April 1st we are coming home. We have also decided to relocate to Cincinnati closer to family & (old) friends, and affordable housing (you hear about the free $8000 from the oh-so-generous government for first-time home buyers as long as we buy before December?).
Due to recent price hikes in the Seattle Uhaul market, we are flying into Portland on the 1st at the exact same time as we leave Shanghai. Then we will drive our truck straight to Chipotle, before heading up to Seattle. We'll be spending a few days there seeing friends and getting our stuff out of storage before heading to Minnesota for a few more days to see Joel's family before ending up in Cinci on the 10th. Hopefully we recover quickly from the jet-lag.
We will have a cell phone upon arrival to Seattle so give us a call! (206-852-1759)
And lastly, here are some pictures from our last month here. We met an amazingly friendly girl from Anji (she does NOT go to this school, lucky for her) and she was kind enough to take us to several places we would never have gotten to go around here including some tours of authentic Chinese factories, one of which has supplied Office Depot and Walmart with swivel desk chairs. We also got to see the 2nd largest pumped-storage hydro power plant in the world, which basically means a giant man-made lake at the top of a mountain. Fascinating stuff!
This Is Not A Joke
Beijing
Well, we lied about writing about our Thailand/Malaysia trip. We started but only got a few days in. We'll post it if we ever finish, same with our Beijing trip, which we just got back from. For now, though, the pictures will have to speak for themselves.
It was really fun to see Beijing, and even better to spend time with Liz's parents! It was incredibly cold though (below freezing high almost every day) and they "seeded" the clouds to make it snow 3 days. We saw the Great Wall, ate scorpion, saw that huge downtown building that burned down a few weeks ago because of fireworks, got even more addicted to second-hand smoke (on our non-smoking hotel floor!), and rode subways packed tighter than sardines. Ah, China.
Happy Year of the Ox.....Bang Bang!
I am glad we were not in China for the new year. Fireworks are still going off everywhere, even 5 days later (although we have heard fireworks every single day since we got here).
We miss Thailand. China is depressing. We are quite literally very alone here, as there are maybe 5 other people on this entire campus that is our home/prison. The restaurants nearby are all still closed so we have a 45 minute walk to get anything to eat or go to the grocery store. And we are not good at making our own food here because the grocery store is jam packed with all sorts of disgusting unidentifiable things and nothing we would ever want to eat. (That might be different if I knew how to carve and cook a whole duck...not that it would help Liz any). So after 3 weeks of gorging ourselves on familiar food and wonderful Thai cuisine, we are back to pancakes, cereal, Snickers, and ramen. And spaghetti from time to time. And the occasional grilled cheese, which isn't the most filling our nutritious meal. We start teaching again in 6 days. We would've stayed away longer, but plane tickets doubled for the return trip the day after our return flight, I assume because so many Chinese are flying home then too.
Anyway, we had a wonderful time in Thailand and will write a detailed account of our whole trip soon. Here are our pictures while you await the accompanying stories.
The Beach
Pathetic as this may be, I am sitting 50 yards from a stunningly beautiful beach typing a blog and uploading pictures. The weather is perfect, blue sky, cool breeze, free huge breakfast. Obviously I don't want to spend too much time on here, but since we're finally in a place with good wireless, I thought I'd upload our pictures from Kuala Lumpur. We'll actually write about our trip sometime, but not now. Anyway, here are the pictures, I'm gonna go get some sun!
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!
It's been quite a while since we have posted anything and I am tired of looking at our previous title at the top of the blog. Honestly, life has been quite boring here lately, full of anticipation for our upcoming trip, and also full of incredible agony as we try to finish out the semester. Both Joel and I are forging through giving final exams...which we have managed to make take up 4 class periods. Part of our exam is oral so we're spending a couple minutes with each of our students and its actually pretty painful. Hearing the same thing over and over (literally 300 times), "I like listen to musica because I sink is interesting," and "I want to be business because make much money." One of my students was struggling to answer the question, "What is your father's job?" and the good girls in the front row decided to help her out by yelling, "housewife!" so she answered, "my father's job is housewife," and all who heard laughed. It was pretty funny and I know I should have felt bad, but I didn't...not even a little bit...mostly because I gave them all of the questions ahead of time to prepare.
Christmas was a busy day for us because we had to teach in the morning. I had an 8am class giving final exams and Joel came with me since it was Christmas and all. We both had 2 morning classes, but they weren't at the same time as one another so we spent 8-11:30 in class together. We hurried home to make a quick lunch of Ramen noodles before video chatting with Joel's family as they all opened their gifts on Christmas Eve. Then at 1pm we were invited for a "Christmas Party" which was an all day event with the other foreign teachers at the school (1 from Germany, 4 from Japan). We were supposed to go to just a big park, but they ended up taking us to the Bamboo Garden in town. To our surprise and excitement, we got to see Pandas! The park was absolutely dead because its freezing out, but the bamboo was pretty cool and had Joel and I been alone, we would have watched the Pandas for hours. Of course, in true Chinese way, we were scurried along as quickly as possible by a Chinese speaking tour guide yelling through a megaphone...only to walk through the museum. For me, it was really boring. Joel enjoyed parts of it, but a museum about bamboo does not interest me at all. After our trip to the Bamboo Garden we headed to a hotel in town that the founders of our school own for a gigantic Chinese feast. Most of the food tends to be unidentifiable, but for the most part at big fancy meals like this everything is delicious. Of course, I stick to vegetables and things that look familiar. Joel tried goose tongue (which looked sick), octopus, and some white gelatinous ball with black liquid inside. At the end of the meal we were rushed out because there was a Christmas party back at school that luckily Joel and I managed to get out of by having plans to video chat with my family. Being invited to activities with singing and dancing means in some way we will be forced to humiliate ourselves in front of hundreds of people. On our way out the foreign affairs lady handed us all wrapped gifts and as she handed me mine, stated, "Its a cup, for keeping things warm." Good to know. Thanks for ruining the surprise.
Right now we have 4 days off, then head back to school for 2 days of classes (I have 7 total and Joel has 8) and then its one month of relief from this place! We are headed to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on January 9th for 5 days and then off to Krabi, Thailand to bask in the sun and sit on the beach. Our only plans while being there are to ride elephants, take a Thai cooking class, snorkel, and be beach bums. In Malaysia we are looking forward to exploring the city and their famous Batu Caves. They also have shopping malls with theme parks inside which should be fun to see and partake in. We get back from Thailand on Jan 28th, start back to school on Feb 6th, and then head to Beijing for a week with my parents! Though things have been hard and depressing here, we have a lot to look forward to and are coasting along until the time comes.
As for an update on our voting poll, this is a communist country, did you really think your vote mattered?! Just kidding. We appreciate your input into what we should do. Moving to Linyi would have nixed all our ability to travel over this month break due to all the money we would lose out on. So, we decided to stay here, as long as we can. Right now, I think I might only be able to make it until March. With the economy the way it is at home we are also a little worried about finding jobs when we get back. Joel has a potential opportunity to go back to work for one of his old companies and if that pans out we'll leave as soon as they can secure the position for him.
If you're interested in where we will be this upcoming month here are the links to the 3 places we're staying in Thailand:
http://krabidir.com/anfriendlybungalow/index.htm
http://andalanta.com
http://www.sundaresort.com
Anyway, we hope you had a great Christmas season and are looking forward to what lies ahead this year! We love and miss you! Merry Christmas from the far east!
This is a pic of us displaying some lovely Christmas gifts from our students including a giant heart sucker, a stuffed Santa Claus, and a styrofoam snowman.
P.S. You can see new pictures on our Picasa site of our Christmas festivities!
Seaweed: Face removes the horniness
"Natural plant essence,Keep the skin for one whole day of clear comfort."
No joke, that is the entirety of English text written on a small jar of clear face jelly a student was using in class. I had joined Liz for her good class tonight and happened to take a second glance at the label only because "Seaweed" was in big letters on the top. Happening upon the word "horniness" also in the label was one of the biggest little joys of our time here. We both died laughing while all the students insisted on knowing what on earth was so funny. We weren't about to begin trying to explain the meaning of that word to them so we stuck with "it's bad" and something about how things can be really funny when translated wrong.
My theory is that a former teacher at a school like ours got fed up and started teaching the students...well, shall we say, uncouth words that you wouldn't ever find in a dictionary. Come to think of it, that sounds pretty fun..... mwahaha.....
God is sitting on his throne looking down on us from heaven...and laughing.
We enjoy board games. They're a good way to pass the time with each other rather than watching TV or something else of that sort. Needless to say, we can't really play them in China. We didn't bring any of ours and they don't really seem to play anything here besides cards and Mahjong. We spent the first 2 months playing cards, as that was all we had. Then we found a puzzle in the toy section at the grocery store. We finished that in a week then went back to cards. A few weeks ago, we were looking around again and to my great delight, found the game Reversi, also called Othello. It's a simple game, probably less complex than checkers, but also provides ample opportunity for complex strategizing, so I think it's quite fun. As kids, we would always play it with grandpa so it's also a game of fond memories.
Anyway, tonight we decided to pull out our Chinese version of Othello, folded paper board & all, and enjoy a quick game after supper. In the middle of the game, Liz got a bit antsy at having played the same 2 games for 3 months and suggested we peek at the present we had gotten from her parents that we suspected to be a board game. Feeling devious, I agreed. We could just open a corner and see if it might be something different we could play for a few weeks before wrapping it up again to open on Christmas. So Liz grabbed the gift from under our sad little tree and began to carefully peel back the tape on one end.
"Ohh, you've got to be kidding!" she said, laughing in disbelief. In the midst of playing the 1 game we have been able to buy here in China, we had received the very same game, which I had put on my Christmas list a month earlier. At least now we have the real board and not just a folded piece of paper!
Now if that isn't God having a little bit of fun at our expense, I don't know what is. We got a really good laugh out of it. I mean, we've had the presents under our tree for a good week now, and the one time we cave and decide to peak at one was while we were playing the same and only game we can get in China. Ah, cruel, humorous fate.
In other news, we've posted some more pictures. On a few different occasions when we've taught for each other while they were sick, we've had the students write get-well cards. They are quite humorous. Here they are in full.
"Thanks for the chicken. Give me a meet"
Thanksgiving has come and gone here in China without much excitement at all. Joel and I tried to explain to our students the whole concept of the holiday, but much was lost in translation and the kids seemed less than excited about this day of eating and watching football. We forced them to make "hand turkeys" and told them that it was a tradition, even for older people, to make these turkeys at Thanksgiving. We also had them write some things that they were thankful for. The grateful hearts of nearly all 600 of our students extend only to their parents because they give them money, and KFC which gives them chicken. One of my not so bright and lazy "cool" students Mark wrote the lovely title of this post on his hand turkey. He's so smart and wordy, isn't he? I'm really proud of what my 3 months of teaching so far has done to these kids. Teacher of the year in China goes to LIZ!
Joel and I, for some strange reason, decided that on Thanksgiving we would try all of the kinds of ramen noodles our grocery store has to offer. Seeing as this is an entire aisle of the store, upon buying the packaged instant noodles for our feast, we had to pick just one brand to try. I think this was about 15 packs of ramen. After a breakfast of pancakes on Thanksgiving day, we weren't hungry for our meal until about 2pm. After one pack of ramen each, we were quite full. Needless to say, our ambition was squelched and we only ate 2 packs each on Thanksgiving. At the end of the day we ended up just depressed that we had eaten ramen noodles for Thanksgiving and in order to try and salvage the seemingly funny challenge, we've been eating ramen quite a lot ever since. Eventually, we will post a video of our endeavors, but for now, just enjoy the pictures.
In other developments, we are planning for our one month Chinese New Year holiday. We had hoped to go to Tibet and Nepal, but Tibet seems too difficult and expensive because you have to go with a tour group. After seeing Chinese on tours with a tour group, this is really the last thing we want to be a part of. Ever. So...we decided to look into plane tickets just to Nepal. Sadly, these flights are over $1,000 a person and fly through either Bangkok or Mumbai. Too bad terrorists and anti-government protesters really knock this option off the list. Out of curiosity, we looked up tickets to Paris and flights there are cheaper than to any other neighboring country of China. We're seriously considering a trip to the city of love for Joel's birthday and a good break away from here. We'll keep you updated as our hopes of it actually happening unfold :)
The only other piece of news, that is not very interesting, is that we are reading more. We finished all of Grey's Anatomy so we can't use that to fill our time now. I am getting back into fiction and enjoy living vicariously through fake people. I just finished Saul Bellow's Rain King, which was really quite amusing and now I'm lost in The Secret Life of Bees. We have the movie downloaded and ready to watch, but I am forcing myself to finish these last 40 pages before we do! Has anyone read the book and watched the movie? Will I be disappointed with how it is portrayed if I watch the movie? I like the book so much I just want the characters to come to life so I'll probably watch it anyway. I really hate that Queen Latifah is in it thought. Really, Queen Latifah doesn't fit any of the Boatwright sisters! Thankfully, my students are awful and my patience is low so I get a lot of reading done while "teaching" class.
12 Day Break!
Today is my 12th day without teaching. It has been quite enjoyable. Here's how.
I taught last on Nov. 11th, which was a "day 3" in our 5 day rotating schedule. I was sick on day 4, so Liz taught my classes (poor Liz was a gem and didn't have this same break). Day 5 we have off already. That day I also was informed that the next 2 days I would be gone all day at a basketball tournament with the school team. More on that later, but it meant no teaching for me on day 1 and 2. After that, we found out that the students all had a "sports meeting", which was basically just a big track meet of all the classes competing against each other. So day 3 and 4 we had no day classes. We did have to go "babysit" our evening classes on day 3, but we weren't expected to teach and it was essentially just a study hall.
Day 5 we have no classes, and the next day was supposed to kick off a 4 day break. Well, the night of day 4, we were told that the school changed the schedule so we would have day 1 of the next big week before the 4 day break. We had already booked our hostel and made plans to go to the most famous mountain in China so they agreed to let us make up classes for that day later on. So today now ends what we turned into a 5 day break, and the last day of my 12 day break. I have all but forgotten what to do in class at this point, and now our 4 days of classes are squeezed into 3 so we have a rough few days ahead.
Now, I can't really complain, this break has been awesome, I just don't quite understand why we don't have to make up classes because of official school sporting events, but when the school changes the schedule at the last minute and doesn't inform us until long after we've made plans, we are then expected to make up for their mistake. Ok, that's my one gripe, now on with the post.
Last year, the school basketball team (faculty team) was blessed with a 6'4" laowai (foreigner) shortly removed from playing real college basketball. This year, the school basketball team got me. Last year, the school basketball team won the big 2-day tournament, bringing pride to the entire school. This year, the school basketball team lost the big 2-day tournament, bringing shame and disappointment to the entire school. And by lost, I mean absolute dead last. The difference between winning the entire tournament and dead last? This guy.
It was fun though, and I got free shoes, socks, a warmup jacket, and 2 missed days of class out of it. Oh, and 4 very hearty Chinese meals with everything from...well...all I could really say for sure is chicken and salted peanuts. And a glass of disgusting hard liquor for no less than 18 toasts.
The first day, our bus left at 7 in the morning for the half our trip to the school where the tournament was to be held. Once there, all the teams were ushered into lines before entering a gymnasium for the opening ceremony. After a lot of who knows what, we all shuffled out and over to the outdoor courts where I could see my breath. There, they gave us our uniforms and following the lead of the rest of the team, I stripped down to my underwear in public for the first time in my life to change into the POWERWAVE uniform. Nobody seems to care about that sort of thing here, and men change pants regularly for sports, no matter how many high school girls are around. We were on the far court and fortunately for my pride, nobody seemed to notice me. I was kind of dreading it since we foreigners stick out like a sore thumb and usually get stared at.
Along that note, the students at the school would pour out and surround the courts between every class, all day long. At first they noticed the foreigner warming up on the far court and excitedly came over to watch. It may have been the cold, or the lack of enthusiasm for being scrutinized, but I decided to warm up rather lethargically and soon they got bored and went over to watch their home team warm up.
I started the first game for some reason (for various reasons including lack of communication, I hadn't practiced with them for probably 2 weeks leading up to the tournament ) and didn't play all that well. I didn't play all that terrible either, but for some reason, the coach decided to bench me midway through the 1st quarter and left me out the rest of the game. We got killed.
The next game he decided to try me out again and I promptly scored 7 points. They left me in nearly the rest of the tournament (whether or not I played well or clearly needed a breather). That 2nd game came down to the wire. We were ahead by 1 point with the clock winding down. They fouled us and we promptly turned the ball over on the inbounds pass, giving them an easy layup for the lead. For some reason, on our next inbound, they threw it to me. I surveyed the court and passed the ball off just in time for the final buzzer to sound. Why, with seconds on the clock, would they throw the ball to the one guy who clearly has no idea that is the case? Who knows, but it was an annoying way to throw away an easy win. And they weren't easy to come by this tournament for us. By the way, the "buzzer" was actually just a cymbal they would just drop on the ground.
Our 3rd game we got out ahead and were actually playing really well when they decided to "give up" at halftime. So at the end of the 1st day, we were 1-2. The next day we lost our first game pretty handily (I guess we play worse in the morning) and the guy who speaks a few words of English told me "We 7th place. Last year, we champion." I tried to ask if we were done for the day and it seemed that we were. So, we hung out, ate lunch, came back, napped in the grass, and watched some of the women's volleyball. Our school's volleyball team was doing really well. In the middle of watching them play, we were told to go over to the basketball courts again. I wasn't really sure what was happening, but I tied my shoes just in time to start our last and final game, which of course we lost, securing last place.
We apparently had to hang around till all the games were done because there was a closing ceremony. I was bored and missing my wife, having been apart for the better part of 2 days after 2 months without so much as 2 hours apart. There was a woman from our volleyball team who speaks some English who talked to me while walking back to the gym for the closing ceremony. She asked if I was happy despite "failing". I said yeah, it was fun even though we lost, which was true.
On our way, we crossed paths with all the students going back to class. They said something to me, but I didn't understand and didn't really feel like being embarassed again in front of hundreds of students. We laowai get too much unwarranted attention as it is. So I kind of shrugged my shoulders, played dumb and kept walking. A moment later, the lady told me that they wanted a hug. I tried to keep walking and pretend I didn't know what was going on, but she coerced me to turn around, at which point 3 girls ran over and excitedly gave me the most awkward, embarassing hugs ever to occur. Hundreds of students laughed, as well as my whole team, and I turned around as quickly as I could, wanting to avoid a bigger swarm. I did, and the lady explained that they never see foreigners so they are very excited. I figure I probably made them the most popular students in school so I guess I don't really care.
That's about all I have for now. There's not much to write about our trip to Huangshan, except that it was really incredible. Maybe even on par with the Grand Canyon. The pictures don't do it justice, and I don't know if I'll ever get the video we took up on here, or if it's even worth watching, but we captured as much of it as we could. Enjoy all 691 pictures we took!
New Developments
Development #1. We did some research last night and discovered that it might not be so easy to break our contract here & go to a different school. Apparently, they have to give us a release document in order for us to teach legally at the other place. If they so choose, they can withhold said document, which would force us to leave the country 15 days after breaking the contract. Apparently, if this happens, you are never welcome in China again. Ever.
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