Explosions During the Joyous New Year

I am sitting right now in our new apartment in Shanghai…having just decided to get up from lying down and sleeping intermittently after a hefty dinner. And it sounds like I have been transported to a horrific war zone. I hear explosions right outside the window and firecrackers so loud they might as well be going off directly inside my eardrum. It’s like someone is shooting a machine gun through our window…well, at least in the courtyard of the apartment complex. But hey! It’s Chinese New Year! Hooray! For an entire week, people (including the security guards 50 feet away) take great pleasure in shooting off firecrackers and fireworks ALL OVER the frickin’ city between the hours of 7pm and 1am. It’s midnight, so I’m in this mess for at least another hour…unless they all get bored or tired or deaf…all unlikely since they are clearly professionals at these shenanigans. Holy moly! It truly is incredible just how much the Chinese love their firecrackers and fireworks, and how no one has yet to step up and say, “This shite is too f-ing loud all the f-ing live long day….how ‘bout a little breather, eh?”

Well, at least I can chalk it up to being an intriguing and enlightening experience…at least.

- Emma

Harbin Pictures

Here are a small sampling of the pictures that I took on my Harbin trip. I'd match them up and insert them in the other blog entries, but I just don't have time for that...

A picture from my 32-hour train ride to Harbin. Crowded...

As Chinese New Year approached, fireworks stands popped up all over the place. A dream come true.

Sweet bulls made out of soda cans.

Candied fruit on sticks. Pretty much the best thing ever.

Playing one of the ice sculptures.

Dogsleds for pulling people around on the ice. God, I love China.

Another mode of ice transportation. Equally hilarious.

Mickey Moused themed ice sculpture park. Too much for words.

Live animals for sale at the Tiger Park.

Tiger!

This is how they sell ice cream in Harbin. It's that cold!

Ice sculpture castle.

Ice sculpture city.

Park entrance.

Buddhist temple with ferris wheel in the background...

- Jon

Home Sweet Home

I'm back in Shanghai now and it's nice to be back. It's also nice to be able to feel my hands and feet... A fair amount of interesting stuff has happened recently, but I'm pretty tired and I'm going to leave most of it for another day. Instead, I just want to make two final notes about my trip to Harbin.

1) I have not shaved in almost 2 weeks, so I have quite a homeless man beard going right now. Luckily, in China, this beard brings me lots of respect (particularly from cab drivers and men selling food on the street). I've gotten quite a few universal "I respect and admire you as an accomplished and worldly gentleman" recently. This consist of wild gesturing at my scrub, a ridiculously smiling face, and big thumbs up.

2) On my flight back from Harbin I sat was sitting in between two ladies. As the plane started to taxi out to the runway we all buckled our seatbelts. To my surprise, both of these ladies were then unable to unbuckle their belts. They had no idea what to do and were literally trying to tear the fabric apart to get out. I don't think either had ever flown before... Anyways, they were so grateful for my assistance that they insisted on stuffing me full of homemade dumplings on the flight back. I didn't complain :)

- Jon

Harbin: Part V

Today I'm going to skip over my usual first paragraph about the unholy cold in Harbin. Suffice it to say that I've never been colder in my life...

I don't have all that much to say today because it was a pretty slow day. Things started off with a successful trip to a 7-tiered Buddist Pagoda and a Confucian temple. It was temple day! The temples were so-so (after traveling through Thailand I think I've become accustomed to large, ostentatious, brilliantly golden temples and the Chinese ones don't make the cut.) The most interesting part of the temple was probably it's neighbor: a 100-foot ferris wheel. This juxtaposition made for some quality photos...

Over the past 4 days in Harbin I've gotten better and better and making my way around town via public transit. At the beginning, I was a pretty hopeless case and I spent a fair amount of time wandering around looking for my destinations (or buses). Now I've combined upgraded map skills, less shyness about asking for directions in Chinese, and a better sense for the city and I'm getting results. Today I shuttled directly to each of my destinations without any trouble. (Side note: my Chinese character studying has really started to pay off in the map reading department).

I've been eating a lot of hot pot in Harbin recently. Hot pot is one style of Chinese cuisine that is particularly popular in the North (and in cold weather in general). Basically, hot pot consists of a boiling pot of spiced oil-based broth that is shared by the whole table. Then you order all sorts of raw dishes (meats, tofu, veggies) and you drop them in the pot and eat whenever they're cooked. It's simple and amazingly delicious :) I've had it for dinner each of the last 3 nights. Yum! I'll probably always associate Harbin with hot pot because of it...

Here is a joke from my Joke of the Day that made me laugh:

Three leaders of the big beer companies meet for a drink. The president of Budweiser orders a Bud. Miller's president orders a Millers and the president of Coors orders a Coors. When it is Guinness turn to order he orders a soda. Why didn't you order a Guinness everyone asks? Nah Guinness replies. If you guys aren't having a beer neither will I.

- Jon

Harbin: Part IV

I realized that I have failed to mention the Disney themed ice park that I visited two days ago. This is a major omission. On Wednesday I spent part of my evening exploring Zhaolin Park's ice/light sculptures. Before entering I really had no idea what I was in for... Basically the entire park (maybe 5 acres) was filled with larger than life Disney themed ice buildings and sculptures. There was a section for pretty much every Disney movie you can think of. It was an impressive display and it was obviously constructed with great care and at great expense. We're talking a full-on Disney world in ice. To top things off, pretty much everybody at the park rented little 3-wheel scooters (the kind that handicapped people in the US use) to motor around the park. God knows why, but it added another level of ridiculosness to the whole escapade.

Ok, on to today... I spent the morning on a quest to find the Japanese Germ Warfare museum. Once again, I was misled by some poor Lonely Planet directions (my theory is that the Lonely Planet writer drunk himself into a stupor to ward off the cold while he was writing the Harbin section). After practicing a little Chinese on unsuspecting pedestrians I made my way through the freezing cold to the Germ Warfare base. It was a pretty cool museum, but I had high expectations and was a little disappointed. I guess I've been to some very well-done genocide-related museums (in the US and Israel) and this one seemed less well-planned. That having been said, I really enjoyed the museum and I also had a fun time in the neighborhood. I checked out this one outdoor market nearby that was awesome. It seemed like everybody in town was bustling around preparing for Chinese New Year (and by preparing, I mean buying as much food and fireworks as they could carry). The scene was made even more comical by the immense amounts of clothing everybody was wearing. It looked like the whole population had turned out in sumo suits for the day...

Today's other expedition was to Harbin's Ice and Snow Park on Sun Island. Now, with all of the snow/ice sculpture parks its easy to get confused, but this one is the mother of them all! I made it out to the ice park just before sunset. I wanted to take a bunch of pictures in daylight and then compare them with the night pictures (at night the entire place gets lit up by brightly colored lights embedded in the blocks of ice.) Anyways, I had a terrific time wandering around this city of ice buildings and lights snapping pictures and generally being a tourist. A couple of things of note:

(1) Camels do not belong in Harbin. Nobody should ride them around the ice park for any reason. Chinese people are crazy.
(2) I would have gladly sold out on all of my morals just to feel my feet this evening. I was so cold that I cracked and took refuge in the little heated glass coffeehouses where they force you to buy obscenely over-priced hot chocolate). The sad thing is that I know I would do it again.

Ok, that's it for today from Harbin!

- Jon

Harbin: Part III

Today I was told that yesterday we had a bit of a heat wave in Harbin (temperatures right around -20). This floored me. I think I barely survived yesterday. Heat wave, my foot. Frozen snot on the face is proof enough that we were not in a heat wave. Semantics aside, today was even colder than yesterday and almost painfully so with the wind. Normally I would hide inside on a day like today, but I'm only in Harbin for a couple of days so I boarded the bus and made my way down to my first stop of the day: the Siberian Tiger park. When I read about the tiger park in the Lonely Planet, I was a little worried that it would be a crappy zoo and a sad experience, but I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw. Before we get to the tiger park itself, I should mention my journey out there. I took my first bus without a problem to speak of (except my feet basically froze to the floorboards, but thats par for the course with -30 temperatures). I had to switch buses to cross over to Sun Island where the park was and that took a little wandering and questioning street vendors about the location of different buses. Eventually I found the correct bus rolling down the road, so I sprinted out and hailed it. I hopped on and found 3 white people on the bus! The first thought that went through my head was "Sweet! These clowns must be heading to the same place that I'm going, now I can't get lost." Sure enough we all got off the bus at its final stop, which I can only describe as a winter wasteland. There were very few buildings in the area and only 2 people (one of whom fishtailed while riding his motorcycle, crashed, swore, and then went on his way). We were dumbfounded and lost. We ran down the other person, who pointed us in the right direction before going on her merry way too (she was off to make dumplings at a factory, no lie). Anyways, eventually we stumbled down this road, got picked up in a van, and finally ended up at the tiger park. The park was actually really cool! It was a HUGE area (imagine Jurassic Park) and we drove around in these buses and saw tons of tigers hanging out. Tigers are HUGE! End to end I think a full grown tiger might be 7 or 8 feet long (plus a tail). Their heads and paws are massive! I definitely would not want to be attacked by one of them... Oh, the other awesome thing about the tiger park is that you could buy livestock (chicken, duck, or a COW!) to feed to the tigers. A bunch of the Chinese tourists bought chickens for the tigers. The chickens were a sad bunch and barely lasted a second. The tigers would have made short work of just about anything alive though. Pretty intense.

After the checking out the tiger park, I returned to the main downtown area of Harbin and hung out for the rest of the afternoon and evening with my three new friends. It was really nice to chat it up with Jim, Amy, and Rob - all really cool people who had just finished up a Peace Corps tour in Southwestern China. We traded China stories and chatted over chuanr, beer, and hot pot. A very relaxing and pleasant afternoon :)

Time for a random note about Harbin. Everybody in China is supposed to learn (and speak) Mandarin in school, but each region still has its own dialect that can be almost impossible to understand if you are from a different region. Harbinren speak a variety of putonghua (Mandarin) that involves a lot of rrrrrrrrrs. This kind of makes them sound like Shrek with a fishhook in his mouth at all times and makes it very difficult for me to understand. For example, I was chatting with my cabbie yesterday and I asked him what his favorite food was. He said "huorrrrrrrrr guorrrrr" (instead of "huo guo"). Hmmm, hard to describe unless you speak some Mandarin, but the point is that people from Harbin sound funny.

Oh, I also want to make an addition to yesterday's post. After visiting the Jewish museum in Harbin, I should make note of the Chinese attitude toward Jews. Oddly enough, it is one of admiration and enthusiasm. Chinese people think very highly of Jewish people and insist that they are the best people on Earth. This has to be the only place in the world that Jewish stereotypes are viewed positively. Very unusual. My theory is that intelligence, fine arts prowess, and financial knowledge (three stereotypes associated with Jewish people) are all very highly regarded traits in Chinese society.

Pray for warmer temperatures tomorrow...

- Jon

Harbin: Part II

The day started off with great promise. I walked out into the shockingly cold air only to run smack into a tiny little man wearing a military army coat and yelling about the potatoes he had for sale. Now, there wouldn't really be anything unusual about this event (pretty standard for China), but I noticed that this man had a distinguishing facial feature. Well, facial feature is a stretch I guess - this man has snot frozen right on his face. It's cold out!!!

My day was one of ups and downs (note: I consider this man's frozen snot a definite up, I laughed about that for a good 15 minutes). Things started out with a trip to Harbin's New Synagogue where I learned all about the 20,000 jews who moved to Harbin around the turn of the century and basically turned it into the bustling industrial city that it is today. The museum was pretty cool and it had a definitive Chinese flavor (besides the obvious misspellings and the like). The main focus of the museum seemed to be three-fold:
(1) Chinese people are awesome for welcoming the Jews into China
(2) The Jews who moved to Harbin are amazing for building industry
(3) Jews are very smart and are particularly good at playing musical instruments. Another interesting point of note, I had the museum all to myself (apparently the old synagogue/museum is not a huge tourist destination). Oh, I was also able to pass off my Dwight School teacher's ID card as a student ID and got into the museum for free :)

After the synagogue/museum I decided to check out the famous church and square in the area. Tour of the religions so far... Anyways, the square was pretty sweet and the church looked cool (made for some good photo ops). Everything in the area was aritecturely VERY Russian - beautiful stone building, onion domes galore, etc... The other amusing thing about the church is that it was blasting bad pop music at high volume from big amps throughout the whole square. There is only one explanation - Chinese associate Christianity with America and America with Britney Spears. On my trek over to the church I also learned a valuable lesson about navigating Harbin - go underground whenever possible. There are blocks and blocks of subterrean malls all over the place (probably because its too cold to walk around above ground) that make for a very convenient and down-right pleasant way to walk around town.

Ok, one negative note: Lonely Planet's entry on Harbin sucks. It is out-dated and pretty poorly done to begin with... Many of the restaurants listed are no longer in existence and directions to other places that do exist are just wrong. Bah. Usually I have nothing but praise for Lonely Planet, but not here...

I'm writing an awful lot in this entry, so I'm going to wind things up a little bit quicker. I spent the rest of the day wandering around a beautiful walking street in downtown Harbin, Stalin Park by the river, and Zhaoling Park which was also nearby. The whole area was filled with tons of beautifully carved ice sculptures. Highlights include:

(1) all of the ice-related activities in Stalin Park (picture dog-sleds pulling tourists around on the ice, sleds and luges for racing down man-made mountains, weird sleds with metal poles for people to use
(2) the "Russian goods" stores that sold only vodka, Russian dolls, chocolate, and army surplus
(3) CHUANR. I think I ate at least a dozen chuanr today. Harbin has the delicious meat chuanr and also the candied fruit chuanr. I think I'm addicted...

Here are a couple of things that I've noticed about Harbin (besides the cold):

(1) They rarely use any coin change here. I'm currently carrying around a handful of 1 yuan notes in my wallet. Pain in my butt. My theory is that people don't like the coins because their fingers are so cold that they can't use them to pick out the individual coins.
(2) There is something to the rumor that Dongbeiren are tall. I've noticed that I can't see over most of the crowds over here. Sad, but true.
(3) Girls here wear a lot more make-up than in the rest of China. Maybe because they are super-pale from never seeing the sun? Wait, being pale is good in China... No theories on this one.
(4) They share cabs with complete strangers here. One person will hire a cab and start going to his/her destination. While driving, the cabbie will be on the lookout for more passengers (by that I mean yelling "ni qu nar" out the window at any pedestrians). Anybody going in the same direction just hops in the cab. I've yet to figure out how the payment system is supposed to work, but I have a feeling that people are freeloading off me. Ah well, more power to them I guess.

As a final note, I was traveling today without toilet paper. Consequently, we must mourn the loss of two pages of my book that will never return. After this unfortunate incident I stopped in KFC and picked up enough napkins to last me through the week. The Colonel comes through in the clutch again.

Tomorrow will bring many new adventures I'm sure, but thats it for now!

- Jon

Harbin: Part I

I have arrived in Harbin (and after a little bit of wandering around in the tundra I even found my hostel)!!!! First impression - holy god, it's cold. I didn't really have an appreciation for the Siberian winter conditions until I stepped out of the train and felt the moisture in my nose freeze instantly. We're not just talking "brrr, its cold"-type cold. We're talking about the kind of cold that people die in... Also, note to self: next time remember to buy a pair of boots before entering -20 degree conditions. Anyways, I rolled in around 6pm, so all I've done so far is take a bus to the boondocks, find my hostel, and stuff my face with dumplings. Tomorrow I'll find out if Harbin lives up to the hype.

Ok, I should also discuss my recent train ride. First of all, the car was packed to full capacity (I snapped some pictures, but they won't be up on the blog of another day or two...) Everybody was heading home for the "Spring Holiday" (which occurs in the winter) and people seemed to be in a pretty jolly mood. I sat in a section with 4 ladies (and my seat partner turned out to be a PhD English student - convenient...) I spent most of my time reading, trying to sleep in 15 minute intervals, and chatting about all sorts of bizarre topics with people nearby. My favorite conversation involved Nancy telling me the story about "Redcap and the Wolf". It took about 15 minutes of dedicated story-telling before I realized she was trying to tell me the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Haha. Anyways, here are some stats from my train ride:

Time in transit: 33 hours 12 minutes
Time sleeping: approximately 3 hours
Pages read: 542
Instant Soups Consumed: 6
Number of times I was asked what country I was from: at least 20
Number of cigarettes smoked secondhand: infinity

All in all, it was a pretty interesting and informative experience. I got to chat with a bunch of Chinese people in English and broken Chinese and it provided further motivation to improve my language skills. Ok, time for some quality sleeping!

- Jon

Movin' on up...

This isn't going to be a long update because it's been an insanely busy day and I'm exhausted, but here goes... Yesterday we finished up the semester at Suzhou Foreign Language school and moved into our new apartment in Shanghai!!!! It's a busy happening time. We are also entering Chinese Spring Holiday (in the middle of winter) which means that pretty much everybody in the whole country gets a month of vacation. Apparently a couple hundred million will be going home via train over the next week... I've decided to join the crowd and will be traveling 30+ hours to Harbin to check out the Ice Festival in -20 degree temperatures. Then down to Hangzhou with Emma and then another 35 hour train ride down to Kunming for a frisbee tournament and some hiking. Oh, to top it off, Emma's parents are arriving tomorrow! It's going to be an exciting month!

- Jon

Bragging Rights

About a year ago, I went to see a play called The Shipment at The Kitchen (theater), associate directed by my dear dear friend (ahem….sister) Lee Sunday Evans. It was in the raw-ish stages of development, with the director Young Jean Lee open to comments and critiques by the audience. It was created as a “black-identity politics show,” meant to really push the envelope on both white and black perceptions of race…and sort of taking off all the sugar-coated layers and forcing the audience to confront it all. I was impressed by every aspect of the show: direction, acting, writing…to me, it didn’t feel “raw” in the sense of unfinished…just real.

Now, I am proud to announce here that the play has made a few changes and improvements and has earned itself outstanding and respecting reviews in the theater section of the New York Times. Check it out:
The Shipment: New York Times Review

If you live in New York (and have an open mind), I highly recommend this show.

And my compliments to the beautiful and talented Lee Sunday Evans. Keep rockin’ girl!

-Emma

E-A-G-L-E-S

This past weekend the Eagles upset the heavily favored Giants on their way to the NFC Championship game against the Cardinals (Note: Have the Cardinals ever won anything, what's going on!?!?!?) Unfortunately, I was unable to watch the game live (it aired at 2am local time), but from all the highlights that I read and watched it was a tremendous game. What makes it even more tremendous - the Giants lost! Yes!!!! This has to be the greatest year of Philadelphia sports of my lifetime. It's a shame I'm not back in Brooklyn right now - it's much harder to tease snooty Giant fans online... Anyways, this is a happy day for Philly fans everywhere :)

On a related note, many of the Eagles have pledged not to shave their facial hair "to keep the Eagles hot" and many fans are joining them. I'm not sure if this is a testament to Philly fans' solidarity with their team or their dirty hygenic habits. Either way, count me in. Here is a current picture of me and then one of my father and our facial hair. (I tried talking my sister into it, but no dice...)



- Jon

"If you had fur on your nuts, it was a festival out there..."

As you can tell from my title, the temperature has dropped down a couple of notches recently. COOOOOOOLD! It's actually not all that cold, but there is never anywhere that is too warm either (read about the glorified hair dryers that serve as heaters in one of my previous entries.) No real need to moan about the weather on the blog though - I just need to buy myself some long underwear, a real coat, and a pair of gloves.

The semester is winding down quickly. I am entering my last week at school and Emma is all but finished already. It's pretty nice to finish up :) I realized that this Friday is going to be the last time I work for the next 6 years or so... Awesome! Grad school is a beautiful thing. Speaking of which, I'm getting pretty psyched for grad school. I don't know what's come over me these past few years, but I've really been focusing myself on continuing my education while working. It's funny though - I don't think I really fully applied myself academically the whole time I was in college, but now that I'm out of college I'm constantly trying to learn new things and dream of taking courses in Chinese or Statistics again. Swat turned me into a student after all... Anyways, I'm rambling now. The point is that I'm almost done with work and I'm really looking forward to studying Chinese and Stat for the next 6 years!

Recently I've also been planning my next China adventure - Harbin. Harbin is in the Northeastern (read: Siberian) corner of China. This part of the country is known for three things: freezing weather, dumplings (yum), and the Harbin Ice Festival. I'm mostly braving the cold (apparently the average temperature is -20 degrees Celsius) to check out this Ice Festival (tons of cool ice sculptures all over the parks in town), but I'm also looking forward to checking out some other cool things in the area. There is this old Germ Warfare Base that the Japanese set up and a cool Jewish museum about the Russian Jews who moved in during the 1920s and even a Siberian Tiger Park. It should make for an interesting trip... Oh, I've also entered cost-saving mode (not working for the next 6 years will make me a poor little man) and instead of flying up to Harbin I will be taking a 32 hour hard seat train ride. This should save me around 1000 RMB one way, so I figure that after the train ride madness I can afford to eat as many dumplings as I can stuff in my face from the moment I set in Harbin until I leave.

On a totally unrelated topic, I have been messing around a lot with podcasts recently (mostly for ChinesePod) and I really like the format. Emma just introduced me to TED Talks too and they're awesome! Highly recommended for anybody out there with a little time to kill and an interest in Technology, Education, and Design (read: Dad)

That's all from Suzhou. Our last week here!

- Jon

Difference in Disciprine

What is discipline like in a Chinese school? Unfortunately, it's hard for most foreign teachers to describe because most of it goes on behind the scenes. We foreign teachers control our classes in a way similar to the way we would in our home countries, but there is a definite level of respect given to teachers here that is completely absent in the US. Some of this respect is probably due to societal differences in the value of education, but I think a large part of it is also due to the discipline at Chinese schools. It is very rare for a Chinese student to misbehave in class or challenge the authority of a teacher. On the rare occasions when a student causes a problem in class, he/she is immediately taken to the Chinese teacher's office. Now I have no idea what the Chinese teachers say or do to the students, but the students always return regretful and obedient. It's weird and a little unnerving actually.

Anyways, I had two students come in 5-10 minutes late to my first period class today. Normally, when students are late I have them do some sort of minor punishment (that usually involves teaching me some Chinese). Today their Chinese head teacher caught them coming in late and yanked them out of the class. They were gone the entire period and only returned at the very end. I asked what had happened and they said that they were in trouble for being late. I asked what happened when you got in trouble for being late and apparently if you are late your punishment is to stand outside the entire period (keep in mind that we're in the middle of winter). I can only imagine what would happen if an American teacher forced students to stand out in the cold without their jackets for an hour because the students were late...

Chinese disciprine.

- Jon
P.S. Emma has told me that my intentional misspellings of discipline are confusing. It was just meant as a little inside joke for those South Park followers out there...

Bridge to Nowhere

Last week we had a couple of days off for the New Years Eve holiday. We didn't have any big plans, you can't venture too far when you're expected back at work two days later. Mostly we wanted to relax, but we also wanted to do a couple touristy things in Suzhou (we have to do them soon before we move to Shanghai). Our goal was to check out this ancient bridge called Precious Belt Bridge (宝带桥). We figured this would be a relatively short venture, but we didn't account for, what I will call, the Chinese Map Suck feature. I won't get into details (because its too painful for me), but we spent the whole afternoon wandering ALL over Suzhou by bus only to arrive at the bridge (in the middle of this weird industrial shipping area) and find it locked and closed for the day at 4:55pm. Erg. This test run gave us the opportunity to figure things out a little bit better and we homed in on the bridge on day 2 pretty quickly. Here are some pictures from the venture:

One of the most busted buses I have ever ridden. It actually stalled out every time the driver stopped at a light.

Me fishing gunk out of the dirty river

Emma at the bridge.

Me dancing a jig after having successfully found the bridge!

That's it from Suzhou. Only another 10 days left here!

- Jon

That Cursed Fingernail

Normally, when I play Frisbee I need to keep my nails uber short so that I don’t completely split my nail open on a potentially faulty catch (not like that ever happens). But since I’ve been out of commission because of my back issues and now that the season is on pause due to the wintry season, I’ve been a little neglectful. My nails aren’t dangerously long, but they’re getting to point of being just a tad too close to the line of sharpness. All those close by, beware! In fact, my nails mimic with intensely close resemblance the single long pinky nail that Chinese men sport. It is very bizarre. I have yet to figure out for exactly what purpose these men keep their nail (rarely, nails) so long and pointy to such a witch-like extent. Maybe it’s to dial their cell phones. Maybe it’s to point at scared children. Maybe it’s to pick their noses. Perhaps it’s to semi-subtly get in touch with their feminine side. If you have any other hypotheses, please feel free to share. I’m open to new and fresh insight.

Now, women have some long nails too, but I guess I wrote it off as being generically girly. Sorry. Stereotyping…it’s already out there. Deal.

In other news, the time finally came…I got food poisoning. My guess is that some tap water wasn’t properly boiled, but who knows. Bloating to the max for 4 days….including New Year’s Eve. Let’s just say I kept it low key. But I’m still alive—taking medication and recovering, but still paranoid about what I eat and drink…I guess that’s a good thing. Blast you Chinese water and Chinese food! For now, I’ll be switching it up between Western and Chinese food…a little variety and a little peace of mind.

Later,

Em

Sad or Amazing?

The Chinese government has mandated that during the cold winter months every student must perform some sort of physical activity for a half hour in the morning (in addition to the normal scholastic routine). On most days, this activity consists of running in large packs (by class) around the track while a gym teacher chants out "yi, er, san, si, yi, er, saaaaaaaaaan, si!" (one, two, three, four, one, two, threeeeeeeeeeeeee, four!) over the loud speaker with military marching music playing in the background. It's much funnier and odder than I can really describe, but that's the basic idea. Recently, I noticed that the school administration decided to mix up the routine a little by substituting jumping rope in for running. They pack a couple of hundred student into the gym and have them jump rope for a half hour. This all seemed well and good until I walked by the gym a couple days ago and noticed that about 20 kids were jumping rope, while the other couple hundred students jumped up and down while pretending that they had a rope. Sad or hilarious? Or both?

新年快乐！

- Jon