China Fatigue

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

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

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

Merry Christmas Everyone

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

A Perfect Sunday

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

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

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

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

But......


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Below are random elements from the last week:



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Garden next to the Bank of China Building

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

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

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

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

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

Empty the brain of all things random

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All that for only one cup of coffee?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Were you mugged or was your wallet stolen?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toasters, Regulations and Cooking a Gorilla

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paper Hats, Pearls and Parties

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

Awwww, these witches don't look scary at all

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yup...It's my ultimate dream city

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Say "Qiezi"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you like "Ancient" Music?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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