relationships is far clearer based on their addresses alone.

At the meal, I of course had to use Chinese to try and communicate (with Jean translating when things got hairy), but I have to say it was so much more difficult for me to communicate then than even just at home with Jean's parents. Part of it could've been I was not as sharp that day, part of it could've been the vocabulary they were using, and part still could have been their accents and pronunciation. I have found that in China I have a FAR easier time speaking with younger people, under the age of about 40, than those over, especially so in the South (where I live). There are exceptions of course, Jean's mother thankfully being a notable one, and I am NOT saying that it is because they are older, but the fact remains that by and large pronunciation of the younger generations is a great deal more uniform and proper than the older generations. If I had to hypothesize as to why, I'd most likely go with the availability of television from childhood. It would make sense that uniform national programming serves not only to homogenize a nation's culture, but also a nation's speech.

During the meal Jean mentioned that she and I were considering going skiing, and as it turned out, Jean's mother's cousin (the 40-something year old woman) was a tour guide. It so happened that she was arranging a group to go skiing the next day, and it was easy enough for us to join them. Jean also invited her best friend (a middle school classmate of hers) and her friend's friend.

The next day we woke up early to meet Jean's mom's cousin's tour group. We met them at a hotel, boarded a large van (or small bus?), and set off. The ride was three and a half hours to the mountainside and the first place we stopped was a restaurant, as it was lunchtime, and it was included in the tour fare.

After that we were taken to a ski resort where we didn't actually go skiing, but instead rode a cart down a metal track. They called it a luge, but really... if Uncle Jack or Aunt Mary are reading this, it was essentially exactly the same thing we rode to come down from the great wall except longer.

After that diversion the tour group finally headed to a different place to go skiing. Jean, despite having grown up in the far North had never actually gone skiing, so it was her first time. The slope we were on was quite a gentle grade, but despite this, poor Jean, she was quite nervous and once she started sliding, she didn't know how to stop, save for simply falling... which is what she did... quite often. This was before she finally decided to give up entirely.

As for me, the slope was too gentle. I didn't fall one time. And believe me, I'm not saying I'm just so good that I didn't fall. I've only ever been skiing twice before in my life, so I'm no pro... which is in fact how I know that it was too easy. Unfortunately, the place we were at, there was only this slope to play on. Additionally, we were only there for about two hours before we had to leave, at which time we hopped back into the van/bus and spent the next four hours going back to Harbin.

(The next week after we returned, Jean's company went on a ski trip to a mountain town in Zhejiang province, the province where we live. This time, I'm told, she did much better.)

Jean skiing in Anji

The next day we rested a bit, mostly stayed home watching the Olympics, playing cards or mahjong, and playing Wii.

The following day Jean and I decided to go skating and so Jean's mom went with us to show us where a park was where we could skate. The park was along the river and the ice-skating circle was actually on the river itself! We arrived there at maybe 10 o'clock and we were the only ones there, and skated for about 30 minutes before heading home.

The next day Jean went out shopping with her best friend, while I stayed home, watched the Olympics with her parents, nursed a slight cold, and, in the late afternoon, began preparing the pasta.

Jean's parents hadn't eaten Italian pasta before, so mine was their first, and they said it was alright, but it didn't really suit their tastes. I've found there're quite a few Chinese for whom this is the case. Luckily Jean likes it :D

The next day we boarded a cab, headed for the Harbin airport and (after a flight delay, which seems to be the norm for me in China) began the journey home.

Overall, my impression of Harbin was that it is culturally quite an interesting city, being both Chinese, but also having architectural influence from neighboring Russia. Quite a few buildings were not Chinese in style, but rather 19th century Russian, which was quite a departure from the rest of China that I've seen.

I have to say, finally, that while it was really fun to visit... I just don't know if I could handle winters like that. With daytime highs between -5 and zero degrees Fahrenheit, and lows even colder, it was always a big todo just to go out and fetch a simple something. Inside the house it was quite comfortable and warm, but after about 2 minutes outside, my face and ears would begin to hurt. I'm a southern kid, and I'm simply not cut out for that kind of weather. It never snowed very heavily while I was there, so I didn't have a chance to build my as yet unbuilt first snowman. Also, Jean's parents were quite inviting and very gracious and hospitable and I hope I'll soon have the chance to return their hospitality.

Oh, and there was some good news both during and after the trip. A few days after we got back we contacted the ticket seller again and they did indeed refund our tickets. But more importantly, while in Harbin, Jean at one point received a phone call saying that she received a packet from the U.S. Embassy; this turned out to be her visa approval! So after we go down to Guangzhou again to fetch and affix her visa, she'll officially be headed stateside!

And FYI for those that don't know yet, the tickets going back are purchased, and we'll be arriving June 29.

Mallrats

2010-02-08T07:01:00.017+08:00

Ok, so finally, here is the story of Jean and I's trip to Guangzhou for her visa interview.

This first part is irrelevent, just, the morning of the day I left for Hangzhou to go to Guangzhou, the fog outside was crazy. Again, not relevant to the story, but it was mad thick.

When we arrived in Guangzhou, we first went to the hotel, which had been arranged by a woman who helps people coming to Guangzhou on visa matters. Jean asked her a few questions about it, and the woman answered to the best of her knowledge, and then Jean and I set out for a late lunch/early dinner. We searched online for a buffet and found one called the “Las Vegas Buffet” at a mall not far from where we were staying.

The mall was called Zheng Jia Guang Chang (正佳广场) and was rather large. You could enter on the ground floor or outside they had an escalator that would take you directly to the 4th floor.

There was even an ice-skating rink inside the mall.

When we entered the mall we passed by an electronics store and walked by a 103” Plasma TV. The price tag was something like $100,000. Here's a picture of me standing next to it for some scale.

We went to the Las Vegas Buffet for a late lunch (3:05pm) only to find that they were open for lunch from 10am to 3pm and open for dinner from 6pm till 10pm. We had just missed the lunch session. As we left, I grumpily made the comment “This isn't like Las Vegas. Las Vegas would be open 24 hours.”

We decided to grab a small lunch, try and kill 3 hours there at the mall, and then go back for dinner.

On the 7th floor of the mall we found a video arcade. We played a few games. They had “Drummania,” a Japanese drum game I had played before, but I kept failing because the machine's bass pedal was messed up.

There was also a Mario Kart arcade machine, and the game would take your picture while you were sitting there so you could see you as a Super Mario character. This is what I would look like if I were Super Mario's brother Luigi:

When 6 o'clock came around we went back to the buffet. It was a little bit expensive, but it was a pretty decent buffet too, so it evens out. Overall the food was above average for a buffet, but not uber-fantastic. The pizza was your typical Chinese style fare: bread with an inkling of tomato sauce, topped with onions, carrots, peas, corn, mushrooms, and a sprinkling of cheese. Yeah, not the most appetizing pizza. They did, however, have these excellent chicken filets that they made right in front of you.

After we ate, we were over-stuffed and we left the mall to return the hotel room. We turned in early because we would need to show up at the embassy at 7am the next morning. There were a lot of people already waiting there and they finally let people start to filter in around 7:30. The embassy was inside an office building, but you could only enter the embassy part with a letter showing that you have an appointment. As such I waited for Jean in a coffee shop in the office building, right outside the embassy, passing the time by talking with a guy from Nevada whose fiancee was also there that day for a fiancee visa interview.

A few hours later, I guess it was about 11, Jean called me, said she was done, and asked me to meet her out at the front of the building. She told me the interview actually went really well. Her interviewer was a young woman, she guessed perhaps late 20s to early 30s. Near the end of the interview the woman said to her, "Well, everything seems in order, you don't have any problems with you case." Then she said, "Now, let's talk about your party membership."

For those that don't know, by U.S. immigration law, if you are a member of the Chinese Communist Party, that is an automatic bar against immigration. When Jean was in her junior year at college she was invited to be a party member. Now, for some context, for a Chinese citizen, membership in the Chinese Communist Party is somewhat of an honor, only about 5% of the population is actually a member, so membership offers are generally only made to the best students. And not only that, but it can be advantageous in finding a good job, especially the stable and coveted government jobs, a fact not lost on imminently graduating college students. As such Jean accepted membership in 2007.

Now, for immigration to the U.S., if you are or ever were a member of the Communist Party of China, waivers can be, and are often, granted. In those cases it is beneficial to both quit the party, and prove that your involvement with the party was relatively inconsequential. This was essentially the case for Jean; she merely did the minimum required which was basically to pay the monthly dues (about $1 a month). All she had to do was quit the party (which was easier than she had initially anticipated), provide proof of her resignation, and prepare a statement explaining her involvment with the party. And she could claim that it did indeed help her find a job, as she does have a government job (she works as a clerk at the Hangzhou city Uptown district Financial Office).

Since she had these documents prepared and ready, they were able to immediately take them to be used in processing. Because of the fact that she had been a party member, it is policy that she could not get approval for the visa that day. However, the interviewer insinuated to Jean (I say insinuated because I don't remember exactly what Jean said she said to her) that it wouldn't be a problem and that we would be contacted by the embassy in a month.

So, the interview was about 5 minutes total and it was finally done. Jean was relieved a bit because of how stressed she was leading up to the interview, but still felt a bit disappointed that she couldn't succeed that day. I told her not to worry about that, that the interview went as well as it could, and that there was nothing she could have said or done differently (short of lying about Party involvement) that would've resulted in approval that day.

Neither of us had eaten breakfast that morning, so stuffed from dinner the night before, so by the time Jean left we were both ready to eat. We found a Southern style hot pot place to eat lunch. The meal was pretty good and Jean commented on how much cheaper it was here than it would've been back in Hangzhou.

Afterward, we wanted to relax for a bit so we walked around the block and found a StarBucks. The vanilla or creme or whatever it is they add to the top of these drinks made a heart shape, so Jean wanted to take a picture. Next to the coffee mugs is the photo album that Jean made in preparation for the interview. It was not required, but was something that would help to prove our relationship. Aside from that it was an extremely heartfelt effort on Jean's part, and I was quite moved the first time she showed it to me.

While in the StarBucks, I did a bit of web surfing, and, knowing that Guangzhou was a fairly international city (not unlike Shanghai), searched to see if I could find a place nearby that sold genuine Wii games. Now I say genuine because, just as the movie and music industry and China are overrun with piracy, the video game industry is equally as copyright unfriendly. The end result is that it is difficult to actually find genuine video game discs anywhere in China because they out numbered by pirated discs by at least tens of thousands to one. With a price differential of $60 to $2, it's not difficult to understand why. In China, however, the video game systems must be modified to be able to play these pirated discs. My Wii was bought in the U.S. and was never modified, and so cannot play pirated games, only genuine discs.

So I started searching and I found a message board of someone mentioning that they thought they had seen some genuine discs in a video game shop at the mall we had gone to the day before. It wasn't a sure thing, but since we had nothing else to do, and had some time to kill (it was then 3 o'clock and our flight back to Hangzhou was scheduled at 10pm), we caught a cab back to the Zheng Jia Guang Chang.

Something we happened to see there that we hadn't noticed the last time we had come was one of those 3D sidewalk art pieces that you sometimes see in e-mails and such, and we took some pictures to share.

From the wrong angles:

From the right angle:

Anyway, we got to the mall, found the video game store, and they did indeed have some genuine Wii games. Three to be exact: Wii Sports Resort, Wii Mario Kart, and The New Super Mario Bros Wii. Luckily, the one I was looking for was the last of those three. The original price they had listed was 478 RMB, about $70, which I was a little hesitant about considering the price in the states is $50 + tax. Jean asked if they could discount it, and they were willing to go so far as to give me the membership price, a 10% discount, and so I did finally buy it for 430 RMB, about $62.

Afterward we perused through the mall a bit more, and found a subsection that was more like a Chinese mall, and less like the American-style mall the rest of the place resembled. The advantage of these Chinese-style shopping centers are that you can often find some real bargains.

After we finished there it was about 5 and we decided to head to the airport. Even though we didn't need to go back at that moment, we didn't really have time to go do anything else, especially not knowing where anything is in Guangzhou. We hunted for a cab for about 30 minutes, at which point we were sweating even without wearing our jackets, a welcome feeling in the dead of winter compared to Huzhou and Hangzhou. After finally getting one, we found our way back to the airport bus, then to the airport, and then to our gate. The plane was already a red-eye, 10 o'clock departure, and actually took off about 40 minutes late. When we landed back in Hangzhou, it was nearly 1 o'clock, we were exhausted and nabbed a cab back home rather than try and find the bus.

Anyway, Spring Festival is coming up, the students here at campus have all already gone home, and this Saturday Jean and I will be flying up to Harbin to visit her family. It's going to be so cold. Harbin is latitudinally equivalent to Minneapolis. It's a city famous for its snow and ice sculptures. It's going to be a lot of fun, but it's going to be very, very cold, with daytime highs in the teens (Fahrenheit) and nighttime lows below zero. I have no idea what that will be like, but I will soon find out. To the Frozen North!

A Decent Proposal

2010-02-01T16:28:00.005+08:00

Ok well....

I am QUITE late on this blog post, but here it is. And it is a doozy.

Ok, SO, Jean and I had decided that we wanted to get married last year, and last July we first submitted the paperwork to apply for a K1 Fiance visa to the United States. However, even though it is something we had discussed at length, agreed upon, and both want very much, I hadn't formally proposed to her. Most importantly because I hadn't bought a ring.

I guess it was last August or September, we went to a jewelry store one time to look at some rings. While there they measured her size, but that was all we did. In October Jean finally said to me, "We have so many big expenses coming up, with the visa, and the airplane tickets to Harbin and Guangzhou and back to America, and so many other things, you don't need to buy me a ring now. It's not that big a deal, I'm not that kind of girl, you really don't need to worry about it."

So, at that point, I didn't mention it to her again. Of course that wasn't the end of it, just that was the last I talked of it with her. Of course I've to get her a ring.

So at that point I began saving up, and then when I began working some regular part-time hours at Web International English, I was able to save up fairly quickly and then, Friday the 15th, the Friday before we would leave to go to Guangzhou for her visa interview, I went and bought the ring. I bought it at a jewelry store in Huzhou, and Apple, my co-worker at Web, went with me to help me look for a ring (my Chinese is ok, but really technical stuff I can't follow). The biggest problem in looking for a ring was not the price or the quality, the biggest limiting factor was finding one where I liked the style of the ring. Finally I found one that I felt suited her the best and bought it. Now, I couldn't remember exactly what Jean's ring size was, and I could tell that the ring was a little bit too big, but the store told me that we could bring the ring back later and have it re-sized at no charge, so it was not a problem. I figured the romantic element of surprise was more important than having it fit perfectly snugly the first time.

Now, I had bought the ring on Friday night and had it sitting out in my apartment. Since I was working, unusually, at Web that weekend (to make up for lost hours while I would be in Guangzhou), Jean had decided not to come to Huzhou, since we'd really only be able to spend Saturday evening together, and we'd see each other Monday anyway.

However, come Saturday morning, I sent Jean a text message telling her, "I love you and I miss you." and Jean replied saying "me too" and then asked if I wanted her to come to Huzhou that day. I said "Of course I do," and then she replied that she would. After that, however, I remembered that I had the ring sitting out in my apartment and I wouldn't be able to hide it before she saw it, since I was already at Web and wouldn't be able to go back home before Jean arrived. So I called Ellis and told her the situation and asked if she could get the key from the door woman of our building downstairs and hide the ring at her place. She said no problem, and she did, crisis averted, surprise kept. Being the shutterbug she is, Ellis couldn't help but to take some pictures of the ring, and so I'll post them here.

Now as part of my plan I also bought a suit, and Sunday night, the 17th, after working at Web, a few people from Web went with me to help me get a good-looking suit. Also, after buying the suit Sunday night, I told Ellis about it and she snapped a couple of me in my suit as well.

So, Jean's interview was on Wednesday, January 20th in Guangzhou, and our flight to Guangzhou was to leave on the morning of the 19th from Hangzhou. So I had planned to meet Jean in Hangzhou the evening of the 18th. So, I packed the suit (as neatly as I could) into my bookbag, along with any other small things I might need for our trip. Then, Monday the 18th, I headed out to Hangzhou, and planned to meet Jean at Eudora, a nice western restaurant in Hangzhou that she and I frequent.

So once there, I had my bookbag, which was not unusual since I had come from Huzhou just earlier that day, and Jean met me there after she finished work. Once they showed us our table, before I had a chance to sit down or set my bag down, I said I needed to use the restroom. Once there I quickly changed into the suit. It took a bit longer than it should've. Since everything was going according to plan, and since this was a big moment, I was a bit nervous, and buttoning the shirt buttons was trickier than it should've been.

Then I came out, and walked back to our table. Jean saw me in the suit and her jaw dropped, she was completely surprised. Once I got to the table, not giving her a chance to say anything or ask any questions I pulled her seat out a bit to face me, got down on one knee, opened up the ring box, and said, "金嵩，你愿意嫁给我吗？" (Jin Song, Ni yuan yi jia gei wo ma?)

Now, earlier that day I had actually been going back and forth about whether I should propose in English or in Chinese. English was my native language and so it would've been more natural for me to say it, and her English is excellent... but she is Chinese and so maybe she as a little girl had imagined someone saying it to her in Chinese. I finally decided, "When in Rome..."

It actually worked out great, because I proposed to her in Chinese, and then she said to me, in English, "I do!" I slipped it on her ring finger and it was a little too loose, so she then moved it to the middle finger, where it was still a bit loose, but wasn't falling off. (I then mentioned we could get it fitted later.)

Even though because of our history and our plans I knew that she would say yes, this was still a really special moment for both of us.

Ok, so that covers the first bit of big news. The second: Jean's visa interview in Guangzhou.

Actually that could be a long story unto itself, so I think I discuss it in a separate, but imminent, blog post.

Google, Guests, Guangzhou, and Good Ones

2010-01-18T00:06:00.006+08:00

Ok, it's been a couple weeks, and I mightn't have updated my blog now, but there is just too much stuff that either has happened recently or that will happen soon for me to ignore.

In case you didn't know, on Tuesday, Google announced that they are finished with censoring their searches on google.cn (the google portal for mainland China) and that they would try to work with the Chinese authorities over the coming weeks to see how they could implement an unfiltered search engine, if at all. This "if at all" is not only significant, it's likely, as the Chinese
government is not likely to compromise on this issue. So it looks like Google, and all of its widely used features such as google docs and gmail will soon be unavailable in China. Part of this was precipitated from what Google said was a highly targeted and sophisticated hacking attack originating from China. The implication was that it was the Chinese government behind these attacks, but wasn't expicitly stated.

Later, VeriSign, an internet security company, looked into the matter and declared that the attacks were either done by "agents of the Chinese state or proxies thereof."

After I first read this news I realized that this could have huge, if not in the short term, at least in the long term, economic and political ramifications. But I posited that it may hinge on what the other US-based internet players do after Google's withdrawal. I did read recently that there has been a bit of a revival of a bill on Congress that would ban US tech based companies from doing business in countries that digitally spy on their own citizens. There are a number of reasons why I think a bill like this probably couldn't pass, but it does show the renewed vigor of the argument.

In the end, I think that in the long term, Google's move here is a good thing... for the Chinese
people. Google.cn was the #2 search player here in China with about 35% of the market. The leaer is Baidu.com with about 58% market share. However, an article I read recently suggests that while the Google-using Chinese population was smaller and younger, they represented, on average, a wealthier and more highly educated portion of the Chinese population... the kind of people more likely to make noise and effect change later on.

Two of the more interesting articles I read were a San Francisco gate piece here and a New York Times piece here and I highly recommend them for a read.

By the way, in all that I've been reading about this issue this past week, I did come across one extra interesting tidbit. Apparently using encryption of your internet connection (such as I do when I use my VPN to connect to my blog or facebook or youtube) in China is not allowed... unless you are a foreign national. So, I'm perfectly allowed to circumvent it using my current methods. :)

The weekend before last, Jean and I invited Ellis to come to Hangzhou (only her 2nd trip to Hangzhou in over a year) and to stay with us for the weekend. On Friday night, we all went out to Eudora, a favorite Hangzhou hangout of ours, to eat some pizza.

Ellis

Nachos

Fried Calamari (interesting side note, and I may have mentioned this in a previous post, but the phrase "fried squid" in Chinese, 炒鱿鱼 chao you yu, is a colorful way to say in Chinese that one has been fired from his job)

The pizza at Eudora is the best I've had in China... but it essentially is a little too heavy on
the grease, as you will notice in these pictures.

As listed in the menu, the four-sausage pizza

The 4-cheese pizza. This picture really gives you a clear idea of how much grease was involved. Perhaps it was more like, "Oh waiter, I think I found some pizza swimming in my grease."

After going for a walk to burn off some of those greasy greasy calories, we decided to add a few more and bought a half-dozen doughnuts for the next day's breakfast. Top to bottom, left to right: Coco Ring (That's "Coco" Ellis. There is no "k"), Cherry, Chocobanana, Blueberry, Strawberry, and Coffee

On Saturday, we went to the movie theater to see "Avatar." The movie was played in English with Chinese subtitles. The only annoying parts were when the Navi were speaking their native language. There were no English subtitles in those sections, only Chinese ones. I'm not totally illiterate when it comes to Chinese characters, but it'd be safe to compare my literacy level to that of a 7 year old, both in terms of vocab recognition and reading speed. When those Navi-language-only moments would happen, I could usually catch at least 3 or 4 characters that I knew before it flashed to the next line, and it was often enough for me to understand, but that wasn't always the case. Luckily, those moments were infrequent and minimized by the fact that James Cameron's writing is fairly simple and predictable. The movie was visually stunning and brilliant, and from a design and visuals standpoint, perhaps the most impressive movie I've ever seen. From an acting standpoint, however, I found it average, and as far as the story was concerned, if you've seen Disney's "Pocahontas", you basically know the story already.

After the movie we grabbed some lunch, grabbed a drink in Starbucks, took a stroll by scenic West Lake, and snapped a few pictures while we were there.

This one is my favorite.

After that we caught late dinner at a restaurant called "Babela's" where we had some beer-fried bananas with ice cream, test-tube cocktails, and serviceable pizza for only 19 yuan ($2.79).

We finally ending the evening with a few beers. Wonder if these Harbin brand beers will taste any better fresh from Harbin next month?

Well, this week Jean and I will head to Guangzhou for her visa interview at the U.S. Embassy.
Jean's getting fairly nervous, which is understandable, but I keep telling her that we've got nothing to worry about: Just be honest, and it'll be over before you know it, and we'll soon have a K1 (fiancee) visa in our possession.

Before this week, I had assumed that the visa interview would take place in a room and might need 15 to 20 minutes. However, after some research, Jean found that the interviews are done in an open area, with the interview officers behind a glass window, something akin to the DMV. Further, the interviews are quite short, generally 3 to 5 minutes.

This is a fairly significant event, so be assured that I'll be posting about this trip shortly.

Finally, last week was my last week of classes, and I had given my students a written exam. I don't mean make fun of the students, but I have to admit some of the answers my students wrote, often intentionally on their part, gave me a chuckle.

One of the sections of my exam compares the usage of the word "much" with "many", and the students are to write two sentences, one using "much" and one using "many." The one that made me smile was the student who wrote, "It won't take me much time to finish this test. I have many other things to do this afternoon."

Another funny one was related to the class we had on cooking vocabulary. The question was "When you cut bread into flat pieces you _____ it." with the correct answer being "slice." I gave one student half credit for making me laugh when he wrote, "When you cut bread into flat pieces you will eat it."

Finally, since one of my lectures this past semester covered Christmas, I asked them a few questions about it. One of the questions was, "Where does Santa Claus live?" The vast majority of students got this one right, but I liked these answers:

-America (had 2 students give this answer)

-Finland (really not too far off when you think about it)

-Florida (I guess she thought my father was Santa Claus from his picture?)

and finally...

-In everyone's hearts

You gotta love it.

The '09-'10 Holiday Season, Jingle 铃 (Jingle Ling)

2010-01-04T23:16:00.011+08:00

In case you're curious 铃 (Ling), as in the title of this post, means "bell."

The Holiday Season has come and gone for the most part, and I hadn't yet posted anything.

Well, I was going to post shortly after Christmas, but then it turned to New Year's, and I decided to have one combined holiday post.

Also on the docket today, I finally got in some of the photos from my modeling. My personal opinion: I needed a haircut, and the orange striped shirt they had me wear is atrocious.

Well, I may as well lead off with that. I already posted about the modelling, so if you hadn't read it you can check it out here. Without further ado, here are the pics:

So I did actually have to work on Christmas Day, but it was just one class at 8 AM, which finished at 9:40, so the rest of my day was free, just like any Friday. Unfortunately, I couldn't spend the day with Jean since she had to work. But my foreign friends were having a Christmas party and I was invited, so that's what I did. Paul the Canadian invited several others over to his house for dinner, and he provided all the food, save for the wonderful desserts a la Ellis.

Sorry I don't have any photos from Christmas, I didn't bring my camera and (gasp!) neither did Ellis. Paul prepared an excellent roast chicken, and after dinner, a few of us sat around and played "Truth or Drink", a slight variation on "Truth or Dare", and which was fueled on by the inexplicable enthusiasm and raunchiness of one Korean exchange student named Ding-Ding.

The next day, Saturday the 26th, Jean came to Huzhou where we exchanged gifts. Now I had actually made an online purchase of some luggage that she had asked for, but it had not yet arrived. (On a side note, still haven't purchased y'all's gift for Jean, Mom & Dad.)

Luckily I was not completely empty-handed in the gift department as I had furtively bought her a toy penguin I had seen her play with when we were in a supermarket one time.

Recently, Jean and Ellis have been becoming better friends (Ellis keeps joking that I had better "watch out." At least, I think she's joking... right, Ellis?). Anyhow, Jean bought a little something for Ellis, a interesting slide calendar. It's difficult to describe, but the best way I can think is to imagine a Swiss Army knife except each of the blades is a month of the calendar. Also, much larger than a Swiss Army knife.

I mentioned to Ellis, not what Jean had gotten her, but that Jean had gotten her a little Christmas gift (as a heads up), and so Ellis also got Jean a little gift as well. It was a notepad. But not just any notepad. In its original package the notepad looks like... a package of Salmon you might buy in a grocery store. Yeah, it's definitely different, but in a good way I think. Jean mentioned she's not sure she wants to open it, because the package is all part of the presentation. I tend to agree with her.

As for me, Jean got me a new electric razor, and a pretty darned spiffy one I might add too! She may have gotten the idea when I mentioned I'd had my old one since high school, about 10 years old now. The new one she got me has the swivel heads (that will pivot to the contours of the face) and can be washed under running water. I've used it several times now since Christmas and this has turned out to be a really fantastic gift! Thanks babe!

Also pretty interesting, even though it wasn't "technically" Christmas Day, on Sunday morning December 27th (still Christmas weekend) it was snowing! Now maybe I'm just a bumpkin from the South, but consarnit, I can count the number of times I've seen snow actually falling in front of me on one hand, so when I saw this, it was pretty cool. And you could, with a reasonable stretch, even call it a Christmas snow. I took a video of it, and I've posted to YouTube here.

Finally New Year's. Alas, once again I couldn't spend a holiday together with my sweetheart. She works for the City of Hangzhou, Shangcheng District Finance Office. And in China, if you work in a government finance office, or in any bank, you spend New Year's Eve working. It's the last day of the fiscal year, so there's many things that need to be done, and they stay at the office all night. From what Jean has told me the office leaders take everyone out to dinner, and then they go back to the office and go back to work until midnight.

The calendar New Year's Eve is not the "big" New Year's Eve in China, so while those workers would rather not be at work, it's not the same injustice that it would seem to be back in the states. (Chinese New Year, now that's a horse of a different color.)

So, Web English, the company I work for part-time, was putting on a show that night and they asked me if I wanted to attend. Since I had no other plans, I said, "Sure."

The show/party began at about 7 PM and went on until about 10 o'clock. Brandon (an American teacher at web) and I had a short performance onstage, a poem recitation. We recited a short Chinese poem about the city of Huzhou.

山从天目成群出 Shan cong tian mu, cheng qun chu
水傍太湖分港流 Shui bang tai hu, fen gang liu
行遍江南清丽地 Xing bian jiang nan, qing li di
人生只合住湖州 Ren sheng zhi he, zhu Huzhou

To roughly translate (and I do mean "roughly", this is poetry after all. If any of my Chinese friends are reading this, please forgive any errors) it says that the orator has seen beautiful mountains and rivers and such scenery, but that Huzhou is the only suitable place to live.

The students from Web also put on several different performances, and did a pretty good job at that. Here are some of the photos from the event.

Here several of the teachers are receiving awards. Yep, that's right, I'm the only one wearing jeans at this formal event. In my defense, I didn't formally receive an invitation which formally said it was formal dress. Also, if I had, I don't have any black pants here in China.

This is me, Apple, and Brandon. Apple is the manager of the teachers, basically my boss, and, unfortunately for her, in charge of coordinating the whole event.

Here are Brandon and I during our poetry recitation.

This is Steven, a Londoner, replete with thick cockney accent, one of my colleagues at web, enjoying himself to the open bar. (I gotta say, the first time I met the guy, he was tall and lanky, and reminded me of the tall, lanky henchman of Cruella deVille in "101 Dalmations." Then, lo, when he spoke, I found that his voice was every bit as cockney as I had expected.)

Here is one that the photographer snapped when I wasn't looking. Nothing special happening here, I just think it's a good picture of me, which is pretty rare, I usually hate my pictures of me.

After the party ended several of us from Web (foreign and Chinese alike) headed over to the Forest Bar (a bar in Huzhou) and met up with some of the other Huzhou foreigners already there. We then proceeded to try and catch up to them in drinking. Not long after we counted down and rang in the New Year. I then went to Hangzhou the next day to spend the New Year's Day with my girl.

Family Fotos

2009-12-18T00:02:00.003+08:00

So this past week I've been explaining Christmas (as a cultural phenomenon) to the students as well as teaching them a couple of Christmas songs.

Some of the classes have come up just short in terms of time, meaning, I finished all my material and still had about 15 minutes left.

So I showed the students some pictures I had from Uncle Johnny's birthday party September of last year (2008).

Two very interesting comments were made, without fail, in every class that saw the photos:

Interesting comment #1: The students have all said that my father looks like Santa Claus.

Interesting comment #2, and I hope she doesn't get upset by this: The students have all said that my Italian-American (but full Italian by blood) Aunt Rosemarie looks Chinese.

Don't shoot the messenger on this one. I can see their first point, but I don't personally see the second.

What's Up Doc

2009-12-17T23:32:00.003+08:00

So for the last couple of weeks I've been kind of "phlegmy" but not coughy or feverish or really any kind of otherwise ill feeling. Then last Friday I woke up and something was wrong with my left ear. I could still hear out of it, but it was muffled, kind of like how it sounds when you've got water in your ear.

Anyways, I figured it'd go away, but as of Tuesday it had not, so I mentioned to Laura, my boss, that I'd like to go to the hospital to get it checked out.

For those of you thinking, "Why go to the hospital?", in China, they don't really have separate private doctors' offices, so if you're sick, even just for something minor, you go to the hospital.

So Laura arranged for a student whose English was not too bad to accompany me to the hospital. Luckily the wait wasn't very long. Including registration and then waiting for the patients in front of me in the otolaryngology deparement I waited probably a total of 20 minutes. (By the way, that's a new word for me, the English word for the "ear, nose, and throat" division of medecine. Also by the way, the literal Chinese translation of "otolaryncology" is, word-for-word, "ear nose and throat science")

The doctor had a look at my ear and literally 10 seconds later said (in Chinese of course) "You have a cold, and the mucus is just backed up. Once the cold goes away, so should the ear problem.

The doctor was an older man, perhaps 60, and after saying a few other things in Chinese to the student who was with me, he then looked at me and said "Parlez vous Francais?" At first I didn't understand him because A) I was expecting to hear Chinese and so wasn't listening for French, and 2) his accent was very heavy on the Chinese. After that he again spoke and said "Je peu parle un petit peu d'Francais" I then immediately tried to search my brain for "me too" in French, but the only thing my brain could find was "Wo ye shi", which is "me too" in Chinese. Only now as I am writing this blog entry have I just remembered that "me too" in French is "moi aussi." Learning Chinese has been a challenge and an adventure, but darn it if it hasn't pushed out just about all of the quick response expressions I have ever learned if any other language, including the Spanish I studied for three years in high school. I honestly believe that if a Spanish-speaking friend of mine asked me "Hey, como estas?" I would answer "hen hao" (very well).

The doctor then explained that he had worked for 4 years as a doctor in west Africa, in Mali, where they speak French. After that exchange he then directed the student and I to the testing room, where they just ran a couple of hearing tests (push the button when you can hear the sound), and then what seemed to be an automatic hearing test. For the automatic one he put the sensor into my ear and then the program ran played some tones at different frequencies and somehow automagically measured something about my auditory sensitivity. The doctor running the tests said that aside from the slight muting from the mucus, my hearing was fine.

After that, I was given a prescription of a couple kinds of pills and a nasal spray for my cold. We filled it there at the hospital, and that was that.

Just so you guys are aware, here in China, I have no health insurance. So, the doctor's visit, plus all the auditory tests, plus the medicine came to quite a total:

167 yuan, or about $24.50

Now the earnings in China are much lower than they are in the states. But even when you take this reduced earning power into account, this is still relatively cheap, even by Chinese standards. The way I get a "feel" for the cost of something is this: You take the price in yuan, let's call that "Y", and divide it by two, and let's call that "x". So now "Y" yuan to a Chinese would be "like" $x to an American. So in this case, 167 yuan to a Chinese person would be like $83 to an American. Certainly not something you'd like to drop everyday, but that's how much a doctor's visit PLUS medical tests PLUS medicine costs with NO insurance?

Anyhow, as an update, that was Tuesday, two days before I am now posting and my cold still hasn't gone away. Still not serious, but still not gone.

I could be a Part-Time Model*

2009-12-11T22:18:00.003+08:00

*But I'll probably have to keep my normal job

I work part-time at this place called "Web International English" here in Huzhou. It's a commercial school for learning English.

On Monday of this week, Apple, my boss (that's her English name) said that there was an elevator company in Nanxun (pronounced Nan Schwinn, one town over, in the same county as Huzhou) that was looking for some foreigners to use in its advertisements and promotional materials, and asked if I would mind going to Nanxun to be a model for them.

The offer, in addition to stroking my ego, paid 1000 yuan (about $140) so I figured, yeah, why not!

On Tuesday, Apple sent me a text message asking if I had a suit, to which I replied, "Not in China." She then asked me for my size so the photographer could bring one that fit me.

On Wednesday she asked me, "Do you have any leather or formal shoes that are not sneakers?" To which I replied, "Not in China."

I think it's safe to say that my formal events and occasions have been few and far between during my last 14 months here.

So today, I went with Apple to the elevator factory in Nanxun. The photographer supplied the suits (there were 2: a blue pinstriped suit, and a gray pinstriped suit), a few shirts (different elevators had different colors and different lighting some some colors were better suited than others), but no shoes. Turns out that wasn't really a big deal, they just didn't include my feet in the shots.

Afterward, I signed a release for them to use my photos and they handed me 1000 yuan cash. As a bonus, since they had purchased those shirts just before and in my size, they let me keep them. The shirts are nothing special, not designer labels or anything, but are still nice shirts, and it was a nice little added bonus.

Within the next couple of weeks I should get some copies of the photos taken, and I'll post them here when I do.

On a side note, Ellis, my American co-worker at the college, went to model for this company a few weeks ago, as well as Brandon, my American co-worker at Web. Their photos came out fine, but the company wanted some more pictures and some different faces. If you want to see their photos you can catch them on Ellis's blog:

Ellis's own photos: http://plateofwander.com/?p=3563

The final professinal ones: http://plateofwander.com/?p=3797

Thanksgiving '09

2009-12-11T17:42:00.006+08:00

So about two weeks ago Ellis (the other foreign teacher at my school, remember I am a foreigner) invited many of the Huzhou laowai (foreigners) to her apartment for a Thanksgiving dinner.

It was a nice little affair with food (everyone brought something), conversation, and even a some guitar and singing (real guitar, not fake plastic guitar).

I made some spaghetti to bring, and I have to say... it was REALLY good. I only used a Hunt's tomato sauce, but I also added some browned ground pork and some fennel and I let it simmer for about 4 hours. It turned out SO much better than expected. Grandma, you would be proud. I may be a particularly strict critic of my own sauce, but one nice compliment was that Ellis, a self-proclaimed "foodie", immediately asked for seconds after finishing her first helping.
The only thing that would've made it better is if it had been hot, I had prepared the spaghetti and the sauce, but unfortunately we began eating about 90 minutes after we arrived, so it was a little cool (The apartment is not heated).

Now me, always forgetting to bring a camera, I didn't take any pictures, save for one here I took with my camera phone of the spaghetti.

However, Ellis, being inseparable from her camera took several pictures. I'll upload a few of them from her blog here, but she's got several others with annotations at that on her Thanksgiving blog post:

http://plateofwander.com/?p=3744

Jean and I arrive first

People Snacking

The Huzhou foreigners dining

Englishman Jack plays the guitar

Canadian Paul and I sing a song (maybe Oasis)

New Record

2009-11-25T15:54:00.000+08:00

Recently broke my personal record for running up the six flights of stairs to my apartment again:

11/25/09 - 22.8 seconds

Too Long

2009-11-11T10:26:00.007+08:00

It's been a long time since I've last posted, which is due to a combination of blogspot (the blog hosting site) being blocked in China, making it inconvenient, but not impossible, to post, and the fact that I've been a bit lazy to post. (Note, I began drafting this blog post Nov 11, but didn't post it because I didn't have the pictures. I got the pictures and published the blog post Nov 25, despite the fact that it says it was posted Nov 11.)

So here's a quick recap on the last couple months:

A few weeks ago I organized a Rock Band party at my place. I invited over the Huzhou laowai (foreigners) that I know, and a few of the English-speaking Chinese with whom I am friends. I made tacos (thanks to Aunt Mary for the taco seasoning), Ellis baked a delicious cake, and with plenty of beer we had a good time eating, drinking, singing, and playing faux guitar and drums. I've got a few pictures below:

The tacos!

On the left, Canadian Paul and his Chinese wife Annie. In the middle, Englishman Jack, and on the right American Brandon.

My beautiful girlfriend Jean

And here are a few of me REALLY getting into singing "Chop Suey" by System of a Down. When its blurry, I'm jumping.

The excited, happy lad in the chair in those pictures is American Edward... a guy who I'll mention in the next blog post (tomorrow).

Two weekends ago while in Hangzhou, Jean and I went to a restaurant that was recommended to her by a workmate of hers. It is a western-style restaurant (read: not Chinese food) and it was purported that the pizza there was pretty good. When we went in， I noticed that the vast majority of the patrons there were indeed foreigners, something, at that point, I had not yet seen outside of Shanghai. Anyhow, Jean and I sat down at our table and ordered the fried squid, the nachos, and a pepperoni pizza.

The appetizers came out first, and the nachos... they were not Chinese nachos, they were not some Chinese approximation of nachos, they were honest-to-goodness nachos chips topped with chili and cheese, and they were awesome. The fried squid were tasty, if perhaps a little too salty.

On a side note, the expression "fried squid" in Chinese (pronounced chow yo yu) means "to be fired" as in, to lose one's job.

The pizza, pictured here, looked delicious, and seemed to be brick oven baked, the way good pizza ought to be. The flavor was also quite good, better than any pizza I'd had in China thus far. But, I have to say, it may have been one of the greasiest pizzas I have ever eaten.

The pizza would look better, but it was taken with a phone camera.

In any case, I was impressed and I think I now have a favorite restaurant in China. I saw their breakfast menu, and I look forward to giving that a go sometime.

That's all up to recently, but I will eventually be posting the remaineder of the summer Beijing/Xi'An trip, and also, I'm going to have a post pretty soon on some if the minor niggles about living in China (other than the aforementioned blockade of websites).

Fall Semester begins, I'm clumsy

2009-09-18T00:06:00.002+08:00

I realize it's been a month now since I've last posted, and I eventually will finish posting about the Beijing/Xi'an trip, but I'm blogging again for now.

The new semester has begun and it's business as usual, though for the first 3 weeks I don't have my freshman classes. For whatever reason the freshmen begin 3 weeks laters, something to do with military training.

So this weekend is an important weekend as I will be meeting my girlfriend's mother for the first time. She lives in Harbin which, geographically, if Huzhou is like Atlanta, Harbin is like Nova Scotia. Just her mother is visiting, not her father. I'm a bit nervous, but to be honest, considering the level of my Chinese, I don't know enough to really make a fool of myself, so I don't have too much to worry about.

In other news, this last weekend I lost my cell phone on a bus in Hangzhou. No one stole it, I think maybe I dropped it while sitting in my seat and I didn't pay close attention. Luckily I had saved all my important phone numbers to a file a few months ago, so I didn't lose anything too important, just annoying having to spend the money on a new phone. That said, the phone I lost wasn't great, and since it had been dropped many times and soaked at least twice, sometimes it didn't work exactly as it was supposed to, so getting a new phone isn't all bad.

I got my new phone yesterday, and I am really pleased, it looks sexier than the previous phone, it's faster, it's more functional, and it was actually cheaper! (In case you are curious, the old phone was a Motorola ROKR E2 which I bought for 600 yuan, about $88, and the new one is a Motorola ROKR Z6 which I bought for 530 yuan, about $78.)

One interesting thing I discovered as I was adjusting all the settings on my new phone: I downloaded the "Opera Mini" web browser for the phone, which lets you browse web pages more efficiently than the browser that comes with the phone. Now, the way it works is, you enter an address, it goes to Opera's servers, they get the page to their servers, then compress the page, and then send it back to you. It's actually faster this way because any images and text get compressed first so instead of waiting for a 100kb page to download, now you are waiting for a 9kb page to download, and when you're talking web browsing on a non-3G network, that is a huge difference.

Anyways, I began to think, this whole system essentially works like a proxy, so, I wonder, let me see if I can access blocked websites in China, such as youtube, facebook, or even my blog right here. So I typed in those pages, and lo, I had access.

I think it's strange that if I go to a computer, I cannot access facebook or blogspot.com (without some mucking around), yet on my cell phone, I can just go right to it. Go figure.

Other Huzhou Laowai

2009-08-18T11:45:00.002+08:00

This post isn't really a post for me. It's a link to my friend Ellis's blog.

She has a post on an all too typical experience for her: Chinese people's fascination with foreigners.

http://plateofwander.com/?p=2798

Now, it's a very interesting read, and from what I've heard from her and others, not an atypical occurrence. But not for me.

Now I can certainly understand that at first glance I may not get noticed as much as other foreigners, I'm neither glaringly white nor dark, my hair is black, and I'm not too tall. From behind, it might be hard to know that I'm not a Chinese.

Once people see my face, though, they are immediately aware that I am indeed not Chinese. I get some stares, but not the way my other friends seem to.

And as far as something like Ellis's experience at the gym, the well-meaning, yet still annoying pestering while working out... it just doesn't happen with me. The only people that talk to me at the gym are essentially one of two physical trainers that work there. One uses English, and the other uses Chinese. But even then, I wouldn't say they talk to me at length or to an annoying level, it's usually just a hello and a few words.

I'm not complaining. I'm sure this would get old fast. But for whatever reason, even though other gym members can plainly see I'm not Chinese, I guess I just don't incite the same level of curiosity. Or maybe it's because I'm a dude.

By the way, if you don't know, "laowai" (from the subject of this post) means foreigner.

July 23, Tiananmen Square & Forbidden City

2009-08-18T07:44:00.007+08:00

The first morning in Beijing we got up early and headed out for Tian An Men Square via, and for the last time, the subway. When we got there, it wasn't too hot, as it had rained that morning and was still cloudy. It would rain later, so it stayed cloudy, but that did make our outing pleasantly cool. We took some pictures in the square.

First Arrived

Facing South

Facing North

Always LOTS of People Everywhere

As you can tell from some of these pictures, there were always lots of people here in the square... which makes this picture Jean took when she was a little girl all the more confusing. There is literally no one else in the square (only a few across the street). I asked her about this, and she said she doesn't know why there was no one, perhaps it was very early in the morning, and perhaps it had just rained. Also, not nearly as many Chinese took touristy trips 16 years ago as they do today, as the Chinese people have more money today than in the past.

Jean, age 8, Tian An Men Square

Later, we decided to get in line to see Chairman Mao's body. First we went to a building across the street to put our stuff in the locker. I knew no pictures were allowed, but I didn't know cameras weren't either, so I didnt put my camera away in the storage place. In retrospect it kind of makes sense, though they don't disallow cell phones, but you do get in trouble if you try to take a picture with one. We waited in line for about an hour until we got to the entrance and the security checkpoint. Since I had my camera on me they denied me entry. What I should've done is stopped taken a deep breath and told my family, ok you guys go through, I'll see you at the exit. Instead I wasnt thinking and I just exited. After I realized what I should've done, I hoped they still would go through, so I made my way to meet them at the exit.

20 minutes later, however, they still had not shown. I decided to wait 5 more minutes, and then if they were still a no show, I'd go to our pre-arranged "get separated" location. But just at that time, I got a phone call. Uncle Jack had borrowed one of the workers' cell phones and called me. They had been waiting at the entrance for me for the last 20 minutes. He asked if I was just going to wait for them at the exit, I said yes, and they went through, and after regrouping I apologized for making them wait there in the first place without giving them notice.

It was all good, and we then went to go eat lunch. We just walked a short way away from Tian An Men square and saw a Chinese Fast Food place. These were NOT the kind of Chinese dishes to show off Chinese cuisine, but we needed to eat, and we didn't really know where anything else was. There could've been a great place right around the corner, or just as easily 10 blocks away.

After that we walked back toward the forbidden city, but made a pit stop along the way. Katy and Uncle Jack needed to use the public facilities while we waited outside.
Uncle Jack returned first, followed shortly by Katy, who shortly began with a disgusting tirade over the state of the bathroom inside and the shortly thereafter labelled "squatty potties."

Afterward we crossed the street toward the Forbidden City. Before we entered, Beth asked me, "If it's a forbidden city, why are they letting us inside?"

Out in Front

Courtyard Inside

Lion Statue Crushing a Baby Lion
(at least that's what I say it is, but when you read
"crushing" you must imagine Borat saying it
and doing the crushing motion with his hand)

We finished the afternoon with an educational (we rented the audio tour device) stroll through the city/palace, shortly after which it began to rain. Luckily we snagged a cab back to our hotel minutes before the rain came down really hard. The driver was different than most other cab drivers I have met in China in that I could more easily understand what he was saying. His Chinese pronunciation was fairly standard, which unfortunately for my comprehension, is something that is a bit rare among taxi drivers.

July 22, To Beijing

2009-08-14T22:26:00.008+08:00

The next morning my family was in China, things went well enough, we ate the complimentary breakfast, which had both Western and Chinese style items, and was actually not half bad.

Then we checked-out, loaded our stuff into the van, and headed to the Hongqiao Airport of Hangzhou. We arrived at about 9:30 which was actually PERFECT timing. The solar eclipse for that day had begun at 8:41, but that was just the starting overlap. By 9:30 things were beginning to get slightly dimmer, and by 9:35 it was beginning to look like early evening. And then at 9:41, the moon completely blocked out the sun and it was dark as night. Everyone was shouting and ooing, and I have to say, it was actually a LOT cooler than I thought it was going to be. The sky had been a bit cloudy that day, so the pictures and videos taken with my camera may not be very good, but because of the clouds, we were able to look reasonably directly at it without burning our retinas. It lasted about 5 minutes, and then there was light. And the crowd that had gathered outside the drop-off point at the terminal dispersed and went about their day.

In case the video wasn't very clear:

Dark out...

And a few seconds later.

Lots of people taking pictures

A couple familiar faces in this one

On a side note, as a bit of a surprise, while I was at the airport, I bumped into my school's leader. He noticed me and called out to me and said Hello. Not a big deal, but China is a huge place with LOTS of people and it's always an interesting surprise for me to unexpectedly run into someone I know here. Especially when I'm not in my "hometown."

So, we got our tickets and checked the luggage with no problems, and had about 90 minutes to kill before our flight. Our flight began boarding a bit late, about 10 minutes before the scheduled takeoff, but that can happen from time to time I suppose. The real problem was the waiting after we were already on the plane. The flight was scheduled to leave at 12:20 and land in Beijing at 2:20. We finally landed at 4:00 spending nearly 2 hours on the plane AT the gate with the AC having problems, and then another not quite 2 hours in the air. The others were rather frustrated with that flight, and they should've been especially considering they were still feeling jetlag from arriving the day before. I wasn't as frustrated as I could've been, but that's only because I have one slightly more frustrating... no, one extremely more frustrating flight experience while traveling American Airlines on one occasion... but that's a different story.

We arrived in Beijing and hopped on a van to the hotel. Uncle Jack did a really great job selecting the hotel as it was really nice, and I'll have a video of it posted soon. Our dinner outing was delayed a bit by some heavy rain, but it didn't last for too long and we went out not long after.

We found a Japanese restaurant not far from the hotel. The reason we went to the Japanese restaurant and not a Chinese restaurant is because the sign said (in Chinese) something that translated to unlimited Japanese buffet. When we sat down, but found that it was not actually what one would call a buffet, but WAS, after talking with the waitress at length in Chinese, an unlimited servings deal. Basically you would sit down around a hibachi grill and you just order anything and everything you'd want off the menu, then they'd bring it out and the guy would cook it right there for you. If you wanted more later, you could order more. You paid one flat fee and the food was unlimited and you did choose it yourself. It just wasn't a typical, get up grab a plate and pick stuff off a bar situation. It was really delicious though.

July 21st, A Tillman Clan Arrives in China

2009-08-13T19:36:00.008+08:00

The weekend before the travelling began I unfortunately fell a bit ill and sported a fever on Sunday while in Hangzhou visiting Jean. Luckily Jean helped take care of me and scored me some aspirin, which did help to break my fever, but unfortunately it returned, and I wasn't feeling well enough to return to Huzhou that night. Monday morning I was feeling a bit better, but not 100%, but I had to return to pack my things for the trip and get my passport so I could fly.

Tuesday morning, July 21st, I left my house at 8:30, arrived at the Huzhou bus station at 9:10, and bought a bus ticket to Shanghai. However the next bus was to leave at 10:20, so I had to just kill some time. As soon as I sat down in the lobby, I realized that after all I had remembered to pack, I had forgotten my passport. So I rushed out, grabbed the nearest taxi, told him I was in a hurry and to go to the Huzhou Vocational and Technical College. We got there in about 15 minutes, and got to the front gate of the school. I asked the guards if they would let the taxi go inside the school because I was in a hurry and needed to fetch my passport, but they said no. The taxi driver had already said he would wait, so I told him I would run. So, I got out of the car and began sprinting the nearly half a mile back to my apartment from the front gate and up the 6 floors to my apartment. I say began sprinting because I wasn't able to spring the whole way. I definitely didn't pace myself well. Half a mile should not begin with a full-on 100% dead-out sprint. In any case I did run the whole way there, grabbed my passport, drank some MUCH needed water, shut off some lights I had forgotten to turn off when I left the first time, and ran back.

Altogether the driver waited for me about 10 minutes, the last part of which I seriously began worrying about whether or not he had waited. If he hadn't it could be EXTREMELY difficult to find another taxi from there in a short period of time, and there wouldn't be enough time to catch another bus. Luckily he still was and upon seeing that I decided I'd give the driver a tip. This may not seem like much, but tips in China are essentially non-existent, so when a service-person we would usually tip receives one, their reponse is usually one mixed of surprise and confusion. In retrospect, I imagine he would've waited for me as I had not yet paid him when I ran to my apartment.

Anyhow, I did finally arrive back at the bus station at 10:00, 20 minutes to spare, plenty of time before my scheduled departure. After boarding the bus, however, I began to question my timing, and soon figured that I might be late. The bus to Shanghai needed about 3 hours, but that is just to arrive at the south station. That put my arrival at 1:20pm assuming nothing went wrong along the way. My family's flight, according to the Delta website I had checked before I left, however, was to land at 1:15 . I knew that there would be a 20 minute delay for checking everyone's temperature on board (a policy China has implemented on all incoming flights from the US and Mexico due to the H1N1 flu), perhaps another 20 minutes going through customs, and then, I guessed maybe 15 minutes getting their luggage.

But I knew that it would take be about 90 minutes to get to the international arrivals terminal once I arrived at the Shanghai South Station, meaning there could've potentially been about 30 minutes difference after their exit through the "Nothing to Declare" gate and when I would arrive, leaving them wondering where to go and having no way to contact me. I really began to stress about this, and so I called my American friend Nellie in Shanghai, to see if maybe, on the off chance that she was free, if perhaps she could do me a solid. My luck had seemingly changed as it turned out she was actually free for a few hours, wasn't too terribly far from the airport, and was willing to help me out.

I finally arrived in Shanghai at 1pm, not 1:20 (so it's 2:40 hours, not 3), called Nellie and tried to coordinate. We then agreed that I would make my way to the non-airport side of the Maglev station. Then I'd give her a call if I had not already heard from her. If my family had arrived, she'd take them to the maglev to me; if not, I'd hop on the maglev to the airport. I got to the maglev station at about 2pm, and she said she still hadn't seen them, and that it was beginning to worry her. She said the boards show that their flight landed at 1:12pm, and that people from other flights landing about the same time had already come out. I got to the international arrivals gate at about 2:20 and saw Nellie but no Tillmans. Nellie had been free up to this point, but did have something else to do later, so she had to go, and I thanked her again for helping me out. I, however, was beginning to worry too. It had now been OVER an hour since they landed and they hadn't shown. I was nervous they'd been quarantined or something. Luckily my fears were not founded and sometime around 2:45 they finally came out. Whew! Turns out it was a combination of A) taking people's temperatures, B) Stopping to take pictures, allowing others to get in line in customs before them, insuring C) a long line at customs, and D) simply having to wait a long time for all their checked luggage.

Tillmans Arrive at Customs

So, we began schlepping our stuff from the Shanghai airport, through the Maglev, then the #2 subway to Peoples' Square, switched to the #1 to the South Railway station, and landed a train to Hangzhou. This bit of travel is not too harrowing if you are one or two people travelling lightly. But if you are 5 people and 4 BIG pieces of luggage, it can be rather more troublesome.

On the Shanghai MagLev Train at 430 km/h
(That's 269 mph in, as Katy put it, "real life")

Anyhow we arrived in Hangzhou, snagged a minibus (a van) to our hotel, the Best Western Premier, showered and cleaned up, and waited to meet Jean to go to dinner. She gave me a call when she arrived at our hotel and I went down first to meet her.

I couldn't find her at first, and we were trying to figure out where the other person was. It was at the moment when we said we were both at the door that I realized that we could not possibly be at the same place. As it turns out there were TWO Best Westerns in Hangzhou, and she was not at ours. So, poor Jean had to hop ANOTHER cab to ANOTHER Best Western hotel in ANOTHER part of town that she didn't know very well. But she did finally arrive, beautiful as ever, and everyone was introduced, and we made our way to dinner. We weren't sure where to go to eat as the restaurant Jean had previously selected was convenient to the other Best Western. So we decided to take a stroll and push our luck. We shortly found a place that seemed nice and took a table.

There was no menu, the plates and foods were either on display or on display being cooked and you could choose what you liked. Jean and I chose for our party, and chose carefully for our recently arrived and certainly tired and weary (and perhaps somewhat picky) guests. While we were waiting on the food Katy said she'd like to take a look at some of the things they had, what I had ordered. She approved of the choices, but while looking at the dishes, Katy noticed some caged chickens. Katy mentioned that she thought it was strange to have the live chickens out where the patrons could see them, as if they would point and say "Ooh! I want that one!", and that you wouldn't see that in the states. I replied, "Sure you do. Have you ever been to Red Lobster?"

The food was good and everybody enjoyed most of it. I say most of it, because when selecting, I wasn't sure if deer was too outside the mainstream for my family, and as it turns out, it is. I ate it, but it looked better than it tasted. It was actually kind of bland.

Anyhow, we went back to the hotel, where upon opening the mini-fridge, Katy noticed that the Red Bull cans in China are short, fat, and yellow, as opposed to the familiar, chic, tall, skinny, and grey and blue. There at the hotel, Jean helped us negotiate a better rate from the minibus for a ride to the airport the next morning, and we all took a few pictures, after which Jean went home, and we all went off to bed for an early, action-packed next day.

Jean and the Tillmans

Trip Posts

2009-08-12T18:02:00.003+08:00

Ok, so I returned from my travelling about a week and a half ago. And I DID write a TON of stuff about the trip, but I never posted it because I wanted to be able to post it with the appropriate pictures.

However, since then, I haven't gotten around to doing it because there are loads of pictures to sift through and choose from. As a result, I have been procrastinating doing posting the entire bit. But, beginning tomorrow, I will put posts up from each day of my travels with the corresponding date in the header.

I'll keep doing this on a daily basis until I'm caught up, in which case I'll probably return to my weekly or so postings.

Back in the USSR, er I mean China

2009-07-18T19:49:00.003+08:00

So I've been back in China for about a week and a half now and getting back into the swing of things here.

Last week I was working part time at a place called "WEB International English." It's basically a private school, and they have offices in cities all over China. I had been working for them part-time since last semester, but at that time, it was maybe one extra hour a week. This last week however they had me working every evening from 6-9pm straight. I have to say that's not my most preferred schedule in the world, but I also just kind of dealt with it since it was only last week, and these next 2 weeks I will be gone travelling.

It has been fairly hot here since I arrived, and when I would go to WEB, I would ride my bicycle. But when I arrived, my shirt would be soaking wet, especially the back, so each day I brought an extra shirt for me to change into once I arrived.

A couple interesting things have happened in the brief span since I've returned, however. Last week, on Monday I think it was, I was standing at a corner, waiting for the walk signal to light up, and these two girls came up to me and asked "Excuse me, can you tell me where Red Flag Road is?"

Now the interesting thing about this is... In Huzhou, maybe if you're 20+ yards away you can't tell I'm not a Chinese. But if you're standing right next to me, it's pretty clear that I am a foreigner. SO, these girls NOT ONLY decided to ask a FOREIGNER for directions (why they think he would know, I have no clue), but they ALSO asked me in CHINESE! So here they are in a small (relatively) city with few foreigners, and they ask one for directions in Chinese. I really don't understand why they would have thought I could help them, let alone understand them.

The funny thing is, I knew exactly where Red Flag Road was and pointed them in the right direction.

The other interesting thing that had happened is this. In the US, Tampa is very well known. It's not a huge city, it's not a bedazzled city, but at least within the US, Americans all know of Tampa.

However, not too surprisingly, I had never met a Chinese person in China who had heard of Tampa. It works the same way there. There is a city in China called Shao Xing. It's not a large city, there's nothing particularly special about it, but everyone in China has heard of it. But I had never heard of it before coming to China. So it's really just a cultural thing. (Many Chinese have heard of Orlando, but not because of Disney World... because of the Orlando Magic, they are NBA crazy out here.)

BUT, this last week, while I was teaching at WEB, the "never met" changed to "ever met." I was teaching a small class of business intermediate students (by small I mean 2 students). One of the students was a man about age 40. In the last 5 minutes of class I asked them if they had any questions about the lesson, or since this was the first time we had met, if they had any questions about me. They asked me where I was from, and I said "America, Florida." The man then asked me, "What city in Florida?" And I said, "maybe you guys haven't heard of it but, Tampa." With a laugh he slammed his hand on the table and told me that he had actually lived in Tampa for 3 years working at a Chinese restaurant. He couldn't remember the name of the restaurant, but in any case, I've finally met a Chinese person in China who knows about Tampa.

Ok well, I'm off now. I will now be leaving to go fetch my aunt and uncle and their two daughters from the airport, as they will be arriving in just a few hours. We're going to travel to Beijing and Xi'An, finishing the travel next Friday, the 31st. Here's hoping we have a smooth trip!

Chinese Wedding

2009-07-09T11:06:00.001+08:00

Last weekend I had the opportunity to attend a Chinese wedding because Jean's cousin in Shanghai was getting married. (Unfortunately I pulled a bonehead move and forgot to bring my camera along, so, sorry, no pictures.)

Since Jean was her cousin's maid of honor (ban niang in Chinese), she was often busy helping her for much of the day, which gave me the opportunity to practice my Chinese with her aunt and uncle and her cousin's friends. I definitely struggled as this quickly became more than basic conversational Chinese, but I was actually surprised by the level to which I was able to hold my own. This is not to be confused with fluency, mind you, but just that I get a personal sense that my Chinese really has improved while I have been here.

A modern Chinese wedding is a bit of a mix of both Chinese and western traditions. For example, the bride wears a traditional western white wedding dress.

Before the wedding the bride's friends come over to her house help her prepare. Now, in a western wedding, it's bad luck for the groom to see the bride that morning, but in the Chinese tradition, the groom comes over to pick her up.

However, it's not just as easy as that for him. First, the bride's girlfriends will block the way and not let him to her, despite his cries of “I love you” to his waiting bride. Finally, he gives the girls many “hong bao” (红包, literally “red package”) which are red envelopes filled with money to “bribe” his way past them. Later they make him do some extra feats to prove his love for her, in this instance, by doing 20 pushups on the spot. These games and feats are all in good fun.

Next, they head off together to the dining hall for the wedding. Although an American wedding has two parts, the processional and the reception, the entirety of a Chinese wedding is basically the reception. There may be a very brief ceremony on stage for the exchanging of the rings (another western influence), but the rest is just a big dinner.

At an American wedding reception you might see decorations in light color themes like white, purple, light blue, or pink, but at a Chinese wedding the predominant color is red, red, red. This is because red is a lucky or prosperous color in traditional Chinese culture. Also, when the guests give money as a gift, they always give in denominations of “lucky” numbers, such as 888 or 600. The NEVER give anything with a 4 in it. 4 is considered unlucky because the Chinese word for “four” sounds similar to the Chinese word for “death.”

Finally, the bride and groom go around to each and every table at the reception to share private toast with everyone. Meanwhile all this time, food is being served to the guests. And the food is important. I have heard (though I can't remember from where at the moment) that Chinese will sometimes judge the quality of a wedding based on the deliciousness of the food!

Family Feud Redux

2009-07-09T01:59:00.000+08:00

So the last week of normal classes I played The Family Feud again with my students. While playing unexpectedly (as is the way with these things) came across some interesting cultural points

The survey question in this case was “Name an animal men are compared to.”

It turns out this question actually has more to do with culture than language, so while I did get some of the expected answers (e.g. rat, pig), some of them have different meanings, and others times I got answers I didn't expect like “monkey.”

The students did say the #1 survey answer, pig, but in American English it can mean a couple things; it can be a fat, lazy person, or it can mean a chauvinistic man or womanizer. In China, it only has the fat, lazy connotation and is used more often for women than men.

A rat in American English might mean a sneaky person who might try to deceive others, whereas in Chinese it means a person is just garbage in general. Similar, but not exactly the same.

Snake is similar to rat in English, someone not to be trusted, but in Chinese this comparison (according to my students) is not common and doesn't really have a meaning.

Fox is used in both languages and, by one definition, a bit similarly. We might say someone is “smart like a fox” meaning they're very sly and clever. In Chinese is would also mean someone is very smart, but in a bad way, sort of a “using one's powers for evil” kind of thing. In English, however, a fox can also be a very sexy woman or man, but this usage doesn't exist in Chinese.

Wolf has almost the exact same meaning in both language-- a guy who chases lots of girls.

The students also suggested “cow” which at first thought seemed a bit unusual, but then I remembered that we might also use “ox.” And the translation of “cow” and “ox” to Chinese is both “niu” (牛). If a man is a “niu” in Chinese it means he is honest and hard-working, while if we say a guy is an ox, it just means he is big and strong. I also explained to my students that we might use “cow” to describe a very fat woman.

Being compared to a lion in English would speak of one's bravery or whole-heartedness, but in Chinese it means one is ambitious.

The Chinese also compare men to tigers if they are strong and fierce... similar to how we might use it to describe a woman of similar characteristics. (The Chinese can also sometimes describe a woman as a tiger if she is strong and fierce, but the connotation implies a bit of manliness to her, like if we might say a woman has balls.)

If a man is a dog, in both English and Chinese, he is generally not a very good guy, perhaps a cheater. However, in English, as slang, it might also be used to describe a very ugly girl.

And finally, while we would never compare someone to a monkey in English without racist undertones, in Chinese it means someone is very clever.

To any of my Chinese friends who are reading this and disagree with my Chinese interpretations, these meanings I got after asking my students what the meanings are, so it is according to them. If you disagree with it though, I'd love to see your point of view in the comments.

Also, to any English speakers who were interested in the survey results of the family feud question, they were, in this order: pig, rat, snake, fox, wolf, bear, and skunk.

Maybe New Record, Not Sure

2009-06-03T20:18:00.004+08:00

Well, the last time I timed myself, for the record, running up the flights of stairs to my apartment on the sixth floor, I got 23 seconds. However, at that time it seems I didn't also check the fractions of a second.

Today I timed myself again and got 23.58 seconds. Maybe it was faster than last time, maybe it was slower. In any case, I think 23.58 will be the new standard as it is more precise. Looks like I have some work ahead of me to break the 23 second barrier without also breaking my neck.

In other news, the reason I had been having trouble the past couple of weeks prior to last week updating my blog is because blogpot.com, the website hosting my blog, fell victim to the Great Firewall of China. Youtube.com was blocked sometime back in March, but as recently as this week, it seems there has been a firestorm of firewalling on all sorts of other blog websites, up to and including twitter.com, Microsoft's live.com, and even the photo sharing site flickr.com

I didn't know why the sudden extra outburst of censorship, but I read an article on ArsTechnica.com that clears things up a bit. It seems that tomorrow... well, I'll let Ars explain:

http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/06/twitter-flickr-ms-services-added-to-chinas-great-firewall.ars

The hope is that after this anniversary things will lighten up. For my convenience sake, here's hoping!

Also, recently I was checking out flight info for my uncle and aunt and cousins' upcoming trip to China. I was usinga Chinese airfare search enginer qunar.com. (FYI qu nar = go where) Some of the flights are actually pretty cheap, so, for kicks I decided to search for a flight from Shanghai to Tampa and back, the one I will be making here shortly. I found the EXACT same flight, EXACTLY the same flights for $150 cheaper. Ugh!

I already bought the tickets so there's nothing I can do about it now, but I have at least two more flights I will make from China: one in winter 2010 and my final return in summer 2010. For those I will definitely make sure to add qunar.com to my airfare research list.

Back

2009-05-29T16:50:00.002+08:00

Well I haven't posted in about 2 weeks, a week and a half of which is because I had nothing terribly interesting to write about, the last few days of which have been "technical" issues in accessing the blog.

Actually I still don't have much to talk about. I can't see Jean this weekend because she has gone to Harbin to see her grandmother, who is visiting from Canada. Her grandmother (her maternal grandmother) lives in Canada with Jean's aunt.

The weekend before last I made a sorry attempt at making macaroni and cheese from scratch. Basically, the cheese was not liquidy enough and it gooped together in clumps, so it did not spread evenly around the macaroni.

On the bright side though, while Jean and I were at the grocery store here in Huzhou, we were walking down the ramen aisle when Jean noticed a cheese ramen box. We bought it, made it, and ate it. It was good, but nothing special, essentially the same as boxed mac & cheese back home including the powdered cheese. The noodles were not macaroni, however, they were long, ramen-type noodles, but the principle and flavor are the same.

The big deal about that is that here in little old Huzhou I can now actually purchase easy mac if I so desire.

Also I've been in communcation with Uncle Jack and Aunt Mary about planning for their trip to China. Because the cost of domestic flights is so relatively inexpensive in China, we're going to fly from city to city. The only snag in that plan is that these domestic airlines generally do not accept a foreign Visa credit card.

This weekend is actually a holiday weekend in China. We have Thursday and Friday off. However, as these Chinese holidays often go, work resumes on Sunday to make up for Friday.

This weekend I've been fiddling with my computer, and have been toying with the idea reformatting my computer and testing out Windows 7. We'll see how that goes...

Anywhow, less than a month in this semester to go which means summer vacation and flying home for a couple weeks, which I am definitely looking forward too!

Funny New Word

2009-05-14T21:08:00.003+08:00

I just learned a new expression today in Chinese.

Apparently, this usage is becoming less common in China, used more primarily among the older generation, but Chinese can say "hai zi ta ma" (孩子他妈) or "hai zi ta ba" (孩子他爸) to refer to their wife or husband respectively.

What makes this funny is that, "hai zi" translates to "child" and "ta ma" translates to "his mom" (while "ta ba" is "his dad").

So, "hai zi ta ma" and "hai zi ta ba" are quite LITERALLY "baby mama" and "baby daddy."

Traffic

2009-05-13T14:31:00.004+08:00

Well, my aunt and uncle and their family have their tickets ordered and they will be coming to China in July.

I also have my plane tickets set, and I was actually able to find a reasonably priced ticket ($1025) for a flight leaving near the end of June and returning 2 weeks later in July. Anything else at any other time in July or in August varied from $1650 to over $2000.

As they will definitely becoming to China now, I felt obliged to find some examples of traffic here in China so that they are not shocked and stunned on their first ride in a Chinese cab.

So, I scoured youtube and found a few good representations.

These videos are not mine, they are other videos people have taken of traffic in China.

One thing you will notice right away is the seeming messiness and randomness of traffic in China.

When riding in a taxi here, more than once you would probably just want to close your eyes. It takes some getting used to, but after a while you begin to realize that although the drivers here are perhaps a bit crazier than in the states, they are REALLY REALLY good at it. Despite this, even now, I occasionally catch myself hitting the imaginary brake pedal while riding in a taxi, but not nearly as often as at first.

For most of the drivers, the lines separating lanes are literally just suggestions. I remember saying that jokingly after my experience in Beijing in 2004, but the truth is, I'm so used to it now, that it doesn't even seem funny, rather, just the way it is, very mundane.

It's like when a recipe calls for 1/2 cup of water or 1/3 cup of milk or 20 grams of sugar, you don't sweat being too precise about it, because close enough is close enough. Now, notice my example there. It's not funny, its just ordinary and mundane. And that's how the Chinese drivers see lines on the road.

This video is a typical small but busy intersection on a busy night. In Shanghai and Beijing, most places aren't like this because most places have bigger intersections and are better organized for pedestrian traffic. But here in Huzhou (this video is from I don't know where) a scene like this on a Friday or Saturday night is typical, with cars trying to poke their way through and motorbikes, bicycles, and pedestrians just going wherever they damn well can.

I also came across this video of Nanjing Road in Shanghai. This is generally a very busy area in Shanghai. This video is titles "Crazy traffic Nanjing Road in Shanghai" However, perhaps it is just that I have gotten used to it, but this really doesn't seem all that crazy to me:

Here is another example of an ordinary taxi ride, this in Beijing:

And finally this video is a bit longer, about 2 and a half minutes, of an intersection in Harbin. This is a prime example of what happens at a busy intersection in China. While seeming scary and crazy, this is not at all unusual. FYI while this video is a bit longer, it's worth it to watch the whole way through:

Thankfully, even the worst intersection I've come across here in Huzhou isn't as bad as that last video. However, the close calls you saw in that video ARE par for the course. Another note, for those loved ones (Mom) who might worry that I ride a bike in this kind of stuff, A) It's not quite as bad in Huzhou, and 2) I have quickly learned to avoid more congested intersections by taking roads with less traffic per space, even if it means pedaling an extra half a klick. It often is faster despite this.

Oh one more. This video though, this one is crazy even by Chinese standards, especially starting at around 0:20 seconds:

Summer

2009-05-11T16:30:00.004+08:00

Well this last weekend was Mother's Day weekend, and unfortunately I wasn't able to see my mum, but I did give her and my grandmothers a Skype call to wish them a Happy Mother's Day.

It may not officially be summer, but summer weather is HERE. Today the daytime high was around 97 degrees (Fahrenheit) and yesterday it was only a few degrees cooler, with a high around 91-92.

One big difference between here and back home is you see LOTS of girls breaking out their umbrellas as parasols, which at first glance struck me as kind of funny/silly, but then at second thought, actually makes a lot of sense. In Florida it gets hella hot and humid, but for the most part, you don't spend too much time just outside. Either you're inside, or you get in your car to go somewhere, and once you arrive, you walk maybe 20 meters into the nearest building.

The exceptions of course are if you are laying out on the beach or something like this, but then in THAT instance, you DO see people with umbrellas.

Anyway, here at school the students primarily walk everywhere, and its a half a mile walk to the nearest bus stop, its actually pretty reasonable as protection against the sun.

The good news is that the weather is supposed to cool down a bit later this week with a forecasted high tomorrow of around 89 and then Wednesday and Thursday highs of 71 and 75 respectively.

On a completely unrelated note, I was listening to the "Lingua Franca" podcast the other day, a podcast published by the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) whose episodes are each about 15 minutes long and whose subjects are always based on language. It's really quite interesting. Anyway, I listened to an episode recently that was talking about Latin and its influence, and at the end of the podcast, the host read this passage, which I found tickled my brain rather nicely:

An emeritus professor from my alma mater had been advising me to write my magnum opus. She offered to provide some bona fides for me to her publisher, but when I finally did carpe diem and write the thing, I became persona non grata with the publishers. When I tried to send them a facsimile of my masterpiece it caused a paper jam. I suggested, almost as a non-sequitur, that if I fixed their fax machine for them pro bono then, as a quid pro quo, they should publish my magnum opus et cetera. This, as my professor has since been telling me ad nauseum, was not a good idea. What I should've offered them was a mea culpa.

One More Year

2009-05-05T09:01:00.002+08:00

So last week I told Laura (my boss) that I would like to renew my contract and stay here at Huzhou Vocational and Technical School for one more year. There are a few reasons I decided to stay here as opposed to somewhere else.

For one, I only plan on being in China one more year, and if it's just going to be one more year, I'd prefer to be someplace that I am familiar with that I know will be a good, comfortable, safe situation. It's not that someplace else couldn't be better. But, from stories I've heard on the internet and from other foreign teachers, I got pretty lucky landing here. It seems that teaching college kids is preferable to younger kids, the hours are pretty decent, and Laura, Hebe, and Violet (the ladies who help us with any problems we have) have all been fantastic, bending over backward to assist when either Ellis or I would have any problems. In addition they've all become really good friends.

Further, the school takes care of us pretty well. The on-campus apartment they provide is not only pretty nice, it's pretty big, and, by virtue of being on campus and behind the guarded gate, it's safe. (Which is an even bigger plus for Ellis... unfortunately for her, she's been harassed by her share of creepy guys here, both Chinese and foreign.)

Also, they will still give us the airfare bonus stipulated in the previous contract, and the new contract will be effective as soon as the old one ends, meaning it will begin in July and run through next June. This means that they will even pay us in full for July and August... when there are no classes.

I have to say again, in this experience, I feel really lucky to have been connected with this school.

In other news, this last weekend I was asked to be a judge for the Huzhou city oral English competition. There were students competing at six different levels: college kids, high school kids, middle school kids, and 3 levels of elementary school kids, divided by age. It was an all day affair. It wasn't so bad, though it was a bit repetitive at times.

I was surprised to see that, to me at least, it seemed that the middle school kids had a higher level of proficiency than the high school kids. Laura said the same thing and suggested that perhaps it was because high school kids spend so much time preparing for the college entrance exam. (On that note, the college entrance exam in China, is something akin to the SAT, except longer and FAR more important. In the states, your SAT scores can vary in importance depending on your high school grades and extracurricular activities like sports or volunteer work or leadership roles. This means that the SAT, while important, counts for anywhere between 20% and 50% of your admission criteria. The Chinese college entrance exam counts for 100% of the admission criteria. They don't care what you did in school, what your extracurriculars were, the difference between going to an "ok" school vs a "good" school vs an "excellent" is ONLY your score on this exam.)

With the primary school kids we had to watch them give a minute-long presentation, after which we would ask them one question. We (the judges) were given a list of questions to ask the students. It was actually pretty rough, because after you ask a question, you hope and pray that the student says SOMETHING. Too often though, especially with the younger children, they did not, and we were just left with an awkward silence.

On the whole, however, I was very impressed with the English abilities of these kids. And even if their level wasn't fantastic at such a young age, I believe the younger you begin to learn a foreign language, the better, so more power to 'em.

Interesting Pictures

2009-04-28T21:15:00.003+08:00

Last weekend in Hangzhou, while Jean and I were in the mall, they had an art exhibit of sorts, one of which was a bust of "Abraham Obama".

Someone had combined the likenesses of Lincoln and Obama and made a bust of it:

In the same area, they had this for some unknown and unexplained reason, but I thought it photo worthy anyhow:

Today, I was headed toward a restaurant to get a quick dinner when I came across this:

Apparently somebody busted a water main. In any case, this eruption created a river in the street, so I would've been unable to get to that restaurant without getting my shoes and socks totally soaked, so I ended up eating eslewhere.

Ridin the Bike

2009-04-28T07:47:00.002+08:00

My bike is nothing special. Just a $60 one-speed.

I of course get passed by cars and motorcycles all the time.

The electric scooters they have an awful lot of here pass me sometimes, it depends if it's a fast one or a slow one, but I'd say I pass about 60% of them.

But, since being in China, I have NEVER been passed by another bicycle. And I intend never to let that happen.

On an unrelated note, I hope this swine flu deal back West turns out to not be as serious as the news reports make it seem now.

Jean's Sister

2009-04-22T00:08:00.009+08:00

Since Jean's sister lives and works in Japan, she doesn't get a chance to see her sister often. However, this last week, her sister came to Shanghai on business. As such, they of course took advantage of this opportunity to hangout.

Jean also wanted me to meet her sister, but Saturday they were doing things in Shanghai, and I was in Changzhou. Sunday I was free, but they had plans to just go shopping all day in Hangzhou, so Jean suggested I meet them in Shaoxing on Monday, another city here in Zhejiang province.

Come Sunday night, Jean called me and told me they were really tired, and to just meet them in Hangzhou, which was not a problem.

So I met up with them, and we went out to West Lake. Now, Jean's sister has been living and working in Japan for 10 years, so she can speak Japanese fluently. However, she knows little English, and my Chinese, while not terrible, is far from complete, and not quite conversational. So, unfortunately for Jean, the brunt of communcation was either directly between she and I or she and her sister, with smatterings of translations when I didn't catch something important.

By the time we got to West Lake, it was about 11:30, and I was starving because I had eaten at 6am, and then only a bowl of cereal and an apple. The times Jean and I had gone out to West Lake before, I had noticed this bar/restaurant called "Borassa" which seemed fairly nice and had some outside tables with a nice view of West Lake. We decided to try that place for lunch. However, once inside and looking at a menu, Jean's countenance saddened and she said disappointedly, "This is a Chinese restaurant, not a Western restaurant." It's not that anyone dislikes Chinese food, it's that they were looking forward to having something a bit different, and the decor and style of this place screams foreign, and yet, they served Chinese food. So we ended up just ordering some beers and french fries and talked about where to go for lunch.

I originally suggested a German restaurant: it's certainly different enough from the norm, yet still tasty, and not too bizarre. However, after a quick internet search, it seemed Hangzhou lacked a German restaurant. We finally decided on Papa John's which was about one block away. After a nice thin crust pizza and some ribs as an appetizer, we grabbed a Blizzard from DQ, and went for a stroll around West Lake to help all of our stuffed bellies feel a bit better.

We walked around, chatted, rested, took turns sneezing (all 3 of us seemed to be sneezing that day, I'm not sure why, maybe a high pollen count), and took a few pictures when the opportunity seemed appropriate. Later, we headed back toward downtown as the girls wanted to get a little bit more shopping in. At about 5 o'clock, I boarded a bus back to the Hangzhou North Bus Station, because I had to return to Huzhou that day for a class on Tuesday.

Jean's sister seems like a very cool chica, and when the two are together they are constantly laughing. She also invited us to come visit her in Japan this summer, so I may get to go to Japan after all!

Tuesday, Jean accompanied her sister back to the airport in Shanghai and said goodbye. After Jean left the airport in Shanghai, she got on a bus to the Shanghai South Train Station, waited 30 minutes, boarded a train for Hangzhou, and from there took the late night (and often crowded) bus back to her apartment.

The worst part for Jean is, after all that, when she finally arrived back at her place, her sister had at the same time just arrived back at her home in Japan. In the time it took Jean to get to the airport in Shanghai back to her apartment in Hangzhou, her sister hopped an international flight and was fetched from airport to her home. This says two things: A) Japan isn't all that far from Shanghai, and 2) Traffic in China, especially buses, is a pain the ass.

Update: Jean tells me they weren't shopping in Hangzhou on Sunday, but instead were in Haining, where they sell lots of leather goods.

Dinosaur Land

2009-04-21T21:58:00.014+08:00

A few weeks ago, some of my students told me that they had decided to take a class trip to 常州恐龙园 (Changzhou Konglong Yuan, Changzhou Dinosaur Park). They asked me if I would like to go, to which I told them, "Yes, I would! I love dinosaurs!" (Later, a few of the students, worried I had misunderstood them, explained to me that they didn't have "real" dinosaurs, hahaha.)

By the way, maybe no one will think this is interesting, but "dinosaur" in English comes from Greek "deinos" meaning "terrible" and "sauros" meaning "lizard." In Chinese, its very close: 恐, "kong", meaning "fearful" (close to terrible), and 龙, "long", meaning "dragon." In English slang, dinosaur can refer to a person stuck in old ways and methods, refusing to use modern ones, or to an outdated machine like a car or computer. In Chinese slang, 恐龙，dinosaur refers to an ugly girl.

So this last Saturday morning, April 18, I and about 100 students (of which only about 30 were my students) boarded 2 buses at 6am and headed toward Changzhou, a city that is a 2-and-a-half hour bus ride away. I brought my DS and had a freshly downloaded movie (Requiem For A Dream) loaded onto my iPod, so I was able to stave boredom on the ride.

The park itself is actually a dinosaur-themed amusement park with a dinosaur museum also inside the park. The museum is only a small part of the park, but they did have some fairly impressive and complete fossils. (Just so everyone is aware, if you can't see things very clearly, you can click on the picture to load the larger image of it.)

Sichuanosaurus. Why? Because it was found in Sichuan province.

The plaque called it "Tuojiangosaurus," but I think of him as ol' stego.

I know the lighting in this picture is very bad, but I tried to take this picture from many angles to no avail. Anyhow it was too huge and complete and impressive to not include. This brontosaurus looking fella is called Mamenchisaurus.

This is a miniature of what the above might have looked like when he was alive.

Classic Triceratops

Now, why they had mechanical bulls INSIDE the dinosaur museum I'll never know. But I wasn't gonna pass up that opportunity.

There was some interesting scenery in the park with dinosaur statues strewn about, the most impressive of which, I thought, were the apatasaurus-like constructions inside the lake that had moving parts and made noise.

Trusty Cretaceous Steed

Ah, its the friendly, neighborhood mail-velociraptor!

A family of apatasaurs taking a dip.

There's not a lot of room for these horny guys to fight.

This was actually a reasonably cool looking T-Rex. Unfortunately, due to the position of the sun, this was the best lit angle I could take.

The apatosaurs had moving heads and roared. Therefore, they must be real dinosaurs. (The entire image doesn't display in this window, please click to see the entire image. By splicing two images from slightly different angles together, this "maybe" creates a slight 3D effect.)

In terms of thrill rides, there were actually several, maybe a couple dozen rides, only one of which was a roller coaster. However, the roller coaster was more of a "children's" roller coaster. Despite that, the other thrill rides were still pretty fun.

Saw this while waiting in line. The hamburgler would not be welcome. Admittedly this warning is not incorrect, I just think the use of the word "burgling" was funny.

The only major problem we faced that day was the same problem you'd face at any major theme park on a weekend... large crowds and long lines. Other than that, it was actually a pretty fun time. The park itself, in terms of quality, design, decoration, cleanliness, theme, and all those metrics that you'd use to describe a theme park, I would say were on par with Busch Gardens minus the zoo and roller coasters, so a pretty solid enterprise.

Finally, I saw this as we were leaving, and I don't know why, but I think it's funny.

Internet Video in China

2009-04-13T21:52:00.003+08:00

Ok, well, it's been a couple weeks now and youtube.com is still down.

I think I've finally found out why.

Up until recently China's SARFT (State Administration of Radio Film and Television) only required that video sharing websites hold a license to be able to air their content in China.

Well recently, they have introduced some new regulations. From http://illuminantpartners.com/blog/index.php/tag/internet-china-chinese-online-video-sharing-sarft-law-regulation-intellectualproperty-ip-ipr/

"Under the new rules, all films, TV series, cartoons and documentaries must obtain offline broadcasting licenses before being transmitted via internet media"

Essentially, this is in an effort to stamp out pirated materials from being shown online. However, there is an exception in the "haven rule" which essentially says that for user-generated content (meaning stuff that individual people upload, not businesses) each piece of copyright-violating content will be removed upon notification.

Anyhow, because the youtube servers are not located in China, and thus they cannot enforce these rules, it seems perhaps the Chinese government is using it as an excuse to block youtube.

In any case, it means I will have to find some other way to get to see youtube content.

Never Fails

2009-04-08T07:41:00.002+08:00

So this actually happened back in February, but I forgot to add it to the blog until now.

I was getting dressed in the locker room at the gym one day, and a man came up to me and asked, in English, "Are you American?" to which I responded, "Yes I am."

Then he asked me in English, "How long you in China?"

At that point I responded to him in Chinese, "Wo shi qu nian shi yue lai de" ("I arrived last year in October")

However, after I said this, he looked like he didn't understand me, which made me start worrying: Did I say a wrong word? Did I use the wrong tone?

Anyways, I said it again, in Chinese, a bit more slowly and deliberately, to make sure that I said it correctly, but he still didn't seem to understand me.

At that point I asked him, "Wo shuo cuo le ma?" meaning "Did I say it incorrectly?"

He looked as if he still didn't understand me, and when I was about to say something again, he said to me in English, "I don't know much Chinese, I am Japanese."

Apparently he was just a Japanese businessman doing business in Huzhou. :$

Family Feud

2009-04-02T17:41:00.007+08:00

So this week I have been playing the "Family Feud" with my classes. I was able to find many questions and their answers from an FAQ on "The Family Feud" video game for the Super Nintendo.

The FAQ listed all 1400 questions and answers from the game. One issue was, however, that these surveys were done among Americans, and as such, some of the questions were so steeped in American culture that the kids would have no idea. For example:

"Name something mothers wear while driving their kids to school"
-Chinese, by and large, don't drive

"Name a public place where women sometimes put on makeup"
-I have not once seen a Chinese woman apply makeup in public that I can remember. I'm not going to count the washroom because that may very well be the only place, and a one answer Family Feud question doesn't work.

"Name something people often say to each other but really don't mean"
-I'm sure the phrases themselves vary by language, and irony and sarcasm also DO vary by culture.

"Name a holiday that ends in the work "Day""

However, there were still several hundred questions, and I didn't even need that many, so there certainly were categories where things worked out fine:

"Name things women find hard to resist"
-Answers: Shopping, Candy/Chocolate, Men, Jewelry, Clothes, Gossip, Money

"Name the smartest animal"

"What's the first thing you do after waking up from a nap?"

There were some other questions, however, where the question was really good, but a few of the answers were too American for the kids to guess. In this case, I would often either just remove an answer, or replace an answer with a more Chinese answer. For example:

"Name something you buy that is almost always white"
-The problem here was a lack of the answer "rice", which frankly is an excellent answer, and the inclusion of the answer "eggs." Eggs in China are all brown, not white. In fact, most of the kids were surprised to hear that all the eggs in the USA are white.

"Name something you do when you wake up"
-Here, "coffee" was an answer that Chinese would never use, and to my surprise, the kids were surprised to see "shower" on the list. They said that they take showers at night instead.

"Name something you use every day"
-In this question, "car" is not as appropriate a response in China as would be "bus" or "bicycle". As a result, if the students said "car" or "bus" or "bicycle" I gave them credit for this answer.

Finally, there was one other problem with some of these questions that could be relatively easily corrected by removing or adding some responses. The problem was this: These questions were all from "Family Feud" on the Super Nintendo... meaning that the questions would be appropriate to 1992/1993 culture. Some examples:

"Name something you might forget in a restaurant"
-While all the answers given in this question still worked today, "purse", "coat", "leave a tip" (which the Chinese kids never guess), "hat", "umbrella", "keys", "glasses", and "take home bag", there was a GLARING absence of "cell phone"

"Name an occupation whose workers deal mostly with strangers"
-I had to remove "telephone operator".

All in all though, the game worked well, and the kids liked it. By the way, the idea for doing this came from Ellis (the other teacher here) wanting to play an April Fool's prank on her students. So we got together to try and plan something together for our classes. We thought of the Family Feud idea and picked out the questions. In class, we combined our classes and had them compete against each other. Then near the end, we pretended to have an argument about something, and were yelling at each other until Ellis finally stormed out of the room. The kids were shocked, haha. Ellis returned 30 seconds later and we shouted "April Fool's!" and gave the kids candy. In retrospect, 30 seconds was a bit long and very awkward. Some of her students started to follow her out to find out what was wrong, and my students were asking me, "What did you do?" In the end, I think that was about the best practical joke we could've done with the students on such short notice without it being either too lame, too obvious, or too terrible.

Youtube

2009-03-30T15:48:00.003+08:00

Last Tuesday I was inconvenienced by the fact that YouTube.com was blocked in China.

The reason for the blockage was due to some controversial video posted, and since the YouTube servers aren't in China, they blocked it.

I guess Google and China worked out whatever issues were at play because Friday, it was reopened, so no big deal, a temporary outage.

Unfortunately, today, for the second time in as many weeks, youtube.com has been once again blocked in China.

This is getting rather annoying.

Weekend at the Zoo

2009-03-26T20:07:00.004+08:00

This past weekend Jean and I went to the 杭州动物园, the Hangzhou Zoo (literally, Hangzhou Animal Park).

We left her place Saturday morning and headed to the bus stop. The bus we needed to take, the 315, came by a couple times, but was extremely crowded, so we decided to try and nab a taxi (which for some reason, all day, I kept calling it a tab, like I wanted to start saying taxi and finish saying cab).

However, when a taxi came by, we said where we wanted to go, and the driver said the traffic that wasn't too good so he didn't want to go that way. We decided that since the zoo wasn't too far (3 stops on the bus), we'd just suffer through the crowded bus for a bit. So, we hopped onto, nay, squeezed into the next 315 that came by and went on our way.

Now, the zoo is about 3 miles away from Jean's apartment. At the time, however, I didn't know how far it was. Anyhow, the bus SLOWLY, in some seriously heavy traffic trudged to about halfway there. Then everything just came to a complete standstill. Just for reference this was at about 2:30 in the afternoon. Some people asked the bus driver to open the doors to let them off, and about half the bus emptied out, including ourselves. (FYI, to give an idea about the sardine-tight packed-inness of the bus, even after half the bus emptied out, there were still no seats available.)

Jean said she didn't know exactly how to get to the zoo from that point, but as it turned out, it was on the same road we were on, just about mile and a half down the road. I should point out, we walked the remaining mile and a half, not hoofing it, just walking relatively leisurely, and we beat not only our bus, but we passed an earlier 315 bus on the way. The traffic was not moving at all. Even Jean admitted that while traffic is usually heavy in Hangzhou, it rarely was this bad, a dead stop.

Anyhow, we did ultimately arrive at the zoo. I did, however forget to bring my camera. I still took some pictures with my camera phone, but the quality is nowhere near as good as my camera. But as someone probably once said "the worst picture is the one not taken."

I have several pictures, but I won't bore the blog readers by putting them all up. But here are a few of the more interesting ones:

This one isn't interesting per se, I just like that the monkey area of the zoo is called 猴山, hou shan, literally, Monkey Mountain.

Here is China's most famous animal: the panda

Here they have some fake panda statues just outside the panda exhibit. These pandas look awfully fierce!

Here is a rather scrawny looking tiger. Don't get me wrong though, I still wouldn't want to mess with him. Though I have to say, the tiger kept pacing back and forth over a stretch of about 3 meters, almost as if it was a nervous tic, kinda weird.

This one by itself is also rather ordinary, BUT, this was my favorite animal growing up. Why? Because I was always short and wanted to be taller.

Finally, a particularly sad elephant. Seemed like he was imprisoned, and during this, what I guess was its feeding time, it was chained to the bars. (Just so you know, the elephants did have a Large outside area, but they were just inside for that time I suppose to feed. It's still pretty depressing, but at least the elephants don't have to just sit in that small room the entire time.)

By the way, when we left the zoo, we planned to go into town to eat. But after about 2 hours in the zoo, the traffic outside was still stopped. So we walked the remaining 2.5 miles into downtown, and we still got there faster than the traffic.

On a different note, I learned a slightly interesting fact. Mashed potatoes in Chinese is 土豆泥, "tu dou ni". "Tu dou" is potato (literally "soil bean"), so I had just assumed that the "ni" (泥) meant mashed or smashed or pureed, or something to that effect. Actually, "ni" (泥) literally translates to mud, not mud-like consistencies of things, but plain old "dirt-and-water" mud. So, mashed potatoes in Chinese translates to English literally as "potato mud." :) It actually makes sense, but it also seems pretty funny.

Birthday Weekend

2009-03-16T10:35:00.002+08:00

So for this past weekend, the weekend following my birthday, I invited some friends over for dinner Saturday evening.

All total there were 5 of us: Jean, Ellis, my friend Erik the Peruvian, Jennifer (a new girl in Huzhou from Minnesota, I think), and myself.

Ellis offered to bake a cake with her newly acquired toaster oven, a cake whose batter that has strawberries among its ingredients. Yes that's right. Strawberries in the cake batter. Unless you've tried it, you really have no idea how WELL that works.

Anyways since I was inviting people over, I had to prepare the food. I decided to prepare baked chicken breast, mashed potatoes, and... baked ziti, once again. Jean decided to try her hand at making some sushi, as she had seen her mother do so many times before but never actually done herself.

The chicken breasts were easy to do, as I've done it here so many times before. You simply buy the boneless skinless breasts (which, here in China, are cheaper by the pound than chicken wings), marinate them overnight, add a bit of breading, and bake for 30 minutes, easy peasy. The one snag with the chicken: I didn't think about it until too late that I didn't have enough steak knives, so the guests had to use butter knifes to cut the chicken, a tool which worked better stabbing the chicken than sawing it, not because the chicken was tough, but because these were really thick butter knives which a "fake" serrated edge.

The mashed potatoes were something I had never made from scratch before, but was actually really simple. They came out just "alright." When preparing them at one point I noticed that it needed more salt. Unfortunately I added a bit too much salt. It wasn't "oh-my-God-I-need-to-drink-some-water-immediately" salty, and it actually was still pretty tasty, just maybe a hair on the salty side. The only other bad thing about the mashed potatoes is that while they were delicious, 4 potatoes doesn't make nearly enough mashed potatoes for 5 people. I think a better number may have been 7 potatoes.

The sushi that Jean made actually was not a fish based sushi, but frankly, I think that was for the better. The sushi she made contained cucumbers, sausage, eggs, and carrots all wrapped inside a rice and seaweed border. Jean claims that they weren't very good, but I beg to differ. Most of you know how picky I am, and I even liked these. To be fair, her complaint about them lies in that, with her first batch, the rice wasn't quite soft enough, which may be true, but if anything, is my fault because she asked me if I thought the rice was cooked enough, to which I replied, "yes." The rice wasn't hard though, just maybe not quite as soft as it ought to have been. Again though, my fault on that one.

As for the ziti... As I mentioned in a previous post, I couldn't get the ricotta cheese. I also didn't make an attempt to "make" a ricotta substitute. As a result, I was basically crossing my fingers and hoping that it turned out alright.

There were a couple items working in my favor, however, in contrast to last time. When I made the ziti before, I had bought a large bag of shredded mozzarella. This time, the mozzarella I had was a total of about a pound of block mozzarella. While that did mean that Jean and I had to shred it by hand, which was time-consuming, it definitely was of better quality.

Additionally, last time, I accumulated my ingredients keeping in mind that there would be a couple vegetarians among our dinner party. This time however, all omnivores, so I could add meat to the sauce. Now, I had never seen ground beef at any of the grocery stores in Huzhou, so I just planne to use ground pork, which is plentifully available. So, Saturday morning Jean and I went to the largest of the 3 big grocery stores in Huzhou to fetch the meat and a few other items. To my pleasant surprise, they actually had 2 packages of ground beef! We're talking in the entire store, there were a total of 2 one-half-pound packages of ground beef and those probably only still there because it was still morning. Anyway, I happily snatched it up.

The sauce was also better this time. Rather than just opening the can when the pasta was ready and adding it to the baking dish and mixing it, I first cooked the sauce with browned ground beef and some fennel for about 2 hours before baking the ziti. The sauce was DEFinitely better.

Mixing ingredients, pre-baking

Finished Product

In the end, without the ricotta, the ziti was still really good! Personally I thought it was marginally better than the last time, perhaps because of the meat sauce, not because of the lack of ricotta. Jean did comment that the consistency was not the same as last time, and that could've been because of the ricotta, but the flavor was really unaffected, and it turned out really well. Nuts to ricotta!

Finally, we ate the cake that Ellis had made. The strawberry batter cake, and then as a topping she had some crushed strawberries with sugar (basically a delicious strawberry filling similar to the kind Mama, my grandmother, uses in her strawberry shortcake bowl).

It was definitely a fun day, one of the best I've had since coming to China: preparing the food during the day with Jean with the radio blaring tunes, eating all the delicious food, and the warm and entertaining company.

Running

2009-03-11T00:05:00.000+08:00

So while walking Hangzhou this past weekend, I mentioned to my girlfriend how I have seen that Chinese girls run in 2 ways:

The first way is the same way that all girls run when they need to hurry.

The second way is a move that cannot really be described in words, but is an EXTREMELY girly-looking manoeuvre, one which I have never in my life seen an American girl do, not even little girls. Furthermore this move varies from being "no more efficient than" to "only very slightly faster than" actually walking.

After I mentioned that to her (and a brief demonstration of that run so she knew what I was talking about) she had a short criticism of the way I run, like when crossing the street, or when I forget change for the bus and run back up the stairs to my room (which as you all know I can do in 23 seconds). She said "You know, when you run, you always run so fast, so powerfully, when there's no need to run so fast."

To which I replied, "If you're going to criticize the way I run, I'm glad you do it with words like 'powerfully' "

New Record

2009-03-10T13:39:00.000+08:00

Ground floor, foot of the stairs to the 6th floor top of the stairs: 23 seconds

Pre-Birthday Weekend in Hangzhou

2009-03-09T20:55:00.000+08:00

So this weekend I went to Hangzhou to visit Jean.

Frankly, I wasn't even thinking about my birthday when I went to go see her, but when I got to her place she had bought me some snacks, some American-style bananas (more expensive here), and a birthday cake!

When we started to cut the cake, we noticed that the cake-cutting knife was shaped like a fish, which Jean then pointed out was cool because I am a Pisces. After she said that, I said, well now I HAVE to take a picture of the knife, so I did, and then she pointed out that with the shadow, the photo looked like 2 fish, so it was indeed a Pisces.

And for my birthday, she bought me some new kicks, a new pair of Nike sneakers :)

Something a bit random, while walking along in Hangzhou this weekend I saw a statue of a creature with a dog's body and an elephant's head.

Finally, tonight, I went to dinner with Ellis and some of the teachers from the school where we ate an eel dish (a specialty dish of Huzhou, with tiny eels- it tasted like noodles), duck tongue, frog-potato soup, and a few other less exotic, yet still very Chinese dishes. This picture isn't too clear, but it is the duck tongue:

I did try a little bit of everything, and it really wasn't all that bad. And for the most part, I don't really mind "trying" these new foods. However, one exception for me personally is foods with vinegar. Vinegar is quite possibly my most hated of all foodstuffs. Actually Jean and I had a conversation about this the other day. She mentioned that her two most favorite kinds of foods in the world are spicy foods and acid food (acid meaning with vinegar). She said she was glad that I also liked spicy foods so she can share it with me, but disappointed about the 醋 (cù, vinegar).

Anyhow, this next weekend I am going to have a few people over for dinner. Ellis mentioned she was going to bake a cake, and I am going to make baked ziti. One big problem this time though is I didn't get a chance to go to Shanghai to get some ricotta cheese. A friend of mine, another teacher at this school here, goes to Shanghai every weekend. A couple weeks ago she offered to grab something from Shanghai for me if I ever needed anything, so I asked her if she could nab mozzarella and ricotta. She did find the mozz, easily the more important of the two, but she couldn't find the ricotta. So, that means I'm gonna have to try to make the baked ziti without ricotta cheese, OR... try and make a ricotta substitute from milk on my own... We will see...

Back in China

2009-02-27T19:40:00.000+08:00

So it's been almost exactly a month since I last posted.

In that time, I flew home, had a good time, and flew back and began the new semester.

I have to say, the weather since I got back, while not as frigidly cold as it was in the couple of weeks before I left, is rather gloomy. More than gloomy though it's just kind of gross.

Every day. Every freakin day it rains, and the daytime highs range from 40 to 48 degrees Fahrenheit. It just makes everything all messy and I have to remember to bring my umbrella with me everywhere I go and the bottom of my jeans are constantly wet and I can't ride my bike anywhere. Unless I wear a raincoat poncho, but even then, the roads are dangerous enough, I don't need to add limited mobility, vision, and reduced braking ability of everyone into the mix.

Speaking of the roads being dangerous, when Jean was walking to work the other day, she was hit by a car. Luckily he wasn't going too fast when he hit her, but it was enough to knock her over and she had a pretty mean scrape on her knee- a 2-bandaid jobber. Other than the scrape she's fine though.

As such I DO go the gym (3 km into town), but I end up taking the bus or a taxi. Usually the bus, taxi if I've just gone grocery shopping (or if I just really get sick of waiting at the rainy bus stop and I see an open cab). I am pretty proud of myself, I've been Really good about going to the gym regularly since I've gotten back. Granted that amounts to two weeks of being good about it, but last semester, I usually only ended up making it to the gym 1 to 2 times a week, as opposed to the 4-time routine I've got going now. You really just cannot make any progress going 1 or 2 times a week. Granted, better than nothing, but not enough to make some physical, visible gains.

By the way, I've come up with what I think is an ingeneous backup plan for my classes in case I happen to lesson plan too short (meaning the class is 90 minutes total and my prepared stuff only lasts 70 minutes or so). I have told my classes to pay attention to the news and make note of any interesting things they see or hear and then I make a discussion out of that topic in class. Some of the news items have not much more to discuss than the statement itself, while others lend themselves to lengthy tangents.

I also do this myself and sometimes tell the students about some interesting news topics. Like the chick who had octuplets. What's funny is that the fact that she was not married and did this got just as large a gasp out of the classes as did the fact that she had 8 kids at once.

Chinese New Year

2009-01-28T20:32:00.000+08:00

So Chinese New Year's Eve was Sunday night and I spent it with Jean. She was a bit homesick as this was the first Chinese New Year's that she hadn't spent at home with her family. And remember that Chinese New Year is to the Chinese like Christmas is to us in terms of being together with family.

Anyway, we stayed up to ring in the new year, and all throughout the night we'd constantly hear fireworks, not unlike you would in the states, perhaps for New Year's and certainly for the Fourth. However, at midnight... Holy Cow! (I just realized how appropriate that expression is after I typed it because on the Chinese calendar, this is the year of the ox.)

Anyways, at midnght, a deluge of firework and bombs went off. This wasn't like when you go to see a fireworks show and there's lots of fireworks they set off and you look at from a distance of perhaps a quarter or half mile. This was like fireworks being set off everywhere in all directions everywhere in the city. (By the way, I was in Hangzhou, a Chicago-sized city, during this.) And perhaps not as widely dispersing, but people would be setting off these rockets that would explode, with not a whole lot of fire, but a LOT of boom, and we're talking just outside the apartment. You couldn't talk, it was like a warzone, without all the imminent danger. It actually was kind of cool :) But, if you had plans to go to sleep shortly after midnight, you can forget it. While the super loudest bombs died down after about 20-30 minutes, there were till fireworks going off some place in the city until well into the night.

The next day, Jean left to go to Qingdao to visit her grandparents. She wasn't able to get a ticket to Harbin to see her family, but found a super cheap ticket to Qingdao to at least see her grandparents (like $40 one-way).

Since she was leaving, I went back to Huzhou. When I got back to the school, I noticed a bunch of leftover launch pads from dozens and dozens of rockets that the guards must have set off the night before. Considering how much is going at the school this time of year, I don't blame them. It's gotta be a relatively boring job to begin with, but when no one is in the school and off for vacation, ech.

Happy Niu Year everybody! (Niu means cow)

Español

2009-01-21T22:08:00.000+08:00

So while I am learning the Chinese language and practicing in some form every day, I am also unexpectedly brushing off and practicing my Spanish.

Here in Huzhou, there is a Peruvian man named Erik. I met him around Christmas time and he and I have been hanging out a bit since then. His English is ok, a little bit better than my Spanish, but not great.

Anyhow, it's a good chance for me to dust off and get some practice with my Spanish and Chinese skills at the same time... Which also has some unwanted side effects. Since I've been studying Chinese more intensely and more recently, often when I want to say something in Spanish, the Spanish word just will not come to mind because the Chinese word won't go away. And I'm talking about with simple expressions like "I", "He is... ", "I want to...", etc.

But while I have forgotten a LOT of Spanish since high school (when I was actually pretty decent at it), having used it with him recently has gotten me back into the hang of it a little.

Now I just have to work on switch between "Spanish mode" and "Chinese mode" more easily. Which, like anything, practice makes perfect.

Vacation Time

2009-01-14T21:34:00.000+08:00

Well, I was originally supposed to have classes at a training center this week, for a winter program they were having, teaching kids from 3 to 14. But, it ended up getting cancelled, so my vacation began this week!

So now, with not much to do (since my girlfriend still has to work during the week), and since many of the students with whom I have become friends have gone home, I've basically just been focusing on doing two things that I had become too lazy about over the past few weeks: working out and studying Chinese.

You may think, "well you're already in China, why do you need to study it?" The problem is, certainly being here helps a LOT in terms of exposure to both written and especially spoken language, but there's still so many words I just dont know, so I gotta keep at it.

Chinese New Year is a HUGE holiday here, it is their Christmas. The city gets decorated, the stores get super crowded, the same thing everyone back home was doing a month ago. Anyway, most of the time, people go home for Chinese New Year. My girlfriend's home is in Harbin (way way way northern China, practically Siberia. In fact Harbin is FAMOUS for its enormous ice sculptures). But she may not go home for the holiday. If she doesn't, the week she has off, we're thinking about flying down to Guangzhou for a few days. Guangzhou is in southern China, and latitude-wise it is like Havana, Cuba, so it should be nice and warm. The tickets are actually pretty cheap. Round trip for one seat is about $90.

By the way, to any of you who are reading, if anyone ever feels like giving me call you can do so at (813) 990-0980. Using Skype, I was able to set up a local Tampa number. Anyone can call this number just as you would any other number in Tampa, and its a local call (if you're in Tampa. If you're not in Tampa, it's still the same as if you are calling to Tampa). It goes to my Skype. If my Skype is on and I am home, I will answer it on my computer. If my Skype is not on, or I am not home, after a few rings it will get forwarded to my cell phone here in China.

Snow

2009-01-07T22:56:00.000+08:00

I forgot to mention in my last post here that late last night it snowed here.

Only the 2nd time in my life that I'd seen snowfall.

But unfortunately, by the time I woke up this morning, around 7am, the snow had already melted so I couldn't get a picture. Bummer.

Finals for the Students

2009-01-07T16:44:00.000+08:00

So today I wrapped up giving my students final examinations, which in their case was an oral presentation.

I have to say, in the last class today, one group of students did something that I couldn't help but laugh at.

First let me explain a phenomenon that is extremely common here in China that is fairly rare in the US. Quite often here you will see a group of girls, 2 or 3, walking along or in class holding hands or arm-in-arm. And we're not talking 7-year olds. We're talking girls as old as 25, 26 years old doing this. Anyways, you get used to it, and here, it's actually kind of endearing.

Anyhow, during this one presentation, there were a group of 4 girls. They were standing up doing their presentation and there was a pair on each side. Each pair of girls was holding hands throughout the entire dialogue, and it just reminded me of the Xmas episode of Futurama. They visit Robot Santa's workshop on Neptune and all the Neptunian elves there always are in pairs, doing everything while holding hands. After reading what I just typed it no longer seems funny, but if you've seen that episode, you know what I'm talking about, and it seemed funny at the time.

(By the way mom, I'm not being lazy and not typing Christmas, in Futurama, in the future, everyone calls it Xmas, pronounced "exmas", and that Christmas is an archaic pronunciation, kind of like "ask you a question" instead of "aks you a question")

Another thing I thought was funny is one group did a presentation on England and they said the food there was very good, which is funny considering everyone always talks about how awful the food is in England.

Finally, in another class, they also did a presentation on England, and while listing cultural activities that British people enjoy mentioned "watching opera." However, and I'm not trying to be mean, but with her pronunciation, the way she said it sounded like "watching Oprah."

I'm not making fun of these kids, as most of them are making a genuine effort, and learning a foreign language is definitely not easy. It's just the mistakes are sometimes a bit funny, and if you can't laugh at life, what fun is there? :)

Cold with a cold

2009-01-05T16:36:00.000+08:00

Woke up this morning with a little bit of a cold, but not too bad, so it's really not a big deal.

But the weather is quite cold, and today it is sprinkling out so you have 40 degree rainy weather. Miserable.

Today I had my first set of "final exams." I had the students in each class work in groups and do a presentation in English on a city they'd like to visit, talking about the people, the culture, the food, things they'd like to do, etc.

It went pretty well, though I guess some of them weren't clear that for each group they should talk about one city. Some groups had each person talk about a different city. After looking back at what I wrote down for my requirements, it seems I wasn't explicitly clear, so as long as they had good information, pronunciation, and grammar, I didn't count off any points for that.

Something funny happened when the other foreign kids and I went out for dinner last week. We were talking and I had mentioned that the previous week, due to it being cold, me being lazy, and it being Christmas-time, I skipped the gym completely that week.

Ellis then mentioned that she hadn't been in a couple weeks, and that she Would go but that she "couldn't handle the stairs."

After hearing her say this, I was thinking in my head "I know we live on the 6th floor, but jeez, I didn't think it was that big a deal." After a couple of us didn't respond, she said, "It's just really annoying when at the gym and on the bus everyone is looking at me all the time."

She said she couldn't handle the "stares," haha.

(FYI: They stare because they don't often see a tall American female in Huzhou.)

The Weekend in Huzhou.... and Shanghai... and Hangzhou

2009-01-04T10:06:00.000+08:00

Happy New Year!

So this weekend I went to Shanghai to see the PS2 seller about my PS2 prblem. When we (Jean went with me) arrived there, the clerk hooked my PS2 to their TV, popped in Guitar Hero 3 (their disc) and let me play. Now the thing I was worried about is that the problem happens about 90% of the time. Perhaps 10% of the time it gets through the whole song without a problem. Luckily, it DID mess up in the song. So they got out another PS2, and I played the same song, and it went smoothly, no problem. SO they agreed to swap out the PS2. However, I had originally bought a red one and they didn't have another red one to swap it out with. It wouldn't have bothered me to have a different color one, but for whatever reason, they decided to have one of their workers leave the store and go to, I suppose, their supplier and get another one. (I'm not sure why, maybe it was that one they tested it with was theirs and they didn't have another one in the store of ANY color.)

Anyhow, we had to just stand around waiting for about 30-35 minutes before the guy got back and I tested it. I played three songs with no problem so I exchanged it.

I was glad to have that taken care of, but Jean was visibly bored and perhaps slightly annoyed at all the 麻烦 (ma fan, trouble). To add to her displeasure, when we planned to go to Shanghai, she asked if we could also go shopping at the fake market, to which I of course agreed. However, because we arrived in Shanghai a bit later than we originally planned, and because it took longer at the video game shop than anticipated, there wasn't enough time to to go to the fake market, and barely enough time to eat lunch (which by 4 o'clock we had not yet eaten) before catching a bus back to Huzhou.

At that point we would've gone ahead and eaten lunch/dinner, but I had ALSO forgotten to look up where to find a nice restaurant in that part of Shanghai, and Jean wasn't very familiar with that part of town. So, hungry, bored, and cold, we decided to go the bus station to head back. She knew there was at least a McDonald's at the Shanghai South Bus Station, so at least we could grab a bite before heading back home. I promised her that once we got back to Huzhou we could go to a 火锅 restaurant (huo guo, hot pot, like a fondue restaurant where you have a boiling pot and they bring you stuff you cook in it yourself).

However, as we were walking to the ticket counter, we came across a Papa John's. We hungrily and happily decided to go ahead and eat there! Our bellies full, and our moods both much improved, we left the restaurant when I noticed that also in that bus station was a Cold Stone Creamery! I had yet to find a decent ice cream place in China and it seemed like a good choice for dessert, so we got some ice cream. Finally we headed to the bus ticket counter only to find out the last bus for Huzhou had left at 6:05 pm and it was now 6:20 pm.

So we decided to take the 7pm train from Shanghai to Hangzhou and stay at Jean's place that night. It wasn't all bad though. At her place, we were talking about movies and she said she had never seen Back to the Future, so we watched it. (On a side note, Ellis, the other foreign teacher living at my school had ALSO not seen Back to the Future. Which is pretty unusual considering she is an American and even MORE unsual considering she was a FILM major!) Anyways, I was able to find the movie on a Chinese “youtube” like website. When I was clicking the link to it, Jean noticed the info listed about the movie, that it was made in 1985. She said, “That movie is 24 years old?” .... I had never thought about “Back to the Future” being an “old” movie, but the truth now is, at 24 years since its release, it is a fairly old film.

The next day in Hangzhou we ended up eating hot pot for lunch, went around, got some shopping done, ate a cheap pizza for dinner and finally hopped on a bus to Huzhou. By the way, speaking of shopping, there is a brand of clothing that I've never seen in the US before called Kappa. I find their logo very interesting, as you can see here. A Chinese friend of mine mentioned that the logo gets even more interesting when you cover the top part of it with your hand...

One other interesting thing I noticed is that they actually have an MLB store there in Hangzhou!
As expected the majority of the gear was Yankees stuff, but the most disappointing thing of all was that there was NO Rays gear. Nothing. Not a cap, not a hoodie, not a jacket, nothing. To be fair, the Rays weren't the only team for whom I didn't see any stuff. Neither did I see any Marlins, Orioles, Rockies, Cardinals, Blue Jays wear, or even anything for the Phillies or the Braves! So, I blame it more on lack of inventory.

After shopping, we headed toward the bus station. On the walk to the bus station though, I saw a strangely familiar sight... the Goodyear Blimp!

Anyways, this week in classes are final exams, and my students will be giving oral presentations in class. Then Thursday, if I can (meaning, if the field is open), I'm going to try and teach some of the students American football (for which I will try to fabricate some flag football belts) and then Friday morning I will wake up and watch the National Championship game through Slingbox. Go Gators!

PS2 and the new year

2008-12-29T17:56:00.000+08:00

Well for New Year's it seems that I have to attend a party that my department is holding. But it's not too bad, I didn't have any other plans yet anyways. I can't spend New Year's Eve with Jean because at her company they have to work until midnight on New Year's Eve. They do go out to dinner stay and later they get like a phone call from the head of the company wishing Happy New Year, but in the time between dinner and midnight, they do actually have to work, it's not a party. Seems pretty rough to me.

Anyhow, pretty soon many of my foreign friends will be gone. 3 of the kids (20 somethings) here either already have or will have left China by the middle of January, and Nellie isn't leaving China, but moving to Shanghai. So at that point it'll pretty much just be Ellis and I here in Huzhou, save for a few other older foreign teachers who have families here.

I did get to break in my football today! On Mondays I have an English Corner, and I brought the football with me. I asked some of the kids there if they'd like to throw the ball around afterward, and a couple of the guys threw it with me. Sure, their form was horrible, and it was cold outside, but it felt good to play some toss and catch again.

I'm actually going to try to plan on inviting some students, and whoever else is interested, to the school soccer field Friday afternoon to introduce them to football. Now that I think about it, maybe I ought to look into getting some flags.

On another note, I did get the "genuine" PS2 disc, but when I put it into my PS2, it wouldn't even load at all. So, I contacted the seller (in Chinese of course), let him know, and he said to send it back and he would take a look at it.

So, last Tuesday, I sent it. He got it a couple days later and told me he tried it and had no problems. My guess is though that he got it, popped a game in, and when it worked, felt there was no problem. So I tried explaining to him my specific problem and with which specific games. He then said he would try to play those games himself and see if he could see the problem.

Well, later on, he said he tried them and had no problem. He suggested maybe it was the discs' problem or perhaps I was operating it incorrectly. It DEFinitely isn't that I was operating it incorrectly, and while it's possible the problem is the discs, I find it less likely that ALL of the discs, EVERY single game I tried had this problem.

(By the way, the problem is, the game would load and play, but then in the middle of playing the game, the audio would get all messed and the game would freeze. The game might unfreeze a few moments later but the audio would still be all screwy. In a game like Guitar Hero, which is THE reason I got the PS2, audio problems mean unplayability.)

I ultimately explained to him that I just wanted to be able to play my game, and the way things currently are I cannot. The seller was not being confrontational or uncooperative (from a Chinese standpoint that is, returning or exchanging merchandise in China is not as simple a process as it is in the states). To look at it from his end, he tried some games, and they seemed to work fine, so there wasn't a problem. Although I bought this online (from China's version of eBay), the seller was based in Shanghai and has a shop there. So being that he didn't see my problem, and knowing that I can recreate it easily, I asked him if I could go to his shop and show him the issue. He said ok. SO, on Thursday, the 1st, I will go to Shanghai (with Jean) and get this whole thing taken care of once and for all. Either the PS2 doesn't work when I show him and he replaces it OR it DOES work with a different disc, perhaps one he used, and then I just know I need to use a better disc. Either way is fine.

I also found out today that my break isn't as open as I thought. The semester is over for me after next week. However, the training center that the school has a relationship with will be having a winter program from Jan 11 to 17. Not terribly looking forward to it, but at least they do pay so will get a little bit of extra cash.

In other news, the losers lost again. The Bucs, just 3 weeks ago playing for the NFC South, lose 4 straight games and will sit out the playoffs. What a collapse. Pretty crappy, but frankly even if they'd lost 3 and won this last won, they'd've just snuck into the playoffs and lost the opening game anyways, taking it away from a team that actually deserves to be there (like this year's scrappy Eagles). The Dolphins, on the other hand, won 5 straight games, took the AFC South, and are heading into the playoffs on a good note. They play a tough Baltimore team who beat them earlier in the season, and I don't know if they can beat them this time, but at least they didn't just up and quit with 4 games left in the season.

What I am slightly concerned about is the very real possibility of Atlanta, or worse, Carolina winning a Super Bowl in our house, IN Tampa, since that's where the Super Bowl is this year. Oh well. What I do think is funny is the fact that New England goes undefeated last year and doesn't even get into the playoffs this season. To be fair, they did finish 11-5 which is a pretty darn good record, and it's just luck that this year 11-5 isn't good enough to make the playoffs for sure (which is rare).

Christmas and the End of the Year

2008-12-29T17:27:00.000+08:00

So last week was Christmas and some of the other foreigners and I went out to dinner. As I said in the last post, the original plan was to go to Nellie's but there would've been just too many people. But before we went to dinner, a few of us did go to Nellie's first just for to hangout for a bit, and have a few snacks and drinks.

I brought along the Christmas episodes of Futurama. Man, that was a great show.

Anyways, when we went to dinner, we all ate at a western-style (meaning western food) restaurant here in Huzhou. I had eaten there once before with Wayne actually, and made the bold mistake of ordering the pizza there. Ketchup with pizza is not very good.

So this time I ordered something different: the steak. I was actually pleasantly surprised, it was really good. So, now I know where to get a tasty steak in Huzhou :D

Anyways, since I didn't end up having a potluck Christmas dinner, I didn't get a chance to make the baked ziti, but I still had all the stuff to make it. And I wanted to make it and make it soon since acquiring the ingredients was kind of expensive and since some of them wouldn't last much longer. The ricotta cheese I bought actually had a date of December 19 on it, but I figured, it had never been opened so it might be ok. But, to be safe, I would taste and smell it when I finally opened it. If it was good, I'd use it, otherwise I'd trash the whole thing. So, on December 26, (a week after the ricotta's date) I made the baked ziti before bringing it and heading over to Jean's in Hangzhou.

The only thing it was missing: meat. Originally since I had planned to make it for our small Huzhou group, two of the girls I know are vegetarians, so I didn't buy any meat to add to the ziti. Even though I wasn't making it for the group anymore, I didn't think to get any meat until I began cooking the ziti. Despite that, it actually turned out pretty damn good if I do say so myself! Ellis tried a bit before I left for Hangzhou, and she said it was good too.

Jean also really liked it. She agreed that it would be better with some meat, and also perhaps just a small amount of chili peppers to add just a bit of kick. I'm actually looking forward to making it again for some other occasion and serving it gooey and hot.

Also in Hangzhou this weekend, Jean took me to an "Italian" restaurant in Hangzhou. It wasn't one that caters to westerners, but rather Chinese. The advantage of this is that it wouldn't be as expensive as the former. The disadvantage is the risk that it may not be very good. In terms of Italian food, it was ok. The spaghetti was just ok and the garlic bread was fine. The pizza however was actually not bad, certainly no worse than at the Pizza Hut in Hangzhou, and yet at a third of the price. The best pizza I've had in China so far was still at the Papa John's, but this place's pizza, at only 20 yuan (about $3), was pretty fair.

Christmas Eve

2008-12-24T16:10:00.000+08:00

So, some students had invited me to a couple of Christmas parties here on campus so I'll probably make an appearance at those.

Tomorrow night, I had originally planned to go over to Nellie's (another American English teacher) apartment for dinner with her and some other American/Canadians. But unfortunately for Nellie, the list of attendees grew a little too large for her apartment to accommodate (instead of 5 or 6 people, it would be 13 to 15 people). As such, we will all go out to a restaurant for dinner.

However that means that I won't bring the baked ziti I had originally planned to make. But it's not so bad. It means I can make it this weekend just for my girlfriend and I, and it leaves more for us to eat as well! :)

Anyhow, today when I went to the office before class, one of the Chinese English teachers had bought gifts for us, and she gave us some candy which she said was a gift from the school.

On my way to my first class, I was in for a surprise. As soon as I walked in, the students shouted "Merry Christmas!" and the one who had been waiting behind the door showered me with "snow" (shaving cream). They got me pretty good, but they did help me clean myself off and it didn't stain my jacket. In addition, they had all bought me a gift, a really beautiful cake!

My second class also wished me Merry Christmas and brought a gift for me: a smiling yellow dude coin bank, and they gave it to me inside this stocking (so I will have a stocking this Christmas).

All-in-all, I got a lot of loot today:

Anyway, if anyone back home is reading this, Merry Christmas and I'm thinking about and missing and love all of you!

Internet Connectivity

2008-12-22T17:29:00.000+08:00

Well, My internet is finally back on.

For the 3rd consecutive weekend and also for 3rd time in a one week span, my internet was out. It's finally back on now.

It's been fairly frustrating, but this time the phone company actually came out to replace something, so I think (hope) it will finally be good this time.

Jean visited me this weekend and gave me my Christmas present since we won't see each other again till after Christmas. She told me last week that she got me something that she thought I would like, but I had no clue what it could've been.

So when I saw her, she gave me... a football!

I was really surprised and was seriously an awesome gift. I've been meaning to try and find one to toss around and maybe teach some of the students how to play. It's an official collegiate size ball.

Even more interesting though was she had planned to buy me a Tampa Bay Buccaneers football, and she even bookmarked the link, but when she went to go buy it later, it had already been purchased. (It was from an eBay-type website so there was only one available) Even though she wasn't able to get that one, I felt it was really cool of her that she even thought about that.

Guitar Hero! or Merry Christmas from the Chinese Supermarket

2008-12-19T23:19:00.001+08:00

So I had been itching to play Guitar Hero and/or Rock Band since I've been gone. I'm sorry, that game is just too much fun.

Last month I had ordered a Guitar Hero controller (for the Playstation 2) and a USB adapter so I could play a "Guitar Hero" clone game on the computer.

However, it didn't quite work right. The timing for the detection was often off, and sometimes it just wouldn't detect it at all. I didn't know if it was the controller, the adapter, or maybe the computer processor just wasn't good enough to handle it.

In any case, I couldn't satisfyingly play Guitar Hero, so I began to save up for a Playstation 2 (PS2). And this month I ordered one off of Taobao.com (Chinese e-Bay). it cost 1100元 (yuan) or about $160 for the system, 2 controllers, and some games.

So I ordered the system yesterday, Thursday afternoon, and received it today, Friday afternoon. That's the one nice thing about ordering stuff online in China: it's usually cheap for delivery, and as long as its ordered from Shanghai, it's next day.

Anyhow, I fired it up, and the good news was, for games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, the game played as it was supposed to, the timing was right and the controller worked great.

The bad news however was that quite often, like 70 to 80% of the time, the song would stop midway, as it would as if the disc was cracked or scratched or something. I had bought discs for Guitar Hero 1, 2 and 3 and Rock Band, and they all experienced this, which WOULD lead me to believe that something was wrong with the PS2. HOWEVER, ALL of those discs were pirated copies, burned DVDs. So I'm not totally sure if it is the machine or the discs. So today I ordered an original disc for Rock Band (cost about $7). If the original disc plays fine, its because the other discs are copies. If it has the same errors, its the PS2, which I kind of hope its not, because it's always kind of a hassle to exchange stuff purchased over the internet, and you're usually stuck paying the return shipping fees at least one way. In any case, I'll learn what the problem is soon enough.

Anyhow, I have a gym membership here in Huzhou, and I try to go to the gym 3-4 times a week, but I often get lazy and it becomes 2-3 times a week (more often 2). Unlike at home, where I can just walk 100 yards and be at the gym, here I first have to bicycle 5 kilometers (3 miles) to the gym. And as the weather has gotten colder, it has made me less enthusiastic about going.

But, despite getting the PS2 today, I DID go to the gym, not the least of which reasons being if I didn't go, it would've been only once this week, and I do really try to keep it to at least 2 times a week at minimum. After the gym I went to Tesco, the Wal-Mart like store near my gym. Since about the middle of November they've been playing Christmas music throughout the store, which is nice, and they also have signs up saying "Merry Christmas"
The funny thing about it is this: You see where it says "Merry Christmas" and then right below it are some Chinese words? You'd THINK that those Chinese words are the Chinese words for "Merry Christmas". But you'd be wrong. Merry Christmas in Chinese is 圣诞快乐 (Sheng Dan Kuai Le, literally "Christmas, Be Happy") But the words in that sign are 疯狂购物节 (feng kuang gou wu jie), which literally translates to...

"Extremely Popular Shopping Holiday".

Haha, at least the Chinese aren't kidding themselves about it.

This Week, New Stuff + Internet Woes

2008-12-18T16:49:00.000+08:00

So this Monday, I received two things in the mail I'd been waiting for: the package from my parents with the quilt that my Aunt had made for me. I didn't take it with me when I left because I only brought two bags to China and only had so much space, there just wasn't room. Also, when I arrived, early October, it wasn't that cold yet, so it wasn't necessary as now. However, I am REALLY happy to have it now, it makes a big difference. The weather right now isn't so bad, but essentially, every day the high is in the 50s, and the low usualy around 32. And that's only right now. Technically, winter hasn't begun yet! :S

The other package I was awaiting was a new phone that I ordered. The phone I had been using since I arrived was one I had been borrowing from Nellie (another American teacher here). It did the job, but couldn't connect to the internet (on the rare occasion that I might need to check something while not at home), and also occasionally, I'd have to restart the thing or else it'd not send or receive any calls or messages. Also though, Nellie is moving to Shanghai, and so, needed it back.

So after doing a bit of searching on taobao.com (the Chinese version of eBay) I found what was listed as a ciPhone. It essentially looks like an iPhone on the outside, but is certainly not one on the inside, either in terms of hardware or software. But it was cheap, just under $90 (they don't do free phones with contracts so much in China), the touch screen works well, and it does what I need it to do: send and receive calls, messages, and connect to the internet. I am just a bit disappointed in its video playback capabailities however. The only videos it will play well are very low resolution with a low frame rate. Think worse than youtube videos. But oh well, you get what you pay for.

Anyhow, I have been having MUCHO problems with my internet connection recently. When I arrived back in Huzhou from Shanghai this last Sunday evening, I came home to find the internet connection was down. Just like the last weekend, when I went to my friend's house to watch the football game. They got it working again Monday. And then it was fine for Tuesday and Wedne/sday. But then today, Thursday, it was on, the off for about 30 minutes, then on for about an hour, then off again for about 5 minutes, then on again for about 10 minutes, and then finally off again for several hours. In fact, I'm typing this right now in a word processor, waiting for the internet to come back up so I can post it.

I really hope this issue gets resolved soon. One outage on a rare occasion, ok you deal, it happens. But this is becoming a fairly frequent and frustrating occurrence.

Anyhow, as promised, finally, here is a video of my new apartment that I moved into a month ago. Rather here is a link to the video:

Trip to Shanghai

2008-12-18T16:42:00.000+08:00

Last weekend (the weekend of the 12th) was the birthday of one of my American friends here in Huzhou and so we (we 20-something American kids in Huzhou) had planned to go to Shanghai to celebrate his birthday.

So this would be my first time actually visiting Shanghai. Landing at the airport, being picked up, and going directly to Huzhou doesn't count.

The others headed for Shanghai Friday evening, but I instead would meet up with them Saturday. The reason being is that I first headed to Hangzhou to go see Jin Song... my girlfriend.

Yes, that's right, I have a girlfriend here in China. She is my “friend” from Hangzhou that I mentioned in some previous posts.

Anyway, I met up with her first, and then together we met the rest of my friends in Shanghai on Saturday.

Shanghai was pretty cool. The transportation was SOOOO much better than in Hangzhou. Reason being, Hangzhou is a city about the size of Chicago, with only buses and taxis to get around. And although Shanghai is actually bigger than New York City, it is spread out further and has a solid subway system in addition to the taxis and buses.

Not to mention, Shanghai has the world's only actively running maglev train track. It runs about 30km (about 19 miles) and goes from the Shanghai Pudong airport to some subway station whose name I forget. Since it's a maglev (magnetic levitation) the thing can go REALLY fast. The whole trip takes about 7 minutes, so it AVERAGES 160 mph (257 kph). And at its fastest the thing is moving at 270 miles per hour! (420 km/h). By the way, I was told that the trip taks 7 minutes, but that if you were to take conventional means (like a taxi) it could take you 45 minutes to an hour, due to both distance and traffic)

So, I had to ride that! And I took a video of it while I was on. I wasn't sure how the video would turn out, but you can really get a sense of the speed from it. The video is about 7 minuts long and we reached top speed (270 mph) at about 3:15 into the video, and that whole minute (3:00 to 4:00) we were going at least 250 mph in that stretch. I've uploaded it to youtube so you guys can watch it.

Something else about Shanghai. You can be in Huzhou (a Tampa-sized city) for a couple weeks and not accidentally see another foreigner (American, Canadian, or European). In Hangzhou, when walking along the street, you'll see a foreigner about every 8 to 10 minutes or so. In Shanghai, however, you won't go a minute on the street without seeing other westerners. It's a very international city. There's really nothing special about that per se. It's just, I have been living in Huzhou for two and a half months now, and I have gotten used to doing a “Oh look, another foreigner!” when I happen to see one.

Also, since it is more international, they do have some Christmas decorations up around Shanghai, here's some pictures

This last one actually reminds me of an episode of the simpsons. There was an epsiode where Homer makes friends with a guy owns a toy shop and is explaining to Homer some of the weird toys he sells. One of them is a Japanese toy, a robot Santa Clause, who the shop owner says the Japanese refer to as “Annual Gift Man.” Anyways, in Shanghai, they have a display of a giant robotic Santa Clause and it reminded me exactly of the one from the Simpsons.

So anyways, Saturday night, for my friend's birthday, he had been craving Mexican food, so we went to a Mexican restaurant he had heard about in Shanghai. It was a fairly nice place, and judging from the clientele, certainly seemed to cater to foreigners. Also, you know you're eating a restaurant that caters to foreigners when the menu is ENTIRELY in English... as in there is NO Chinese on the menu. (I didn't even realize that at first, until Jin Song mentioned that she didn't know what these foods were because the menu was in English. By the way, her English is actually pretty good, but when you start talking about Mexican dishes that Chinese people have never heard of, let alone eaten, she was pretty much in the dark.)

Anyways, there was a problem when we arrived there: we did not have a reservation and they didn't have any open tables. However, they were very accommodating and offered to seat us in a lobby area. I guess we didn't think about what that meant exactly, but that's exactly what it was. In the waiting area, the lobby, they have some sofas and a coffee table, and they cleared it for the 6 of us to sit and eat there.

It was actually a bit surreal. We “kids” (all 20-somethings) we sitting around the short table eating dinner in the extra space, while all the “grown-ups” went into the dining room to eat. It was actually kind of funny in retrospect, but it essentially was like a “kids” table. Anyhow, it was a Mexican restaurant that catered to foreigners, and as such, it was kind of a “fusion” Mexican restaurant, or what I like to call “yuppy-Mexican” (Kind of like how P.F. Chang's in the states isn't really like Chinese food, they call it “fusion” cuisine, but it's really just yuppy-Chinese food). The food here was kind of expensive relative to other restaurants, and the portions a bit small. Anyhow, Jean (Jin Song's English name) and I ordered some tacos, which actually weren't terrible, but the rest of what we all ordered was a bit disappointing in terms of what you'd call good Mexican food, coupled with the price and portions.

The next day for lunch we ordered food from a different Mexican restaurant in Shanghai, not as high scale. The ingredients themselves did seem to be more authentic, less “yuppy” but we didn't have a menu when we ordered. And so, when we ordered beef tacos, they were a mini tortilla (a taquito) with... just beef. That's it. Just beef. No lettuce, no tomatoes, no onions, no cheese. Just beef. And not like a lot of beef, a sprinkling of beef that was fairly dry. Anyways, it would seem that if you want good Mexican food, and you live in China, you will be SOL.

I actually feel worst for Gino, the guys whose birthday it was, because he was the one who had been anticipating getting some good Mexican food all week in Shanghai (in Huzhou, you couldn't find a tortilla to buy if you wanted to).

One thing I also took care of in Shanghai was mailing out the postcards to some of the kids I know back home. That was actually something I could've done in Huzhou, but I would always forget, or when I'd remember, I didn't have a Chinese friend around to help me explain what I wanted to do at the post office. Anyways, at a post office in Shanghai, Jean helped me get the proper postage I needed to mail them off. One thing that was kind of different, the stamps there are not self-adhesive. You have to walk over to the counter and paste it yourself with glue like this:

Finally, the last thing I did do in Shanghai... For Christmas next week, we Americans are going to get together for a Christmas dinner and everyone will make something and bring it. I deciced to make baked ziti! However, in Huzhou, you can find tomato sauce, yes, but the only Italian noodles they have are spaghetti, and forget about the cheeses. So while in Shanghai I bought some ziti, mozzarella cheese and ricotta cheese in preparation.

All in all I liked Shanghai, certainly the availability of western foods was much more highly accessible, and the subway system made getting around fairly easy. Maybe next time I go, I will buy some tortillas to try and make my own tacos. Also, Pizza was available in many places, and while most cities (even small cities like Huzhou) in China have a McDonald's, Shanghai even had a Burger King. Mmmm, flame-broiled hamburgers....

Return

2008-12-18T16:39:00.000+08:00

I haven't posted anything to my blog in about a month now. It's not that nothing interesting has happened. It's a combination of me being lazy and forgetting to take my camera with me, or buying worthless batteries (for my camera).

So about a month ago I did finally move into my new apartment, and I will take a video tour of it, but that'll be the next post.

About 2 weeks ago Wayne (of the group of 3 Chinese that came over for pizza and poker a while back) invited Ellis and I over to his family's home for dinner and to teach us how to play the Chinese game of Ma Jiang. So we went over there, helped them make baozi (Chinese dumplings) by hand and after dinner, they taught is the “Huzhou” brand of Majiang. By the way, his family have a very nice home, and a 65” TV, but I didn't have my camera with me, so I don't have any pictures.

Apparently in China there are several different flavors of Majiang in different regions (kind of like how each region has its own dialect), each with its own rules, but the version we played was actually somewhat similar to rummy, and was rather fun.

So that weekend I was excited about the SEC Championship game coming up: Florida vs Alabama. Now, for those that don't know, I'm able to watch American TV using a device called Slingbox. It's connected to my father's cable and his internet at his house. Then over the internet I can watch cable TV, actually controlling that cable box. The whole reason I even bought the device was for football. And I mostly pay attention to college football this year because it's on at a time when I can watch. If a college game is on at 6pm Eastern time on a Saturday, that is 7am Sunday morning for me. So any evening games I'm able to watch. However pro games, specifically the Buccaneer games, are usually on a 1pm Sunday, which is 2am Monday morning for me, so I can't watch them.

Anyhow that Saturday morning (Friday evening back home) I woke up, and my internet connection was out. Usually its not that big a deal, and there was nothing I really needed to do at that time. However, a few seconds later it hit me that if the internet was not back up by the next morning, I would miss the game! So after shouting a few profanities in no general direction, I began to think, “What can I do?”

My gym has internet, and so do some local coffeehouses. The problem was, however, that the game was on at 4pm ET, or 5am my time. Those places wouldn't be open.

So, I knew it would be a bit of an imposition, but I had missed so many football games this year, and I get to watch so few, I really wanted to see this game, so I called up Wayne, and asked him what he was up to Sunday morning. He said he was free, and then I explained my predicament to him. He said “Sure you can come over. I had no plans, and my fiancee and my parents are out of town this weekend, so its no problem.” He even said if it would be easier (since the game was on so early, 5am) that if I wanted to I could just stay the night.

Anyways, later that evening, my internet still had not come back on, and so I went over to Wayne's and we played some video games (on the DS), went to bed, and the next morning, watch the Gators win the SEC Championship game. I owe Wayne a huge debt of gratitude for that. Plus, we were able to connect my computer to his 65” TV, so it worked out pretty well.

Winter Clothes & Western Food

2008-11-16T19:08:00.000+08:00

This past weekend, I went to Hangzhou to visit my friend Jin Song again. However, this past week, the weather had turned noticeably colder, and I figured it'd be a good idea to go ahead and get some warm winter clothes for when it gets even worse. Earlier in the week I had bought some long underwear (didn't need it yet, but I want to be prepared) and a hooded sweater (because I had to have SOMEthing to wear while I washed my jacket, which had become a bit dirty).

But now I needed to actually do some serious shopping and get some more clothes. So Jin Song went to the a mall in Hangzhou with me where they were having a sale. By the way, Hangzhou has SOOO many more people. I guess that's going to be typical of a large city though, but I'm actually thankful to be in Huzhou for that reason, I'm not overwhelmed by the sheer number of people.

Anyhow I did find a new pair of jeans (because my 2 pairs that I brought with me are really all I have here in the way of pants) a nice long—sleeve shirt, some quality gloves, and a REALLY nice (at least I think so) down jacket. Here's some picture of the new duds.

I kind of look like a serial killer in this picture, but thats the look I was going for while posing, so there.

I was able to buy the down jacket for $75 USD at a Jack Jones store, which seems like it was a good deal, but I'm not sure how much a jacket like this would cost in the US.

Anyways, that day in Hangzhou I did get to take advantage of one of the benefits of being in a larger, more westernish Chinese city: availability of western food!

For breakfast Jin Song and I went to a hotel that had an “American style” breakfast buffet. It was definitely a heart-clogging, diabetus-inducing meal, but oh was it good! I went up several times, but here you can see my first plate:

I guess that may seem quite ordinary for the rest of you back home (basically a grand slam at Denny's), and don't get me wrong, I'm not ripping on Chinese food, but it was definitely nice (albeit slightly expensive) to get some familiar breakfast foods.

The culinary indulgence didn't end there though. After a long, hard day of shopping, we went to one of the many pizza establishments they have in Hangzhou: Papa John's Pizza. Again, nothing really out of the ordinary for those at home, but it was great for me to enjoy some excellent marinera sauce (and not be surprised by the taste of ketchup) and some tasty chain-restaurant style pizza. I have to say though, I like the pizza at the Papa John's here better than at Papa John's places in the states.

Also, here is a nice shot of West Lake near sunset, just because it's a cool picture.

Thursday Night Poker & Pizza

2008-11-16T18:58:00.000+08:00

So this past Thursday, Ellis offered to have a pizza night (where we'd make pizza) and invite some people over. I had some other Chinese friends from Huzhou whom I had told about my attempt at making pizza, and they mentioned they'd love to be there for my 2nd try. So I figured this was a good chance to ask them over. So we invited Nicole (a woman from Huzhou who I had met online before leaving the US, and so was the only friend I had in Huzhou prior to my arrival) and Wayne & Jayne.

Jayne was an ex-coworker of Nicole's so they were friends. I had met Wayne & Jayne about 2 weeks earlier; Nicole mentioned they were interested in meeting me since they would be moving to the United States next year. I thought they were really cool people, very warm, very interesting, and very smart. (By the way, all of these Chinese people can speak English, so if my Chinese failed, we weren't stuck.)

Anyhow, Ellis, being a self-proclaimed “foodie” and amateur culinary artist, prepared the pizzas, making the dough and sauce from scratch and did an excellent job:

When the guests arrived they noticed the poker chips out on my table and said they were curious to learn. So, while eating homemade pizza, I taught them and we played poker! Everyone had a great time and our Chinese friends offered to teach us Mahjiang the next time we get together. In case you've never heard of Mahjiang, it is a very Chinese game played with tiles and that's about all I know about it as of now, haha, but I guess I'll know more fairly soon.

New Apartment

2008-11-16T18:54:00.000+08:00

So about 3 weeks ago the hot water was not working in my apartment. I called Tian Jia and she sent some workers over to fix it, but the hot water had been in and out pretty much the entire time since I had moved in.

As a temporary solution, until the workers fixed my hot water heater, Tian Jia gave me the key to the unoccupied apartment on my floor, since the hot water heater worked in there.

So I took a shower in that apartment, #607, and it was difficult not to notice how big it was! The living space was about twice the size of my apartment, the kitchen and bedroom were slightly bigger, but also the bathroom and kitchen each had a window to outside, making it feel less dank. So later, I talked to Tian Jia again and suggested that since I kept having hot water problems in my apartment (606) and since it worked in 607, maybe I could just move into 607. She said that sounded like a good idea, but needed to ask her director.

The next day she called me back and said it was cool, but that I'd have to pay for the cleaning lady to come and clean it since they had already paid for mine to be cleaned. With the advantages of this apartment, more space, brighter feel, and not least, hot water, this was no problem. In the meantime, I had been waiting for them to install the cooking hood, curtains in the kitchen and bathroom, and for the cleaning lady.

Last Friday (the 7th) I invited a bunch of the other foreign kids in Huzhou over to my place to play poker. Originally I had thought it was going to be about 6 people, which I can easily manage in my current apartment (606).

But earlier that day I got a text from Nellie; she invited even more local-living foreign people, so we'd have a total of 10. It was cool, the more the merrier I say, but we ended up having to move the game into my new apartment, 607, to accommodate all the guests.

It ended up being a lot of fun: good snacks, good people, and good beer. Ellis took some pictures:

[Poker pictures to be added]

My apartment is actually a bit out of the way for everyone else, so we may not do it at my place next time, but hopefully it won't be too long before we can do it again.

I also remembered how much I like playing poker with a group of friends, so the next day I invited a couple of guys, students at the school, over to teach them Texas Hold'em. They caught on pretty quick, and I learned how to say different poker terms in Chinese: fang qi (fold), xia zhu (bet), xiang den (call), jia (raise), fa pai (deal), xi pai (shuffle).

By the way, I will finally be moving into the new apartment this Sunday and Monday. Once I get all moved in I will post a video of it.

This post is not in chronological order

2008-11-10T13:15:00.000+08:00

The Monday before Halloween, I sent out a text to a bunch of the other foreign kids here if they'd like to have a poker game Friday night.

I had forgotten that it was Halloween, and they shortly told me that they would be going to Shanghai for Halloween, there were parties there. They invited me, and I said I'd love to go with them, but I had to find a costume.

Well the problem of a costume was short lived as the next day I got a call from one of the teachers at the school saying that Friday night the students were having a kind of a show and they had formally invited myself and some of the other Chinese English teachers and the heads of the school. I was told that it was kind of important that I be there, so my plans got changed.

So, Shanghai got scrapped and I went to the students' show which was more of a formal production than I had initially thought. Anyhow, I was warned beforehand that the students would invite me, the new foreign teacher on campus, to perform up on stage. So I decided to keep it simple and just sang "Frere Jacque" (luckily the school leaders had left, so I was just singing in front of a bunch of kids).

Anyhow, not as exciting as Halloween parties in Shanghai would've been, but on the other hand, I seriously had NO idea what I was going to do for a costume!

Also, the other foreign teacher arrived from the states that weekend, so she JUST missed out on having to perform.

So that's something else, as of November 1, I have a neigbor!

The new teacher's name is Ellis. She's from Arizona and just graduated from Wellesley in May. Upon her arrival, I learned that her Chinese was already REALLY good as she's beens studying it for 4 years, and spent a semester last year in Beijing JUST studying the language. I hope I can get that good eventually, but I'm definitely going to have to 努力 (nu li, work hard).

By the way, Ed and mom, here is a picture of my Huzhou bicycle:

Voting Issues

2008-11-10T10:25:00.000+08:00

Ok, I haven't updated my blog in almost 2 weeks. There's still lots of things going on, I just get busy, or sometimes lazy. And when I get lazy, I let more time pass, and the more time passes the less I feel like updating the blog about something that happened. Anyhow, I had quite an adventure trying to vote in the election last week.

The following post is about that process for me, but be warned, its VERY long. Probably too long but I finally finished it (I actually began writing it last Tuesday, so some of the things, like my internet, that were not working properly are now fine) and I don't feel like making it concise, so if you want to read it, it's a lot, and if not, ya ain't gonna hurt ma feelins.

So two weeks ago I filled out this form and faxed it to the Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections that requests that they send me an absentee ballot via email.

However, I didn't hear or receive anything from them, but I had an alternative... or so I thought.

The elections office had mailed an absentee ballot to me in the beginning of October, but was received after I left for China. I figured I could have my brother fill out my choices and then have my father sign it, since he has my power of attorney.

So, I called my brother up Sunday night, the Sunday before the election. I asked him to read me each point on the ballot and I he selected for me.

Then I told my dad about this, and he told me to have Richie (my brother) bring it to my father's house before my brother left for work (they live very close about 2.5 km apart).

I'm not exactly sure about the sequence of events after that, but I know that at some point my father was at the elections office in Tampa, I suppose trying to submit my absentee ballot. They would not accept it, but they said they could send me an absentee ballot via e-mail, but they had to contact me and talk to me first to verify that is what I wanted to do. They called once but either Skype didn't forward it to my cell phone or I didn't hear my cell phone. They called me again and I heard my phone ring and I answered but the person on the other end couldn't hear me. Luckily they called me right back (since I can't make international calls from my cell phone, only from my computer). The woman asked me if I agreed to the absentee e-mail ballot, I did, and she said it would be sent that day.

Later that day I got an e-mail from that woman confirming our conversation and her contact phone number. However I did NOT receive the e-mail absentee ballot. I replied to her e-mail saying I had not received it, but this reply was sent at 2am Florida time, so I could only hope she'd see it first thing in the morning.

Anyways, Tuesday night (Tuesday morning in the states) I went out to dinner with Ellis, the new teacher at the school here and my new neighbor, and the other foreign teachers here in Huzhou, so Ellis could meet the gang. Afterwards she needed a few things and I needed milk so we stopped at the grocery store. I also picked up peanut butter and bread. When we got back she asked for some help setting up her internet. The school gave her a computer, like me, and it worked when she arrived, like mine did, but she was wanting to be able to use her Mac.

By the way, her internet works as it is supposed to. Meaning she doesn't have to install special software on her computer in order to access the internet, and her internet access doesn't cut out at midnight. These were problems that were supposed to have been fixed in my apartment as of this last Friday, but as of Tuesday, they had not been. Anyways, after setting up her internet and getting an actual wireless network up and running, the power in the building went out completely. Not a scheduled power off like they do for the students when the turn the students' power off at 12. The whole building lost power: the foreign teacher dorms, the lights in the hallway, everything.

At that point, I was about to go to bed, but I remembered I had to get the absentee ballot filled out before 7 PM Florida time. I guess because the internet is through a DSL line, it is not on the same power as the rest of the building, because I was still able to access the internet, using my laptop and its battery power. I tried to call the woman, Jacque, at the elections office, but the circuits were busy. I emailed her again. And then I called my dad to let him know my status. He said just to try to keep calling. So I did, and I got repeated circuits busy signals, but finally got through. I waited on the line, as calls were being answered in the order they were received. The receptionist answered and said "Hillsborough Country Supervisor of Elections." I asked to be transferred to Jacque's extension, and then the signal got cut off. So I tried calling back, again and again, and finally after many more "All Circuits are Busy" messages, I got through. I asked to be transferred, and finally, connected with Jacque. I told her I had not received the absentee ballot via email. She asked me to wait, she would check on why that was. After about 5 minutes she came back and told me it would be e-mailed within the next hour, and if I didn't receive it to call her back.

Now, this was at 11:30pm China time. The power had been out for about 80 minutes at this point. My computer battery only had about 20 more minutes of power (it's 3 years old so I only get 90-100 minutes of battery time), and even if the power DID come back on, my internet still turns off at midnight (even though it is supposed to have been fixed already).

Anyhow, at about 11:47pm, 2 minutes before my computer lost power, I did finally receive the e-mail with the absentee ballot. That my computer lost power wasn't so bad. As long as I could get to the internet somewhere, I could get it. And even if I had power and internet after midnight, all I would've been able to do is copy it to my USB flash drive. To print it, fill it out, and fax it I would've had to wait till morning anyway.

At that point, I was tired, and there was nothing else to do anyway, so I went to sleep. I set the alarm on my cell phone for 5:30 am. I woke up at 5:30 but still had no power. So, knowing that I had until 8 am (7 pm EST) to get the stuff taken care of, and knowing that nothing was open this early, I went back to sleep until 6:30. I woke up again at 6:30, still no power, but I could always just use a computer in the school. I would need to go into the school to print and fax anyhow.

So, I made my self a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for breakfast (no cereal, didn't want to open the fridge with the power off), and headed off to our office. I arrived at 7:15am (6:15pm EST, 5745 minutes till the polls would close in Florida). Once there, no one was there and no computer was on. I went to the office next door, which was also an English teachers' office. There was one guy there, and I asked him if I could "shang wang" (上网, use the internet). He said sure and he let me, but he then said "ke shi you yi dian man" 可是有一点慢 (but it is a bit slow). A bit slow was an understatement. After plugging in my USB flash drive to download the PDF file, it took THREE minutes for the thing to recognize it. About that time another teacher showed up in that room: Mr. Xia. (Xia is pronounced kind of like "sha") I've met him several times before and he's a really nice guy and his English is fair. He offered to let me use his laptop as it was a bit faster. So thanks to Mr. Xia (who would prove instrumental in this process) I was able to access my e-mail and download the PDF for the absentee ballot to my USB flash drive. It was now 7:30 am (6:30 pm EST). The next step was to print it. There is not a printer in either of the offices for the English department, and the room they [the English teachers] use to print was not yet open.

At that point, with just under 30 minutes to go before the deadline, I considered giving up; this was going to be nearly impossible to get done in time, and there wasn't much I could do about it. But I couldn't. It was my fault I didn't take care of this stuff sooner, and so I had to try down to the last minute.

With the help of Mr. Xia (Xia, 夏, means summer by the way), we went to other teachers' offices nearby where someone, anyone was in, asking if they had a printer (da3 yin4 ji1). Finally we found one, they booted up the computer and let me print the 6 pages I needed (the document was 7 pages, who needs instructions in Spanish?).

It was now 7:40am. I had 20 minutes in which I had to fill it out and fax it. Since I didn't know of any closer or better place to fax it, I went to the same office I went to last time to fax the absentee ballot form 2 weeks ago, Tian Jia's office. The last time I had sent an international fax, we used the fax machine FROM Tian Jia's office, but they cannot make international calls from that room. So, we had to bring the fax machine into the office of a man across the hall (I can't remember his name. How terrible! Let's call him Mr. H) in order to send it, so we'd probably have to do that again. Tian Jia works in the administrative building which is on campus, but not super close to where I was at that point. So, I sprinted down the hall, ran down the stairs, unlocked my bike and high-tailed it to the admin building. I then ran to Tian Jia's office, arriving at 7:45. I knew she wasn't there yet, but hoped maybe someone was. No such luck.

I then tried to see if I could find ANYone whom I could ask "Nar keyi fa guo ji chuan zhen?" (Where can I send an international fax?) The first person I saw walking up the stairs was Mr. H! Luck was finally turning. After asking him if I could send a fax, he said we could, but Tian Jia was not in yet. In Chinese (Mr. H was EXTREMELY helpful but unfortunately speaks very little English) I told him I knew, but that I had to send this fax Before 8 am. When we got to his office it was 7:46, but unfortunately, no one had yet arrived at the office across the hall, the one with the fax machine.

Luckily, one of Tian Jia's co-workers, a girl named Yuan yuan, arrived 2 minutes later, and then Tian Jia about 30 seconds after that. So, we moved the fax machine over to Mr. H's office and began setting it up. I scanned the instructions page for the phone number, but before we started that, I wanted to make sure we would be dialing correctly, so I called my dad from the fax phone. He picked up, I said, "It works, gotta go!" Then we began faxing the actual absentee ballot at 7:55 am (6:55 pm EST). However, I tried to put all the pages in at once, let the fax feed them through as multiple pages (5 in total, no need to fax the instructions page), but Yuan Yuan and Tian Jia said I had to feed them one at a time. Unfortunately, this meant it had to dial each page as a separate fax, which, figuring dialing, connecting, scanning, and disconnecting, ended up taking about a minute per page. Finally, on the last 2 pages it was 7:59 and I just went ahead and put both pages in the fax, hoping it would feed both pages through as one fax, and figuring if the pages were received after 8, it wouldn't matter anyway. The 2 pages DID feed through as a 2 page fax, and the time on the fax machine said 8:01.

Next I wanted to call the elections office to see if they had received my ballot. Unfortunately I didn't have the number for the elections office handy, so tried calling my father, my brother, my mother, and my sister to see if they could check it on my e-mail. But none of them answered, so I called the only other number that I could remember off the top of my head: Joe Molinaro. He was still at work, but he did answer and was able to check for me.

So next I called the elections office to see if they received my ballot. The receptionist who answered tried to transfer me over to the woman who could check, but she was not in, but the receptionist offered to send me an e-mail later to confirm that they had received it.

A couple hours later I received the e-mail, and they got it! After all that, my vote finally counted!

Getting the Hang of Things

2008-10-30T00:00:00.000+08:00

So this last weekend, after a lack of options on pizza, I decided to try and make my own.

I've done this more than a few times before in the states, and it usually tasted pretty good, so I figured this would be easy. What hubris! I made some pizza, and it looked alright, but it didn't taste too hot.

However, I forgot that back home, I bought the dough pre-made, and the sauce was labelled "pizza sauce" and I knew which cheese to choose.

Here, you can't just go buy "pizza dough," the cheese selection in slim, and so is the tomato sauce. (Remember, the word for "tomato sauce" in Chinese is EXACTLY the same as the word for ketchup.)

I bought some tomato sauce in the imported foods section at the grocery store here in Huzhou, the RT-Mart or "Da Run Fa" (大润发) as the locals call it. The consistency looked pretty good, and it was imported from Italy. Also, it actually tasted alright as a pasta sauce when I cooked some spaghetti. But as a pizza sauce, it was lacking, perhaps not sweet enough. Maybe next time I'll try the Hunt's tomato sauce. Yes, that's right the cheap-o Hunt's tomato sauce. It's not cheap here, but maybe it'll do better service as a pizza sauce, no way to really know until I try.

I mentioned that when I went to Hangzhou the weekend before I had bought some mozzarella cheese. At the store there, there were 2 brands of it. I couldn't tell you what I was thinking when I decided to buy the less expensive one. The Land O'Lakes one. Bad move on my part. Next time I will definitely use the better mozzarella.

Finally, the dough. As I said I had always bought the dough pre-made in the past, but this time I had to make it from scratch. So I bought some flour, yeast, and sunflowerseed oil. I know it's ideal to use olive oil, but seriously, olive oil is REALLY expensive here, like it costs twice as much here as it does in the USA, and they have several other oils that were so much cheaper, and also, since it is my first month here, and I had to spend money on buying supplies for my place and for the gym membership for 9 months (you have to pay the membership all upfront), so I went with the more economical choice. Maybe it's because I didn't use olive oil, maybe not. The fact is, the making of the dough from scratch was a lot more involved than I had thought, and also, it was the first time I had ever done it. I began making the dough at 11, thinking I could be done and eating by 12, 1 at the latest. But mixing the dough, waiting for it to rise, beating the dough down, letting it rise again, that all took about 2 and a half hours before even spreading the dough on the pan.

Anyways, it was a bumpy process because I was looking at the directions online, going into the kitchen to do it, coming back and looking online, and repeat. Next time I will have a better idea of what I am supposed to be doing so it should be a lot smoother and more streamlined. If I do it again after that, even more-so an then maybe I can tweak the recipe for the dough.

After it was all said and done I ate at 3 pm. But it DID actually look pretty good. Have a look:

Anyhow, that was the first time I used the toaster oven, but the 2nd time came the next day, I baked some chicken. That turned out ok, but was a little too salty. That problem was easily enough fixed though; I baked chicken again last night for dinner: far less salty, much better. I will say though, it was UBER convenient back home being able to buy boneless, skinless chicken pieces. The bone part really isn't a big deal, but it's kind of a pain to take the skin off myself.

This week of teaching was quite a bit less awkward, I believe I am starting to feel a bit more comfortable in my position, but things are yet far from routine. I'm sure as time goes on it well keep getting better.

The weather has begun to turn a bit cooler, and it has been wetter the past week as well. My old LTC jacket is still deceptively warm and works quite nicely, but I think I will need to do some shopping soon for some long sleeve shirts, maybe a pullover, and, in preparation for winter, long underwear.

Wednesday Night Episode

2008-10-23T18:16:00.001+08:00

Something fairly interesting went on Wednesday night.

But first, I appreciate everyone's comments, in fact I really enjoy reading everyone's comments, But I also especially like knowing who says what. The way these blogs work, I can either allow anonymous posts, or I can restrict so only registered users can leave comments, and I didn't want to do that because it's such a hassle and then no one would ever leave comments. And I know that at the time you leave your comment you think, "Well it should be pretty obvious to T.J. that this is me," and sometimes it is, but I've got a lot of friends and family apparent, so it's not always obvious. So as a favor to me, when you leave a comment as "anonymous" I'd ask that you put your name somewhere in the post. I love reading everyone's comments, so please leave 'em and leave more! Just let me know who said what. :)

Ok, back to Wednesday night, Oct 22.

Wednesday was Gwen Hoy's birthday. (Gwen is another American teacher in Huzhou, but at a different school.) So she invited everyone to a birthday dinner at 7. It was very nice, and afterward a few of us went to a bar for a couple drinks. It was fairly nice, had a live band, and since we were sitting too close, it was fairly loud. Anyways, afterward, I had to walk about 2 kilometers (that's 1.2 miles) back to my bicycle. Don't worry, I was NOT riding drunk. I had had about one drink at the dinner (dinner lasted from 7-9pm) and then maybe 1.5 drinks at the bar soon after we arrived at 9:30 and we left the bar at 10:45, so the each of them were completely processed by the time I arrived at my bike at 11:15.

So, I cycled my way back to campus, the guard opened the gate for me, and I rode the last kilometer back to my apartment, arriving at 11:45pm.

Now, the thing about my place is, it is in the same buildings as the student dorms, and the students have a curfew off 11pm. At 11pm, they lock the doors. Now, I have come home after 11 twice before tonight. Each of those occasions, I knocked on the door, and there is a woman posted just inside, and she would let me in. She can sleep, but since she is on-the-clock while at the school, she must be ready. (There are about 3 different women who do this and it's a different one each night.)

Now, normally there is a lock there, and they would give the foreign teachers living there a key. But apparently, the lock was not working right, so the door was chained shut from the inside. But it had been this way before, so I didn't worry at first.

So, I knocked lightly, waited a minute with no response. So then I knocked harder. Waited another minute. Then I tried knocking a little harder, still nothing.

About this time I noticed some flashlights walking toward my building along the path to my building. It was a couple of guards who worked there. As they came up, one of them asked me what was the problem. In Chinese of course.

Anyhow, I couldn't quite think how to say "I've knocked but she hasn't answered" but I certainly know enough to say 我住在这里 (Wo zhu zai zhe li, "I live here").

So then he and the other guy realized what was going on and they began just banging away at the door and yelling for the woman to come out. But still nothing. So they kept going at it even louder! It was quite a racquet and they went on for about 5 minutes, banging and yelling. Again, even if someone had the normal key to the building, it would do no good since the doors were chained shut from the inside, so she had to wake up and open it.

One of the guards tried to explain something to me, but I didn't understand, but then he explained it using some different words and I understood him. What he essentially said was that sleeping is not her job, this is her job. I'm not a student, I'm a teacher, so since the student curfew doesn't apply to me, she should be prepared to open the door if I arrive home after 11. He said something along the lines of, "if I just slept during my post, what good would that do?"(because he is a guard).

After several minutes of this loud noise, several students awoke. From the students I heard a lot of "Tian Na!", literally, "Heavens!" and from the guards to the students, a lot of "Bu hao yi si!", meaning "Very sorry." But the guards did ask one of the students to go down and wake the door woman. The student, a girl, did NOT seem too happy about this. But she did go down, woke her up, and she opened the door.

After that the guards left almost immediately and the woman at the door said nothing to me, but I've got a feeling she's not gonna like me too much anymore, haha.

Still kind of the first week of teaching

2008-10-22T07:58:00.000+08:00

Since I had gone to Hangzhou last week on Monday and Tuesday for my physical checkup, I had not begun my Monday and Tuesday classes yet, so I had my first Monday and Tuesday classes this week.

The kids seem interested enough, but, and this may be a cultural thing, they are very reluctant to raise their hands and volunteer in class. And I mean when we're playing something like Hangman, and I said "Raise you hand if you want to guess a letter," I hear people whispering or saying letters, but still no one raises their hand. I have to call on them individually. But that's no big deal, I'll try and find some way to invite their participation, perhaps candy.

So Monday evening I went over to Nellie's (the other American teacher at my school) apartment to pick up an extra toaster oven she had. I now have the tools to bake a pizza! Just have to pick up the ingredients (as I will have to make the dough from scratch). I will give it a shot this weekend.

By the way I don't know if I mentioned it in previous posts, but last week a friend of mine invited me to lunch. So we went, and I knew I was taking an awful risk, but I ordered the pizza there. It was a personal sized pizza, and it didn't look very good, but I took one bite... and spit it back out. Can you believe that for the sauce they used.... KETCHUP! Gross. I couldn't even eat anymore, I ordered something else. Hopefully my pizza ends up alright. Worst case scenario, if I visit Hangzhou again or Shanghai soon, they have a Pizza Hut. If it's anything like the Pizza Hut in Beijing then it's not fantastic pizza, but at least it's edible.

Finally, I got my bicycle last week, but I made a HUGE mistake. It's a 1-speed bike. If I LIVED in downtown, that would be fine, because with all the traffic, other bikes and pedestrians, you're never really going at full-speed for more than a few seconds. However, I live a good 5km (about 3 miles outside of downtown. About 2.5km of that 5 km is in traffic, but the other 2.5 km it is fairly wide open with a few slopes (bridges) and I am limited to first gear. If I do a sprint on the bike I get going fairly quick, but you can't sprint for much longer than 30 seconds at a time. If I had a 5-speed, it would not only make it SO much easier, but I would be able to get home so much faster. Anyhow, I heard it is fairly common for bicycles to get stolen in China. One Chinese friend of mine has lived in Huzhou for 10 years and has had 10 bikes stolen. Nellie has been here just over 2 years and she said she is on her 3rd bike. Anyway, if something happens to this bike, I won't be too upset as it gives me an excuse to get a better bike. :D

Weekend in Hangzhou

2008-10-21T21:57:00.000+08:00

So I'm a bit late in updating, I've just been a bit busy, and when I haven't been busy I've been tired.

So this last weekend I visited Hangzhou, a large city about an hour south of Huzhou. I'd been here before for the medical checkup, but was just there for that and left. This time I was going as a tourist. I heard that West Lake (西湖 Xi Hu) is quite beautiful. So I went to Hangzhou and a friend of mine, Jin Song, met me at the bus station and we went to West Lake. It really was pretty nice, and I took some pictures of course!

There is a street there that my friend told me is considered the historic district, and the buildings do look quite traditional, but I actually forgot what the name of the street is.

But it is a tourist destination, and what tourist hotspot is complete without a Disney store?

I thought this was interesting because it's a McDonald's in an ancient building.

Here is West Lake itself.

They also had little boats where you could go out on the lake. We rented one of those and got some more pictures. Here is that same tower just closer.

And here is a daytime view of the downtown Hangzhou skyline.
These other pictures were in the park area around West Lake, nice imagery is all.

Hangzhou has a LOT more people than Huzhou. Once I rode the bus from downtown Huzhou back to my place and I thought it was crowded. I was sorely mistaken. When I was leaving Hangzhou, my friend and I took a city bus back to the bus station (to go back to Huzhou). It was like sardines in a can, it was so crammed! I don't know how they do it everyday, ugh.

However, with so many more people (Hangzhou is Chicago-sized while Huzhou is about Tampa-sized) comes some other benefits. For one, there are more foreigners. In Huzhou, in a week, granted my first week, I unexpectedly met 3 westerners that I did not know. In Hangzhou, I saw that many in half an hour just walking around.

But the BIGGEST benefit of a larger city is that it is easier to find certain western foods. Now don't get me wrong I'm willing to eat Chinese food for lunch and dinner. Some of it I like, some of it I don't, but for lunch or dinner I'm adventurous enough to give it a shot. But breakfast, I'm sorry, you just want something easy, comfortable, familiar, where you don't have to wonder what it will taste like. Now I was able to find one kind of cereal in Huzhou, some imported German cereal of cornflakes and freeze dried fruits. It tastes fine, but the selection here is limited to that or the box of plain cornflakes and they are expensive, like $8 USD per box.

But in Hangzhou there is a Chinese chain grocery store called "Carrefour." Now, their selection is still lacking compared to any grocery store in the US, but at the very least I could find other things like Frosted Flakes or Cocoa Krispies or similar things, and they weren't expensive! I picked up a box of Frosted Flakes for $2. They also had the German cereal, and it was still expensive. I think these other cereals weren't expensive because they were packaged in Thailand rather than imported from Europe.

But most importantly, I've been looking to make a pizza on my own here, due to Huzhou's lack of pizza. However, Huzhou lacks mozzarella cheese, but not the Carrefour in Hangzhou! These may seem like trivial things back in the states, but I was psyched to finally find some mozz.

Bicycling in Traffic

2008-10-18T07:49:00.000+08:00

So, on Wednesday, my 2nd day with the bicycle, I rode to downtown to go to the gym SO it was my first time riding the bike in traffic.

I was a bit nervous at first because the traffic here is rather chaotic to look at. But after a few days I began getting used to it and actually, I'm not so nervous anymore, and it's kind of like a video game. Still fairly dangerous and you gotta watch out, but the city is set up for pedestrians and bicycles, and the cars are always definitely looking out for bikes and peds, so its really not too bad.

When I first got here I noticed they're constantly using their car horns. At first I thought it was strange but now I realize, it's a necessity. With so many bicycles, mopeds, and pedestrians, its not a "Hey get out of my way jerk!" horn, it's really a "There is a car approaching behind you, be careful" horn. That is unless you DON'T get out of the way, in which case the horn will beep repeatedly and then it DOES mean "Hey, get out of my way jerk!"

First Week of Teaching

2008-10-14T19:16:00.000+08:00

So Monday I didn't start teaching because I had to go to Hangzhou (the capital of this province) to get some medical tests done. Unfortunately, after we had driven about three quarters of the way there, I realized I had forgotten my passport! The others who went with me actually had other business in Hangzhou, so it was a completely wasted trip, but I DID have to go again today.

When I got back Monday though, I did have enough time for my afternoon class: English Corner. It's not so much of a class as just sitting down with the students and having conversation. When I showed up, there were only 8 students, but that's because most of the students didn't know that the class had begun that day. I later discovered that there will typically be more students: anywhere from 30 to 80!

At English corner, among the 8 who were there, their levels varied, but there was some genuine enthusiasm. I also told the students that in my classes they were only to use English, but that since I am also learning Chinese, outside of class they may use either English or Chinese with me.

So that was yesterday. Today, I went BACK to Hangzhou, did NOT forget my passport, and everything went swimmingly. The classes I would've had today were cancelled because we weren't sure I'd be back in time from Hangzhou. I did get some cool new stuff today though: a water dispenser in my apartment, and a bike! I walked to downtown on Sunday, and from the door of my apartment to the heart of downtown Huzhou takes almost exactly 1 hour. Taxis are convenient, but would get too expensive to take them everyday. The bus is a reasonable alternative, but the issue is that to walk from my front door to the bus stop still takes 15 minutes. Sure, running would chop that in half, but then I'd be tired and out of breath, not too mention sweaty and stinky, so a bike is the best solution.

So, Tian Jia went with me this afternoon to go get a bicycle and it plus the lock cost me 398 yuan, about $60. After that she had something else to go to. I was wanting to go to the gym here in town. It has been 2 weeks since I've worked out and I'm not liking it. So, I walked with the bike to downtown, which was not far from the bike shop. I didn't ride because after buying it, I realized that has been 7 years since I've even mounted a bicycle. And the traffic here is pretty crazy, so I figured downtown Huzhou was NOT the place to work out my rusty riding skills. I did visit the gym, it looked pretty nice, they even have a nice bar and sitting area WITH WiFi. One of the workers giving me the tour could speak some English, so I used both English and Chinese with him. Also made a new foreign friend at the gym, a Mexican guy named Arturo who lives in Huzhou apparently.

After the gym it was about 6:00 pm and it started getting dark (that's when it gets dark here, but on the bright side, the sun rises at about quarter to 6 in the morning). So I walked most of the way back to my place, not wanting to ride in traffic just yet. Along the way I saw an old man selling fruits, and the bananas looked good, so I bought a few. 8 bananas for under a buck, not too bad. But more than that I felt good about my Chinese skills, and I should only get better from here.

When I finally got near the entrance of the school, I hopped on the bike. The first 10 meters were a bit wobbly, but after that it was all good. Like riding a bicycle.

I don't have any new pictures today, I always forget to bring my camera with me, but to be honest, my camera is a bit clunky to carry around casually. I want to get a new phone soon, preferably one with a good camera so that I needn't have that concern.

Also, something I forgot to mention in previous posts: Friday night, I was invited to go for massages with Nellie, Gwen, and Gino. We all met up around 9pm, and then Nellie mentioned to us that this other English teacher, Paul, a Canadian, invited is to go to S.O.S., a bar/karaoke place in town, free drinks, free good, etc. Once there we met Paul and his family, and some other Chinese people there with him.

We decided that we could get a massage anytime, so we hoofed it over to S.O.S. We arrived and started drinking and singing. They served a mixed drink of Jack Daniels and Nestea, which, surprisingly, is pretty good! There actually is one Chinese pop song that I know, so I decided to sing it. Some Chinese people told me that I did very well and that they've never heard a foreigner sing a Chinese song before, so they were impressed. As I began drinking more, as has happened in the past with my Spanish, I began speaking a lot of Chinese. It certainly can't be that know anymore while drinking, it's just that I become less conscientious about making mistakes in the language while drinking. Anyways, it ended up being a fun time, and I arrived home around 2.

Video on Blog

2008-10-12T22:36:00.000+08:00

It seems that the video works for some and not for others. It actually does not work for me. For those who cannot see the video, I uploaded it to youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v74fMnPE50Q

Also, if anyone ever leaves a post as anonymous, it'd be cool for me if you could also leave your name or something so I know who its from. Thanks!

First Weekend in China

2008-10-12T17:45:00.000+08:00

Well, I've been here 5 days now. At first it was almost overwhelming so much stuff to see, and take in. But I've been adjusting.

By the way, I posted pictures before of my dormitory, but that was on the day I had arrived, before I moved into it. I have now moved in, and have purchased a few things to make it feel like a home (you know, soap, paper towls, garbage bags, S-video cables to connect the computer to the TV, all the typical stuff). As such I made a short video tour of my place:

Now, the few times I've been downtown I haven't been finding my way around, I've just been following my friends, so I don't really have an idea of what is where. So today I decided to talk a walk from the school to downtown and walk around and get my bearings.

I think I have a better idea how the downtown area is laid out now, although it takes nearly an hour to walk there from my apartment. I think I'll try and get a bike soon to make things more convenient.

I've seen quite a few Tiburons since I've been here, although, they don't say "Tiburon" on the car here, it just says "Hyundai Coupe"

I met Tian Jia today in the downtown area. She needed some passport-type pictures of me for some paperwork and we went to get those. Afterward, it was about 2:30 and I hadn't eaten lunch so we went to KFC. It was pretty much the same greasy stuff we've got at home. By the way, apparently, Chinese people don't verbally differentiate between "drumstick" and "thigh." You say "da tui" which means "big leg" but BOTH the thigh and drumstick are called this same thing, so it's hard to tell them I want just a thigh.

After that I went to get some fruit from one of the supermarkets. I picked up some seedless grapes. I had some grapes the day before, but they were seeded. Trying to eat seeded grapes is a lot like trying to eat small meat chunks that have tiny bones in them: you have to try and separate the soft parts from the hard parts in your mouth, then spit out the hard parts. Seedless grapes are a bit more expensive here, but SOOOO much easier!

While at the supermarket, I also scouted out the meat area to try and find the stuff I like to cook. You can't even find chicken thighs not part of a whole or half chicken. I also noticed some other interesting bits, and I took pictures:

Pig Heart

Pig Intestines

Pig Tongue

Pig Kidney

Pig Hoof

Finally, after I left the supermarket, I was just meandering around the downtown area for a bit, getting familiar with the area when I saw the AWESOMEST mannequin ever:

Also, I didn't think to take a picture, but they had an "official Apple retailer" in Huzhou. I went inside, and the MacBook they had on display was running Windows XP, haha.