Asian Invasion

Underwater Hockey

2009-06-20T12:44:00.001+08:00

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.

2009-06-12T10:47:00.000+08:00

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

2009-06-01T22:42:00.000+08:00

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

Oh, Cruel Sun

2009-05-31T14:30:00.000+08:00

Yesterday, I had a physiotherapy appointment to work on my back problem. It went really well. I started seeing a new doctor who seems really smart and has helped me tweak the exercises I was doing so that they’re more helpful and more fitted to what I need, and I’ve actually begun to feel a bit of improvement… Let’s just say, my back doesn’t hurt quite as much on a constant basis. Yes!

New news: in addition to swimming every other day, I’m also allowed to jog! Slowly, gradually, with great caution, but nonetheless, jog I shall. And jog I did. While the freesbisti did their thing today at the park, and while I attempted not to feel intense jealousy their ability to run and sprint and lay out with ease, I jogged around the field slooooooooooooooooowly for about 15 minutes. It hurt a little at first, but I got in a good groove. Ya hear that, Body! You’re gonna get better! Ha! Then I did my stretching routine, and watched the fit gals and girls scrimmage.

Even though the sun was blazing, I was so out of the habit of playing sports and hanging out outside that the concept of sunscreen didn’t even give me the courtesy of crossing my mind. Result: even though I’m wearing a tube top, it still looks like I’m wearing a regular tank top. Stark contrast between red and scarily pale. It doesn’t hurt (too much) and I haven’t started peeling (yet). Moisturize I will.

Lesson: even though it’s gazillions of miles away, the Sun will smack you up like nobody’s business. So take precautions. Use protection. ☺

- Emma

Shaq

2009-05-30T22:09:00.000+08:00

I was on my way to a math tutoring job in Minhang (Chinese for demolished dead zone) and I was happily chatting away with my cabbie about the NBA finals. Side note: basketball is huge here and people love the NBA, especially Kobe. I hate Kobe and love Shaq, so I started talking to the cab driver about Shaq. He didn't seem to understand, so I said it slowly. Shaquille O'Neal. Then he got it and said "Oh, O'Neal. Women jiao ta O'Pang." A rough translation of this is "Oh, O'Neal. We call him O'Fat." Hilarious.

Jon

Pesky Censorship

2009-05-29T18:34:00.000+08:00

The Chinese government's censorship of Blogger has made blogging more difficult than I had anticipated. They are slowly figuring out and shutting down the proxy servers that I've been using. Bah.

In any case, life is moving along here in Shanghai. The weather is consistently amazing. Almost every day the sun comes out and shines down brightly. It's wonderful - it's amazing how much sunlight can effect one's mood. (300 days of sunshine every year in Colorado!)

Recently, I've also been doing a lot of planning for our month-long trip in Western China. I'm ridiculously excited about this adventure! Spending 30 days exploring Xinjiang and Xizang has been one of my dreams since we arrived in China. I've been checking out information on the web and in guidebooks about the area and the pictures are amazing! It's going to be refreshing to get out of the mass of steel, concrete, and people and into a more natural environment, Oh man, I can't wait!

Jon

Censorship

2009-05-21T00:14:00.000+08:00

With the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre coming up, the Chinese government decided that the best course of action would be to block Blogger.com (oh, and make it really hard for foreigners to acquire visas). Gah. So, so very annoying.

You might be thinking to yourself right now, "Self, if blogger is blocked in China and Jon is in China, then how is he updating the blog." This is a good question. Basically, there are a whole host of different proxy servers that can be used to get around the Great Firewall and effectively avoid the blocks that the PRC has instituted in all of its infinite wisdom. The government censorship is really doing nothing more than impede my ability to post quotidian posts about life over here. 加油，中国！

Anyways, this is the reason that I haven't been posting recently, but I will dig under the Great Firewall to bring you revolutionary news, such as what I had to eat yesterday (delicious pasta made by Emma) or the Ratatat concert that we're going to tomorrow...

Hope all is well in the outside world!

- Jon

Awesome

2009-05-11T11:24:00.001+08:00

You can't do this on your bike...

Seen right outside my apartment last week...

- Jon

X-Games

2009-05-10T11:24:00.010+08:00

About a week ago one of our friends gave us 4 free tickets to the Asian X Games. With nothing better to do on a Saturday morning, Emma, Kevin, Zoey, and I made our way out to watch the best alternative athletes in Asia as they skateboarded, rollerbladed, and jumped motorcycles. We poked around the grounds for a couple of hours and watched skateboarders do jumps on the halfpipe, rollerbladers zoom around their course, and extreme drink/food companies shamelessly promote their products (nothing like free shots of Mountain Dew!) I'd say that the two highlights for me were the motorcycle jumping (which was insane) and seeing how much change we could stick between Emma's toes (an astounding 8 RMB in 1 yuan coins and 8 RMB in jiao). Mostly though, it was really fun to relax and wander around the games. Here are some pictures!

Skateboarder doing sweet tricks

Motorcycle Madness

More Motorcycle Madness

Emma showing off her skills!

Me desperately trying to stretch my toes apart (to no avail)

How much money can you fit in between your toes?

- Jon

Jeju Pictures (Part 1)

2009-05-03T22:46:00.010+08:00

View of the Ocean from the Hotel

Dinner, Pre-Rubix Chaos

Kevin doing what he does best

Post-changing Orange Fashion Show

Shanghai Seven

Throwing Action ShotPost-tournament Team Photo

- Jon

Fiesty Children

2009-05-02T06:52:00.001+08:00

Most of my little students are charming and adorable and eager to learn, but some are a little….rambunctious. Not normal kid-rambunctious…bordering on defiant, which just doesn’t happen (or isn’t allowed) in China. Well, last week, a little punk (who has been pushing all of the teachers’ buttons for awhile) stood up from his miniature chair, walked into the middle of the room (we sit with the chairs in a horse-shoe shape), and projectile spat…yes, spat…on to the floor. I froze. I was so stunned. I expected the teacher to haul his ass into the hall and give him a piece of her mind…and hand…which I’ve seen to be the norm. But no. She just gave him a glaring look, and I proceeded with the lesson. Yikes.

I guess I give the kid kudos…it was a pretty ballsy move.

- Emma

Trashcan Smoker

2009-04-30T16:39:00.003+08:00

A long time ago I talked about building a meat smoker in China. The project has been developing really slowly for a couple of months (mostly due to laziness, but it is also difficult to locate and acquire certain materials in China). Anyways, last week I was able to track down the last necessary piece (a very small hot plate) with the help of one of my students and TaoBao (China's version of eBay). With all the pieces in place, all that remained was a little metal cutting and hole punching. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the required tools, so yesterday Charlotte and I hit the road in search of tools.

We walked down Wulumuqi Lu past the fruit shops and flower ladies. Eventually we happened upon a bike repair man in an alley. This might sound a little sketchy for our readers outside of China, but its pretty much par for the course out here. So we asked the bike repair man if he could drill some holes in our trashcan/meat smoker and he said no problem, but his friend would have to bring a drill over. We're all just standing around in this alley waiting for the drill to arrive and the guy asks where we're from. We tell him that we're American and he starts talking about 9/11, Obama, and terrorists. It was really weird. Usually, when you tell people that you're American they just smile say "Obama" and give you the thumbs up or they just look at the other Chinese people smile and say "mei guo de" or American... Anyways, this goes on for a little while and then his friends arrives with the drill hops off and starts checking out the trashcan. He decides that it should be 50 RMB to drill 4 little holes and 1 big hole. His price estimate takes me by surprise and we deny it right off the bat. We try to bargain the guy down to 20, but he won't go any lower than 30 RMB. I don't understand why though... The job was for 5 minutes of labor. If I asked a mechanic in the US to drill the holes, he'd probably laugh and do it for free... In the end, the guy gets all angry at us and storms off with his drill and we carry the trashcan back to the apartment.

As we walk into the apartment complex, I realize that the complex's repair guys probably have the tools necessary for the job. We ask the security guards and we are led down to the underground repair man lair (basically a room where all the repair guys just sit around and chat all day). We explain the situation and sure enough, the guys pull out a couple of drills and we go to town on the trashcan. Everybody seemed to enjoy the process - I got the holes I needed and the repairmen thought the whole project was hilarious. We told them that the holes were for an art project...

All in all, it was a solid little adventure and now the smoker is ready for its first test! I'm sure you'll hear more about it in the near future!

- Jon

Heavy is the head that eats the crayons...

2009-04-28T23:02:00.003+08:00

(One of my favorite quotes from the most recent 30 Rock episode)

It's been an eventful week or so. I've been a bit behind on the writing, but I'll try to just keep plugging along.

This past Sunday was one of my favorite days in Shanghai. Things started out in the morning with a cooking lesson from Phil's Mom. Emma and I subwayed over to Line 3 and met Phil at the train station. After a short walk through the pleasant early summer weather, we arrived at Phil's house and started cooking immediately. We all hung out in the kitchen while Phil's Mom began cooking. She taught us how to many tons of amazing Chinese dishes (hong shao niu rou, some crazy tofu wheat gluten thing, delicious monster shrimps, yummy lima-like beans). Emma was taking notes on the process and I was scribbling down all sorts of nonsense in Chinese. It was actually a pretty hilarious conversation to follow. I'd ask for the Chinese name for some sort of mushroom and Phil's Dad would tell me and then I'd write down the characters and ask some other question. Phil'd Dad would respond in Chinese (and sometimes Shanghainese) and I'd try to keep up with the conversation (Phil would back me up with English translations whenever necessary). It was a lot of fun just sitting in the kitchen and chatting! The meal itself was also amazing and Phil's parents were amazing hosts! Emma and I are going to invite them all over some time for a big Italian dinner. Everybody wins :)

After this glorious Chinese feast/cooking lesson we all made our way over to the Century Park fields for a 4-hour frisbee fest. Teams from Nanjing and Ningbo joined us for a 5-team friendly round robin. The weather was perfect and it was great to run around. Nothing like a little sunny frisbee after lunch :) It was awesome to have so many people from the Nanjing and Ningbo areas join us too. Their teams are really making progress and rapidly developing skills. It's great to see!

A good day isn't complete without a trip to the Dong Bei Ren restaurant for some cheap eats and cold beer. The food service was a bit slow (we arrived at 8pm which is too late apparently), but there was plenty of beer and lots of fun drinking games were played. My favorites involved overlapping hands slapping the table and counting games (which are surprisingly difficult when not played in your native language...)

All in all, a very successful day!

- Jon

Midget Obsession

2009-04-27T11:03:00.003+08:00

One of my friends in Shanghai recently sent me this unbelievable article.

Lion Mutilates 42 Midgets in Cambodian Ring-Fight

An African Lion much like this is responsible for the death of 28 Cambodian Midgets

Spectators cheered as entire Cambodian Midget Fighting League squared off against African Lion
Tickets had been sold-out three weeks before the much anticipated fight, which took place in the city of Kâmpóng Chhnãng.
The fight was slated when an angry fan contested Yang Sihamoni, President of the CMFL, claiming that one lion could defeat his entire league of 42 fighters.
Sihamoni takes great pride in the league he helped create, as was conveyed in his recent advertising campaign for the CMFL that stated his midgets will "... take on anything; man, beast, or machine."

This campaign is believed to be what sparked the undisclosed fan to challenge the entire league to fight a lion; a challenge that Sihamoni readily accepted.

An African Lion (Panthera Leo) was shipped to centrally located Kâmpóng Chhnãng especially for the event, which took place last Saturday, April 30, 2005 in the city’s coliseum.

The Cambodian Government allowed the fight to take place, under the condition that they receive a 50% commission on each ticket sold, and that no cameras would be allowed in the arena.

The fight was called in only 12 minutes, after which 28 fighters were declared dead, while the other 14 suffered severe injuries including broken bones and lost limbs, rendering them unable to fight back.

Sihamoni was quoted before the fight stating that he felt since his fighters out-numbered the lion 42 to 1, that they “… could out-wit and out-muscle [it].”
Unfortunately, he was wrong.

You don't hear about that everyday... Unfortunately, I've been informed that its not true...

- Jon

Gregory Brothers

2009-04-26T01:54:00.003+08:00

The Gregory Brothers rock my world!

Enjoy the video!

- Jon

Jeju: Part II (Frisbee)

2009-04-25T20:26:00.003+08:00

There were all sorts of horror stories regarding the Jeju weather. Before we left for Jeju, veterans of the tournament told me stories of 35 mph winds in years past (wind is the bane of a frisbee player's existence). Luckily, the sun was shining and the skies were calm from Saturday morning until the end of the tournament. In fact, I don't think I could have asked for better weather. It was glorious!

I've been to tons of frisbee tournaments in a handful of countries and Jeju stands out in my mind as one of my favorites. The whole tournament is organized by the local Korean government and they cover all expenses for the weekend. They also provide shuttles from the hotel to the fields, delicious Korean lunches (kimchi be damned), and even provide alcohol and food at the party. The games were played on fields that were used when South Korea hosted the World Cup. It's actually kind of unbelieveable. Frisbee players aren't used to getting that kind of official sanction or support.

The tournament facilities and organization were top-notch, but there was a lot of other great things about this tournament. I like the idea behind Gnarly 9's tournaments. (For the non-frisbee players out there: Gnarly 9's are tournaments where each team is limited to 9 players. These tournaments place a special emphasis on endurance and team chemistry.) 9's tournaments force teams to come together and play as a unit. It is a great way to develop team chemistry on the field and I thought that our team did a great job of that this weekend. It was also pretty sweet to play a greater variety of teams. We played teams from China, Korea, and Japan. There was even a team from Guam at the tournament! The frisbee scene in Shanghai is great, but its really nice to see the whole international frisbee community in action.

I don't want to go on too long about the tournament because its over and done with now, but I feel like I should give the readers some sort of report so here goes... The first day consisted of 4 pool play games. We played a Japanese team and 2 tough Korean teams (during one of the Korean games I caught a forearm to the face while marking a huck giving me a nice black eye) and Beijing. Things were pretty messy in the first game, but we rolled to an easy victory (11-2 or so). The next game started off badly with the Korean team getting ahead of us, but at 4-2 we started hitting out stride and didn't look back. I think it was good for our team to go down a bit early in the tournament because it forced us to figure things out offensively (and prompted our effective to switch to vert stack). We ended that game and the next one with decisive victories at 11-6 before playing Beijing. This was a fun game to play in because it contrasted the differing styles of the two Chinese teams. Beijing is full of smaller guys (who have very good throws) and the Shanghai team is full of big runners (who can't throw to save their lives). We set the tone early in this game with some pretty aggressive D and lots of big hucks and rolled to an 11-6 win. It was a satisfying victory! On Sunday we finished up pool play against a team from Jeju Island and then faced Evil HuWa (Shanghai's second team) in the quarterfinals. It was fun to play both of those teams, but the best game of the day came in the semis against a very good Japanese team. I don't remember too many details from this game, but I do remember that both teams played really well. The IKU team took half around 7-5, but we stormed back in the second half to take the game around 13-11. It was a great comeback and I enjoyed the game immensely. Unfortunately, we met a much fresher Korean team in the finals and fell to them 13-7 or so (I cramped up at 4-4 in this game). On a whole, it was a great weekend for frisbee :)

Pictures will follow shortly. I'm still going through the 4398we849854789 pictures taken by Kevin!

- Jon

Jeju: Part I (The Hike)

2009-04-22T22:47:00.002+08:00

I spent the past weekend playing frisbee, partying, and exploring Jeju Island. Jeju is a relatively large island located south of South Korea and northeast of Shanghai. It is a common honeymoon destination for Korean couples and, for some reason, the local government has also decided to sponsor an international frisbee tournament there. Bizarre... Anyways, I'm going to break my Jeju blogging up into three sections. This first section will be about my exploration of the island on Friday, The second section will focus on the frisbee tournament and the last part will be about the Rubik Cube party.

About 15 Shanghai frisbee players arrived together in Jeju early Friday afternoon. Our first impressions of Jeju were overwhelmingly positive. I had been told horror stories about the windy/rainy spring conditions in Jeju, but found the island surprisingly clear, sunny, and calm. It was gorgeous! After passing through customs in the airport, we hopped on a bus to our subsidized hotel rooms (thank you Jeju government - China, get on the ball!) Sun Beachy hotel was everything I hoped for (a bed) and more (buffet breakfast) and it had great views of the water to top things off. Side note: pictures will follow as soon as I can snag Kevin's memory card...

Our next stop on the island was a small Korean restaurant. Ordering food was damn near impossible due to our utter incompetence using the Korean language. In the end, we dragged the waitress outside and pointed at pictures of food on the wall. Sad state of affairs... In an odd way, this experience helped me get a better picture of my Chinese skills. In China, I am constantly aware of my language deficiencies. It is always apparent what I am NOT able to say as I fumble through conversations. But, here in Korea for the first time I felt what it was like to be completely useless in another language. It helps me see how far I've come in Chinese and how much I CAN say.

After lunch, Hugh and I wandered down to the water where we bought delicious oranges and explored the bridges and rocky beaches. I stopped ot read on a rock for 20 minutes or so as Hugh went boulder-hopping away. After finishing my chapter, I packed up my book and set off in search of Hugh. I followed the bends of the shoreline for over an hour exploring caves, scaring mountain goats, being scared by pheasants, and yelling for Hugh. I was always confident that I'd find him around the next bend, but around sundown I gave up hope and headed back. It didn't make any sense though - one side of the shore was ocean and the other was a cliff. Where could he have gone? Ah, some mysteries will never be solved. Anyways, the path was beautiful and I enjoyed myself immensely. If Jeju were a cab driver, I'd give it 4 stars.

- Jon

B-Boy Battle & Sake Bar

2009-04-21T23:29:00.002+08:00

On Saturday night, I went to see a b-boy battle at Racks, a bar & billiards lounge. Lining the hallway and the floor were skater-looking kids, all Asian, with clothes that looked they had been graffiti and hats with a super stiff rim. For the first hour or so, kids were just goofing around and doing their thing....not much of a show. Which I thought was a huge disappointment....until I realized that the show hadn't started yet! Whew! There was then a combo of crew and individual battles. One crew had a girl, and it was awesome. She mostly did acrobatic stuff, but it was still hot. I got some great footage too....they are so talented and crazily strong and flexible. I am not worthy!!!

One slight disappointment was that I thought the famous Korean crew, The Gamblers, were going to be there. Ever since I saw the documentary Planet Bboy (which you should all see), they've been on my radar. Instead, one guy from the crew, "Bruce Lee," was a judge. At least I got to see his moves at the beginning...he was clearly the best one there.

Later I went to a sake bar with Geoff: 100RMB for all you can drink sake and Japanese Smirnoff Ice-esque beverages. I only had one square cup (yeah, weird) of sake before switching drinks… that stuff was mighty strong for my test buds. The best part, though, were the strange characters I met. One guy looked like the epitomized stereotypical California dude. And where was he from? You got it. When he said where he was from, I somehow heard Washington, so I asked, “Oh, you’re from Washington State?” He responded, “You’re from Washington State?” I said, “No, are you from Washington State?” Again, he asked, “You’re from Washington State?” At which point I gave up: “Yes, I’m from Washington State.” Not like I cared that much anyway…He now lives in Macau (which is the Vegas of China) and is in Shanghai doing market research: he sells diamonds for Ermenegildo Zegna, but only on sunglasses. You know the big bug glasses with studded shiny hints to add bling? That fact alone had me giggling for a while. But more inner laughter ensued when he pitched his “brilliant” idea for a play. He had no plot line, no beginning characters. Just the first two lines of the theme song: “The nights of Shanghai! The lights of Shanghai!” It’s now stuck in my head, so he may be on to something. Silly boy.

After some short yet comical side conversations, another guy comes over to me (mind you, Geoff has abandoned me at his point and is nowhere to be found). Somehow, he gets the idea that Geoff has a crush on me, and though he does adore me, I’m sure….he’s more like my brother than anything else. I tried to deny it to Sir Creepy, as he closed in on me and squinted his eyes all dazed-like, but he wouldn’t budge. That started the story of lies. I just started making stuff up, most of which I can’t remember, but it was really fun to start spewing out fun stories and making up random stuff about me (e.g., I only date Asian and Black guys…Sir Creepy was white, so it seemed convenient). Somewhere in there I did mention that I had a boyfriend, but the creepiness prevailed. The best part was his jacket: an MC Hammer style gold silk jacket with two giant fish on the front boob area…and it was reversible!!! Ha! He even took it off and flipped it inside out to show me. It was all I could do to not laugh…

Later, he asked for my number (persistent bugger), and for some reason I gave him a wrong number: I changed the last digit of my actual number. I know, I know, I should’ve just said something like, “No, sorry…” But I didn’t…and here’s the kicker: he got another digit wrong in addition to the fake one. So I could’ve given him my real number and he still would have gotten it wrong!

Overall, a splendid day.

- Em

Eco Design Fair

2009-04-21T11:39:00.003+08:00

On Saturday, I volunteered at the Eco Design Fair, which showcases green products that use organic materials and are environmentally and socially responsible, sold by vendors at little stands. There was organic produce, all natural toothpaste, travel packages for eco-tours, and more. I MC-ed the fashion show, which highlighted really beautiful clothing from a bunch of different designers and stores that use natural fibers, no dyes, organic processes, etc. A huge bonus was that I also got to wear a smokin' hot black dress (boobalicious-ness was a bonus) and a silky coral scarf. I also got my make-up done....so indulgent in girlyness, I love it! I also got free lunch (a delcious falafel wrap)...bonus.

Then I took pictures and paroused....clearly, I bought some stuff: delicious Australian yogurt, yogurt cake, yak cheese, and a t-shirt from the organization Roots & Shoots, which develops organic gardens in Shanghai and was founded by Jane Goodall, who is a rockin' lady.

To top it all off, it was such a gorgeous day! Super warm, beautiful and sunny, a light restorative breeze - it made me so happy! I'm really affected by the weather, which is a bummer since Shanghai is usually so cloudy and gloomy. But when a gorgeous day comes along, I feel so much more relaxed and positive and spontaneous and giddy. :) Don’t worry: I’m not completely devoid of smiles on cloudy days…at least I try not to be…

- Em

Dilbert

2009-04-17T00:39:00.004+08:00

I love Dilbert and these two made me laugh:

Now I'm off to Jeju Island for a Gnarly Nines tournament! Hooray for frisbee and traveling!

- Jon

More Pictures from Tianjin and Beijing

2009-04-16T15:56:00.009+08:00

Checking out a sweet bridge at the Summer Palace

Outside the Bird's Nest in the Olympic Green

Kevin being evil

Workers' Forward!

Pictures at Tiananmen

Milan wearing the wig at the tournament

Celebrating at the top of the Great Wall!

Standing Room Only

2009-04-14T23:20:00.009+08:00

Our return from Beijing happened to coincide with the Tomb Sweeping holiday here, so the train was packed beyond capacity and we were unable to purchase any tickets that included seats. Instead, we were left with tickets that guaranteed us arrival in Shanghai, but no seats for the 13 hour overnight journey. Chinese railways be damned!

We started off crammed in the aisle between seats on car 3 (a hard seat car). Our plan was to make our way to the dining car as quickly as possible and chill there until they kicked us out. Unfortunately, the Chinese railways were one step ahead of us. Knowing that the hard seat compartments would be crowded well past capacity, they locked the doors between hard seat cars and the sleeper cars (effectively sealing us in the 3rd class seating). Luckily, Phil's smooth talking got us entrance to the sleeper cars. We chilled in the dining car just chatting and celebrating Sara's birthday with a little cake until around midnight. At this point, we were kicked out of the dining car. We all spread out in the sleeper cars in a weak attempt to avoid being kicked back into the crowded hard seat compartment. This weak attempt did little good and I was rounded up by an attendant and booted back to where I belonged. Since I was stuck in the hard seat compartment (without a seat), I decided to make the best of things and struck up some friendly conversation with my neighbors. We ended up playing Chinese card games until 3:30am! It was a blast :) After some sweet card games and chatting, I ended up just lying down in between the seats and falling asleep. It was more comfortable than I expected...

Here are some pictures from the trip to Beijing (in reverse order):

Me sleeping on the train back from Beijing

The triumphant team returns home

Artsy shot of the Great Wall

Resting at the top

Marking some territory

Ok, I'm bored of posting pictures. I'll get some more up tomorrow...

- Jon

Pessach

2009-04-13T12:26:00.000+08:00

Last Saturday, I hosted a Passover seder at our apartment. I was a little nervous (more anxious than I should've been) because it was the first seder that I was hosting without the help, guidance, and culinary skills of my mom. But she sent some amazing recipes, like the kosher-for-passover cake (with chocolatey nutty goodness) that is legendary in our household. There's only one place to buy supplies for Passover in Shanghai, and it's at a Jewish center mostly used for kindergarten and Hebrew classes. They had one room on the third floor with some basic Passover needs, like kosher wine, matzo, matzo meal, brisket...but it was by no means a store. I got their last box of matzo meal, for which I was eternally grateful. I cooked a few dishes in the days prior, and then spent most of the day cooking on Saturday....just like my mamma did. I think the biggest hit was the matzo kugel...so scrumptious and delicious. I'm actually thinking of making some more...just cuz.

We had over mostly Jews with a smattering of non-Jews, and we read a uber simplistic kids' version of the Exodus story (part of the Haggadah), sang some songs led by Sara and Dan, read the 4 questions, and told a silly but still humorous joke using the Jewish-grandmother tones and accents. Then we feasted and feasted some more. Overall, it was a pretty big success (even though the nerves of hosting and organizing got the best of me at times), and now we have leftover cake to last at least a month....who am I kidding? A week. Either way, boss'm.

Happy Passover and Happy Easter!

- Emma

Beijing: Part 2

2009-04-12T22:43:00.002+08:00

The Great Wall escapade is only part of my tale from Beijing. Day 2 started off with a little train ticket purchasing. Chinese communication was hugely successful, but unfortunately acquiring seats was a dismal failure. Due to the Tomb Sweeping holiday, all seats were already sold, so we ending up with standing room only tickets for our 13 hour return journey to Shanghai (more on that later...)

Anyways, Kevin, Adam, and I kicked off our day with a little exploration of the Summer Palace. On our way out to the Summer Palace we stopped at a little street stand and feasted like kings on chuanr (meat skewers) and rou jia mo (pitas filled with shwarma meat, cucumber, and la jiang). It was AMAZING! Some of the best street food I've had in China... Ok, so we make it to the Summer Palace and the grounds are sweet. I can understand why the emperor wanted to spend his summer months there. There were cool buildings, tree-lined avenues, and beautiful lake views in every direction. Equally omnipresent were saleswomen climbing all over the place with boxes of 1 RMB coconut-flavored popsicles. It was a hot day and we had more than our share of popsicles. Hit the spot. We spent a couple hours wandering around the palace grounds and highlights would include cooling my feet in the lake and reading the plaques at each building (all of which were apparently burned down by the evil Anglo-British forces in the 1860s...)

After checking out the Summer Palace, we made our way over to the Olympic Green (but not before making another stop at the rou jia mo stand and filling up again). The buildings at the Olympic Green were really impressive. I loved the Bird's Nest. It looked like the stadium had an exoskeleton... Very cool. The Water Cube (although equally unusual and iconic) was not nearly as interesting (although I'm told its better viewed at night). We spent a fair amount of time just hanging out and people watching at the Olympic Green. And by people watching I mean using Kevin's sweet long-range lens to take pictures of people really far away. I think we took over 1000 pictures on the weekend and a full 200 were probably taken here...

Daylight was fading at this point, but we decided to hightail it over to Tiananmen Square. It's not everyday we're in Beijing after all... Tiananmen was sweet. I've been before (on my 2006 venture), but I really like the area. I love the workers' statues that line Mao's Mausoleum (which was unfortunately closed by the time we arrived) and there are always crowds of Chinese tourists checking it out and locals flying kites or just enjoying the sun. It was a perfect place to end our whistle-stop tour of Beijing...

Next, I will tell the tale of our standing room only journey home.

- Jon

Beijing: Part 1

2009-04-11T16:37:00.003+08:00

We woke up entirely too early Sunday morning and reconvened the gang at Dongzhimen station where we boarded a bus to the outskirts of the city. We wanted to get out to the Jian Kou (sp?) section of the Great Wall and the idea is to ride the bus as far as we can before switching to an alternate mode of transportation for the last leg of the journey. We got off the bus at the end of the line and were immediately surrounded by a small swarm of drivers all jockeying for position and bickering amongst themselves over the best rate. Luckily, we had Phil serving as tour guide extraordinaire and he bargained to get a deal for all 8 of us to cram into a mian bao che (bread car) for 200 RMB. That's 3 red flags for Phil!

The ride wasn't too exciting (which is how you want it in China) and we arrived at a fish farm at the base of a mountain. We attempted to eat some lunch, but failed miserably. We didn't fail, so much as the waitresses failed. This restaurant was probably one of the most poorly organized establishments I've ever been to... There were hundreds of customers on the roof top (which was beautiful) and they were all yelling "fuwuyuan" (waitress) constantly. It was kind of hilarious actually. Eventually, a couple of waitresses scurried over, took our orders, and then promptly forgot everything. Food was being made, but none of it was going to the right tables. After receiving 1/4 of the food we ordered in an hour, we got fed up, paid for what we ate, and left. On to the wall!

It was a gorgeous day and hiking went swimmingly for the first hour or so. Until our trail dead-ended at a cliff face. At this point, Kevin, Milan, and I monkeyed our way straight up the cliff face (which, in retrospect, was pretty dangerous) and continued trailblazing our way upwards. After some intense bushwacking and rock climbing we made our way to the peak of our little mountain, unfortunately, we weren't really much closer to the Great Wall and now we weren't anywhere close to a path. We decided that going back down the way we came up was too dangerous, so we scrambled/slid down the other side of the mountain until we reached a new path. No more than 5 minutes later, the rest of our gang ambled up. Reunited and rejuvenated, we continued on this new path towards the Wall.

It was pretty late in the afternoon when we summited, but the view was amazing! The skies were clear and blue (a rarity for China) and the weather was perfect. We walked along the wall for a couple of hours and had countless photo taken by Kevin (who is somewhere between professional photographer and stalker). I'm going to weed through the photos tomorrow (we took 1000 on the weekend) and post some of the better ones... Anyways, not too much else to tell, except that the hike was really sweet. I haven't been hiking much out here in China and I missed it.

The day finished up with convincing the gondola man to turn the machine back on for us (so we could get back down the mountain while it was still light), a little frisbee in the parking lot, a ride back to Beijing with Henry (our driver), and a BCD (boozy Chinese dinner) back in the city. Day 1 = Success!

- Jon

Tianjin Continued

2009-04-10T01:13:00.004+08:00

Post award ceremony, our exhausted Shanghai Hobo/Baijiu heroes jumped on the Beijing bus and joined all tournament participants at a restaurant. We parked ourselves at a big corner table, started eating lots of delicious Chinese food, and opened up a crate of free beer (thank god for sponsorship). The food was amazing and the beer flowed like...beer. No more than 15 minutes go by before we are informed by the Beijing players next to our table that we are being involved in a game. I like to call this game - drink the beer. Anyways, the idea is that any time a cap is thrown into your glass you are obliged to drink. Basically, this means that a veritable hail of caps are being flung back and forth between tables and lots of beer is being consumed. The recipe for a good party :)

I don't want to get into many more details for the night, except to list these highlights:

1) Watching Burrowes and Phil drink in the beer frisbee race. Who knew a 120 lb man could drink so much?
2) Joe being hilarious and ridiculous. I also believe he showed a group of girls his PA.
3) All the MVPs being told to take their shirts off to accept their awards. Jeff's band-aid enhanced nipples were particularly hilarious.

After all of this nonsense, we jumped back on the party bus and headed to Beijing. I don't remember too much from the bus except that I had a great time and left almost all of my belongings on the bus (luckily, they were recovered by Beijing players)...

More Beijing adventures to follow soon...

- Jon
P.S. To read more about Tianjin or Asian Ultimate in general check out Tao's blog (one of many) at http://china-ultimate.blogspot.com/search/label/Tianjin%20tournament

Tianjin Madness

2009-04-07T23:07:00.003+08:00

I'm back in Shanghai now after an eventful weekend. I'm going to break things up into pieces (mostly because I'm too lazy to write it all out at once). Things kicked off on Friday night when I met up with 6 other silly Shanghai frisbee players in the train station... We packed into our overnight train and we were off! The train ride to Tianjin was pretty uneventful. Mostly it consisted of us trying to play cards in the dining car and being told that we weren't allowed... Who does that?

After a relatively tame night, our train arrived arrived in Tianjin at 6am. We were disgorged into what can only be described as a smoggy haze enveloping the entire city of Tianjin. The pollution was incredible. There was no sunrise or sunset - just reddish, hazy dawn and dusk. We enjoyed some of Mr. Li's Beef Noodles at the train station and trekked over to the fields (stopping in a park on the way to play hackeysack/badminton with old people.) It was ridiculous how many old people were out and about at the crack of dawn. Why do old people wake up so early? After a couple of distractions and a police officer running over, blowing his whistle, and giving us the "time-out" hand signal (trying to get us to stop playing catch), we made it to an industrial park. I mean industrial in every sense of the word. This park brought images of Soviet-era bloc countries and Detroit put together...

The tournament itself was pretty sweet! We picked up two girls from Beijing - Larke and Lauren (who were awesome) and played 5 games with our 9 players. We didn't play particularly well, but we had a blast playing together. We managed to eke out a victory in the finals (although none of us really know how) and were rewarded with a big trophy and gaudy official certificates from the local government. Ah, China :)

Next issue - Tianjin party and bus to Beijing...

- Jon

The Life of a Teacher

2009-04-07T21:37:00.001+08:00

Since I started teaching…even when I was student teaching…I have been much more prone to getting sick because of my wonderful germ-ridden munchkin students who just love to slobber, stick their fingers up their noses and in their mouths, and then so kindly and lovingly give me a high-five. But since I’ve started teaching kindergartners in Shanghai, I’ve been sick pretty much all the time, with cold symptoms always hanging around. But recently, it all came to a head. I woke up Saturday morning and I couldn’t open my left eye. Curious…in my still tired and confused state, I rubbed my eye pretty furiously and it finally opened with a bit of gucky resistance. I took a glance in the mirror and saw that my eye was crusty and pussy around the edges and lashes, and was uber red. At least it was only in one eye…oy.

I made sure to wash my eye and my hands frequently. I checked on-line to see what I was in for. Some seemingly reliable source said it should be cleared up within 3-5 days, even with no medicine, especially if it was viral (which, according to the infallible internets, applied to me). I emailed my boss and let her know my condition and that I might need to miss a day of work (that day being Tuesday since I already had Monday off due to some random Chinese national holiday). But I never got a response. After a couple of days of hanging out with some Suzhou friends (with caution, I assure you), I re-contacted my boss to try and find out what was what, seeing as my eye was still scarily red. She said I needed to see a doctor and so I did. And lo and behold, I received good news from the medical genius at the local eyes, ears, nose and throat hospital. He gave me two kinds of eye drops to take every two hours (which have really been helping lessen the redness and the itchy pain), AND he said that I would need another 3 DAYS REST. Yup. No work until Friday. One day work week…not too bad. My boss wasn’t too happy because she needed to find a quick substitute for 3 days. But what could I do? Doctor’s orders…

I still have another 2 days of chillin’ out and recovering. I really can’t complain (well, sans red itchiness I could deal with, but I’m not complaining). Jon is a little afraid of my contagiousness, but I have been super careful and I haven’t touched my eye ONCE! I’m pretty proud of myself.
The kicker now is that I’m also having more cold symptoms (coughing, sore throat…), so the trio combo of back/hip pain, conjunctivitis, and a cold is rocking me pretty hard. But I’m staying pretty positive, and enjoying the time off (even though I don’t get paid for days missed), so all is relatively well.

Take care all, and be careful around snotty kids (pun intended?).
Em

Fireman Training

2009-04-02T16:49:00.002+08:00

Everyday after I leave class I pass by the school track. Usually there are a couple of old people wandering around doing tai chi and playing with weird toys (I can't describe them sufficiently, so one of these days I'll just snap a picture). Students sit in small groups on the field in the middle of the track enjoying some sunshine or eating some snacks. All of this is fairly familiar, but there is something special about our Jiaotong University track - fireman training.

Everyday a fire truck pulls up and unloads a couple dozen firemen. They don't train like normal people though, they train like professional athletes. These guys are ridiculous. They sprint around the track carrying all sorts of bizarre parafanelia. Sometimes they run with backpacks full of rocks, sometimes with full gas masks, and sometimes just carrying two rolls of fire hose. These guys are horses... If my building is on fire, I'm glad that these guys are coming to the rescue...

Jon

Ningbo!

2009-04-01T16:46:00.002+08:00

I have been lazy about updating this recently, but I'll try to fill you in on some recent happenings...

I spent the weekend playing frisbee in a hat tournament in Ningbo. Even though the weather was on the cold/rainy side, the tournament was still a blast! It was great to get out and run around for the whole weekend. Emma came to hang out and cheer me on too! A pleasant weekend of frisbee and hanging out with good friends. I couldn't really ask for much more... Life has been pretty relaxed recently. I've been studying a lot and working hard on my Chinese, but I think I've adapted to the student life here in Shanghai. I like having the freedom to spend my days as I please. Initially, I was worried that I wouldn't like Shanghai (I think I'm ready to live in a less urban landscape), but I'm appreciating life here. I love the restaurants here and its nice to be close to frisbee and friends.

I guess there isn't too much else to say. Right now, I'm organizing a venture up to Tianjin for a 1-day frisbee tournament and then a couple days of sightseeing in the Beijing area. I'm pretty psyched to get back to being a tourist! I know that I want to re-visit the Great Wall and I want to see all the new Olympic buildings, but I'm not sure what else I should do during my short time up North. Any ideas for the best things to see on a whistle-stop tour of Beijing?

Jon

Beard Dream Team?

2009-03-27T00:42:00.003+08:00

A friend in Shanghai suggested that my future included a place on Beard Team USA. Please check out the website at www.beardteamusa.org/meet.html

It's hard to believe that there's actually a team of bearded fools who travel great distances (even internationally) for competitions. I guess some of you might draw similar parallels to frisbee, but this is BEARD competitions. Awesome.

I haven't been writing much recently because I've been so busy studying Chinese and organizing a ridiculous adventure to Tianjin, but I will be back in action next week. Now, I've got some morning classes and then off to Ningbo for some frisbee!

- Jon

Dreams

2009-03-22T11:42:00.002+08:00

I haven't done a very good job of keeping up with the blog this past week, but no news is good news. I've been trucking along in class, learning more words, practicing my speaking, and generally improving my Chinese. I've been working out a little and trying to gear up for the coming frisbee season (I've also been arranged a pretty ridiculous trip up to Tianjin...) I've also been eating a ton of delicious food recently. It's been a really busy, but good week.

On a completely separate topic, I don't dream very often. Usually I go to bed pretty exhausted and sleep soundly through the night without any dreams. The nights when I do dream my dreams are usually fairly mundane. It'll just be a normal day in the life of Jon. (I have bizarre theories on dejavu too, but those can be discussed later). Last night, was by no means a normal dream though. It had elements of me going back to 7th grade (I kept telling them that I was 24 and had already graduated from high school) and it also morphed into this weird world with monsters that were snatching people. I don't want to get into the details of the dream, except to say that there was a conversation in Chinese in my dream and I understood it and responded in Chinese! How cool!

- Jon

Different Aspirations

2009-03-14T20:03:00.002+08:00

Last entry I was writing about my Chinese teacher's shocking view of gender roles. It got me thinking about some of the cultural differences between Americans and Chinese. Now, I'm not going to get into a deep analysis on the issue, nor will I even attempt to catalogue all of differences (and similarities) that I've come to understand during my time here. I'm just want to share anecdotes when something surprises me...

I tutor a girl in business english 3 times a week in the evenings. During our most recent meeting, we were talking about our childhoods and what we wanted to be when we grew up. I asked her what she wanted to be when she was in middle school and she said "I wanted to be a scientist." This kind of blew me back. I can't remember any kids in my middle school who wanted to be scientists. Everybody wanted to be a singer or a professional athlete or something. I remember wanting to be a park ranger. So, I asked her if her dream job was a common one amongst Chinese kids. She looked surprised that I would even ask. She said it was by far the most popular job. Maybe 50% of the kids in her middle school wanted to grow up to be scientists... Wow.

On that note, I'm off to teppanyaki where I will realize my American dream of all-you-can-eat and drink steak, sushi, shrimp, beer, etc...

- Jon

Krazy Kindergartners

2009-03-13T15:32:00.002+08:00

When I’m teaching the young ones, sometimes they do little weird things that are so cute and so hysterical. Like when I really annunciate my words and over-emphasize how the mouth is supposed to look when you speak, and a student tries to imitate (usually involving the letters l, r, and/or n…sometimes all 3…which are particularly difficult for them to pronounce). He’ll be a foot away from me and try his best…just sticking his tongue out and waving it around in a bizarre and totally irrelevant way. It looks like he’s trying to mimic an enthusiastic lizard. I can’t help myself but start to giggle. It’s so endearing and so cute and so amazingly ridiculous.

Also, some students love to yell the songs instead of singing them. One girl (around 3 years old) always uses her full lung capacity to sing our good morning song. She doesn’t really get the r in morning, but it doesn’t matter. The intense energy she’s mustering up explodes out her head, turning her face red, popping out her neck veins, and making her look like she’s just about to keel over. So dedicated!

Lastly, I just learned that one of my student’s names is Noddy. Say that outloud (yup…sounds like naughty). Amazing. Turns out his name fits him well. Here are some other fun names (starred = popular):

Abner (he’s the one in the picture)

Apple*

Minnie*

Raining

Fairy

Thaigle

Jerry Ding

Elva

Happy

Sunny

Sun

Key

- Emma

MRI and X-Rays

2009-03-12T21:46:00.000+08:00

Ever since October—when hurt myself merely pivoting in Frisbee after having climbed the gazillion steps at Huangshan and my muscles and joints were super tight—I have had serious back and hip pain. At first, I couldn’t move I was in so much pain. Five months later, the pain is constant but not constantly excruciating. That’s why I didn’t go to the doctor before: I was worried that I would spend an exorbitant amount of money on a visit and tests only to hear that I need to rest and stretch. But the time has come. I haven’t played Frisbee in 5 months and it’s been too depressing to miss out! And the pain has gotten a little worse since it got a little better.

Yesterday, I got an MRI and x-rays at the local hospital. Three of my coordinators from work went with me to help with translation and such, which was so extremely kind and generous. Plus, we had guanxi (“connections”): the dad of one of the graduated kindergartners from my school works in orthopedics at the hospital, so I got to skip a lot of lines, which means a ton when you’re in China where the lines are endless (I picked a good job, eh?). Anyway, after 2 days of tests and waiting rooms, I got the results back. Apparently, two parts of a bone on the right side of my pelvis are smushed together where there should be a space. It’s like they’re clamped together. I was prescribed an anti-inflammatory to loosen the area up.

This Saturday, I have an appointment with a western doctor at a western hospital, so I’ll show him my test results and hope that he can give me good insight on a diagnosis and on what kinds of exercise/therapy I should do now.

It’s hard to stay positive because it’s so ever-present and inhibiting in my activities, and I kick myself for not having seen a doctor sooner (I was way too preoccupied about money. If I had had insurance and could get physical therapy with no problem, I wouldn’t have thought twice….silly girl). BUT, as Jon so lovingly reminds me, I need to stay on the sunny side of things and think positively, especially since mental stress can add to physical pain. Though difficult, Jon and all my friends (yes, you!) have been super supportive. I don’t know what I would do without all of your love and strength.

Here’s to optimism (and finally taking care of myself!).

Ciao for now,

The End of an Era

2009-03-11T14:48:00.006+08:00

Last night, I shaved off my beard. Here are a couple shots of it in all of its multi-colored glory:

Front Shot

Side Shot

I shaved the beard off in pieces. I left it in a fu man chu for a little while. I also left a moustache for awhile, but those pictures are too dirty to post online.

Fear the fu man chu

It's kind of weird how different I look with the beard, the fu man chu, moustache, and then clean-shaven. I'd say that I look about 5 years younger without a beard. It's nice to be able to feel my face, but I do miss stroking the beard while I'm in class...

Speaking of being in class, today our teacher was explaining how to use the word "responsibility" in Chinese. Her example sentences involved a man's responsibility and a woman's responsibility in a relationship and they accurately portray Chinese views on gender roles. She said that it is the man's responsibility to make money (not terribly PC, but still pretty acceptable) and the woman's responsibility is to "look pretty". At this comment, a couple of Western jaws dropped, but I was surprised by how little effect the comment had on our class... I rarely write about little tidbits like this, but they keep life here interesting.

- Jon

Migraine Free

2009-03-08T00:05:00.003+08:00

A couple of days ago I had an incredibly painful headache. It was some of the worst pain I've ever had and it was completely debilitating. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't study, I couldn't watch movies, I couldn't read, I couldn't even sleep... It sucked. The pain would come in waves too. Everything would be fine for a couple of minutes and then suddenly it would feel like my head was being ripped apart. What was really weird was that it came out of nowhere - I have no idea what could have triggered it. I'm assuming it was a migraine, but I wish I knew why it happened (so I could avoid having another one)... In any case, the migraine is gone now and I'm just left with a lingering (normal) headache. There is a silver lining to this cloud though... I've appreciated these past two days so much more, just because I'm not in intense pain. Nothing else matters when your head doesn't feel like it's being torn apart. On that happy note, I will leave you loyal readers. More posts will follow soon!

- Jon

The Best Car Commercial I've Ever Seen

2009-03-01T21:40:00.001+08:00

Check out this Honda commercial. Apparently it's all legit and it took them a few hundred tries to get it right. Oh, all of the pieces are different parts of the car...

Awesome!

- Jon

Family Response to the Beard Vote

2009-03-01T11:57:00.001+08:00

Here is an email I got from my mom about the beard vote...

Juan,
Since I read the blog on occasion, I figured I'd take my shot at a vote. Keep the beard. Seems like fair punishment (not sure what for, but feels right).
xox, Mom

- Jon

Chinese Gym Experience

2009-02-28T11:07:00.003+08:00

I recently joined a gym in Shanghai (which is conveniently located near Jiaotong University) because Geoff found a really good deal. The point of this post isn't to tell you about my workout plan, but instead to relate an amusing anecdote... A couple of days ago, I entered the gym to lift some weights. First, I went into the locker to change out of my normal clothes and into some shorts. Now, the men's locker room isn't the most comfortable place in the world (what with all the naked men wandering around), but there's a general understanding that if you keep a reasonable personal distance between people and don't stare, then its all good. Anyways, I'm changing into my shorts in front of my locker and a completely naked Chinese man comes up (maybe within 16 inches of me) and starts peeling a hardboiled egg (the trash can was near my locker). Hilarious. I'm just looking over at him wondering what the hell he's doing standing naked in the locker room peeling an egg. So, he finishes peeling his egg and walks back over to his stuff and sits down and eats it. Still in the nude. Then, the dude pulls out another egg from his bag marches back over to me, peels it, and starts eating it right there. WTF, mate? At that point, I was all set, so I left the locker room giggling. Who knows how long that guy was in there naked eating eggs...

In other news, last night I saw a YouTube video that was a Chinese take on the Lazy Sunday SNL skit. Check it out...

Ok, so thats it from me now. Off to play frisbee... Will write more later!

- Jon

Medicine Man

2009-02-26T14:48:00.002+08:00

I’ve been sick with cold/flu symptoms for about 4 days now, 2.5 of those days I’ve stayed home from teaching the little munchkins (projecting my voice through loud speaking and singing over rambunctious kiddies just wasn’t gonna happen…). I was going to wait it out, but I figured that since I took a couple of days off work, I should make it legitimate and go to the doctor. So I called my coordinator and she came over to my apt to take me along. When I got downstairs, she said I could choose the next step: go to a hospital-like place where they’d give me “western” medicine, or go to her friend’s apartment to get “Chinese” medicine…what the heck, I went with the latter. So we took a long-ish cab ride out to an apartment complex with a labyrinth-like passageway. On the way we passed an elderly bunch doing physical exercise on the brightly-colored plastic machines (imagine an elliptical machine, made for a kid but still adult-sized, with no motor…they’re everywhere here).

We finally reached Dr. Ge’s apartment (his name is pronounced like you’re just saying the sound /g/, with a stretched out down-up tone). It was small and cold, made of concrete, like all buildings here (insulation is not so popular). He sat me down at his desk that was covered in calligraphy tools and in a chair lined with fake fur. He tried to speak to me in Chinese—I bumbled responses while my coordinator was speaking on the phone—and then took my pulse…apparently that was all he needed. Oh, he also picked up the desk lamp and stuck it in my face so he could look down my throat…Yup, just what he thought: a cold. Wow, Doc. I’m so glad I came to you! However, while I was there, the phone rang a bunch of times asking for Dr. Ge’s services…apparently he’s pretty popular, and we got VIP special treatment. J

He gave me some medicine (I’m still awaiting another one that my coordinator will personally deliver…along with some noodles and vegetables….what a sweetheart!), and when I asked what it was for, they responded: It’s for a cold. I would just need to have some trust and faith in this dynamic duo.

I still feel fatigued, and the medicine won’t show clear effects for at least a day or so, but I’m glad I went. It didn’t cost me anything (that I know of…) and I got to see the inner workings of a very friendly and popular Chinese doctor.

Off to rest some more…

- Emma

Beard Vote, etc...

2009-02-24T22:12:00.006+08:00

Those of you in China know that through a combination of laziness and... well, just laziness really, I have let my facial hair grow out of control for the last month. I'd say that we're in the full-on homeless beard range now. Basically, its do-or-die time for the beard. In the interest of entertainment, I have decided to leave the fate of my beard in your hands (my loyal readers). Each of you can vote (by blog comment, email, gchat, skype or in person) to either keep the beard or shave it off and I will abide (like The Dude) by your decision. One caveat - Emma's special privilege earns her 5 votes. Here are some pictures of the current beard...

Left side of the beard and goofy grin

Right side sans goofy grin

This is the look I use to scare little Chinese children (then they yell hu zi!)

Emma designed some sweet shorts with the Shanghai Huwa frog on them. The order just arrived a couple days ago. Check it out!!!

Last, but not least, here is yesterday's joke of the day that made me laugh. Hope you enjoy it too!

A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a man below. He descended a bit more and shouted, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The man below replied, "You are in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You are between 40 and 42 degrees north latitude and between 58 and 60 degrees west longitude."

"You must be an engineer," said the balloonist.

"I am," replied the man, "but how did you know?"

"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost."

The man below responded, "You must be a manager."

"I am," replied the balloonist, "how did you know?"

"Well," said the man, "you don't know where you are or where you are going. You made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are exactly in the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it's my fault."

- Jon

Tiger Leaping Gorge

2009-02-23T10:52:00.009+08:00

After poking around the aforementioned unknown mountain, I spent the next couple of days hiking on the stunningly beautiful Tiger Leaping Gorge trail with Alec, Phil, Jacob, and Andrea. The trail neatly followed the gorge basin for a couple dozen kilometers and the views were spectacular the entire way. We were sandwiched between two relatively steep mountain faces with the water beneath us. The trail was remarkably well-marked (my expectations for Chinese trails are quite low at this point) and well laid-out. The journey reminded me of hiking the trail to Machu Picchu in Peru. Here are some pictures...

Part of the gang at the trailhead

Taking a break and admiring the views

View from the bottom of the gorge

Getting back out of the gorge the "dangerous" way, almost completely vertical

Tina's = best hostel ever

View from the end of the trail

The thing that surprised me most about the trail was how relatively empty it was. I think we only passed by 15 or 20 people during our 2 days walking. In China, that is unheard of... My hypothesis is that the arduous nature of the trail dissuaded most Chinese tourists from hiking and instead they chose to take the buses following the low road. Regardless of the reason, it was incredible to have the trail to ourselves. It was very relaxing and calming to just be able to walk around without the constant commotion of other people going about their lives. It's the first time in China that I've been able to relax this way outside of my apartment. It was wonderful :)

- Jon

Joke of the Day

2009-02-22T14:33:00.001+08:00

This past fall semester, at Duke University, there were two sophomores who were taking Organic Chemistry and who did pretty well on all of the quizzes, midterms, labs, etc. Going into the final exam, they had solid "A's."

These two friends were so confident going into the final that the weekend before finals week (even though the Chem. final was on Monday), they decided to go up to University of Virginia to a party with some friends.

So they did this and had a great time. However, they ended up staying longer than they planned, and they didn't make it back to Duke until early Monday morning. Rather than taking the final then, they found Professor Aldric after the final and explained to him why they missed it. They told him that they went up to Virginia for the weekend, and had planned to come back in time to study, but that they had a flat tire on the way back and didn't have a spare and couldn't get help for a long time. So they were late getting back to campus.

Aldric thought this over and agreed that they could make up the final on the following day. The two guys were elated and relieved. So, they studied that night and went in the next day at the time that Aldric had told them.

He placed them in separate rooms, handed each of them a test booklet and told them to begin. They looked at the first problem, which was something simple about free radical formation and was worth 5 points. "Cool" they thought, "this is going to be easy." They did that problem and then turned the page.

They were unprepared, however, for what they saw on the next page.

It said: (95 points) "Which tire?"

- Jon

Unknown Sweet Mountain

2009-02-21T10:45:00.009+08:00

After poking around Kunming a little and checking out the Stone Forest, I wanted to explore things a little further afield (i.e. things outside the ubiquitous 5 million person cities that are everywhere in China). I needed to get the hell out of dodge and, for me, there is only one proper way to do that - cram myself on a night bus headed for Lijiang. I REALLY wish I had some pictures from this night bus because it was a true debacle. They smush about 36 beds on a normal sized bus. Now, I'm sure you're thinking to yourself, there is no way that you could possibly fit 36 beds on a bus (even if you're thinking about those crappy, extra-small beds that they give you in college dorms). Well, you're right - there's no way they could possibly fit that many beds on a bus. So instead, they just mark off 36 flat enclosed areas and call them beds. To make things more amusing, not all these "beds" are created equal. For example, next to the wheel there is a bed that was no more than 4 ft long (I kid you not) and then my favorite was in the back they just put 5 people together in one superwide bed. No separaters, no barriers, just some 5 person spooning with strangers in the back (I had the good fortune of not being stuck in the back, but some of my friends were not quite as lucky). I really should get to more interesting topics, but a little more must be said about the night bus. So, on the night bus I think it is required that they find the silliest Chinese movie they can get their hands on and then blast it at deafening volume until midnight. These are the RULES! (This isn't 'Nam after all.) Anyways, the movie that I had on the first night bus was a hilarious movie about some painter who created paintings by making some other guy get completely naked, dunking him in ink, and then beating him up all over a piece of canvas. Now that's wushu and yishi combined!

Arrival in Lijiang was also fairly amusing. We rolled into the town proper around 6:30am or 7:00am and there wasn't a soul to be seen. (Side note: part of the reason nobody was awake yet is the fact that all of China runs on Beijing time, there are no separate time zones. One country, One Time Zone.) So we're basically wandering around a deserted city banging on any hostel door we can. The most unbelieveable part is that nobody would answer... You'd think they'd be used to getting the backpackers from the night bus. We probably walked around for an hour before we were finally able to rouse a guy at the Ancient Town Youth Hostel and promptly collapsed for a couple hours of sleep.

Refreshed from our nap, we headed out right away for a nearby mountain (unfortunately, I can't recall the name). The Lonely Planet did a pretty terririfically bad job of explaining where to go, how to get there, and how much it would cost, but we were able to sort things out on our own and 1 minivan, 1 bus, and 1 cable car later we found ourselves 4600m above sea level starring out over Yunnan.

Me at the base of the mountain

"Base Camp" on the mountain, 4500m above sea level

I'm taking a new job making Communist propaganda...

It was really cool to be up so high. The views were tremendous and even the air seemed cleaner up there. It was pretty hard to breathe though and we couldn't hike much more than 100 ft before stopping to rest a little. It's pretty cool how fast your heart will beat from just a little walking at that altitude. We were in no rush and spent a couple of hours exploring the mountain and glacier nearby. While we were chilling on some rocks, a group of Chinese men started stripping off their shirts and taking photos. The cold weather didn't bother these guys at all and it made for some hilarious photo ops...

Ridiculous Shirtless Chinese Mountain Men

Little Wooden Message Panels

- Jon

Where Stones Look Like People

2009-02-18T02:19:00.009+08:00

The day after the tournament a couple friends from the tournament (Alec, Phil, Andrea, and Jacob) and I made our way to the Stone Forest a couple of hours outside Kunming. It was basically a maze-like area of large stone pillars and crazy looking formations. A great place to explore and wander around, but it would have been even better to play paintball in... Here are a couple pictures to give you an idea of what it looked like...

A view of the whole forest

Stone that looked like an elephant

One of the highlights of our adventures in Stone Forest was the spotting of Asia's biggest mullet. We saw this guy while we were exploring one of the formations and I backtracked through hordes of Chinese tour groups. After a couple minutes, my stalking paid off and I snapped some pretty sweet shots. Reminded me of the good old times mullet hunting in Wal-mart in Central PA...

Back view of Asia's biggest mullet

Side view of Asia's biggest mullet

We also had the pleasure of eating in a restaurant with the most incomprehensible English menu I've ever seen. It was almost completely gibberish. You'll have to look closely at this one, but check out the words in red...

- Jon

The Prodigal Son Returns

2009-02-17T09:19:00.002+08:00

I have to apologize for vanishing this last week and half. I was in Yunnan (Southwestern China) for about 10 days and spent the vast majority of that time without internet access (hiking or crying because the Berry's didn't pay their bill on time). I have more stories than I could possibly tell in one entry, so my next few entries will probably all be about my trip.

This trip to Yunnan started as many of my trips in China start - the Shanghai Railway Station. Despite my somewhat hellish journey via hard seat to Harbin last month, I had decided to book a 38-hour hard seat down to Kunming (in a desperate effort to save money now that I'm no longer working and studying instead). The journey went about as well as could be expected. There were no dead people, no huge riots, no police crackdowns - just a lot of Chinese people eating oranges, sunflower seeds, and fangbianmian and very, very little sleep. I was also able to read one book from start to finish and get halfway through another one before the trip was over. 38 hours is a lot of time to be in one place without a computer... Oh, I also discovered the joys of books on tape. I listened to a couple of Sherlock Holmes books on tape that I had downloaded and also listened to Jack Welch's self-narrated autobiography. Good stuff!

Anyways, I arrived in Kunming fairly exhausted but happy. Kunming was about 25 degrees warmer than Shanghai and it was amazingly refreshing just to step out into the sun. I had no idea how much I liked the sun... I trucked over to the Berry's place where I met up with Sam, Jono, and Gareth. We relaxed for most of the day and finished up some of the final details for the hat tournament. I was also taught how to salt cure meat and have started doing so in Shanghai!

The next two days we played in a pretty sweet 4-team hat tournament. My team (team 2) was somewhat appropriately named SpongeBeardBoobPants. I think that 5 out of 8 guys on our team had significant facial hair. I won't get into the details of the tournament except to say that we had blast and ended up winning the whole thing. I know it sounds cliche, but what really made this hat tournament special was how much all of the new players learned. It was really great to see how much they all developed over just one weekend (I even taught them MILK.) Ok, more details will follow on tournament parties and other travels, but that's it for now.

- Jon

Cute Kindergartners!!!!!

2009-02-13T15:46:00.000+08:00

Right now, I'm in the computer lab of the new kindergarten school that I'm working in, sitting on a miniature chair clearly made for a 3-year-old, trying to tune out the result of the extraordinary lung capacities of my Chinese "colleagues"....i.e. their voices are f-ing loud. I still haven't figured out if they're actually angry or passionate about something, or if their forceful speaking, as if they're trying to shove the words and sounds out with all of their mind, is simply their way of communicating. Sometimes I try to catch one or two Chinese words that I might possibly understand, so I'm not ALWAYS that "oblivious foreigner," but I'm pretty sure they're speaking in Shanghainese dialect, which makes it even harder to understand. In order to protect myself, I try to limit my time around them, seeing as I can literally feel my eardrums vibrating with fright and shock. I was hoping to make friends...or friendly acquaintances....but I'm not so sure now. Eh, maybe I just need time to adjust. Random note: one of the teachers has one super long K-9 tooth (yup, just one) - vampire style. I find myself staring at it whenever I'm near her....it's pretty creepy. The little kiddies have a ton of energy and make a whole lotta noise, so I need to speak/yell pretty loudly so they can hear me. When we sing songs, which we do often, I find myself struggling to sing loud enough while staying in tune. When the pitch gets too high, either my voice softens....or it stays loud and I sound like a pre-pubescent boy. Either way, my voice and throat are taking a huge beating.

Speaking of the new kiddies (ages 2-6), they are SOOOO ADORABLE! Their cheeks are so pinchable, and their bodies are so huggable, and their eyes are so huge and gorgeous, I just want to hug them and smile at them and stare into their beautiful eyes all day. I'll take pictures soon and put them up on the blog so we can all enjoy the cute kids. :) Too bad that most of their teeth are completely rotten. :( It's like they have spent the entirety of their short lives eating sticky sugary candy and never once brushing their teeth. One girl barely had any sign of anything resembling a tooth in her mouth. I feel really badly for them...I guess dental hygiene is just not the norm here. Overall, I really like my new job teaching English to kindergartners. So far, really fun. Requires a super duper amount of constantly streaming positive energy, but not so much intensive intellectual/brain power. :)And being in Shanghai is really great. Lots to do. And I can go to pilates classes whenever I want, which is helping my back pains.....slowly, but hopefully surely. It's been a little lonely since almost everyone I know in Shanghai, including Jon, are out of town, mostly at the Ultimate frisbee tournament in Kunming...where it's sunny and warm and surrounded by scenic hiking areas (can we say jealous??). Jon gets back Sunday (3 days), so I'm pretty excited.....I really miss him (yup, I said it. I miss my man). Also, Jon wanted me to tell you all that he apologizes for not updating the blog diligently since he has had very limited computer and internet access along his travels. When he gets back, he'll be sure to share detailed accounts of his adventures. So here is where I leave you for now. I am off to lunch and then to wander the area and read my book (I have a total of 3.5 hours break in the middle of the day; not too shabby). Ciao for now!

- Emma

The Yeti Cometh

2009-02-04T15:59:00.004+08:00

I stopped shaving almost three weeks ago for a variety of reasons (Eagles solidarity and laziness). The Eagles lost in the playoffs, but I remained lazy and I was also braving sub-zero temperatures on a daily basis in Harbin so I decided to keep whatever hair I could muster. It's been a week since then and I still haven't shaved. Now it's mostly out of curiosity to see what will develop. I'm also getting some very positive reactions from Chinese cab drivers who seem to really like it... Anyways, I'm about to leave for a 1.5 week jaunt down to Southwestern China for a frisbee hat tournament and some hiking. I'm going to let it grow the whole time I'm gone and then shave it all off when I return. Here are some mug shots of the current multi-colored homeless scruff:

Front Shot

Side Shot

- Jon

Adventures with the 'rents

2009-02-02T16:09:00.017+08:00

On Saturday, my parents flew back to New York from Shanghai after visiting me for the past two weeks. I had a really great time with them...it helped to see them after really missing them for 7 months. And it was awesome that they got to see the change in culture, food, and customs here in China. We went to Xi'an to see the terracotta warriors, which were actually awesome (despite being over-hyped), and then to Beijing to see all the major attractions: the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the Imperial Gardens, and the Temple of Heaven. Now, it wasn't quite has horrifically cold there as it was in Harbin (Jon's such a trooper!), but it was still wicked cold, especially with the ghastly winds up on the Great Wall (we spent a whole 45 minutes up there...I'll definitely be making a return trip). And then our last day at the Temple of Heaven was simply unbearable with the biting air and the forceful wind - we were speedily in and out (that's what she said....beat you to it, Geoff!).

When we got back to Shanghai, we toured around the city a bit and then went to lovely Hangzhou on a abnormally warm and sunny day. We mostly toured around the West Lake, which was crowded with tourists for the New Year holiday, but the warm sun and loving company still made everything really enjoyable.

Here are some pics from the various trips:

Creepy kung-fu lantern sculptures on top of the Xi'an city wall

Terracotta Warriors (Xi'an)

Super well-preserved terracotta warrior

Chairman Mao and me outside the Forbidden Palace (across from Tiananmen Square).

The Great Wall
(notice the lack of tourists? Alas, there is an advantage to being there during the wretchedly cold winter!!)

Mamma Smals and me at the Bank of China in Shanghai with a the info guy (and Chinese New Year enthusiast)

Jon and me in Hangzhou on the West Lake...squinting into the sun. awww....

Ambitious young girl attempting to devour the golden corn (jiāyoù!)

Crazy Chinese men (and token ladies) jumping in to the West Lake (Hangzhou).

Chinese tourists in Hangzhou wanting to take pictures with two pale white foreigners (how cute!)

Chinese Super Bowl

2009-02-02T13:18:00.004+08:00

I woke up at 6am this morning to watch the Super Bowl. At first I wasn't too excited about everything (frankly, I'm excited about very few things besides sleep at 6am), but once the game started at the bar I started getting into it. The game was really exciting and I really enjoyed watching sports (I miss ESPN), but there was something a little weird about the whole scene. Maybe it was being in a bar from 6-11am, maybe it was the exotic dancer that randomly showed up at halftime and started dancing around (classy is not one of the words that comes to mind), or maybe it was just not being on a couch with friends watching the game. All in all though, it was a great game and I'm glad I woke up to see it!

Other things of note:

1) The newest Indiana Jones movie is terrible. I heard that it was bad, but it is beyond bad. It had no almost no redeeming qualities. Ugh. I felt dumber for having watched it. I'd say top 5 worst movies of all time (and I like almost every movie I watch!)

2) Planet B-Boy, which is a movie about international hiphop-type dancing, was almost as good as the Indiana Jones movie was bad. It was done documentary style with interviews and stories following dancers from Japan, S. Korea, France, and the USA. Highly recommended...

This made me laugh/cry:

Ok, I'm off to explore my new Shanghai neighborhood a little and find a China Mobile where I can buy a new SIM card. Hope all is well!

- Jon

Explosions During the Joyous New Year

2009-01-30T19:08:00.000+08:00

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

2009-01-29T23:34:00.018+08:00

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

2009-01-27T23:21:00.003+08:00

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

2009-01-24T22:53:00.004+08:00

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

2009-01-23T21:25:00.002+08:00

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

2009-01-22T20:27:00.003+08:00

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

2009-01-21T21:47:00.003+08:00

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

2009-01-20T21:00:00.003+08:00

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...

2009-01-17T23:49:00.002+08:00

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

2009-01-14T11:53:00.001+08:00

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

2009-01-12T22:22:00.007+08:00

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..."

2009-01-11T22:41:00.003+08:00

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

2009-01-08T12:28:00.006+08:00

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

2009-01-06T23:18:00.011+08:00

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

2009-01-04T22:20:00.004+08:00

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?

2009-01-02T01:40:00.004+08:00

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

Quirky Subtitles

2008-12-30T22:37:00.006+08:00

The other day, I was watching Superbad for about the third time…mostly to kill time…and I couldn’t help but notice the amazingly ridiculous subtitles. I wrote some down for your viewing pleasure:

Words Spoken: That’s cool?
English Subtitles: Telephone contact good.

Words Spoken: Should I just get a shitload of different shit? [shit = booze]
English Subtitles: Prepare the man’s thing.

Words Spoken: Jules and her stupid fucking friend came up to me and they asked me to buy her alcohol.
English Subtitles: The Kai silk still has her with me. The friend goes out in the evening…know the sexy pole of her friend.

Words Spoken: …by some divine miracle, we were paired up and she actually thought of me.
English Subtitles: Then you seduce Kai silk me to seduce her friend.

Words Spoken: Now we’re never gonna bone because of that used tampon Fogel! [Fogel = the ridiculous nerdy sidekick friend]
English Subtitles: Your whole body hair is very hot…you might as well touch me.

Words Spoken: Ow! What the shit was that?!
English Subtitles: Damn, what is the row.

Words Spoken: What the fuck?!
English Subtitles: The mama of.

Also, Sir Zee has brought an amazing blog about wacky Asian pizzas to my attention (like the Shrimp Nude Pizza with Cream Cheese Mousse-Filled Crust from Mr. Pizza in Korea…holy moly) and you should check it out, too.

Peace! And Happy New Year!

-Em

"My rims keep shining..."

2008-12-28T23:44:00.005+08:00

Nothing special to talk about today just a couple of random things:

1) The peasants in China have the weirdest fashion sense I've ever seen. Their clothing differs so much from your typical Suzhou or Shanghai resident that they can be picked out by even the least experienced waiguoren. It's like they're wearing a uniform. The first article of peasant clothing seems to be the sports coat. Whether you're male or female, you must wear a sports coat or leisure suit (I think bonus points are awarded for ridiculous colors, sateen, velour, or tweed - the louder, the better). Next, you must carry with you an enormous bag filled with your belongings at ALL times. If you can't fit inside said bag, then you're just a poser peasant. Again, extra points are awarded if your entire bag is made out of denim. Awesome. Lastly, if you are male and over the age of 35, then black leather baseball hats are the coolest thing you can possibly own. At least you think so...

2) I recently purchased and watched the Google Boys Biography. It was a very simplistic overview of the lives of Larry Page and Sergei Brin (who met in grad school) and the development of Google. Despite its simple format, I still learned a lot about what made/makes Google different from other search engines. It gives me an appreciation for the power of one good idea and it got all my entrepreneur juices flowing...

3) I've started jumping rope as part of my daily routine. Now, I'm enjoying the jumping rope, but part of me feels like I'm wasting some time while doing it. My body is active, but my mind is blank. I'm a little obsessed with efficiency and particularly the possibility of multi-tasking as much as possible in my own life. So, today I grabbed a bunch of audiobooks off the web and tried listening while I jumped. I tried Harry Potter for a little while, but I couldn't crank the volume up loud enough (it has to be pretty deafening to be clearly heard over the jumping up and down on the wooden floors) . So I pushed in Sun Tzu's "Art of War" and it worked like a charm. Pat on the back for me :)

Here is a comic that always makes me laugh:

- Jon

Holidays in Suzhou

2008-12-26T18:25:00.006+08:00

Celebrating Hanukkah and Christmas in China is a little bizarre. There are some signs of the approaching holidays, but they are almost exclusively in up-scale malls that cater to wealthy ex-pats. Also, when I say "signs of the approaching holidays" what I really mean is these REALLY creepy anorexic-looking Santa robots that do jigs (only from the waist down) to haunting Chinese Christmas remixes. Weird, weird, weird. In any case, what I'm trying to say is that celebrating the holidays here is different...

Let me tell you a little bit more about our holiday celebrations. First off, the government has mandated that every foreigner must be given a paid vacation day on Christmas (count one for the Chinese government). [ Side note: maybe we should give the Chinese government another point for stepping in with some serious regulation of their financial system http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/26/business/worldbusiness/26exam.html?th&emc=th ] So, to make a long story short, all of the students were in school on Thursday, but all the foreigner teachers were off galavanting (what a sweet word) around town. Emma and I woke up Thursday morning around 11:30am. This mighthave been a record for both of us - as working teachers, we're pretty early risers regardless of late-night festivities. We woke up refreshed and started the morning watching a little Scrubs in bed. Then after lunch we ventured out to the local industrial worker's complex where I got my hair cut (the highlight of my haircut was probably the 15 minute shampooing by some girl who basically held me hostage in order to practice her English). Good haircut though - I was freshly shorn and felt like a million RMB! We headed downtown to this swanky shopping plaza to redeem Emma's 1000 RMB gift certificate. We spent some time picking out delicious (but absurdly expensive) chocolates and other treats, but we really hit the jackpot when we discovered a grocery store in the basement. We hauled off something like 800 RMB worth of the most delicious treats we could find. It was like one of those crazy shopping sprees that people win on game shows :)

Oh, we also spent the evening doing some holiday arts and crafts. Here is a picture of our "tree":

Happy Holidays!

- Jon
P.S. For all those who doubted me, here is a picture to prove that I did attend the Swan Lake ballet.

Christmas Eve Eve

2008-12-23T18:10:00.002+08:00

Today is Christmas Eve Eve…December 23rd. Along the way on this road leading ultimately (if only temporarily) to Christmas, I might have exuded a little… Grinch-ness. I wasn't really into the idea of Christmas, and I think that I got bogged down with elementary school teacher pressure to have the most exuberant attitude and the liveliest party and the most flamboyant decorations and the most numerous random Christmas activities (word searches, coloring pages, etc) to top all the rest. I wanted none of it so I retreated…but somewhere along this rocky road it opened up to a beautiful view, and then the road was smoother.

I got more energetic and enthusiastic about getting presents for those I love, about making home-made x-mas cards for friends and family (even though it took a stupid long time), about making a make-shift 2-dimensional yellow x-mas tree (to-be-posted when it's complete with accompanying 2-D ornaments), about relaxing, and about spending time with and appreciating those close to me. So I must admit, I'm excited for Christmas. ☺

Also, it'll be a little late (or rather, in the midst), but Jon and I are going to also make a 3-D menorah so that our heritages are deservedly represented in our home decorations. My mom would be so proud!

Here's to wishing you all the warmth and love in the world… Happy Holidays!

Over and out,
Em

More Laughs

2008-12-23T15:59:00.004+08:00

I lifted this from Darcy's gchat status message recently and it made me laugh pretty hard. Enjoy a little Christmas fun! (If the whole picture doesn't fit on your screen, then just left-click on the picture to load the full version.)

In other news, the NY Times is back up and running in China. This is a great relief to me :) I don't really know why China blocked access (I assume it was related to negative media coverage) and I don't know why it has been restored, so I'm just going to give my Dad credit for getting access back since he called NYT to find out what the deal was (and I'm sure he offered up his two cents...) Thanks Dad!

- Jon

Indoor Heating in a Joke

2008-12-22T23:48:00.003+08:00

It's FREEZING here now. Last night, the temperature must have dropped 20 degrees. I could see my breath in my room in the morning! Most of you are probably thinking "Well, just crank up the heat - problem solved." At this point, it is important to realize that I basically have a glorified hair drier for a heater. Each room is equipped with an A/C unit that will pump out small amounts of heat if set on high temperatures. Brrrrrrrrr. Anyways, enough of that. Here is something that came in my Joke of the Day email that made me laugh:

Here are some actual logged maintenance complaints and problems as submitted by Qantas pilots and the solution recorded by maintenance engineers.

(P = the problem logged by the pilot.)
(S = the solution and action taken by the engineers.)

P: Left inside main tire almost needs replacement.

S: Almost replaced left inside main tire.

P: Test flight OK, except auto-land very rough.

S: Auto-land not installed on this aircraft.

P: Something loose in cockpit.

S: Something tightened in cockpit.

P: Dead bugs on windshield.

S: Live bugs on back-order.

P: Autopilot in altitude-hold mode produces a 200 feet per minute descent.

S: Cannot reproduce problem on ground.

P: Evidence of leak on right main landing gear.

S: Evidence removed.

P: DME volume unbelievably loud.

S: DME volume set to more believable level.

P: Friction locks cause throttle levers to stick.

S: That's what they're there for.

P: IFF inoperative.

S: IFF always inoperative in OFF mode.

P: Suspected crack in windshield.

S: Suspect you're right.

P: Number 3 engine missing.

S: Engine found on right wing after brief search.

P: Aircraft handles funny.

S: Aircraft warned to straighten up, fly right, and be serious.

P: Target radar hums.

S: Reprogrammed target radar with lyrics.

P: Mouse in cockpit.

S: Cat installed.

P: Noise coming from under instrument panel. Sounds like a midget pounding

on something with a hammer.

S: Took hammer away from midget

- Jon

P.S. Thanks to all of you who have been emailing me NY Times articles. Firewall be damned!

The Great Firewall Breaks Me

2008-12-22T00:00:00.003+08:00

China censors information on the web. They make it difficult to access any sort of information on Tibet, government errors, Falun Gong, etc... This hasn't been too big an issue for me so far. I've been able to go about almost all of my online business pretty much as I would in the States. The most annoying thing was the painfully slow speed that Facebook runs at here. Facebook actually runs so slowly that it isn't really even worth using over here (which may not be a bad thing). Anyways, everything was all fine and dandy until three days ago when I noticed that NYTimes.com was blocked! This is not ok! I really enjoyed reading the news in my email and now its impossible. I'm trying to find a work-around using proxy servers, but nothing seems to be cooperating. I'm stuck in a news-less void :(

- Jon

Poetry?

2008-12-20T14:00:00.003+08:00

Right now I'm reading "To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design". The book is relatively dry, but very well-written and enjoyable. I recently came across a poem in the book that I really liked (Disclaimer: I'm usually not a huge fan of poetry. Some of it I find tedious, some of it goes right of my head, but there are some poems that I really enjoy, like this one...)

The Deacon's Masterpiece by Oliver Wendell Holmes

Have you heard of the wonderful one-hoss shay,
That was built in such a logical way
It ran a hundred years to a day,
And then, of a sudden, it — ah, but stay,
I’ll tell you what happened without delay,
Scaring the parson into fits,
Frightening people out of their wits, —
Have you ever heard of that, I say?
Seventeen hundred and fifty-five.
Georgius Secundus was then alive, —
Snuffy old drone from the German hive.
That was the year when Lisbon-town
Saw the earth open and gulp her down,
And Braddock’s army was done so brown,
Left without a scalp to its crown.
It was on the terrible Earthquake-day
That the Deacon finished the one-hoss shay.
Now in building of chaises, I tell you what,
There is always somewhere a weakest spot, —
In hub, tire, felloe, in spring or thill,
In panel, or crossbar, or floor, or sill,
In screw, bolt, thoroughbrace, — lurking still,
Find it somewhere you must and will, —
Above or below, or within or without, —
And that’s the reason, beyond a doubt,
A chaise breaks down, but doesn’t wear out.
But the Deacon swore (as Deacons do,
With an “I dew vum,” or an “I tell yeou”)
He would build one shay to beat the taown
’N’ the keounty ’n’ all the kentry raoun’;
It should be so built that it couldn’ break daown:
“Fur,” said the Deacon, “’tis mighty plain
Thut the weakes’ place mus’ stan’ the strain;
’N’ the way t’ fix it, uz I maintain,
Is only jest
T’ make that place uz strong uz the rest.”
So the Deacon inquired of the village folk
Where he could find the strongest oak,
That couldn’t be split nor bent nor broke, —
That was for spokes and floor and sills;
He sent for lancewood to make the thills;
The crossbars were ash, from the straightest trees,
The panels of white-wood, that cuts like cheese,
But lasts like iron for things like these;
The hubs of logs from the “Settler’s ellum,” —
Last of its timber, — they couldn’t sell ’em,
Never an axe had seen their chips,
And the wedges flew from between their lips,
Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips;
Step and prop-iron, bolt and screw,
Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too,
Steel of the finest, bright and blue;
Thoroughbrace bison-skin, thick and wide;
Boot, top, dasher, from tough old hide
Found in the pit when the tanner died.
That was the way he “put her through.”
“There!” said the Deacon, “naow she’ll dew!”
Do! I tell you, I rather guess
She was a wonder, and nothing less!
Colts grew horses, beards turned gray,
Deacon and deaconess dropped away,
Children and grandchildren — where were they?
But there stood the stout old one-hoss shay
As fresh as on Lisbon-earthquake-day!
EIGHTEEN HUNDRED; — it came and found
The Deacon’s masterpiece strong and sound.
Eighteen hundred increased by ten; —
“Hahnsum kerridge” they called it then.
Eighteen hundred and twenty came; —
Running as usual; much the same.
Thirty and forty at last arrive,
And then come fifty, and FIFTY-FIVE.
Little of all we value here
Wakes on the morn of its hundreth year
Without both feeling and looking queer.
In fact, there’s nothing that keeps its youth,
So far as I know, but a tree and truth.
(This is a moral that runs at large;
Take it. — You’re welcome. — No extra charge.)
FIRST OF NOVEMBER, — the Earthquake-day, —
There are traces of age in the one-hoss shay,
A general flavor of mild decay,
But nothing local, as one may say.
There couldn’t be, — for the Deacon’s art
Had made it so like in every part
That there wasn’t a chance for one to start.
For the wheels were just as strong as the thills,
And the floor was just as strong as the sills,
And the panels just as strong as the floor,
And the whipple-tree neither less nor more,
And the back crossbar as strong as the fore,
And spring and axle and hub encore.
And yet, as a whole, it is past a doubt
In another hour it will be worn out!
First of November, ’Fifty-five!
This morning the parson takes a drive.
Now, small boys, get out of the way!
Here comes the wonderful one-hoss shay,
Drawn by a rat-tailed, ewe-necked bay.
“Huddup!” said the parson. — Off went they.
The parson was working his Sunday’s text, —
Had got to fifthly, and stopped perplexed
At what the — Moses — was coming next.
All at once the horse stood still,
Close by the meet’n’-house on the hill.
First a shiver, and then a thrill,
Then something decidedly like a spill, —
And the parson was sitting upon a rock,
At half past nine by the meet’n-house clock, —
Just the hour of the Earthquake shock!
What do you think the parson found,
When he got up and stared around?
The poor old chaise in a heap or mound,
As if it had been to the mill and ground!
You see, of course, if you’re not a dunce,
How it went to pieces all at once, —
All at once, and nothing first, —
Just as bubbles do when they burst.
End of the wonderful one-hoss shay.
Logic is logic. That’s all I say.

Love it!

- Jon

Traffic in China

2008-12-17T16:53:00.002+08:00

Traffic in Shanghai (or Suzhou for that matter) can get intense at times. Sometimes cars will be almost completely gridlocked. I have a theory though that this gridlock isn't a result of the sheer number of vehicles on the road, instead it is a result of the "Chinese left turn". I've tried to explain this to a couple people, but words just don't seem to do the trick. So here is a diagram (which, unfortunately, I cannot take credit for creating) that explains the Chinese traffic patterns:

STEP 1:

We see here a typical intersection. The light has just turned green for the east-west streets, and car [A], an enormous black Lexus with pitch black windows, wants to make a left turn into the southbound lanes. Pedestrians wait on each corner. (For purposes of this demonstration, we'll assume no one is running the north-south red light, and no one is jaywalking - a rather large assumption.)

STEP 2:

To make a left turn, it is VITAL that [A] cut off all eastbound traffic as soon as possible. The first few brave or foolish legitimate pedestrians step off the curb; this is of no concern. [A] makes his move.

STEP 3:

NO! Too slow! [A] has managed to partially block [B], a brand new purple and yellow Hyundai taxi, but [A] has only achieved what Beijing drivers would consider a 'weak' blocking position.

STEP 4:

In this detail, we can see why: [A] has only inserted his left bumper and cannot move forward without contact. [B], on the other hand, is in the dominant position - by putting his wheel hard to the right and flooring it, he can fully block [A].

STEP 5:

[B] proceeds to swerve right, cutting off [C], a tiny red Peugeot with a gold plastic dragon hood ornament, spoiler and assorted knobs glued on. Since [B] is just accelerating, and [C] is now decelerating, this has created a low-density 'dead space' in the intersection. [D], a strange blue tricycle dumptruck carrying what appear to be 40 of the world's oldest propane tanks, sees this and makes a move.

STEP 6:

DENIED! [E], an old red taxi with its name sloppily stenciled in white on its doors, has boldly cut across two lanes of traffic, behind [D], and then swerved right, driving [D] into an extremely weak position behind [A]. Meanwhile, [B] and [C] are still fighting for position, with [C] muscling his way into the crosswalk. The only thing between [E] and a successful left turn is a few lawful pedestrians. [E] steps on the gas...

STEP 7:

...and is cut off by [F], an elderly man pedaling his tricycle verrrryyy slooooowwwly with a 15-foot-diameter sphere of empty plastic cooking oil bottles bungee-corded haphazardly to the cargo area. He was part of the lawful pedestrians, but seeing the stalled traffic, decided to cut diagonally across the intersection. Not only has [F] blocked [E], he is headed straight at [B], giving [C] the edge he needs.

STEP 8:

[B] concedes to [C], who drives in the crosswalk behind [F] and blocks [E]. Meanwhile, [G], a herd of about 20 bicycles, mopeds, pedestrians and wheelbarrows, sensing weakness in the eastbound lane and seeing that much of the westbound traffic is blocked behind [D], breaks north against the light. [F] pedals doggedly onward at about 2 miles per hour, his face like chiseled marble.

STEP 9:

Now things get interesting. [C] has broken free and, as the first vehicle to get where he was going, wins. [E] makes a move to block [B] but, like [A] at the start of the left turn, only gains a 'weak' block. [A] has cleverly let [F] pass and guns into a crowd of [G], which both moves [A] forward and drives some [G] stragglers into the path of [D], clearing [A]'s flanks. Little now stands between [A] and a strong second-place finish.

STEP 10:

Except for public bus [H], one of those double buses with the accordion-thing connector. [H] has been screaming unnoticed along the eastbound sidewalk and now careens dangerously into a U-turn. This doesn't appear to concern the 112 people packed inside and pressed against the windows (although that could be due to a lack of oxygen.) [H] completely blocks both [A] and [D]. On the other side of the intersection, [B] has swerved into the lawful pedestrians (who aren't important enough to warrant a letter) and has gained position on [E].

[E] has forgotten the face of his father: He was so focused on his battle with [B] that he lost sight of the ultimate goal and is now hopelessly out of position.

This clears the path for dark horse [I], a blue Buick Lacrosse, to cut all the way across behind [H] and become the second vehicle to get where he was going (and the first to complete a left turn), since [F] has changed his mind again and is now gradually drifting north into the southbound lanes. But everyone better hurry, because the light is about to change...

STEP 11:

STEP 12:

And we're ready to start over.

Amazing!

- Jon

Case of the Missing Wallet

2008-12-16T22:39:00.002+08:00

Yesterday evening, Jon and I hung out with Robin for his last evening in Shanghai before heading back home to the US of A. We had a great time sumo wrestling with his rambunctious 9-year-old cousin, eating delicious food, drinking yummy wine, and relaxing. We were having so much fun that we ended up leaving on the late side to make our train back to Suzhou….we had to seriously book it. We sprinted through the streets, through the subway, to the train station. When we got there (with 4 minutes to spare), I was completely out of breath, my throat burned, and I was all in all exhausted. I passed out easily.

After an easy cab ride, we finally made it back to our dorm. As I unpacked, I started to panic…where was my wallet?!?! I checked, double-checked, triple-checked – nowhere to be found. Did it fall out of my jacket? Did someone take it from my pocket? I was freaking out, and quite angry with myself for losing my wallet. At least there was no money in it (good thing I’m poor, right?).

I immediately called the credit card companies to cancel everything and get new everything sent to my NY home. I still had to get a new license, and cancel my Chinese bank account, but that would have to wait until the next day.

Then this morning, I was in my coordinator’s office planning to meet later on to cancel the Chinese bank card, when she got a call…the most fortuitous call ever! Apparently, my wallet had fallen out of my jacket in the cab, and the kindest man in the world remembered us and where he had taken us, and returned it to the school (everything intact). Hallelujah!

He left his number, so I contacted him and, with scripted phrases, I thanked him for being completely awesome.

Hooray for Chinese taxi drivers!!!

Over and out,

Coach Carter

2008-12-16T08:42:00.003+08:00

Last night, we watched "Coach Carter" with Samuel L. Jackson. At first, I wasn't too thrilled about the idea of watching this movie. I even started it halfway (Jon had already watched the first half) because I didn't think I'd miss anything too important. Well, I was much more touched by the characters than I would have thought. Maybe I'm a sucker for this stuff (like Coach Carter's mentality and dedication to helping kids even when the system doesn't believe in them and they don't believe in themselves), but it was still good. Here's a quote that one of the kids on the basketball team who, at first, was antagonistic towards Coach and then found him to be a guiding light in a time of need (it's originally by Maryanne Williamson):

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our dark that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people don't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own lights shine, we unconsciously give other people to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Pretty moving...and deeply inspiring.

Over and out,
Em

Christmas ala China

2008-12-15T12:17:00.005+08:00

Christmas in China is an interesting phenomenon. The only evidence of merry-ness festivities is centered around foreigners. In Shanghai, there are a bunch of fancy schmancy western stores, like Prada, Escada, Zara, Louis Vuitton (sp?)..., that have tons of lights and fake xmas trees and giant signs with oh-so-jolly Santa Clauses and "Merry Christmas" outside. It feels really bizarre, like the only way to celebrate xmas is through super expensive shopping...in a removed westerner way. Not that I'm into the religious aspects (AT ALL), but I'd rather focus on family, friends, and spending warm quality time with one another. It's a little hard to do in this atmosphere. But I'm doing my best. I an giving in to the gift-giving aspect this year, which I'm normally not that good at (I'm more of a spontaneous giver), but I figure I can give my "tourist" gifts as xmas gifts (2 for 1, baby).

Mostly, the part of xmas that has been occupying the most time for me is the xmas performance that my class is doing with the rest of the International Department at my school this coming Friday. I wrote a short play called "A Marshmallow Season" about a girl who really wants it to snow, who feels that the air is so magical this year that it will snow, about classmates' doubt of snow coming (since it rarely snows here in Suzhou), and about the snow that does ultimately come, bringing joy to all (holy corniness). Then they sing Let it Snow, singing along with music....and then 4 students have piano, saxophone, and flute solos, which is pretty cool. I thought it was going to just be awesome all around. But painful and difficult organization and planning has gone into these shananigans. I always seem to do that...make more work for myself. Right now, I can't wait for it to be over!!! I usually shy away from the cheesy xmas festivities and Santa coloring pages and mundane activities centered around a religious holiday masquerading as a Hallmark profiting scheme....eh, the two excuses get intertwined in a whirlwind. But here I had no choice. Well, I guess in reality, I like a little bit of xmas cheer, and I'm excited to see my students perform...I think they're gonna be great. And then afterwards, I can really kick my feet up and relax. Mmmmm....

In other randomness, I've been feeling sick after almost every Chinese meal that I have. Not hurling bad, but gripping-my-stomach bad. I think it might be the pans that they use....or the unclean ingredients. Either would do it. I hope it gets better....but for now, I'll make most of my own food, thank you very much.

Later friends!

C.R.E.A.M.

2008-12-15T00:25:00.003+08:00

For those who have not been to the 36 Chambers, C.R.E.A.M. is a Wu-Tang Clan song and an acronym that stands for Cash Rules Everything Around Me. It also reminds me of one of my favorite frisbee cheers (thanks Luke!) Anyways, it's late here in Suzhou and I'm exhausted from my weekend in Shanghai, but I wanted to make a quick note of a recent discovery of mine. A good friend in Suzhou told me that money could be made on blogs by displaying a small google ad on the side. At first, I was skeptical, but I figured that any shot at earning money without doing any work was worth a shot, so I signed up for AdSense and am now displaying a google ad (which you can see on the right side of your screen) on my page. I've been trying to convince friends to click on the link whenever they visit the site and so far their clicks (16) have generated $5.33. Pretty cool! I'm planning on using on pay for all my vegetables using only earnings from my AdSense account :) Haha. Free money is awesome. Please keep clicking!

I anticipate that some of you might have some questions about payment details. Unfortunately, Google is painfully vague about how much each click is worth. From what I can gather, different ad words cost different amounts (the more unique, the more expensive). As a consequence, each click on a "more unique" ad will generate more money for my account. So far, it looks like I am averaging around 30 or 35 cents per click. I like to think of that as 1 lb of tangerines per click. Yum!

- Jon

"Old Godzilla was hopping around Tokyo city like a big playground..."

2008-12-11T00:04:00.005+08:00

NOTE: FOR PEOPLE WHO DON'T USUALLY READ THE BLOG

IF YOU'RE LOOKING FOR THE SONG FROM THE TITLE IT IS THE ULTIMATE SHOWDOWN OF ULTIMATE DESTINY:

Yesterday I had one of those moments where you just stop and think to yourself "What the hell am I doing here?" (But, in a good way.) I was playing basketball with a handful of security guards from the school and we were doing our best to communicate in broken Chinese and English. I was trying to explain that I was going back to my apartment to cook pasta. They couldn't understand why I would ever want to eat so late (this was at 7:15pm). It's very weird to live in a foreign country, surrounded by people who speak a different language and have a profoundly different way of acting (and seeing the world around them). It's wonderful though. It forces one to appreciate the multi-facetedness of everything around us. There is never one way to look at something. Interpretation matters just as much as the actions/events themselves and we all have our own unique ways of interpreting 0ur environment. I'm rambling on a bit more than I had intended...

I was thinking today about why I am here in China. As many of you know, I have delayed moving to Colorado and deferred my enrollment in my Statistics PhD program for one year to come to China. I came to China with three main goals: 1) explore a new country 2) learn Chinese 3) relax and enjoy myself. So far, I think I'm making pretty good progress all 3 fronts (particularly #3), but next semester I'd really like kick things up a notch in the Chinese studying department. I am going to begin formal instruction at a university. I'm looking at a semester-long, intensive study program with 20 hours of instruction a week. I'm psyched!

我很喜欢打蓝球！

再见！
Jon
P.S. I will continue experimenting more and more with typing in Chinese!

Shanghaied

2008-12-08T00:38:00.008+08:00

We had our first visit to Qi Pu Lu (also endearingly called Cheap Street) in Shanghai this past weekend. The street is basically a one-stop shopping extravaganza. It's a bargain hunters dream. There are thousands of little stalls selling everything from freaky wigs to hip-hop sweatshirts and nothing has a listed price (so bring your bargaining skills). The place was teeming with people on Saturday and that only added to the experience. Here are a couple of pictures from our time in Qi Pu:

This is what I would look like if I went platinum and did a lot of drugs.

Wig store.

Grabbing some post-shopping food with the gang!

Happy couple :)

Despite my non-consumer tendencies, I ended up purchasing two items. A new Chinese flannel and a fake Nuggets basketball jersey.

- Jon
P.S. In other news, Hugh taught me how to text in Chinese on my phone. Pretty exciting!

Sugar in Your Gas Tank

2008-12-03T23:08:00.004+08:00

It's been a long time since I mentioned anything about my classes. Things have been going really well at school for me. I've been enjoying my classes for the most part. I think I'm connecting with the kids despite the language/age barriers and I'm teaching some interesting material (at least in high school). I don't write much about teaching on the blog because I prefer to keep my work life separate from the rest of my life. I try not to think about work after around 5 or 6pm. This is particularly important for me while I'm teaching because there is ALWAYS more to do to become a better teacher.

This past week my PGA3 (high school seniors) class finished up the material for our math and science classes two weeks ahead of schedule! This is really a testament to the dedication and diligence of my students. I decided that we should have a party to celebrate their hard work... So yesterday, instead of evening class, I met my kids in the music room for their party. Now, I was planning on just going along as an adult chaperone (kind of like chaperoning a middle school dance), but the class had other plans. They did their best to include me in all of the goofy activities that they had planned. The whole party was really bizarre. It started off with a KFC feast (Chinese people LOOOOOOOOOOVE KFC) and then was followed by an acapella performance of some Britney Spears song by one of the students (which was awesome). After a bit more singing and drumming they started playing a game similar to hot potato. If you were the one holding the hot potato you had to perform a "show" of your choice. Basically, this game is all about watching your friends make fools out of themselves. Now, the kids rigged the game repeatedly and forced me to perform shows for them. I'm not much of a singer and I couldn't really think of anything, so I ended up teaching them how to line dance. Hilarious... I really wish I had a video of it. There was a lot more singing and goofy games. It was really fun and I think the kids enjoyed it!

In other news, I have been getting a Joke-a-Day email. Most of the jokes are terrible, but I recently got one that was sort of clever. Hope you enjoy it:

A woman in her eighties made the evening news because she was getting married for the fourth time. The following day she was being interviewed by a local TV station, and the commentator asked about what it felt to be married again at that age and would she share part of her previous experiences, since it seem quite unique the fact that her new husband was a ‘funeral director.’ After a short time to think, a smile came to her face and she proudly explained that she had first married a banker when she was in her twenties, in her forties she married a circus ring master, and in her sixties she married a pastor and now in her eighties, a funeral director. The amazed commentator asked her why she had married men with such diverse carriers. With a smile on her face she explained, ‘I married one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, and four to go.’

- Jon

“This place is like Dr. Seuss’s worst nightmare."

2008-11-30T18:38:00.005+08:00

This weekend a small group of frisbee players got together to celebrate our Team Blue fall league victory. The fall league victory wasn't really a big deal at all - we just wanted a good excuse to hang out together after frisbee was over... We all met up at Erich's (a Swedish professional disc golfer) house, chatted, drank some beers, and admired his apartment. He had an impressive bachelor pad laid out. Simple and elegant design, huge bed, jacuzzi in the bathroom, and a refridgerator filled with drinks and not a piece of food in sight. At some point, Geoff got a text from one of his friends who works at a club and was offering us each 5 free drinks. Now, I'd hang out just about anywhere if there were free drinks involved in the deal, so I was happy to pile into a cab and head over to JJ2 Lounge (or something like that). We picked up a couple of more friends here and walked into the club and it was like entering an alternate universe. I've never been in a club like this before. There was smoke swirling around the whole place, bizarre spotlights flashing all over the place, music blasting, a scantily clad dread-locked singer dancing around (and being drooled on by about 10 guys). JJ2 lounge defies description - words really can't do this place justice. The best description I could muster when I entered was turning to Robin and saying "This place looks like space." Not my best work, but funny nonetheless.

- Jon

Thanksgiving in a Strange Land

2008-11-28T14:10:00.003+08:00

China is definitely a strange land, but that's not really the focus of this post. I just want to write a quick blurb about Thanksgiving here. Thanksgiving (being an American holiday) is not celebrated here at all, but a group of American teachers at my school decided to get together and give it our best shot. We all got gathered at Keli and Amanda's for a delicious pot-luck dinner. Everybody brought bizarrely different (but still wonderful dishes) - Emma made zucchini, Ryan made fruit salad and bought some chickens, Sebastian brought some Chilean bruschetta type stuff, Pilar contributed an amazing cake, Mike made macaroni and cheese, and I made 2 lbs of pasta (those of you who know me well would have expected nothing else). I really like potluck dinners. There's something special about cooking/baking your own food and then bringing it to share with others. That's what Thanksgiving is all about to me - bonding over food :) It's not the same as turkey dinner at home with family, but these funky Thanksgivings abroad are just as special.

- Jon

Mario's Pizza

2008-11-24T20:17:00.006+08:00

My mom and dad arrived in Italy on Thursday for a little vacation (I must admit, I was kind of jealous…probably because I miss them). That same evening, Jon and I went with one of my students and her mom and little brother to this restaurant called Mario's Pizza. It's kind of far away from us: a 25 min car ride (and about a 2 hour bus ride....we took their car….sweet!). My student's dad is part owner of the restaurant...not Italian though. The evening was a big deal to me because Mario's pizza is pretty famous: it’s written up in LonelyPlanet and a few friends had mentioned a while back that they wanted to check it out….even before knowing that my student was involved in any way.

Anyway, I've really wanted to go there, and the food was surprisingly really good…and not just for a Chinese Italian restaurant! I got the seafood pizza.....mmmm! Delicious! One of my favorites. And my student’s mom got red wine, that she barely had a glass of so Jon and I shared the bottle... Yup…just what you’re thinking…

We had a caprese salad (with surprisingly AMAZING oregano), and some bread (eh, on that one) with olive oil. AND chocolate pizza, which was essentially a quesadilla with nutella inside...i.e., super awesome scrumptiousness. All in all, it was a sweet evening (and a treated dinner) – my belly and heart were very happy (a little taste of Italy and home).

Chocolate pizza. Buonissima!

Over and out,
Em

"Boots with the fur..."

2008-11-21T16:35:00.009+08:00

Many of you will recognize the lyrics from this post's title. Sadly, the title has nothing at all to do with the content - the song has just been stuck in my head recently (mostly because of Sarah singing it incessantly at frisbee). On the upside, the song still brings back pleasant memories of Smartwhores in Brooklyn. Also, I still can't get over the fact the name Flo-rida. So impressed. Haha.

Anyways, this week has passed by relatively quickly and not too much out of the ordinary happened. We had a going away party for Angela (one of my colleagues at school who has quit and is moving back to Germany this Sunday). The highlight of the party was definitely watching the straight confusion on the faces of our Chinese friends as we tried to explain Texas Hold 'Em and Mafia. Their faces just screamed "help me!" It made for some pretty entertaining (if slow moving) games. On Thursday Emma and I were treated to a delicious meal at Mario's Pizza. As a rule, we don't eat much Western food in China (it is much more expensive than Chinese food and usually doesn't taste much like the real thing), but one of Emma's student's invited us to Mario's (a restaurant owned by her father). The food was delicious, the wine was good, and we even got to play with a two year-old Chinese boy who stumbled around the restaurant. Free food always warms my heart :)

In other news, I have been thinking about Japanese game shows a lot recently. Do they have Chinese equivalents? Are they half as ridiculous? Can I get on one? In college, I considered myself a connoisseur of Japanese game shows (if you can be a connoisseur of something so stupid and ridiculous). I've been rewatching them on YouTube recently and showing them to my students - who are duly impressed by such nonsense. Here are a couple of my favorites:

Japanese tongue twisters + mechanized crotch shots = recipe for hilarity.

Human Tetris is always good for a few laughs.

Endurance. Probably my favorite of all time. I still can't believe it exists.

Here's a pretty silly one where they do stupid things in a library. You have to wait until the "Old Man Bites Tenderly" event. It's worth it.

- Jon

"When the magnolia blossoms fill the air..."

2008-11-16T23:01:00.003+08:00

This past weekend was spent in Shanghai (like many weekends before). We went in early on Friday in an attempt to procure tickets to the Masters Cup and watch Federer dominate. Unfortunately, the scalpers outside the stadium didn't have anything in our price range :( I was a little bummed that we couldn't get tickets, but the night ended up being a blast anyways.

I feel like I'm in a different frame of mind living here in China. I am focused on taking advantage of the unique opportunities that I am presented with here (as diverse as they are). This might not sound like much of a revelation, but my whole approach is different than it was in New York. In NYC, I was constantly surrounded by a remarkable variety of exciting new things. I was able to partake in some cool activities, but I let a lot pass by... This isn't to say that I wasn't enjoying myself in NYC, but I was enjoying myself in the same way I've grown accustomed to without experimenting much. I spent most of my free time hanging out with friends in Brooklyn or playing frisbee. Good times for sure, but not different. In China, I find that I still spend a lot of time frisbee (frisbee is life, after all), but I approach new activities and excursions with a much more enthusiastic outlook. I'm going to Kanye West concerts, new restaurants, sweet mountains, international hockey matches, etc... Whenever a friend approaches me with a new idea, I have a little voice in the back of my head that says "you're only going to live here once - do it!" Hmmm, I just re-read that and its not terrible articulate, but I'm too tired to go back through and re-write it. Hope you're all able to decipher the babblings...

In other news, there is a definitive lack of good BBQ ribs in China. I'm contemplating building a smoker and filling this void. I'm sure many quality blog entries will result from this escapade...

Jon

NYT and MC Hammer - What do they have in common?

2008-11-12T18:34:00.004+08:00

I was reading a NY Times article this morning that really struck me. Here is the intro:

"There is a new common symptom of the flu, in addition to the usual aches, coughs, fevers and sore throats. Turns out a lot of ailing Americans enter phrases like “flu symptoms” into Google and other search engines before they call their doctors.

That simple act, multiplied across millions of keyboards in homes around the country, has given rise to a new early warning system for fast-spreading flu outbreaks, called Google Flu Trends.
Tests of the new Web tool from Google.org, the company’s philanthropic unit, suggest that it may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

We already know that Google is the best at everything (that's not my point here). Google is using the internet as a predictive tool. Instead of waiting for events to occur (and data to be collected and analyzed) here Google is getting predictive data immediately. This technique cuts out the labor (at time) intensive data collection process, thereby reaching conclusions much more quickly and, in this case, slowing the spread of a flu virus via quick dissemination of information. What a powerful tool! Statisticians would sell their collective souls to the devil just to get Google's search data...

In other news, a friend in Shanghai sent me the following YouTube video that made me laugh hysterically for at least a minute. You can learn a lot about China just by watching this video (note: my favorite part is the person in the background).

- Jon

"What I liked best was she had so much soul..."

2008-11-09T22:11:00.006+08:00

Another exciting event from last week (Monday night) was the Kanye West concert!!!! It was really bizarre to see a concert in China. They whole thing seemed a little off, but it was still a hell of a lot of fun. The first act was hilarious and silly. Imagine an Asian version of Michael Jackson in a cut-off tanktop moonwalking back and forth across the stage throwing his hands up singing. Pretty spectacular. Kanye came out and the whole crowd went nuts. Now, it should be noted that the stadium was at less than 50% capacity and the crowd was composed overwhelmingly of white foreigners. It must have been a shock to Kanye to see a half-empty stadium of white people in Shanghai, but in China you have to be prepared for anything... The concert itself was a blast! Emma, Charlotte, and I were way up in the upper deck, but we had plenty of room and the girls broke up some dance moves. The sound system was powerful and crystal clear and we grooved. It was fun!!! Here are some pictures of us at the concert and then a couple of Kanye (that a friend in the front row took for us...)

Emma, me, and Char at the concert

Our view at the concert

Kanye doing his thing...

Every time we go back to Suzhou we take the train from Shanghai Railway station to Suzhou. Then we walk about 10 minutes to the bus stop (where we pick up the bus that takes us home). Anyways, so this past week as we were walking towards our bus stop we saw this guy reaching down into a hole in the storm drain on the side of the street. He was up to his elbow in the muck and he was really going after something. I assumed he had dropped something important in the drain and was trying to dig it out. Then, as we approached, he yanked out a fish! He was fishing with his bare hands in the sewer! He wrapped up his filthy fish (which was covered in muck) in a plastic bag and went on his way. God, I hope he doesn't work at a restaurant in our part of town...

Over and out from Suzhou.

- Jon
P.S. My new song obsessions are Hey Mama and Homecoming by Kanye...

In a minute...

2008-11-06T23:19:00.007+08:00

Remember that PBS pre-commercial bizarre 15-second bit that went, “In a minute! In a minute! In a minute! In a minute!” ?? Letting us know that we only had to wait a (relative) minute before enjoying more Big Bird, or whatever…Anyone? Well, anyway, this post will be (should be) just as flashy: a sort of drive-by updating.

Hong Kong: Some of the weekend was pretty sweet. We all rocked out at the party, winning the prize for best group performance, and we also took in all the bright colors and drunken odors at the nearby carnival ala’ Mardi Gras. However, I was a little too ambitious: I played a bit of Ultimate and I paid the price. My back went out again, not even half way through the 2nd game. Turns out I’m not invincible. Blast! I was pretty pissed at myself for making the decision to play in the first place, and at not being able to play, and at being in stupidly horrid pain. Blah. I’m going to start seeing a Pilates/Physical Therapy expert in Shanghai, so initiative is (finally) being taken.

Halloween: Remember Halloween back in elementary school, dressing up as witches and vampires, trick-or-treating, and having a day of games and candy at school?? Awesome right? Well, when the table has turned, it becomes a royal pain of a freak show to provide the shenanigans that both kids want and teachers expect. It’s like each class is in competition to see how many stupid orange pumpkins she can hang up (which has completely killed our supply of orange paper, I’ll tell you that much). At first I was a little bitter, but I ended up getting into it. We played pin the hat on the witch, musical chairs, and mummy wrap. I even dressed up…I even made part of my costume (note the ears…and the hidden tail made of sewn cloth with a hanger and paper stuffed inside).

My cat-alicious self with some of my little munchkin wizards, witches, monkeys, skeletons, and fellow felines.

The basis for "Pin the Hat/Broom End/Feet on the Witch" that I drew. What a hideous monster I've created!

Mummy Wrap: The Pumpkin girl and the Scarecrow doing a scarily good job of mummifying their classmates.

I ended up having a great time, and came away with a sackful of candy. Bonus! Plus, later that evening we all went out (minus students…) to get free beer courtesy of our sweet costumes. Oh, the benefits of being a lao wai…

Election: HOLY MOLY!!! I am so f&*#ing glad that Obama won! I mean, this doesn’t instantly solve all of America’s or the world’s problems, but it’s surely a step in the right direction. I read an article from The Onion that my brother, Paul, brought to my attention, entitled Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress. It makes a pretty interesting, and painfully clear, point of how we can’t seem to get out of the habit of waiting until the shit really hits the fan and we’re all covered in the gross shit that we’ve, until now, tried to dump on the world…before even thinking of switching gears. Apparently, “42 percent of voters said that the nation's financial woes had finally become frightening enough to eclipse such concerns as gay marriage, while 30 percent said that the relentless body count in Iraq was at last harrowing enough to outweigh long ideological debates over abortion.” All I have to say is, puh-leez. Some Americans have - thankfully - momentarily pulled their heads out of their asses to make what in my mind was the right vote…I just hope now that the movement toward change doesn’t sacrifice “small” causes like gay marriage and women’s reproductive rights (the passing of Prop 8, banning gay marriage in California, already sends alarming shivers through my veins).

Furthermore, as Paul cautiously points out: Of course, even though Obama "kicked ass" in the election, and the "people have spoken," the vote was still something like a 52-48% split. This country is so weird. I’m with ya. America is freakin’ weird. Hopefully Obama can rally up the nation to help us really see and believe in the potential awesomeness that America has. I love ya, bro!

Over and out.
Em

P.S. Not quite drive-by in-a-minute updating…sorry…the intent was there. ☺

Black Market Receipts

2008-11-06T09:57:00.004+08:00

Emma and I have spent a lot of time in Shanghai's Railway station over these past few months because of our many trips to and from Shanghai. On every corner surrounding the train station there are ladies mumbling under their breath "fa piao, fa piao, fa piao, fa piao" (fa piao means receipt in Chinese). So, I knew that these ladies were interested in receipts for some reason, but I didn't really understand why. I learned that they were interested in both buying and selling fa piao, but couldn't get any further because of my lack of speaking skills. I asked my friends in Shanghai about fa piao and found out that they are the official form of receipts and businesses use them for expenses and companies use them for tax purposes. These women in the railway station buy fa piao from anybody and sell them to people who need them for expenses.

Fa piao (note the red chops, Chinese people love that stuff)

This past weekend I was in the eyeglasses market with Milan and Mary (they were shopping) and we passed a fa piao lady. I got so excited that I scared my friends... I convinced Mary (who is fluent) to pump the fa piao lady for information. They had a little conversation that involved a lot of pointing at me, some laughing, and eventually some knowledge. It turns out that a fa piao for approximately 100 RMB is worth 2 RMB. So, for every receipt that I collect I can get 2% back on the black market! I'm going to collect all the fa piao I possibly can!!!! I'll be keeping track of the amount of $$$ I make from fa piao on the blog (although I haven't decided whether I should measure it in RMB or in fractions of Teppanyaki). All in all, this is a very exciting moment for me :)

- Jon

Shanghai Hockey?

2008-11-03T10:35:00.004+08:00

This past weekend one of our friends scored some free tickets to an international hockey match (Shanghai Sharks vs. some team from South Korea). I'm not a big fan of hockey, but this sounded like a fun, new experience, so I was pretty excited about all of it! Anyways, after frisbee, some delicious Xinjiang food, and a quick trip to the eyeglasses market (I will say more about this in a later post) we made our way down to the stadium. The stadium was out on the end of the Line 9 subway. Now, I don't have a vast knowledge of Shanghai (I don't live there after all), but I hadn't even heard of Line 9. It is a rarely used boondocky subway that took us out into the 'burbs. It was like going back to Suzhou :) We got to the rink just in time for the game to begin and it was everything that I dreamed it would be... The hockey was definitely mediocre (think high school/college level), but the atmosphere was hilarious. There were thunder sticks everywhere, dancing cheerleaders on a stage (the Chinese seem to have an unhealthy obsession with cheerleaders, but that's a topic for another post), and beer-swilling Chinese hockey fans. It was terrific!

High quality hockey

Picture time at the hockey game!

The highlight of the match for me was betting Robin a bunch of bananas that no goals would be scored in the 3rd period only to have Shanghai tie up the score with a goal in the final 19 seconds of the 3rd period. You just can't manufacture excitement like that! Haha. Anyways, once the game was over we needed to get back to Shanghai, but at this point the subway is no longer so we hire out this sketchy mini-van and ride joyfully back to Shanghai. On the ride back, we prank called Joann (a frisbee friend). We pretended to be lost in cab with a cabbie who only spoke Cantonese and asked her to talk to the cabbie for us. Joann (who speaks Cantonese fluently) then spoke with the "cab driver" Geoff (our friend in the van who also speaks Cantonese). Geoff proceeded along an inappropriate line of questioning (in Cantonese) asking Joann if she was pretty and where she lived. It was all quite amusing at the time, but definitely loses something in the the re-telling. I actually just re-read that and realized how little sense it makes, but I'm too lazy to re-type all of that and I'm just going to leave it up there as is.

Ok, back to work for me!

- Jon

Halloween Suzhou-style

2008-11-02T22:05:00.003+08:00

Halloween isn't really done here in China. The Chinese kids know about its existence and wanted to celebrate it. I taught them "trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat" and gave myself a virtual pat on the back. Now, that's a job well done. Haha. Aside from a couple of candy-crazed kids Halloween is a foreigner-only event in China. A bunch of the other young foreign teachers at our school decided that we should take advantage of the Friday night/Halloween festivities to go out in style. We found an Aussie bar in town that was serving free beer (7pm-midnight) to anybody in costume! I couldn't believe it. FREE BEER. This is unheard of... I mean, I'd dress up like an idiot every weekend if it meant free beer. God, I love free things. Anyways, we slapped together some costumes last minute. Actually, I shouldn't say that. The girls (Emma, Keli, and Amanda) put some serious time and effort (and arts & crafts skills) into their costume and turned out with 1 pregnant redneck and 2 cats. I decided to go with the low-effort route and chose to be a Chinese tour guide. Now, this doesn't make as much sense for those of you who have never seen a Chinese tour, but I'll try to give a little description. Basically, Chinese tours consist of 30 random Chinese (who are all forced to wear matching brightly colored hats) and a tour guide. The tour guide has a similiar brightly colored hat, brightly colored flag, and finals a mobile amp for blasting whatever it is they say to anybody within a 5-mile radius. Anyways, we made our way downtown as a Chinese tour guide, 2 cats, and a pregnant redneck (and her husband) . We drank free beer, chatted, and had a wonderful time. The best part of it was actually the whole crowd of Chinese that gathered around the bar to stare at all the foreigners in costume. They enjoyed the show as much as we enjoyed the free beer. It was a win-win!

Quality Halloween in China!

- Jon
P.S. MUCH more will follow in the near future. Sorry I haven't been updating recently, but I'll get back on that...

Vegas meets China

2008-10-28T11:25:00.006+08:00

Hong Kong is a special place. I was only there for a weekend and I spent the vast majority of that time playing frisbee, but the little I did see shocked and intrigued me. HK seemed like a city of contradictions and odd juxtapositions. Everywhere I looked there was opulence (BMWs, mansions, Louis Vuitton (sp?) stores, etc...) and there was squalor (beggars, ghettos, etc...) When we first arrived in Hong Kong I was taken aback by the bright lights and the Vegas-like atmosphere of Kowloon. The diversity of Hong Kong's streets was a shock for the system as well. I've adjusted to Suzhou (and China in general) which is an incredibly homogenous place. I'm not sure what the actual demographics are, but everybody here is Asian (no surprise, really). This is not true in Hong Kong. There were tons of people of all different races and from all different countries walking around the streets drinking, eating, and socializing. It was like NYC. Anyways, I wish I had been able to spend more time in Hong Kong, but I'm sure that I will return to explore it later...

Here are a couple pictures from the weekend:

O-line (Sherry, Nutt, Sam, me, Robin, Sara, Jono)

Joann, Robin, and our cabbie on the way back from the fields

Emma helping me prepare my costume on the subway (who knows what I'm doing...)

The tournament was a blast. We lost to a team from the Phillipines in the semis. Our team's performance varied from nearly perfect to downright sloppy. There were definitely some flashes of brilliance and I think a lot of hope for the future. The tournament party was pretty fun too :) Highlights include a lot of couch dancing (hard to describe), Double Dragon skit, and eating a HUGE pile of McD fries in the middle of the night!

- Jon

GROSS

2008-10-24T09:22:00.002+08:00

I ate my first chicken foot last night - ugh. Imagine nibbling salty skin from around a chicken toe-nail/claw... That's pretty much exactly what it's like. I don't get why anybody would be interested in the first place - there isn't any meat on the thing to begin with... I guess I shouldn't go on about this too much because I wasn't forced to eat the foot. I was just out with a couple of the Chinese teachers that I play basketball with and I didn't want to seem rude. Bah. I'm going to tell my Mom that good manners did end up almost killing me.

We leave for Hong Kong today!

- Jon

"The only one who could ever reach me..."

2008-10-21T10:35:00.006+08:00

I don't have anything in particular to say right now. I just have a few things going through my head that I want to get down...

1) Despite my previous short anti-political rant, Palin scares me. Check out the website http://www.palinaspresident.us/ move your mouse around and click on random objects in the room.

2) My parents are in China right now! They have spent the past week or so on a pretty sweet tour of "China's Tourist Highlights" (Great Wall, Forbidden City, Terracotta Warriors, tea plantation, etc...) It's pretty cool that they've come all this way to explore a new country. I'm glad that I could provide the impetus for such an adventure! I'm also pretty excited to take a couple of days to explore with them...

3) I am taking 4 days off over the next week. I emailed the foreign teacher liaison about this almost a month ago and he just told me that it wasn't possible for me to take leave. I emailed back trying to express how important this was to me and that I wasn't really asking for leave, more that I was informing him that I wasn't going to be around. At this point, he chose not to respond (this is a common tactic - if you hear something you don't like, just pretend you never heard it and under no circumstances should you confront the issue). Anyways, this situation lasted for a couple of weeks during which I'd send the odd email to remind him that I wasn't going to be around for 4 days. Just yesterday he decided to address the issue and tell the vice-principal about it. Now it's become a huge fiasco. More details will follow on this I'm sure as things develop...

4) I'm really excited to play in my first Asian frisbee tournament in Hong Kong. The level of frisbee out here is significantly lower than that in the States, but I'm still REALLY excited to play in a competitive tournament. I like the people on our team a lot and I'm looking forward to spending the weekend with them playing, eating, and partying in Hong Kong!

5) Huangshan was ridiculously beautiful and we haven't posted enough pictures of it...

Here I am saving the world...

All the lockets and a mountain view

Only in China...

- Jon

Vote!

2008-10-19T10:40:00.003+08:00

As many of you know, I am not terribly interested in politics. Quite the opposite actually... I find political discussions at best boring and at worst painful and divisive. I know it doesn't have to be this way, but maybe I've just sat through too many arguments over abortion or Iraq that just consisted of people waiting for their turn to speak and never coming even close to any sort of compromise or sharing of thoughts or really listening for that matter. Anyways, I didn't start this post to rip on political discussion (my Swat friends will have my head over this in any event), but instead to say that yesterday I sent in my absentee ballot! Despite my anti-political sentiments, I love voting. It's fun! Unfortunately, I've never had the normal voting experience because I've been abroad during the last two presidential elections. Absentee ballots for me!

- Jon

Phillies Phever!

2008-10-16T21:45:00.003+08:00

As many of you on the other side of the world already know, the Phillies have just beaten the Dodgers to win the National League pennant and will soon be playing in the World Series! This may not seem like a monumental event, but I assure you that for any Phillies fan anywhere this is a big deal. Philadelphia has been plagued by mediocre (or downright terrible) professional sports teams for the past two and half decades (i.e. my entire life). They haven't won a championship since 1983 (no Super Bowl, no World Series, no Stanley Cup, and no whatever they win in the NBA.) It's been a tough time to be a fan. Year after year Philadelphia sports teams will either perform terribly or play just well enough to almost make it. It's gotten to the point where its hard to be optimistic about anything Philly sports related.

This reminds me of the last time the Phillies were in the World Series. It was 1993 and I was 9 years old. I was an avid baseball card collector and loved playing the game. It was with great pleasure that I watched the Phillies take on the Toronto Blue Jays. In a thrilling 7-game series, the Phillies built up my hopes and dreams and then crushed them suddenly. I remember watching Joe Carter hit the walk-off home run in Game 7. It was then that my innocence as a sports fan died. I also burned all of Mitch Williams cards after that game. I still cringe when I hear his name. "Wild Thing" - please...

Anyways, I wish I were back in the States and could revel in the Phillies' glory. I wish I could watch the games on TV. I wish I could tease Rob about the Mets collapsing again. But alas, no. It is almost impossible to watch a live game out here (due to time difference and work). There is no joy in Mudville :(

- Jon

Holy Huangshan, Batman!

2008-10-14T00:26:00.017+08:00

So I’m back from a little hiatus of blog-writing….I’m sorry if you felt in the least bit neglected by me. Deeply and truly sorry…….Ok, moving on…

As Jon mentioned, we went to Huangshan (“Yellow Mountain’) with our friend and travel companion Ryan a couple of weeks ago. After an 8-hour bus ride and another 1-hour van ride, we arrived in Tangkou, the town at the base of Huangshan. With the help of the powers that be, i.e. LonelyPlanet, we contacted Mr. Hu (Mr. Who??), who we soon found out spoke excellent English, was a great guide and resource for tips and information about the mountain, and…unfortunately….was the owner of a hostel and restaurant with down right terrible food. A Chinese man in China making terrible food?? I hadn’t known it to be possible…a first for everything.

A view of Huangshan from Tangkou

After a somewhat rough night of sleep – honking of car horns is the Chinese version of 24/7 ambience…the kind that beats on your head as if it’s a gong – we sprung up ready to climb Huangshan. We all decided to climb the Western steps because it was more challenging and thus, in our minds, more fun. Also, most people climb up the Eastern steps, so we thought we’d avoid the crowds. Now, let me clarify. We went during the National Holiday, which means that nearly all Chinese folk travel. And where do they all go? Yup. Huangshan. So even when we “avoided” the crowds, we were still quite flooded. It’s all relative, I guess.

The hoards of Chinese tourists

Anyway, the whole way up is steps. One after the other. 15.5 km of concrete steps. After about 1 hour of climbing, I was starting to feel tired, full aware of the 5 hours of climbing that lay ahead of us….taunting me…mocking me. I could feel the muscles in my thighs and hips and butt start to scream and wail at me: “Who do you think you are making me contract like this repeatedly without a break? Without stretching? I was built for yoga and Frisbee, that’s it!!!” And my response? At first: “Please please, try to adjust. Help me out a bit.” But after continued pain, near cramping, and growing tension, the response turned to: “Listen hear, you. You WILL make it up. You don’t have a f*#^ing choice here. I’m gonna get to the top and you’re coming with me!”Porters carrying a snoozing lady who just straight-up opted out of the whole hiking thing

(but I say go big or go home!)

Unnecessarily long story short, I made it to the top. The hike up was absolutely gorgeous. My breath was repeatedly stripped from my mouth as I stood in awe of the natural beauty around me—the contrast of the height of the mountains with depth of the valleys, the picturesque scene of distant peaks fading into subtler shades of blue, the meeting of jagged and smooth rocks, the staggering of green, the intertwining and interweaving of multi-layered clouds and fog surrounding you, the sun shining brightly and providing a warm and sweet blanket through the cool breeze. An experience truly never to be forgotten.

An array of "lovers' lockets" (ours is now one among the many)

A view of the mountain that lay ahead of us

We woke up the next day with, yet again, hundreds of Chinese tourists all around for the sunrise. Every time a new iota of light made its way to some fool’s eyes, I heard an “Uh! Oh! Whoa!”…as if the sun’s rising was a completely new concept. Hysterical.

Later (after a short nap), we hiked around the Western Trail, which was an absolutely stunning panorama of what felt like a personal getaway that very few people knew about. It was particularly nice that all the tourists didn’t crowd that area because a major aspect of my enjoyment was how sparse the people were among the enormity of the mountains and of the vertical drops from the overhanging paths that we walked on. (holy moly was I terrified!).

And finally, I made it down the 7 km down the Eastern steps, tactfully chosen because most people climb up that route and not down.

Ryan, Jon, & Emma

Unfortunately, I paid the price for that climb. Since my muscles were pissed off at me and tight as all hell, it planted the seed for a tweak in my back and hips that would actualize itself at Ultimate Frisbee League a few days later. I pivoted weirdly a few times, and then, well, I just couldn’t move. Sharp pains shot all throughout my back, hips, and legs and I pretty much wanted to die. Thankfully, the wanting-of-death feeling didn’t transfer to the next day; at least I could walk. Now, a week later, my hip still hurts – I can’t even put on my shoes without wincing in aching pain. But I feel significantly better. I went to see a spectacular acupuncturist yesterday (who only costs about $10 for an hour session) who I think will help me to improve greatly. My goal is to be ready to play at the Hong Kong tournament on the October 25-26, which I think is definitely manageable at the rate I’m going (I’m taking it super easy…even missing League tonight!).

Wish me luck!
Em