This sums up so much

Here is a picture of Xiyangyang and HaiTaiLang (Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf) at Zhongshan Park last week.  Allie and I wanted to take a picture with them but it would have cost us a whopping 10 kuai to snap a photo with my favorite Chinese cartoon characters.

Then we turned around and saw them on a smoke break and being served strawberry ice cream by some little fellow extortionist.

My First Communist Holiday

Taken from The China Daily, "Model workers' receive honors in Beijing"

This weekend is the Workers' Day Holiday and we have Monday off from school.  Many other businesses and schools are closed between 4-5 days and I feel pretty ripped off.  This is not celebrating my labor, Communist Party.

I have also changed my weekend job schedule and now teach on Saturday mornings and afternoons, leaving my Sundays free (yippee!).  Otherwise, I've been pretty busy this week listening to my students' midterm exams, meeting with real(?) Canadians, and pretending I am in America by sitting at Starbucks.  Nothing terribly interesting, but I am also really tired right now... yawn.  Goodnight, residents of the free world.

The good and the bad

Follow-up to the Day of Mourning

As usual, the Chinese government always manages to make even the most solemn of days and turn it into a propaganda campaign.

Domestic media coverage has been tightly controlled, with reporters instructed to focus on the heroism of rescue workers and to avoid stories about the thousands of Buddhist monks who dug through debris or handed out food from the trunks of cars. 

(The New York Times' article can be found HERE.)

I'm not shocked that they did this, but I am still embarrassed and saddened that this happens in a country that I am living in and helping to educate.

In an interview on Wednesday, Woeser, an influential Tibetan blogger who is in frequent contact with people in the earthquake zone, said several monks told her that they had been ordered to leave Jiegu in recent days, although such accounts could not be immediately confirmed. 

Whenever the Tea Party "activists" or any other similar protest group in America claims to be suppressed by the government, they should be reminded that in other corners of the world there are more drastic measures taken to suppress any unsavory opinions and viewpoints.  Being in China (both times) has made me really proud to call myself an American and proud to be living in a country of freedoms.

OMG RU 4 REAL?!?! NOWAI

I taught my students slang this week using dialogues that Matt and I co-wrote this weekend.  Here are the dialogues that they had to read:

(calling on the cell phone)
A: What’s up?
B: Not much, you?
A: Nothing really, just hanging out with my friends.
B: Oh that’s cool.
A: Hey wanna meet up after class?
B: No, I can’t. I’m swamped with homework.
A: Bummer. I want to go to the new coffee shop. Catch you later!/ See ya!
B: Alright, later!

(at school after a test)
A: How was the test?
B: Oh my gosh, I think I bombed the writing section.
A: Seriously? You’ve been studying your butt off!
B: Yeah, I totally froze and forgot everything.
A: That sucks.

(after seeing a movie)
A: That movie was awesome!
B: Yeah it was pretty tight. / Yeah, it was really legit.
A: What did you think of the actor?
B: I thought he was really hot.
A: Truth, but the dialogue was pretty lame.

After hearing 55+ students repeat "that sucks!" and "seriously?" I realized that I might be teaching them to sound like valley girls and bros.  I nevertheless found this pretty funny and I think that they had fun learning more informal words rather than stuff from a formal textbook.

I also taught them about IM (they knew we didn't use QQ but thought we used MSN... weird, right?), AIM and Gchat.  I also listed out some nice little words for them to use when IMing me or their friends, such as nm, brb, h/o, ttyl, gtg, thnx, and jk.  Many of the ones that they use online are numbers.  For example, they type 886 because the numbers "ba ba liu" sound like "bye bye le."

What was even better was when I drew an upward arrow to explain the levels of laughter online.  I listed the ones I use most frequently: hehe, haha, HAHA, lol, lmao, and lmfao.  They have all sorts of weird ones here, including "嘻嘻“ (sounds like 'shee shee') which is somewhere between haha and HAHA to them.

One of my students was IMing me tonight and actually typed "ttyl" to me and I was so excited that he (a) remembered what I taught her on Tuesday and (b) put it to good use.  Success!  Being a teacher means finding fulfillment in the little things like this.

Tomorrow I will go see the cherry blossoms downtown with my friend Allie.  Hopefully I'll also get to meet up with Anna, a Polish girl I have met at my Chinese school, and go out.  I love warm spring weekends. 

I promised myself I wouldn't, but I'm afraid I've fallen in love with a little dog here in China.  She lives on my campus and is owned by a grounds keeper woman who has a little hut on the school grounds.  Jenna and I met her as a puppy last term when she was just a little thing with a gimp leg and now she has grown into a full grown 15-lb dog with a gimp leg.

I really love animals and it's always such a comfort to me to play with one.  I've refused to give her an English name in my head but have all sorts of nicknames for her (1st Violation).  She waits for me when I'm walking past her home and runs to greet me to quickly roll over so I can give her a belly rub.  If I try to walk away, she gets up on her hind legs and asks me to carry her (2nd Violation).

I've been trying to resist, but I actually looked up how to bring a dog back to America last night (3rd Violation).  I know that I couldn't do it because firstly, she kind of has an owner and secondly, my mom would throw both of us out.

Chinese people have a very different view of keeping a pet than we do in the West.  Dog's aren't revered as "man's best friend" and most people are actually kind of scared of dogs, even the tiniest "punt" ones.  The woman that owns this dog has another huge German Shepherd who is actually kept in a cage all day and it breaks my heart.  I also think I might be the only one to love on this little dog!

Well, I walked to class this morning to play with her (4th Violation) and found her tied to a fence behind the house with a 6 foot long chain.  She just looked so sad that I want to buy a wire cutter and hide her in my apartment until I go back to America.  This really breaks my heart and I don't know if i I can talk to her owner!  So this is my latest dilemma and it's really been bothering me all day.  I miss my dog at home, Albert, and can't wait until I can actually get a dog of my own.

TIC = This is China

Today when I was walking back from the gym I saw a man on the street just strolling along with two dead turtles hanging on a string.  Their necks were all stretched out and swinging as he casually walked down the road.  I felt slightly better when I realized that the Chinese people were also staring at him and another man even jumped out of the way and said something like "Oh crap!"

My big China moment for the week though has to do with the fact that I thought I had some sort of respiratory infection.  I started coughing up some nasty stuff on Thursday and had a pretty terrible throat-ache and uncomfortable feeling in my nasal passages.  I woke up on Friday feeling no better and complained about it to my coworkers and even my Chinese teacher, who all said they were experiencing the same thing and we all blamed it on the change in weather, since this week it has gone from below freezing to about 50 during the day. 

Then today I woke up and I thought I was in Beijing. 

The sky was pretty much orange and I could barely see the road that is about 200 yards in front of my building.  I went outside and it was super windy and at points I had to walk backward against the wind because there was too much dust in my face to actually see where I was going.  I should have worn my face mask.

So there you go, my second sand storm in China and my first in Shandong.  Today there was a sand storm in Beijing and apparently it has also reached down here in Qingdao and even as far as Shanghai.  Apparently this is the first sandstorm in Shandong in a long time and possibly ever. 

And if you're not grossed out enough by China, apparently one tenth of all cooking oil in China is actually drainage oil.  Why am I here again? 

On the plus side, this allows expats to start our own FML site: http://www.fmychinalife.com/

I think the sky just broke

I hear fireworks almost every day and sometimes even at night (for some reason a lot of them are set off during the day).  Chinese people light fireworks for the New Year, for birthdays, and especially for weddings.  I'm convinced they also just like setting off very large fireworks, too.

I can't blame them.  Fireworks are pretty awesome.  But these aren't the fireworks we buy for the 4th of July over here.  These are the huge boxes that you buy semi-legally to set off in large fields behind a house crossing your fingers that the cops won't show up and write you a ticket.

One of my first nights here, the chefs that work in the school cafeteria set off one of these fireworks boxes right outside my building, scared the shit out of me and a bunch of girls outside, and set off a car alarm.

Yesterday I was riding the bus back to campus and there were several fireworks boxes lined up in a parking lot outside of a restaurant, about 10 feet from a main road with many people standing in the parking lot just watching.  I should also mention that I was the only one craning my neck out the bus to watch these fireworks and the rest of the Chinese people on the bus just continued with their own things, despite the explosions overhead.

No wonder things like the CCTV Tower burned down because of illegal fireworks.  Granted, they also set off fireworks inside a building that didn't have sprinklers.  TIC, man.

On another note, I have a student named Fantasy.  A male student named Fantasy.  He kind of looks like Edward Scissorhands and even wore a silver metallic blazer to class. 

It's just too perfect.

Beware the H1N1

This video plays in every single airport in China as well as on the buses, subways, and flights.  It's all really an American conspiracy.  



On an unrelated note, being in America is pretty awesome and I have been hacking down on the food list

To eat:

1. Cupcake (CHECK! 2/5: Sprinkles pumpkin cupcake)
2. Milkshake (CHECK! 2/6: Palo Alto Creamery peanut butter oreo shake)
3. Grilled cheese (CHECK! 2/4: Max's Diner ultimate grilled cheese)
4. Cheese in general (ongoing...)
5. Bread (ongoing...)
6. Ben & Jerry's (CHECK! 2/4: Ben & Jerry's flipped out brownie)

This has ultimately left me with an upset stomach, probably because I need my daily dose of MSG served up with a vat of peanut oil and followed up with floaties in water.  I could really go for some 红烧茄子 or 拔丝地瓜just about now...

Chinese Internet: FTW or FAIL?

I tried to google "freedom toast" this morning and was stopped by the Great Firewall.  Apparently they have no tolerance for quasi-politically correct breakfast foods.  I decided that this is a good time to address the limitations of my internet connection in China.

Proxy servers

There are many proxy servers that work here, the main one being HotSpot Shield.  Unfortunately this does not work for Macs and will probably be the only moment that I wish I had a PC.  It's only a fleeting thought though and I immediately go back to being a Mac fanatic.

I use a proxy server and a web-based proxy server to access Blogger and Facebook, although I cannot post anything or interact with Facebook in any way.  It's pretty annoying, but has forced me to email people a lot more often than just doing the random 1-3 sentence post on walls.  This is a big plus, I guess, because email is much more thoughtful and personal than a Facebook message.

Blocked Sites

So how do I know if something is being blocked from me because of the Firewall?  Basically, when I try to load a website, my browser gives me the error message that says "Page has taken too long to load" even though it had only taken one or two seconds to get to that page.  Alternately, the website just never fully loads and the browser stays in the thinking position for a while.

Google images is interesting because sometimes the thumbnails show up, and other times they don't.  Then there's also the possibility of when you click on a thumbnail that you want to see, you'll get the browser error message.  This used to happen to Flickr two years ago, but that issue seems to have been resolved. 

The list of blocked sites

- Facebook
- Youtube
- Blogger (anything .blogspot.com)
- Google's Picasa
- Google image search
- sometimes Gmail goes out for a few hours, but is usually restored within the day.  This has only happened once this time.
- and growing...

China vs America

I am sick of being asked the question “Do you like America or China more?”

I swear, every other Chinese person I meet that is not a student or teacher asks me this. I’ve been asked by bus drivers, fruit stand sellers, jian bing guo zi makers, cab drivers… the list goes on. Call it a cultural difference, but it’s just annoying right now. I don’t think anyone in America would ever ask a foreigner a question like this.

Which leads me to think – why am I getting defensive in the first place? Granted, I do like China, but more in a sarcastic ‘oh-hey-I-got-dust-in-my-face-and-I’m-kind-of-sick-but-I-still-think-this-is-fun’ kind of way. I’ve discussed this with my fellow Sinophiles and we actually have concluded that none of us actually likes China. We’re not quite sure why we’re back here either. It’s not like you can actually be excited about squatty potties, getting shoved onto buses, and children wearing assless pants. Anyone saying that they actually love China is either completely out of their minds or has just convinced themselves that they love China so that they don’t run around screaming in the streets about how crazy their lives are.

Also, when you gather a bunch of China kids in a room the first thing we talk about is how sick we got. I mean, besides the ‘oh hey where were you? Did you like it’ sorts of questions. This always devolves into pretty horrific stories about how sick we got in China. For me, I tell my Shanxi province 4- day bus trip sickness story… oh man, it was bad. Ethan and Andrew were worse off, actually.

Anywho…

I began to appreciate America a lot more when I was here in 2007 and have no problem saying I am an American now. Nevertheless, I always tell the Chinese people that I like both countries so that I don’t get (a) ripped off, (b) dropped on the side of the road, or (c) lectured in rapid-fire Chinese.

But YES I do like America more. The country where I can drink water without boiling it (debatable in DC, actually), find toilet paper in the stalls, and have uncensored internet. End of story. Stop asking me, Chinese people.

PS: Sorry about the lack of posting. My proxy and internet (and gmail!) was on the fritz this last week. Happy belated Thanksgiving!