New Year! (according to the moon)

Last night at 12 was the start of Chun Jie, aka Spring Festival, aka Chinese New Year, aka Lunar New Year. Lots of food and fireworks. Here are the pictures:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/34632245@N08/sets/72157612962528597/

And yes, I made some of those dumplings (the uglier ones).

Harbin there, done that

Went to Harbin last weekend for the snow and ice festival. It was amazing- I'd definitely recommend it. Also, it was, in the words of my guidebook, the cold was "villainous". Seriously, I wore 4 pairs of socks.
The city itself was cool, too- there is a lot of Russian influence, from the Church of St. Sophia and other old Russian Orthdox churches to Russian restaurants, shops, etc. Not many Russian people, though.
Here are the pictures:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/34632245@N08/sets/72157612812869562/with/3214832608/

P.S. The ghostly-looking guy in the back of this picture is me.

California here I came

Update time! Yeah!

In April I moved to southern California, the first time I've been on the West Coast (not counting inside airports) in 24 years. Time to see if the state is all its residents make it out to be.

I'm living only about a mile and a half from the beach, and I have a bike, a bed, and a surfboard, thanks to this guy I didn't even know named Elijah, who gave me all of it for free. Also I think I've found a church here- it's a place where there not so focused on ceremony and timeframes, but really connecting to God, hearing from him, and showing love to others instead of just talking about it. I've really liked it the two times I've been there, and I think it's where I'm going to start attending.

I'm also getting over my deep-seated East Coast bias against the West Coast. The weather definitely is awesome here, and just about every ethnic group is represented here too- I look around sometimes at all these different-looking people getting along in such a beautiful place, and that American pride starts swelling up. Then some guy carrying a surfboard yells out some vulgarities at me while I'm sitting on some steps and eating some ice cream, and some kid flicks me off from his mom's SUV a few minutes later. And so my love-hate relationship with my country continues.


Anyway, here are some recent pictures:





















Irvine, aka the middle class suburban American Dream


















Santa Monica






















Hiking in some National Park near Pasadena

















In and Out- A fast-food chain here that Californians LOVE. It was pretty good.























Me in Santa Monica

Update- in points format!

Feb. 6, 2008- Watched the most extensive, longest fireworks/firecrackers display I've ever seen as the Chinese New Year started in Beijing. Unfortunately, I didn't have a camera with me, but take my word for it, it was amazing.

Feb. 7, 2008- Returned to the US after a year of teaching in China.

Feb/early March 2008- East Coast of the US, from Virginia to Maine. Mostly in DC. Unsuccessfully tried to introduce Chinese hackysack into local population.

March 19, 2008- Flew to Costa Rica to see my parents/ live the good life (for a little while).

Still alive

If there's any confusion regarding the title of this post, let me explain. I'm not about to recount some harrowing near-death experience, but rather it's a reference to the prolonged lack of posts which has been brought to my attention by my many readers. And by "many", I mean "between one and two". So here's a summary of the past 3 months:

Most things have been the same- Lorraine is still here, teaching with Michelle and me, and I still have mostly the same amount of students and classes, although a few have changed. The cold has cut down on bike riding/jianzi playing, but I still ride my bike to and from school, and play jianzi when we can find some semi-warm place to play. Also my camera's still broken.

Tom (my Kiwi classmate) had a Christmas party, in which we had some boxing matches to celebrate Boxing Day (a few days early). Since the only other guy in my weightclass (see: middle schoolers) dropped out, Tom said that he'd box me, but to make it fair, he'd only use one hand. We also all had costumes. Then Tom left China, which was lame, because we still hadn't made The Ping Pong Kid movie or done a lot of other things we were planning. Now he's back in The Shire, eating sheep, having barbecues for Christmas, and living free from fear of the abundant, non-poisonous animals that inhabit their little islands.

Christmas was nice. I did a lot of Christmas activities and talked about the Christmas story in my classes, and taught our kids Jingle Bells and We Wish You a Merry Christmas. We had a Secret Santa gift exchange at our school in which my name was misread as "Michelle", and thus I received a nice pair of sparkly butterfly earrings. I think they'll go well with the rainbow-colored glass dragon necklace I got from one of my students. Also, I received socks, which were surprisingly un-feminine. On Christmas day, we went snow tubing.

For New Year's we didn't set off any fireworks (couldn't find any, as hard to believe as that sounds), but we did eat some delicious Stroop Waffles with some Dutch friends. They were a blast- and they taught us some useful Dutch phrases, like "pipidipip! Yahoo!" and "muda cook".

That's about all that's happened of note that I can think of. Just one more month left, and then back to the motherland!

P.S. I decided to turn No-shave November into No-shave winter. Having a thin beard, it's not as out of control as it might sound. It's kind of like what my brother Steve looks like if he doesn't shave for a week or two.

Two weeks ago was National Day, which is sort of a Chinese Fourth of July. And in China, like in the US, there are fireworks (as there are pretty much every week), and some people also ate barbacued meat. However, instead of just one day to have a picnic and wave flags, here many people had a whole week off school or work. Being some of those people, my sister and I decided to do a little in-country traveling, seeing some sights and going through some bigger cities. I felt a little like a small-town boy, amazed at how big the cities were, how many western commodities they had, the traffic, pollution, and the prices. For instance, a taxi in our town is usually about 7-8 yuan ( 1 USD), but we took some taxis in other cities that cost 3 and 4 times that much! I know that being shocked at the expense of a $4 taxi ride is laughable in the States, but on a Chinese salary that's a lot!

Although it was nice to see a little more of the country, I was glad to head back to the blue skies, low prices, and familiar faces of our small city. And also the jianzi. One night after playing I ran into a friend (we'll call him Jim) eating at little street barbacue place with some of his friends, and he invited me to join them. He then proceeded to order a good amount of some unidentifiable meat for me to eat, despite my protests that I was full. I couldn't make out exactly what the pieces were in the dark, but I was under the impression that they were some sort of squid pieces or maybe animal fat. I managed to get them (and keep them) down, aided largely by frequent swigs of banana soda.

This month a new English teacher from Canada, Lorraine, started working at our school. She's adjusted really quickly, has had a really good attitude, and has taken over some of our classes, which has been great for Michelle and me. Now instead of finishing at almost 8:00 six days a week, I have a night or two off, which has been great. I now have the time to prepare things for dinner other than ramen noodles, and also have gotten back into language study.

Here are some pictures we took on our trip in the city of Xi An, the ancient capital of China. We rode around the top of the city walls, visited historic sites, and saw the famous Terra-cotta Warriors- built to guard the tomb of the Qin Emperor over 2000 years ago.
They're pretty awes.

The sky was always this gray color. These pictures were taken around mid-day. Sometimes a small, sickly orange orb would be visible in the sky, which we realized was the sun.

I have come not to praise Chinese classes, but to end them

"Pengyoumen, Zhongguoren, tongxuemen, jie wo nimen de erdou." (Friends, Chinese, Classmates, lend me your ears). Those were the first words of my speech, and already I was getting a little laughter and a lot of confused looks. I guess some things don't translate so well. Two weeks ago was the end-of-semester ceremony at the university where I study Chinese, so all the Chinese language students, teachers and staff (around 40 people) met together in our classroom for speeches, awards, pictures, etc. I was chosen as the representative for our class, and thus was one of the two students asked to give a speech (in Chinese, of course). With only about a day and a half to prepare, I managed to come up with a short speech in Chinese, which I got a Chinese-speaking friend to proofread. I didn't have time to commit it to memory first, so I read it off a paper, but I think it went over pretty well. It was the first time I've really had to speak in Chinese in front of a crowd like that, but not the last- the next week I was up in front again, although this time it was a smaller crowd (just the teachers and our class), and I wasn't speaking, but singing.

Yes, you read that right. For our final oral exam, our teacher told us that we had to stand up in front of the class one by one and speak in Chinese for around 5 minutes. My classmate Tom and I found out we could sing instead of talking, so the night before the exam we wrote up some Chinese songs, and the morning of the exam we got there a little early and made something up on Tom's little keyboard to go along with it.

Was it rough? Yes. Did they still love it? Absolutely.

I managed to put up some of the less-rough part for your viewing pleasure.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mZWHb7dqOk
For those having trouble reading the subtitles, it says:

Wang Teacher- you are not in our dormitory- Wang Teacher- you are not in my house either- Wang Teacher- but in my dreams I meet you - Wang Teacher- next to your donkey

I wake up (wake up), and I miss you (miss you) (repeat)



I should explain that I had a dream a few weeks ago where our speaking class teacher, Ms. Wang (in Chinese "Wang Teacher") was in the crowd, with a donkey, which she gave me so I could escape from people who were trying to kill me for stealing a giant gold coin.

P.S. Sorry I forgot to post this last month after writing it.