Underwater Hockey

Last night I attempted to stay up until 6am to keep Jono Berry company, as it was his last night in China and he would be leaving for the airport at…you guessed it…6am. We ate dinner at Dong Bei Ren (they hadn’t run out of the mushroom dish! yes!). Then headed over to Windows Scoreboard for some drinking games (kings), card tricks, and breathing in second-hand smoke. Then we went to Velvet Lounge, which is very much not my scene…it’s much too cool for school, and I’m much too ridiculous a girl. Anyway, we found a table outside and were just chilling out, when my friend Emily brings over her new friend Chris Tommaso. We start chit chatting and it turns out that he plays underwater hockey. What the what? Underwater huh? No, you’re kidding right? Alas, no, ladies and gents. Such a sport is a real thing but is not a spectator sport and gets little to no publicity. Hmmm, what other sport is awesome and played worldwide but doesn’t get good publicity….I’m drawing a blank, folks. ;)

Check it out (also search it on youtube.com….I can’t add a link cuz China has deemed youtube.com worthy of censorship…even proxies won’t work with it):

http://www.underwaterhockeyworld.com/

Who knew?
Em

C.R.E.A.M.

I spent the past weekend exploring Macau - the Las Vegas of the East. I spent the vast majority of my time exploring the inside of the Wynn Casino while playing poker. Nothing like relieving crazy Chinese gamblers of their money. I ended up making a month and a half's wages after playing for one weekend! Its a shame that I hadn't visited Macau earlier... If I had known how easy the games were, I would have been going down every weekend. It's probably for the best though - playing poker isn't good for the health or the sleeping schedule (I basically played all night, slept in the morning, and explored the city in the afternoon).

In addition to being a gambling haven, Macau is also a really cool old Portuguese city. I had a great time wandering around the old city snapping pictures. It was bizarre to see old stone buildings and European architecture after so long in China. I'm surprised that I noticed something like architecture, but it is actually a shocking difference. All the other buildings in China seem to be either old school Chinese hutong-type buildings, modern skyscrapers, or 70's ex-soviet style dormitories. It's odd what you notice after a year in China...

Jon
P.S. For those who don't know C.R.E.A.M. = Cash Rules Everything Around Me (from the Wu Tang Clan)

Children’s Day

In the States, we have Mother’s Day and Father’s Day… and in China, today we had Children’s Day. To celebrate, the kindergartens where I teach had an English performance. They sang a few songs that they have learned in this semester. My afternoon kindergarten performed in the morning, so I had to missed their show, but I’m sure they did great.

Usually, parents come to the show while they ooh and aah at their way-overly dressed little dumplings. Unfortunately, foot-and-mouth disease has been going around (bizarre, I know…), so the schools are limiting the number of people in and out of the school. So only teachers were allowed to watch the show…which pretty much made the whole thing seem a little pointless. Why show off how well they can twirl if the only people watching are the folks who see those moves every day? But they were still so cute! Bonus: I only had to work a total of 40 minutes today, with no afternoon classes. Sweet leisure time!

I took some great photos of the kids, however, the proxy server is being a bum and won't let me upload any files. Hopefully this will be remedied and you will all be able to bask in the glow of the cuteness emitting from these little Chinese dumplings.

Ciao for now,
Em