Sino-psis

i've been up to a whole lot of nothing, but in kunming, so it still kind of makes it worthwhile. the weather has been off and on, one day thunderstorming, one day baking me like a lobster (i'll talk more about lobsters in a sec), and one day blowing dust in my face. overall tho, the weather is ten times cooler than for those of you in the southern us. mwahaha.

szo. i've been waiting around this week for the internet people to come, and they didn't. so it looks like i have to wait for another monday bloody monday. and on that fateful day i should get my passport and my ethernet port requirements all filled. hurray!

otherwise, i've been eating and sleeping, reading and dreaming, internetting and gameplaying, hemming and hawing. the dean of my school, who is also my landlord (go with those you can trust,) had my roomie kyle and i for dinner at the lotus hotel the other day. we sat with his family and ate random things off the round table and tried to make conversation. kyle sat next to the youngest son and i next to the oldest, i guess according to our respective ages. i had hushed english conversations and regular broken chinese conversations with the elder bro. he's nice and i think we're all going to get together tomorrow to play a friendly game of basketball CHINA VS US INSANE DEATHMATCH ROAR!! and then maybe go have some tea or something. kyle and yanchen (the younger) are on equal footing in terms of their chinese/english levels, as are haochen's and mine (tho i'm sure his english is better than my chinese, but he just speaks in such a soft tone i can hardly tell.)

yesterday i met up with eliza montgomery, alex and elliott's sister (almost forgot the second t there,) and walked around the town with her. i haven't really been in kunming all that long tho and didn't know where to take her, but she seemed fine with walking, so we walked. and walked and walked. we were both tired and sat in a park for a while luxuriating in the soft green grass watching children throw projectiles, musicians practice their craft, and elderly folk swat a birdie back and forth. that was nice. i was surprised that i recognized eliza right off since i hadn't seen her since (we figured this out) junior year of high school. but it seems that seeing alex a couple of weeks ago helps considerably, as they look a lot alike. today she is in lijiang, currently raining i believe, and then tomorrow she's going to hike tiger leaping gorge, of which i am so jealous. if i had had my passport on me, i would have gone with her, but alas... she seems certainly capable of travelling on her own tho, so i'm not worried. for those of you who know the family, fyi, eliza is going back for her sophomore year, says she'll prolly study abroad junior year (mebbe china) and then go somewhere for an architecture grad program focusing on sustainable development and environmental concerns. wrap that up with a bow and i'm done.

i just bought a camera today, huzzah! it's small and compact and 5.2 Mpixels. the zoom isn't all that great, but i prefer its size to its telescopic abilities. once i get my laptop down here, i should be able to shoot out pictures of my surroundings and add pictures to my flickr page finally. my last camera, rest its soul, left this earth around mid march and i life hasn't been the same since. i'm starting to feel complete again now.

oh yeah, the lobster. yesterday, as i was parting from eliza at a bus stop, there was a lady and child with a lobster in a cup of some kind of milky liquid. odd. but then i realized it was a live little lobster. i happened to get on the same bus as those two and had a good vantagepoint from which to view the antics. the baobei would stick his fingers into the cup and pull out the lobster by its claw and then proceed to tickle its tail. this obviously annoyed the creature, because it then would recoil and snatch at the child with its claws. the child did this repeatedly and the mother would make encouraging gasps each time the lobster clawed. now, i'm wondering why i was never taught to play with things that could pinch me when i was younger. i've always had an intense fear of small bity things, owing to odd experiences in my childhood. but i'm sure if i'd played with more lobsters, i'd have gotten over that much sooner. i think that mother is on the right track, tho i hope she's gonna let that thing grow a bit more before cooking it, cuz it was kinda on the small size. unless, it's a family pet! that'd be something. cmere little lobby! here boy! does pinchy want some phytoplankton? gooood lobster.

oh, eliza came bearing a Lonely Planet and found for us a vegetarian restaurant pretty near my house (she has been vegetarian most of her life, except for some forgivable incidents in china.) fake meat and fake fish galore. right next to a temple of course and has some really good hot and sour soup. i'm game.

anyhoo. i'm about done for this week. again, not much has happened. you?

e

i am sitting in this internet bar as i was twenty minutes ago. i tried to leave yet nature shut me in. there is an awe-ful thunderstorm occurring outside of these protective walls, but i figure it's just kunming saying hi. and that is what has really been happening the past couple of days, kunming and i have been getting acquainted. i was going to save this for a later time, but events have transpired to keep me locked in this town for a bit longer. i now have an apartment and a roommate, but no visa and currently no passport (thus the lockdown.) i want to get away already and i've only been living here a week plus, but that's just my travel itchiness. i'd been expecting to jump out into the wilderness of yunnan by now, but i'm still here. i did get to make a foray into hong kong which was a blast, but i'm still no closer to xishuangbanna or ruili or even back up to lijiang than i was in shanghai - exaggeration, yes, but still, i feel antsy. haven't even had any syrup to drink.

kyle's here with me too (yes tom, my roommate is named kyle, strange how circular life is, you passed off one of your roommates on me) and we were going to go see buddy down at the school to figure out our home internet situation and other shtuff, but doctor wu must have conjured up this magnificent storm to give himself time to get away. we went earlier in the day, but another teacher told us, "he was here, but now he's gone" in perfect english explaining that he'd be back at 230. low and behold, 230 on the dot, BOOM. CRASH. aaaand, i'm slightly wetter than before. hardly made it outta the door. the sky was blue and then ... not. i'm sure it'll be over in ten more minutes, like florida afternoon thunderstorms where you'd have about half an hour to go play ultimate frisbee while being rolled about in sheets of rain (funnest thing ever.) and then we can go tend to business. seems like i've been doing a lot of waiting here, not enough doing. dang visa and the like, messin up all my plans. pbthhhtt!

a couple of nights ago there was a great lightning storm that i watched from my bedroom window, throwing my arms in the air with impressive gestures, causing destruction from the heavens above to fall on those evil sinners below. lightning sprang from my will, thunder from my passion. the city trembled and knew that i was amongst it. i've been reading too much dostoevsky and now everything has religious overtones. but that's the life of the reader. read a book and watch the world change around you as your own perspective changes from the reading. i wouldn't read if it didn't affect me in some way. just wouldn't be that intristing.

i found a nice chinese typical good food restaurant right around the block. i mean, seriously, the back of this restaurant is in our compound, so if we could figure out a way to get in good with the cooks, we actually wouldn't have to leave our grounds to go eat. actually... we can order delivery as well, so we don't even have to go down the five flight of stairs and back up again if we're feeling ultra america-lazy. it's really good food, but kyle caught the china bug from it and had some digestive problems from the broth i think. ruff stuff that chinese bacteria, whatever it is. took me a couple of weeks to compensate bowelly in the beginning of my trip and i suspect he will have similar difficulties. so far, my guess that kunming cuisine might affect me adversely has been proven wrong, but i'm still waiting. i mean, what's life if you get to go through it without any mess? sure, it might smell nice, but there's definitely something missing. something... je ne c'est poop.

i've begun (slooooowly) translating a book that just came out in china written by a foreigner about jiang zemin. i'm translating word for word and that takes time. i figure it's something that will last me the entire year, but i'm also hoping that i have a slightly higher learning curve than i am guesstimating, so it might get done sooner. i also bought a version of wind in the willows that is translated into chinese along with the accompanying english version. that i'm not trying to really direct translate, just get the gist of the words and move through it. still, slow going. chinese, a most challenging language for me. here's to china.

i had a jidanbing this morning, something i haven't had in a while, and it was gooooooooooooood. kinda like an egg sandwich with crispy tofu and spice and salty brown sauce and chives and pickled somethingoranother. sgooooood. come to china, eat it, live it, become it. go china

uhoh, kyle's playing grand theft auto and it looks fun. i think i may join in, i mean, while the rain is pouring and all what else is there to do? don't answer that.

e

just thought i'd throw out a quick lil spot on what i'm doing right now and whence i'm going in the near future. so, i'm in kunming, yeah. i'm currently aprocess of applying for astudying chinese here at yunnan normal university. i've just got to get my visa taken care of (tomorrow) and buy some books and shtuff and i'm all set. i just scored an apartment which i am splitting with a guy named kyle who currently goes to oklahoma university. 500 yuan apiece and it's pretty close to the school. i can't complain, especially since it was so easy to grab, practically in my lap.

i'm really excited about studying again, since i've been pretty much mentally stagnant for the past year in terms of language. the scout oath doesn't apply when you're in china i guess. but now i can just dive into the language and apply it in all walks of life. it just don't get much better.

i have a new celphone number but don't feel it appropriate to put it in my blog. if you want it, email me. or just email me and i'll call you. that works too.

so, for the next couple of weeks, i'll just be methodically working my way around kunming, not straying too far sans passporte (how does one say passport in french, i added the e for fun, but i dunno.) when i get my huzhao back, it'll be open season for me, time to fly.

not much else really going on. transition period and all, leaving teaching to pursue learning again, back to the life of the mind. climate changes, bacterial changes, dialect changes, everything is a little bit different, but certainly recognizable for what it is. a china is a china by any other name.

again, since i'm not really doing anything of import here in kunming a la momenta, i think i will delve into the past to make up for lost/nonexistent blogs from my seedy shanghai days.

Friday is always a good day to get out of bed. Friday is Quiz day!!

So i have all two of my quizzes prepared and ready to go. This week happens to be my week for both of my english classes. and what i mean by that is, my two separate teaching triumvirates for english 6 and 9 have it set up this semester so that each teacher plans one whole week, and then it moves on to the next, and the next, and then back to me, etcetera etcetera. my luck makes it a doubly tough week, but it's good to keep working and not have any freetime. i like it better that way. what's worse is that next week i will have absolutely nothing to do and be bored shnitless. c'est la vie.

two sheafs of paper on my desk rarin and ready to go, and i have first period off, so i can sit and check my email, shut my eyes, read a book. the classes go smoothly, spread out throughout the morning. i give the quiz, sit back for twenty, take them up and give the students a short writing assignment to do. the approach of the weekend makes everyone happier, more sedate. you'd think it'd be the opposite, but the classes were very calm and perfunctory. in and out. have a good weekend, see you on monday sorta thing.

lunch time is cheerful. i go out on the street and eat at a local new establishment with excellent local fare. some eggplant and spicy tofu. an interesting fish dish with a creamy sauce. some soothing tea. this trip to the restaurant is better than the time i went after midterms. one of my ninth graders was there with his friends and they were trying to smoke a cigarette surreptitiously. i nabbed them with my eyes and he looked sheepish, but one of his friends still tried to hide to smoke behind the steam of his entree. jeez, at least have the sense to not try that stuff in front of a teacher. he's also the one who was texting answers on his celphone during a quiz. to someone in another class (which had the same quiz cuz i made it for all three classes). nothing ever happened. i took the phone and gave it to his class teacher, but i heard nothing after that. it seems that his parents make their payments on time, lucky for him.

so yeah, this time, i like the fare and the atmosphere. i go back to the office and hang out, kinda grading quizzes but mostly chatting with john g and talking about how short we hope the staff meeting is going to be. i teach john a game called jotto that jeff and i used to play all the time in the Oasis near honors dorms back at the ol alma gator. basically, you try to guess the other person's five letter word by using hints they give you as to how many letters in the word you guessed are in their word. no repeating letters, no paper. except, when teaching john, i allowed paper. that makes it easier, but also requires you to move a lot quicker and make logical jumps. an hour well spent.

the staff meeting is short and sweet. they gave us some ice cream.

we talked about testing and blah blah and jabberty jibbity. i sit at the front and pretend to look involved while spacing out and dreaming of electric sheep.

the night begins to come clearer. it's friday and there is all kinds of gut-appeasing food and drink to be found in the city. i make plans. people come together. and we go for sushi. Sushi Tei is a big chain in china and beyond that makes some delicious rolls for cheap. also, there is the added delight of a sushi train (not really a train, but i call it that, stop imagining trains, there are none) where you can pull off some rolls whenever you feel the itch. in order to make myself hungry for the sushi experience ( i never feel satisfied unless i eat the restaurant out of business) i went running on the track, stopping short to play some pickup frisbee. or was it football?

the boys of our foreign invaders have been pretty regular about getting together on the weekend and playing some sort of field sport. i prefer frisbee, but the all-consuming power of american football cannot be denied. i join in when my ankles are feeling compliant. cleats help immeasurably (thanks mom and dad for sending those along) and we tear up the grass looking for lanes and patterns and touches and scores. when the wind is cooperating, however, i'd play frisbee over football anyday. the loft and drift, the sharp jab, the hammer, the flick. and all the time running. cuts and sprints and cutbacks and fakes. never stopping because you know the other team will take advantage if you ever do. i certainly would. we play until we're tired and give everything. it's a good day for sport.

and sushi. at sushi tei, after one mouthwatering foray with scott, i've gotten it down to a science. mushrooms filled with crabmeat and katsu sauce on the side. a dragon roll filled with crunchy shrimp and leaves of avocado on top putting it to bed. spicy crab rolls, six of them, with a tangy flavor i keep going back for. fried salmon filets with the aforementioned katsu sauce. the works. and add on top of that some fatty salmon belly floating by on the elliot's tummy train. you've got a baibai pangpang de nanhaizi. a fat n sassy lil boy. refill on the green tea please, thanks.

we decide to just go to scott's place and hang out for a while. he's got a nice apartment in town and a good living room in which to chill. let's say we have.. kevin, alina, scott, jena, me, dee, lauren, and patrick. a nice crew. kevin has me on the floor rolling with his fake throwing up routine, alina watching on admiring her funny man and adding the odd supplemental information that makes their joint routine utter perfection. we talk into the night, sharing stories, reliving memories, creating fresh ones. i nuzzle up to jena - totally baffling dee who was sure that jena and scott were a couple - in order to finnagle a root beer out of her personal stockpile in the fridge. lauren is telling a story about koko's kitten, one of her favorite childhood stories, which kevin totally blasphemes by adding a sexual connotation to the gorilla-kitten relationship. that still cracks me up. dee tells his story about seven-toed whashisname who lost three toes on one foot in an accident. all of dee's stories are pretty gross, but undeniably hilarious. scott and jena make more intellectual conversation arise, commenting on the music or some tidbit. patrick challenges me to scrabble, which i accept. there is a popular drink in china that mixes green tea with whiskey. it is an acceptable mixture to all. i sleep on the floor in a nest i build, expecting jena or scott to make pancakes in the morning. fridays are way better than tuesdays.

keeping with my theme of spontaneous amalgamation, i will relate the following day at school:

i woke up at 6:30 in the morning, not unexpectedly, to the sound of megaphonic military chants and the metered pounding of little footies. i swear they do it just to annoy me. when i came to the school, the dorm guard (now i know his name to be larry) had a handful of keys in envelopes and asked me to pick a room, any room. he must have thought that noone in their right mind would pick the card right on top. i was tired, jetlagged to be exact, and not up to the task of guessing my fate. i picked the top one and ended up with the first floor room, right on the corner facing the basketball courts; right where the morning exercises take place. oh bitter fate, thou knowest me well.

no use in going back to sleep, so i get up and futz. shower dress contacts and i'm ready to go. the air outside has a burnt-rubber stench and drops the visibility to a hundred yards. i look upward in despair, searching for any speck of blue in the sky above, but all to be found is cloud upon cloud of depression. not exactly the most optimistic city to wake up in, but i push on.

i spurt out from the front gate with a spring in my step, only to have it halted by an onslaught of noise glare drizzle. not only is today stinging my eyes, but now it is wetting my pate. i hurry past the prematurely honking machines and the prematurely spitting folks on to my blessed alley, full of its earthly delights. i almost don't even have to walk in the alley anymore, she's ready with my three baozi in a flimsy plastic bag. xiexie, buxie.

today the muck is digging into the fragile tissues in my throat, so i decide to fight fire with fire, smog with sludge, and buy a coke at the local kedi. it doesn't so much cleanse one's thirst as it does kill all bacteria in one's mouth, throat, stomach, intestines, sphincter. coke, the raw choice.

the rain is getting heavier, so i put a move on, jumping from tree to tree like a clumsy squirrel. i neglected to buy an umbrella since the first two i bought broke as soon as i left the store. when i get jaded about a certain object, it'll take me a good long time to forgive and forget and pay the 20 yuan to buy a new one. today makes me rethink that aspect of my personality.

i make it to the primary school, walk moodily past the trash bins made to hold wet umbrellas, slip a little on the tile, and head up the stairs. of course, it's a tuesday. had to be a tuesday. certainly, for the purposes of this story, yeah, it's a tuesday alright. i get to the third floor and walk into my office to prepare for first period. it's 8 am. half an hour till the pain begins. already i have a headache just thinking about it.

noone is there, thank goodness, but that doesn't stop the phone from ringing as soon as i get in the door. and it's an especially annoying ring. i heard that ms bao (director of the primary school, bigwig of our office) had her daughter's voice chanting "mommy, i love you, mommy, i love you, mommy..." ad infinitum last year, but this year it's not like that. it might even be worse. imagine the old mcdonald tune in a high register blaring tone, played over and over at high speed. and then multiply that by one year. yeah, it was a good think i wasn't packing most mornings.

i ignore it, it's not for me.

oh fudge (that's not the expletive i used, but this is a public blog) i have some copying i neglected to do. not to mention i have no idea what i'm teaching first period. or second period. or fourth. lord it's going to be a bad day. and this really has nothing to do with god or fate or poltergeists. this problem i'd gotten myself into was the product of a slow, irreversible ennui accumulated over the past couple months causing me to only do this kind of meaningless work under duress. if i can possibly be doing ANYthing else, i'll do it in lieu of actually preparing for class. i'm pretty sure i learned this from teacher's in my past, but i'm not sure if i could ever prove it.

i think while copying. wait, strike that, i think while waiting to copy. it seems that other people are having the same problem this morning. on top of all that, only one copier in the primary school is working. (man, the suspense is really building up in this story. it's too bad that this happened so often to me during the year that it stopped being exciting and tense and just got plain taxing.) yeah yeah yeah, long story short, i show up to class ten seconds late with a sheaf of papers, two books, and a class full of screech owls. i quickly throw them some dead mice to quiet them for a bit while i compose myself. dead mice = graded quizzes (i'm not sure when i had the energy to grade them, but magically, there they were)

side note: i think i'm jumping around from past to present tense at an amazing frequency during this story. apologies. when pushing the contents of eight days into one, little disruptions in the spacetime continuum are bound to happen.

it is while i am teaching for the first hour that an amazing thing happens. a camera crew enters the back of my room and starts to take pictures of me teaching. this is quite unsettling for me as a teacher, but the students are really losing it. they can't concentrate a bit. as a teacher, i'm furious, but as a performer (the real job of every teacher) i'm at carnegie hall. i start waving my hands and holding up student's classwork to explain my points. i hold up pieces of paper far longer than i ever would have to in a real class and cut poses that make me look like i know exACTly what i'm talking about. the students must be thinking a demon has taken control of my body, because they've never seen me teach like this the whole year. but really, i'm just trying to give them their shots and get them the bleep outta there. it works. and i'm spent. i get the kids to read and i take a seat, mentally preparing for the next class while still "teaching" this one.

thank goodness it's history. my worst subject, the one i'm the least qualified for, and so the one that i don't care about a bit. not that i'm not teaching, it's just that the kids in my class barely speak english and so i can just read straight from the book and elaborate heavily on every point and teach just as well as i would in a native class if i knew my sh..tuff. whoops, forgot to make a quiz. so in the ten minutes between class, i make a paltry test of knowledge along with twenty copies and hit the door as the bell's ringing. argh, i had also promised them they could change seats, so, as they are quizzling, i write a new seating chart on the board, playing chess with the kids current seating arrangement. sandra takes charles's pawn. berlin takes andy. evelyn to dennis2.

the class, after collecting quizzes and moving bodies, goes rather smoothly, except that i don't have a board eraser in the room. i fill up the board with elaborate drawings of medieval warfare and then can't erase to write the homework on the board. i use some scrap paper, but feel beaten.

third period is mine. mine alone. my precious. i desperately want to nap in my chair, but drama is afoot. during the second-third period break, the twenty minute one, the crazy break, something happened. my office mate, emily bond, a real light-weight, was injured. i naturally assumed that it was one of her normal injuries like being bodychecked by a kid flying out of an open doorway, or being squashed by big seventh graders in the hallway. but no, it's even more ridiculous. she was walking down the stairs to the first floor and a sizable child fell from the sky and whacked her on the back. after initial cries that the sky was falling, she figured out that a child two floors above was sliding down the railing of this switchback stairwell and overbalanced due to the heavy load on his back. after caroming off two two rails he landed on emily and then plummeted the rest of the way down, hitting the ground pretty much on his head. a dumb kid deserves dumb luck at least once. he survived and was back the next day. emily had back problems for a month. the school installed metal bars between the gaps in the stairwell to prevent further plummets - but encourage totally awesome railslides! the drama totally ruined my gnarly nappage time. i still had a wicked noggin and a bodaciously heinous pile of work to do. most un-righteous.

i did some more quick copying for fourth and hit the middle school. still raining, so i show up soaked. slip on some tiles and head up the stairs to class. this time i did Not magically grade the quizzes from the friday before. just plain forgot. i rush straight into testing vocabulary knowledge. and then on to some grammar. my kinda class, but it is not to be. the kids are restless, electric, and the material is soggy. i try to make it intristing, but my energy for the day has already been sapped. lunch is the next period and the kids sense that i am looking forward to it as much as they. i pretty much let the class devolve into whispers and other activities and give them some homework to start on for the last fifteen minutes. none of them start on it and i sit at the front looking frazzled, dreaming of cafeteria tofu.

more rain, uninspired conversation at the lunch table, an ice cream snack, and an hour break. that's how i wish it went. but instead: i eat quickly to avoid conversation and rush back to my on campus apartment to snatch a nap. i wake up with the phone ringing. that is not a pleasant sound after a small afternoon nap. it can only mean one thing. i rise and answer and run for the gate. i am late for my ride over to shangbao, the local middle school i teach once a week. that nap got outta hand! for real! if i was frazzled before, i am clearly buggin now.

and the thing about shangbao is, you don't have to necessarily prepare for class, but you have to be on your game. and i didn't bring my computer so i can't just show a movie. i spend the car ride and the time before class coming up with clever ways to use class time - which amount to nothing. my brain isn't working and all i can think about is returning to my nap to continue the dream i was drooling onto my pillow about. i walk into the class, chum for the sharks.

i stumble out eighty minutes later after hearing the tentative tapping at the door. my fellow teachers are ready to hop a cab back. i am missing large shreds of clothing and my hair is sticking up in odd places. one shoe is missing and the other is hanging on by a lace. my face must look utterly terrified, for aggalia gives me a look of concern. "you okay?" i jump headlong into the cab.

day finished. i'm sure i could add more crazy things that happened after that, but it gets unrealistic after a while. actually, though, that was a pretty good approximation of the random things and unnecessary stress that a tuesday often brought to my life. i'll stand by that. the missing shoe was a hyperbole, they only got my pants.

e

i'll write a little bit about my schooling experience at Shanghai High School International Division. I feel that it will come off very drab and jaded, but that is only because i lack the true skill to bring an interesting, fair view to my year there. ok, let's go.

I have previously described SHSID as a "cash cow" and a "farce" to many people and perhaps somewhere in the extent of this blog, but let's flesh that out a bit. Every year the administration of this school prolly hires about 30 new teachers, many with questionable (or blatantly nonexistent) teaching experience, most likely based on what their picture looks like. blond hair is preferable, but anybody with fair white skin and a pleasing smile jumps to the front of the line. all of this is done to please the parents and the financial backers of this school. on the same campus is the real teaching institution, the local division. this is the school where students in china have to test highly to get into and then go from there on to higher and better institutions, on their way to the top of the ladder. yeah, i never taught them. that'd be heresy. at the international division we teach the kids of rich expats in the area and, if i may say so myself, teach them pretty dang well considering the lack of experience most of us are endowed with. lots of english speakers and non-english speakers. i'll get to that later.

kevin carter and dee macmahon and alina samuels and so many other teachers came up with some good slogans. we were thinking about getting a tshirt made to commemorate the experience. here are a couple: on front [ shsid ] on back [ nothing is impossible ] that slogan comes from a favorite saying of our admin teachers when we ask them for something. no, no, that is impossible. [ shsid ] [ we teach because we care ] most of these slogans are full of sarcasm [ shsid ] [ the best! ] another china-ism where everything is the best. here, use this stapler, it's the best! [ shsid ] [ yeah... ] there were many other slogans where people made more bold and deleterious remarks, but we held back on those, and held back on making shirts in the end, cuz everyone was just ready to git outta there.

however, all that being said, i loved teaching. i didn't like making tests, grading, making worksheets, all that work crap. but i did love teaching. most of the time. having to worry about class administration is a pain too. i just wish my students were little angels and we could focus on what we were learning at all times. not always the case. but when everything was going well, i was on fire, teaching vocabulary or whatnot - that was when i loved it. kids asking questions, me firing back answers, the whole learning teaching thing. that stuff is awesome. it's the rest that is annoying, and certain teaching institutions make that stuff easier on their teachers. not ours.

we did get paid well, i'll give them that. 1600 us dollars a month, minus tax. and for a while, towards the end, we got our tax back too. but then there was a chinese law found that said we couldn't do that, so next year it's back. good money though, and shanghai is the place to spend it. now, in this upcoming year, i'll spend a lot of the money i just saved in that job. ah, the world of money, a life dealing with and reeling from it. so, in that respect, the job was worth it.

but we had office hours, 8 hours a day, and there were horribly long staff meetings recapping things we already knew. sounds like a regular job you say? yeah, it was. i don't like jobs. who does?

i loved going to a local middle school once a week and teaching real, true chinese kids. all we did was talk, play games, and watch movies. i never had to prepare for that class or make tests. that's what i wish i had been doing the whole year. nothing but shangbao.

instead, i also taught sixth native english, seventh non native history (i am no history major by a long shot), and ninth non native english. they all had their good and bad points, history mostly bad. i just don't like history that much and didn't convey much of an interest to my kids. i was a bad teacher, i'm sorry to say. in english class, i was better though, being more qualified and confident with my knowledge. i'm an okay grammarian, an excellent vocabularist, and an enthusiastic reader-alouder. but of course, i never taught in a vacuum, so my kids would act up and disrupt the flow. normal classroom antics and all that. just annoying to deal with when all i want to do is go home and take a nap. again, like most jobs. and probably a lot easier than most teaching jobs, neh? so all in all, an easy laid back year in shanghai teaching some cool kids that i'll probably never see again. an international life is an unsettled one.

i'm glad to leave the first floor apartment i was living in, part of the foreign teacher dorms that looked as if they would fall apart after one day in san fran or kobe. i don't miss the dust and the mosquitos and the centipedes associated with my first floor lodging. my neighbor john gildersleeve does not miss his rat pal that he met early on in the year. it was a dump, but a free dump. near my last day there, another teacher's room had a water leak of massive proportions and the dorm guards had no idea where the water main was. i had a better guess, but couldn't access it, so we had to wait fifteen minutes while the maintenance people made their way there from their respective homes. meanwhile, the room below, john g's (he had already left - the day after our last day, that boy was outta there) was filling up with water that was dripping through from the room above. fun shtuff.

apparently our year wasn't as hectic as the year before, when there were some real crazy types working there, drinking all the time and passing out in different sections of the campus. not showing up to class, etc. the eight hour workday was a new invention thanks to our predecessors. many a story was told about those fellas by the few teachers that remained from the year before.

my friend scott morrison will be celebrating his sixth year at that school next year, more power to him. jena balton will be staying in shanghai, but studying chinese, bless her heart. everyone else pretty much left. i think there are 8 or 9 out of 36 returning, crazy folks. i'm going to return there for one day in august to pick up a key left there for me, but that'll be my last dealings with that school.

it was a good year in many ways, but i can think of better ways to spend a year. the friends i made are indispensable and now i'm going to have to make new ones, but that goes back to the life of a world traveller and all that. is it better to make hundreds of year-long friends around the world or make a few good friends and stay put in one place developing those friendships for the rest of your life? hard to say. any answers to that would be appreciated.

e

hmm, there seems to be an uproar for more, so i will oblige. however, not much has happened since hong kong. there is a terrible backlog of information to share, however, so i'll hit you with that.

i think i'll craft an amalgamate of nights for this blog. sew together the thick threads of a couple of shanghai evenings to make the one cloth look all the more interesting. here goes:

let's try my birthday, shall we? i had been chilling with daniel colvard for a week or so, doing my best to show him around the town but basically leaving it up to him, as i had office hours to attend to. early that afternoon i dropped him off at the train station on his way up to beijing, passed between friends around the china table. yifei and i were at a loss for what to do, until she piped up with the thrillsome idea of going bowling, something i had yet to do in shanghai.

and it was all i imagined it could be, and oh so much more. but bowling is pretty boring to describe. i didn't bowl amazingly, but i did put on a nice performance at the end with Dee MacMahon. we were stationed on abutting lanes and my bowling side was a little slower than his. so he finished in the lead with 108 (again, not phenomenal, but none of us had been bowling all that year. forgive us our diminished natures) and i was simply worried about breaking 100 at that point. on the tenth frame, it all became clear. i had a spare and then needed a strike to TIE him. i couldn't even beat him, but i lined it up and struck. the crowd goes wild and all that jazz, but it did feel good. 108 = 108 Dee and i were destined to be equal in more respects than bowling that night, however. (to note: a lot of people came out bowling. don't think that was due to my birthday, but more to the utter brilliance of yifei wang.)

we went then to a club called Harley Bar because we had heard that some bands would be playing. there was a pretty weak band on at first, followed by a strong one, and then capped off by the weakest one ever. i'll focus on the strength in this blog. can't tell you their name (owing to the forgetting nature of the night) but they were superb. a punk band with a lead singer who was one of the strangest, yet most electrifying, lead singers i've seen to date. he would do anything for the crowd. to start, he had tissues stuffed in his spandex biker shorts (all he was wearing) which his guitarist would grab to wipe off the sweat of the performance (it was hot, fuh real). he at one point licked the sweat off his guitarist's face and then licked his own sweat off his own body. from... interesting places. deep, dark places that would scare children. and since there are no children reading this hopefully, his butt crack. quite the performer i tell you. he did this awesome screamed cover of a popular song in china (S.H.E. = you are my superstar) that brought down the house. by this point i and catherine and dee had jumped up into the moshpit and i was pushing around folks singing along. it was just one of those nights. and they kept coming back for encores, thanks to my calling them back enthusiastically i say bigheadedly. whoa, too many adverbs. on to the next section>

the followup band blew, so we skedaddled on to... more different pastures. we went gokart riding. [this is where the faint of heart might want to hang up the ol mouse and head for bed] those puppies are fast. i may have talked about this before, but i'm gonna go into it again. we're talking mach 3 here. breaking sound barriers and other barriers as well for the virginal gokarters among us. and i don't really mean anything hymenal by that, but i'm sure that's been breached on that course before. dee and i seem to always be at odds and here we had never raced one another before. a date with destiny which turned out to be an ugly one with lots of drama.

out on the course: cars flying, turns whipping, metal crunching, sissies screaming, and finally, blood flowing. it is most exhilirating to go full throttle into a turn, hearing your tires squeeching beneath you begging you to slow down, but still continuing on, through, out. but even through all that exhiliration, please remember to fasten your seatbelt tight enough elliot, jeez!

i was stupidly trying to pass dee on the inside of a turn and he cut me off into the wall. i jerked forward, not stopped much by my slack belt, and hit my head on the steering wheel. yeah, i feel stupid. but would i do it again?

anyway, i first checked my teeth, cuz i'd hit my mouth on the bottom rung of the wheel. all checked, go, i took off, determined to catch up to dee. but my sweat kept pouring down the side of my face, annoying the heck out of me. i wiped it away, then noticing the interesting deep muddy red color of my sweat. odd, i thought, but no matter, keep going. a couple more turns and my brain kicked in and i slowed the car down to check for cuts. all i found was more blood. not coming from my ear, or my cheek, but from the top of my head. always a bad sign, i took it for that, and pulled the car over to the pit, the employee graciously pulling the barrier aside to allow me entrance (with a slightly panicky look on his face). at the bar (yeah, they have a full bar at this place) they gave me wet rags and some water. to save you the suspense, it was just a scalp wound - long, but not deep. i survived and didn't have to go to the hospital across the street (yeah, conveniently located - coincidence, no doubt). and to answer the question, yeah, i did it again. two rounds later. but i was a tad bit slower, if you know what i mean. and certainly more tightly strapped. my green shirt was festively decorated with a nice wreath of red splatter around the neck. oh, what a night!

but it's not over. if you thought that mere blood loss would stop me, you were sadly mistaken. i was on a rare tear that was bound for glory (or gory) that night. we went back to my place> (cue suspenseful music)

and residing at my apartment, along with the dust bunnies and the large red headed chinese centipedes, was an intristing assortment of liquor. why not. patrick had had his parents in town and couldn't let them know he had anything as insidious as SNAKE WINE in his place, so he loaned it to me. daniel thought i needed an extra kick on my birthday, so he bought me a handle of black label. and china thought i was in need of intestinal problems, so there was some baijiu as well (chinese moonshine). have i set the scene? let's give some background on snake wine:

a large glass container with different ingredients floating in a red coloured form of baijiu, including, yes, a snake. actually, two. scott nicholson had problems seeing after imbibing a bit of it. most people fear to smell it. i, and others braver than i, usually just wake up in the morning stinking of it, sweating it out every pour and sticking to our mattresses. it's horrid, the devil's poison, meant to ensnare humanity and cause us to fall from great glorious heights.

dee and i were at it again, old competitors we. the black label was shared among the group of six or so, the baijiu disdained. the snake wine only gave its styxian kiss to two that night, and i bet you can guess. patrick was pouring the drinks, not nicely either. dee and i were eyeing one another and going blow for blow. we stopped after a while, but the serpentine tonic had other plans. dee began to speak gibberish, speculating on all kinds of amazing epiphanies that none of us could even come close to understanding, save through his overwrought gesticulations. my gesticulations, occurring a bit later, were of another sort. better they be called gastriculations, i think. i was very earnestly trying to convey to a pony that i was one of those long-necked bobbing birds, tilt-o-chirps, or whatever you call them. except i think they take the liquid out of the bowl.

the next morning i was fine and went to get some breakfast at rendezvouz cafe. dee, sadly, never emerged from his room that day. he had neglected to do as i did so early on in the night, and so was obliged to take the full consequental brunt of his actions. i felt for him, i really did.

too bad that wasn't every night in shanghai (or maybe for the better), cuz then i'd have a lot more stories to tell. maybe kunming's harvest will be more bountiful.
e

>dee has since forsworn snake wine.

per usual, haven't blog-oed it up in a while. make that, three months? dayaaaaaaaaaamn. das long. hokay, so.

let's start with the more recent and then work back from there. i just went to hong kong for a nice little trip. whoa back it up, easy back it up. first i came here to kunming. gonna go to school here, or so i hope. my lady at the ynnu, yunnan normal university, said that it was impossible to change a work visa to a student visa, so i had to go out of the country, get a tourist visa, only to come back in and have that switched to a student visa. the wuos of zhongguo. all in the great design-a of china.

so i went to hong kong. great time. beautiful place. hot as hades. the streets as pushy as xiangyang market in shanghai or the pearl market in beijing. the people seemingly pushing trilingual (bilingual with a side of dialect), but really only speaking cantonese on a whole. the signage all in traditional characters, which was a sight for sore eyes. i'm going to have to move to taiwan or hong kong to ever put my previous knowledge to use. in mainland china i feel as if i'm learning the whole damblamed language all over again.

i saw alex montgomery and hung out with him yesterday. that was a blast from the past. he's doing great with a chinese lawyer girlfriend (hmm, hopefully that's not a secret being outed by blabbermouth byrne) some tutoring jobs and the hopes of starting his own entrepeneurial dreams and sitting back to watch the cash flow in. i won't go into detail on his specs, but he's hoping to tap into the tourism market as few others have before. sounds like good stuff.

his cantonese is amazing, as it well should be after four years in the place, but i was astounded nonetheless. i could get a sense of what they were saying from context and the flow of the language, but even though i knew every word, i didn't understand a word that came out of his mouth. cantonese is frankly unintelligible and sounds like a big throaty tropical toucan trying to speak mandarin with boistrous bokkaws and clucks of the tongue. mandarin is a sweet soft tongue in comparison purred like a kitten, until you hear people arguing just as loudly in their language. any language can come off harsh spoken the right way.

i ate sushi at genki sushi, indian food at everest cafe, falafel at post 97, noodles at mak's, and various seafood and tofu in this wonderful cafe above a wet market in causeway bay. i'd go back just for the food.

i loved the ferry and the open air tram. both hela cheap (about a quarter US) and really convenient. the octopus card that they use in hong kong makes it even easier. put some money on it and flash it for the ferry, busses, subway, trains, etc. not cabs, but you don't really need to use cabs there. you don't really need a car at all, except for a status symbol. alex informs me that hong kong has the most luxury cars per capita in the world. i saw my fair share.

the subway system was clean and efficient. glass doors in front of the train until it comes to a stop, vending machines for sim cards, machines for tickets and adding money to the octopus card, swift escalators and plenty of signs in english and chinese. no wonder hong kong got the bid for the horse racing portion of the olympics as well as hong kong disneyland (over shanghai disneyland). furthermore, you can't eat, drink, or smoke in the subway. no littering. no spitting. no nothing. the fines are trememdous in hong kong and keeps spitting deaths down to a minimum.

alex took me to a cat cafe where cats were walking around and sitting on tables and chairs and laps. next to the door was one snuggled up on top of a tv. i was waiting for the AFHV moment, but it never came. kept expecting to see bip and ell-bee roaming around. next to our table was a glass house with two cats in it. the menu consisted of regular fare, except with meow added to the name. like, a coffee meow. an orange mocha frappacino meow. a lazy meow (orange, pineapple, kiwi). a coke meow. alex and i got some meow cookies and he got the iced banana chocolate mocha meow and i got the aforementioned lazy meow. ridiculously fun to order.

earlier i went to the HMV store and looked at and listened to the music that i'd been missing for a year in china. nothing i wanted to buy really, but fascinating to see what i'd mist.

mostly i walked around and did free stuff. world's longest escalator (broken into segments, but still very cool. i was expecting one long sucker taking me up to the pearly gates), kowloon park (with an appetizing swimming pool that i did not avail myself of), multiple highrise views of the city, temple street night market (lots of people watching, no buying), and lots of standing in well-air-conditioned vestibules. i sweat more in the past week than i have in the past month. that speaks to how hot hong kong is and how little i've exercised recently. whatever mental picture you have of me right now, add a chin roll (sushi) or pump a little more air into that spare tire in your image (fried rice). mmm, food.

the city was densely packed but is on an island that is 90 percent undeveloped due to steep mountainous terrain. quite an eye-opener to see mountains backing skyscrapers. the boats chugging around interspersed with windsurfers, window surfaces flashing brilliantly in the sun, and the mountains chewing on a few clouds standing sentinel over all. beautiful

now that i'm back in kunming the weather is terrible of course. no sky to be found. hopefully it'll get better. in the meantime, i'll apply for school, find an apartment, and trek around. i'll write more, i promise.

e