Sino-psis

not so good at keeping up with this blog of sorts, but i'm trying

speaking of exams, that's what's going on this week here. giving monthly tests to the kiddies, makin'm suffer. so i've been grading and pondering and the like. sboring.

i've sorta kinda got a site set up to share photos with yall, don't know quite yet how to post them directly to this site, if i can at all. so go to www.flickr.com/photos/elliotbyrne/

yeah, you know it

there aren't so many up yet, but i'll.... get there. i plan to take droves of pictures in gansu, do expect a new picture folder to appear in a coupla weeks. be expectant yall.

sleepybyes

e

dear mo mo mo

so, today, i finally bit the bullet and chipped a tooth doing it. i bartered for a warm jacket to take to gansu province with me at xiangyang clothing and fashion market. i had no idea what i was doing, didn't take a chinese person with me, and just winged it. not the best way to go about it, i've found. buddy started out the bidding at 850. ridiculous i tell you. 100 usd about. now, again, not understanding the process, i hemmed and hawed and took the calculator he offered me to type in that i was willing to go down to 200. my first mistake. i find out later that scott got the same jacket for 100 quai. anyhoo, i eventually got the jacket for 300, about 37 bucks, for a pretty nice goretek jacket with fleece lining. i was satisfied when i got it, until i found out that i paid three times too much. ah well. next time i'll be better prepared i tell you.

i really don't like bartering, it doesn't mesh with my brain pattern. anything to do with money usually jars my sensibilities, but when it comes to pitting will against will over something as meaningless as currency, i balk and bow my head into the wind. i'm the kind of person when you borrow money from me, i forget and never remind you, cuz i really don't care that much. similarly, if i borrow money from you, you'd best remember, cuz if i don't pay you back immediately, i'll forget. i try not to borrow if i can help it. i guess i'm getting better at it, but i still don't give a flying fig.

ate turkish food and had a gelato for dessert. livin up the chinese life.

now time to prepare for tomorrow, school begins yet again. monthly test week, gotta see if those kids have been paying attention or have just been cutting ping pang balls in half and drawing circles on them. soon, so soon, the sky will open and envelop my eyes. i'm absolutely sure i won't be able to describe to you the beauty i expect from the tibetan plateau, but i'll take pictures and post them. i kinda wanna hug a yak too. just wrap my arms around it and grab two hunkfuls of shag, burying my face in the musty hide. hehehehe. meh, they prolly get it all the time. yak'll see me coming, be like, "dammit george, another one of those giggly foreigners has that i-wanna-hug-a-yak look on its face again..... not it!" george: "aw man, i did it last time. not fair!" aw man: "suck it up george. hey didn't you roll in that pile of feces earlier today?" george: "oh yeah! score one for the yaks!" zero cool: "yak yak yak, get a job!" moonbeast: "moonbeast hungry" elliot: "oh my god, it's a moonb~"

just went on a pleasant trip on a breezy afternoon through the local neighborhood. i had spent most of today doing nothing, cleaning around the pad, eating random things, taking cat naps and listening to shuffled music. then i went for a walk with a friend. went out the gate, straight on til dusk. first stop was a nearby cd dvd peddler, got some neptunes and a cd of krishna chants that i'm listening to currently. pocketed those puppies and kept on. crossed a long bridge called "long bridge" where there was no sidewalk to speak of except for a bit in the middle so you can stop and look at the sludge flowing beneath. made me want to hop a barge and get outta town, but kept walking. we got to a very poor industrial part of town where walls were made of newspaper and every other building looked to be used primarily for garbage storage. graffiti on every wall with phone numbers for who knows what. everything and everyone looked like they were just waiting around to be displaced, moved, torn down or reconstructed. a pensive silence to the place that was drowned out by the busy flow of traffic cramming its way through the area.
i've found that i haven't yet gotten used to the noise in this city, it's pervasive and constant. every conversation that jena and i had on our walk would have long pauses as we waited for beeping trucks to go by or yelling construction workers to quit yelling. jena however has been here a year, so she says she is used to the noise. i already have pretty bad hearing, and in a land where i need all of my faculties to be in tip top condition so i can communicate effectively, it doesn't help one bit that i only catch fragments of a sentence.
so we walked back across the bridge, bikes and trucks dodging and beeping at us as we walked, and then went a little further down the crossroad. every road here is littered with little baozi shops, cel phone/drink shops, and fruit sellers. eventually we came to one fruit shop that caught our attention and the lady selling saw us eyeing one in particular and shoved it as us to eat. "haochi haochi" she said and unwrapped and gave it to jena. indeed, it did taste good. so we bought ten quai worth. the fruit is called a yezi and i'm still not sure what it is. hold on, let me see if my dictionary has it. hmm, well, the only yezi i can find means leaf. so maybe she was referring to the little natural packaging the small orange apple tasting fruit came in, kind of a popcorn shell. unwrap and pop. tasted right good. i have some more in the fridge for lata
so then we kept walking, the sun having set while on the bridge and now the moon out in (almost) full swing. it being the time around zhongqiujie, mid autumn moon festival, the yuebing (moon cakes) are out and about and the moon looks especially large and nice. we walked around and around, cutting through back alleys and seeing small children doing cute things. we realized that the road we had been on kind of slanted more to the south than we had wished, and so found ourselved way far away from school.
ok, so, on the way back, we must have passed a good ten "hair salons" with at least five girls sitting in there waiting for, something. what a neighborhood to live in. does this one neighborhood really need All of these salons? i hope not. and it doesn't make me want to get my hair cut any time soon. too many vocab words i haven't learned yet
ok, time for dinner, i'll finish talking about the walk at a later time. it's just really nice to get out there and experience instead of just read about a culture. i'm looking forward to next weekend, going to gansu province for a week. that'll be a trip.

went thursday night for a swim. was thoroughly enjoyable since i hadn't been swimming in over a month. however, the circumstances in which i was able to swim were a bit on the odd side, but, you can say that for most things done in china i guess. first off, jena scott and i took the bus there and went to gate 5 of shanghai stadium, where scott was told would be the youyongguan (swimmin' hole). but, alas, no luck. so we walked back to other side, one stop earlier on the bus, and finally found the place amid a mishmash of restaurants, gyms, shops, and random places that were a part of the stadium grounds.

so, we went in and had to go back outside to buy a ticket to get in, went back in, had to backtrack and get a "medical exam" which was a lady with a stethoscope stamping something and giving these cards to us, okaying us to go swimming. i guess we looked like healthy foreigners, no need to probe and deeper than that. went through the requisite locker room nekkidness to the pool and discovered that we were about the only ones without swimming caps. ah well, we like to stick out. also, everyone wears speedoes. like europe, and everywhere else but the US. in that case we don't like to stick out.

the swimming area was chaos. there were two lanes in the middle, dividing the pool into the wading shallow area and the frenzied deep area. signs hanging above the deep end alluded to three main channels, one a slow lane, one a fast lane, and one that was for unilateralism only. who knows what that meant, cuz just like in the streets of shanghai, people were cutting others off, swimming straight at another person and swerving at the last possible moment, and, if they had had horns, honking at one another. i certainly got kicked a couple of times, but i gave as good as i got. the pool was lengthy enough that i felt like i was getting some exercise at least. i stuck to the breast stroke mostly, cuz that way, half of the time i'm above water seeing what obstacles are in my path. the mark of a good driver, looking ahead on the road.

the shallow side was less stressful, so we did a little water yoga and then took off. hungry hungry water hippos as we were, we charged around outside until we decided on a section of town to eat in, went there, and picked a place that just happened to smell faintly of urine. just our luck. but it was thai and the food was good, and they had some thai milk iced tea that demanded we get seconds. i had thai food again last night. i do need to go down to that country and thank the chef. smack my lips a couple of times in his/her presence.

heh, i was someone's saviour last night. coming back from the kangaroo bar, one of the member's of my cab needed to stop quickly, had a lil bit too much to drink. it was easy to tell the cabbie to pull over, my friend's a little sick, yeah, right here, stop, thanks.... but to those in the back, it seemed like magic that i could get that accomplished only seconds after alina had clapped her hand on her mouth. i think it was more due to the driver's experience (he had plastic bags in his glove compartment) but i got thanked multiple times on the way back home for that one. nali nali.

it is kinda interesting how all the foreigners congregate at certain bars without really knowing how they all got there. they can't have all planned it, but they all show up at the same place. magnetic fields of language groups. maybe, would be impossible to prove, but maybe, when a languages come in contact they affect the other slightly, so, when a chinese speaker hears an american, his chinese alters imperceptibly, and that dominoes to whoever he speaks to, she speaks to, etc. so a wave of language rolls outward, bunches of them, all rippling into one another, causing splashes that allow the foreigners to triangulate one another's positions. like bats, using waiyu radar to ping off other people until they get so close they can use their sense of smell from there on out. all done subconsciously thought and with amazing speed. a phenomenon in shanghai.

speaking of going out, yo tengo hambre, onaka ga suita, wo e si le, ahm hongry.

chow

Yesterday I went for my first time to a "nearby" school affiliated with shanghai high, nicknamed shang bao. every tuesday for this semester i'll be going there and talking to a class of 31 students for eighty straight minutes. yesterday wasn't so bad because all i had them do the whole time was ask me questions. i got the requisite do you have a wife and what's your phone number, but i was also asked, why is it that when my dad who went to the states and speaks good english talked to someone on the street, they claimed to not understand what he was saying. that was a tough one to relate back to kids whose english skills are not quite up to par, but fun nonetheless. the time flew by and i was very energized, but i've had a quasi cold lately and my throat already hurt, so after talking for an extended period of time (this was after three other classes yesterday) i needed a salad bar. found one at a restaurant called Brasil, good salad bar. a meaty place, waiters walking around with shishkebob skewers of all types of meat,, brasiliano style, but for such a place, the veggie fare was excellent.

oh, before i forget, tom... and other snl officionadoes... two weeks ago on my first day of class in the sixth grade, was playing a name game where first letter of name equals first letter of animal, mike the monkey etc. came upon vali, and all i could think of was vampire bat, vulture, no cute animals at all. and then something popped in my head and i couldn't get it out, so i used it. vali the vondrook. i even drew it on the board, so in case you were interested, a vondrook is a unicorn mixed with a bunny rabbit. horse looking body, fluffy tail, unicorn horn and big floppy ears. and crazy eyes, wild wild eyes. with pretty eyelashes. and son of a vondrook if the whole class didn't just love it. cept vali. but that's vali for you.

i'm still ekeing over my spelling of officionadoes, just doesn't look right to me, but i'm too lazy to spell check. and i have class in an hour. gotta teach vali et al how to read.

oh yeah, so, shang bao. that place is like a half hour drive away and we get picked up here, driven there, and then cab our way back to here. on normal days we get out of the office at 410, but on shangbao days, jeanne and i will make it back here by five. terrible i tell you. my sixth graders at shangbao are cute though, and actually respectful. they stand up when they speak and listen when not speaking. heh, and right before class, as i was about to start, some music started playing and they all sat there with their eyes closed rubbing their faces. eye exercises, mandatory. i just sat and stared. funny stuff. i think i'll bring a camera next time and surreptitiously document that activity. you'd think at least one of them would be peeking at the waiguoren (foreigner) standing in front of them, but no, all eyes were shut and hands rubbing in circular motions. kerclick!

man those beets in the salad bar were gooooood. it's mighty hard to get a good salad bar in this one horse town. and by one horse i mean the horse that was on the plate at the japanese restaurant i went to a couple nights back. that horse. hard to get good sushi in this one panda town.

okay, i should prepare.

e

ok, so i wussed out and succumbed to peer pressure and went out last night after the banquet. here's what went down. firstly, some friends and i went to scott's new apartment off campus, in a pretty nice part of town, and tried to find his landlady (compound noun) so he could get a key to the outer door of his complex. couldn't find her, so drank a little at his house and left the place. on the way out we ran into a lady who lived there and, upon talking to her, figured out that she was his neighbor, there was a place across the street that copied keys, and she would let him borrow her key tonight so that he could get back in later. a very eventful conversation where i understood most of it and even offered some information up as well. quite fun.

then we went a very short distance by cab, since lauren recently had foot surgery and is only now back in two shoes instead of one shoe and a boot, and came to the cotton club. pricey drinks that i hear tell usually have a lot of alkie in them, but this time they were very weak, disappointing. and the whiskey sour i bought came in a martini glass, that was odd. no, wait, strike that (but don't reverse it) jena bought me that drink and now i forget why... oh, right, something about an insult she threw my way earlier in the night and she owed me a drink for it. woteva. fun times at cotton club. there was a live band with two waiguoren, one long haired hippy on guitar and another on drums, and three chinese on sax, bass and trumpet. they were aight, but i definitely left mid-set.

and went to another bar, called time spinners i think. this one had a live band as well, three guys, all chinese, where the singer looked like that guy from that band... you know, that guy with thick rimmed glasses, young looking, they sing that song where the chorus seems to have the word asswipe in it and the music video has sumo wrestlers or something in it. big cheeeeese, bluh bluh bluh ass wipe. that guy. he was at the bar last night, but he was skillfully madeup to look chinese. and he was singing weird american soft rock oldies in a strained voice that wasn't quite pulling off the lyrics. you could tell which songs he was trying to sing, but the only reason you were gleaning any information from it was through using the viruses in your head to give you the subtitles as the music garbled on. a night for viruses.

i'm making amazing progress, i honestly feel i could get back to the xue from about anywhere in the city. i finally have down pat the major roads you have to know to direct someone here. i skillfully told the cabbie last night to go to one road and then i'd give him more directions from there, don't worry buddy. gah, you'd think i'd been taking chinese for three years now i was so good. scarlet called me just the other day, she's up in beijing having similar fantastical fiascoes and foibles, and it felt really good talking to her and getting the sense that i wasn't alone here. i don't feel lonely that much and there are plenty of new friends to draw off of here, but hearing her voice and knowing it was only a two hour flight away, that made me feel a lot more comfortable. i miss my gainesville peeps.

honestly, though, it's going to be weird whenever i decide to leave shanghai as a home and live elsewhere. this city is immense and it grows on you like that technological viney veiny organo-metal mass that streams out of tetsuo and consumes everything and everyone around him and i'm going to have to hop on a souped up red motorcycle and jet if i ever think i'm going to escape this place. no place in the states will ever be as fluid or as dynamic as shanghai. city of 20 million, bunch of chinese people and buildings, i thought i knew what kind of place i was going to, but i don't think i prepared myself at all. think of the area of jacksonville, but make everything taller, brighter, dirtier, and more chinese. and then throw in some dumplings. that's shanghai.

did i honestly just try to give a mental picture of shanghai using jax as a template? i don't know about me sometimes. just come and see it, that's the only way, then you'll understand. i'm probably going to get a futon up in here, so there'll be a place to sleep for anyone willing to throw away a couple thou on flight, food, and fun. well, i'll pay for the food and fun, so you, whoever you are, just have to deal with the easy matter of airline prices and entry into a country that Capitalises on every foreigner that walks through their doors.

that's all

goodnight to any of you that are still making their own saturday night a good one. i'm going to take a shower and a nap and then go find some food that'll most likely hit the spot.

e

tonight, went to a teachers' day banquet where all of the waiguoren and all of the chinese teachers all got together in a huge set of rooms at a restaurant nearby and ate platefuls of fish meat veggies tofu whatever you can think of and drank plenty of beer and pepsi and 7up. the atmosphere was grande and the raffle doled out many prizes to the lucky few. everyone present got two bottles of shampoo (yippee) and all of the karaoke singing and impromptu italian arias and swing dancing that they could take/stomach. banquet conversation is always the best, ranging from "exactly when does one eat the chicken's head?" to "oh, i look like i'm only 42? i'll drink to that".

i guess the main course of events tonight will lead me to a live band bar called the cotton club and various types and sorts of debaucherous activities, but as of now, 8 pm, i am quite satisfied with the way things have gone tonight. i've been a little tired, since i got out of school and came back, ran a couple of miles, and then took a shower immediately followed by an unexpected nap.... if you plan a nap and set the alarm, those usually are refreshing for me.... but if a nap just happens upon me... i'm just kinda zonked at the moment. currently debating whether my body would be more grateful if i just called it a night or if i put more types of food and liquid in my bloodstream in the next few hours. it's gonna be a hard won debate.

i find that i am getting a lot better at recognizing street names and, more importantly, ways to get from zheli to nali. it's always important to know how to get from one's place of residence to another place of interest, and more important still to know how to find one's way back. i'm getting there, slowly. the map i bought helps, but nothing helps more than sight-memory formation.

i should change. either into bed clothes or going out clothes. i'll let yall know which one goes down.

e

So for all of you who don't already know, here is my information:

shanghai highschool international division
400 shang zhong road
shanghai 200231 pr china

home phone - 86 21 6455 9544

don't abuse the power, if you prank call me, you will be punished. letter bombs are okay though, mail goes through the office, not straight to me, and i'm sure they will look through anything you send this way. hao de


so, i've been pretty much working all today, planning lessons, teaching classes, copying random sheets of paper... it's the good life, that's for sure. and what do i do when i get home? i sit down and get on the computer and write a blog. you'd think i'd be itching to get out into the world and rock china, but no, i'm here. dinner time maybe i'll get out, but i'm boring and don't venture too far. i'll probably go to the nice korean place nearby tonight, they have good potato cakes and kimchee tofu.

some of the other waiguoren have a party planned... actually, it should have already started. some kind of margarita monday. hhhhhactually, i can hear the noise emanating from it three floors above. needless to say, i am not there, and do not plan to be there. i am proud to say that my antisociality has reached new heights, or new depths as it were. i am kinda scared of the foreigner culture that seems to preside here in shanghai, involving working until you can drink and drinking until you have to work. maybe not just a foreigner thing, maybe china thing, but i'm not gonna fall for that trap. easily. it'll take some effort on the culture's part for them to snag me. now when it comes to eating mass amounts of food, i'm hooked baby. easy enuff, just plop a plate of palatable eggplant or doufu or tudou down in front of me, add some kind of spice or cooking ingredient and i'll gobble it up like a famished chinese migrant worker. i'm way too rich for my own good, but everyone expects the whities to be rich, so they don't look at me weird for having money. just for being white. and for bastardizing their native tongue, they gawk at me for that one.

my apartment looks very nice with sheets from ikea (yi jia jia zhi) and a wok from ikea and towels from ikea and dishes from ikea, but i've moved around my furniture and shoved my bed into the ell-hook of my room so that i have a nice living room space in the anteroom... with no furniture in it. two chairs and a tv for a room ten feet by ten feet. i need a couch, i hear i can have them delivered, no sweat (on my part) and for pretty cheap. tai hao le.

i went running around the track yestermorn and did some exercises. this morning, however, i had to get up early to plan my week, so i had no time. it'll be a wonder if i can get into some kind of routine, habitual thingy, so that i can wake up each morning and awaken to the sound of my beating heart and slooshing blood. i've definitely been feeling lazy, hen lei-zee.

giggles from the floors above.

so i've been trying all of the soft drinks and fruit drinks and such here because i have no idea what any of them taste like. back home i know the merits of each flavor and have already ruled out a good two thirds of the brands, however, here, i still have over half of the types of drink to judge. currently i am finishing off a shanghainese brand called chivalry, or xue fei li, that has a nice plum flavor to it, but a bad plum carbonation aftertaste to it. not feeling chivalrous after drinking it either. and x for that one. i did finally find soy milk though, dou nai, and it is good stuff. i doubt i was getting a proper protein with all the odd combinations of stuff i've been eating, so when i took my first sip of soy milk, my mouth immediately formed a broad faced grin, which tells me that my taste buds are hen gaoxing, very happy. it was hard to gulp down the elixir of life with such a smile, but my tummy was growling for a piece of the action and willed it down my throat. it's always nice to find a new/old thing that makes your life easier and happier in a new place. now it is dou nai, tomorrow it will be an umbrella, yu sa, that doesn't fall apart on a whim.

ew, just tried the plum soda again, gross. definitely out. sasparilla soda was pretty gross too. just so you know. oh where oh where did fanta melon soda ever go, that stuff might just be the deciding factor if and when i decide to go back to japan.

any questions? no? ok, good. homework is to find some pretty easy, pretty short, stories for my ninth grade quasi-esl class to read and comprehend. content is secondary.

hopefully most of you are sleeping, and for those of you who are not, have a great day. e

There have been quite a few things going on in my life of late, that and the internet has been off and on so when i did have the time to update this blog i was unable to. This week has been amazing and stressful. Started teaching classes on wed and had two classes yesterday. The sixth grade native english kids are great, willing to learn, talkative, energetic, boistrous even. the ninth grade non native class, however, is harder to handle. They are noncommunicative, not just in the fact that most of them don't speak english very well at all, but more so in the fact that they all are very shy and timid and lacking confidence when it comes to speaking. i feel their pain, which is why i'm prepared to take on this challenge. it's just going to be very, very, very hard.

i still have yet to teach all of my classes, that begins on monday, when i teach my first history class to non native seventh graders. then on tuesday i teach conversational english to a classroom of 45 students or so who are all chinese born. that should be quite interesting to say the very least. This coming friday there is a banquet being held in honor of all the teachers of the international division of shanghai zhongxue, so that will end the week and hopefully relax me after all the craziness i forsee coming soon. hopefully this semester won't be a vicious cycle of stress on the weekdays and destressing on the weekends. that can get boring in its predictability.

as soon as i get settled here, i'm going to start leaving this town on weekends. shanghai is amazing, yes, but there appears to be a whole country out there beyond its borders, and i want to explore. i'll keep this site updated as to all of the adventures.

went shopping today at an ikea in town, bought a lot of things to furnish my house, so i'm feeling very excited to finally have my place in order. i even have the tools with which to make food, if i ever buy any and put it in the fridge. i'll get there eventually. first order of business is to straighten out this whole school thing and become comfortable with that. then and only then do i get to feed myself.

no, nobody should be rushing to send me a care package filled with fudge rounds, i promise i'm getting nourishment of a kind. i'll be fine. this city was made for me to eat, plenty. and often. love this place, i really do.

that's all for now, more later.

e