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.
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.
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.
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