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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My paradise

- My apartment -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nowism and the Evil Eye with the Long Fingernail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tardy Beijing Pics

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

Yup, that's me and the Great Wall

Mutianyu

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

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

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

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

Lovely sign on the Great Wall

Pagoda at the Summer Palace in Beijing

Summer Palace on a novel blue sky day.

Mooncakes and Lucky Draw

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So funny - I love China

What's that in the back of your throat?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kaishi Shanke (Class Begins!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tiny FYI

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

It'd only happen to Kristen....

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

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

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

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

Just a week?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love China!

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

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

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