Dani in Space

Back to August or so...

2010-01-24T00:02:00.000+01:00

So, for various reasons, Boyfriend and I decided to quit our jobs before our contracts ran out.

It was decided that we would quit at the end of August, and Vee was going to quit her job, too, and we could all travel together in one beautiful, triumphant, curious group. China is so big that there is no way to see it all, but we were gonna try.

The posts that follow will be a documentation of that time.

Dudes. Verity came to China. It was awesome.

(Interjection: I just, right this minute, made an argument about the dinosaurs that went as follows: "Lotta T-Rexes prolly stepped on glass, got an infection, it went to their heart..." And thus, Yoshi wears boots and lives!)

auflauf

2010-01-21T19:20:00.000+01:00

My favorite German word is the word for hot dish,

or as boyfriend would say, casserole.

Or when we make it with taco seasoning: cassero-lay! But that's Spanish.

Haircut

2010-01-09T20:17:00.000+01:00

I got a haircut, and I can't decide what decade I think it's from. I got bangs again, but I think I look more like Mary Anne from the Baby Sitters' Club than, say, me in college. Maybe it's because of the giant 80's glasses.

What kind of haircuts will people have in the coming decade? And how can I describe that in German?

Where were we?

2010-01-08T22:43:00.000+01:00

Oh, yeah. May. Later in May, the boys heard about this bar where if you drink 12 pints in 2 hours, the beer is free. As I am a girl, I thought, "Well, a person can't drink 12 pints in two hours, that's crazy." As they are boys, they thought, "That sounds crazy, but I bet I could do it."

We dressed up, and man, we looked good. But Will looked the best, because his suit was made of gold.

We took a before picture, then a picture from the same spot every ten minutes.

Before we started, we asked the waitress when most people quit. Four or five.
Nick (Boyfriend), Rich (Cardigan), and Dan (Blonde) quit at 4.5, but Will (duh) and Nate (Piano Tie) kept going! Rudy (Polo) and I (Girl) didn't play.

Now, the rules say that you cannot puke. DQ, baby. But Will, gold suit or no, is sneaky.

Well, maybe not, but anyhow they didn't catch him when he yakked after 6 or 7. Nathan is a stickler for the rules. Well, maybe not, but he didn't puke.

Following the puke, Will resumed drinking and finished the 12 pints, thus avoiding the bill.
Nathan, on the other hand...

Well, the poor guy drank 11.5 and just couldn't do it. But that's still pretty impressive.

Then we headed for a busy street and taxis. Nathan was inspired and played dead.

First we passed a hardware store where we bought a toilet seat (to replace the one Nate broke while we were in Thailand) and gold spray paint.
Then we went to McDonald's.

dream job

2010-01-07T12:25:00.000+01:00

I had a dream, and the car talk guys were narrating (actually, they just described the other character, laughed about it, and cut out), and I was in Mrs. Robinson's house (I can't remember the actress's name--Anne Bancroft, right?) And she had short grey hair and she was crabby and smoking and wearing a gold necklace over a turtleneck in the way that old rich ladies can do.

I was going to do some work for her, but she offered me a drink and asked if I wanted to play a game, maybe Network or Canasta. (I don't know of a real game called network and I don't know how to play canasta.) I was afraid of her dog, and I kept knocking things over as I looked at everything in her house. She was annoyed.

Anyway, the point is that I found something in her house that made me want to do an art project involving jigsaw puzzles. I feel like I HAVE to make it, because it came to me in a dream and Anne Bancroft was there!

Oh, hi, (Thailand, May)

2010-01-06T17:28:00.003+01:00

New Years Resolution: stop starting every blog post with an apology and just post more often.

So, back in May, I went to Thailand. It was awesome. Details are a bit fuzzy for me now, but here's an overview.

We flew in from Cambodia, waited for a bus at the airport for a while, talked to a crazy guy who claimed the hostel we were headed for didn't exist (it was a Sukumvit on Nut, I remember that, but I probably spelled it wrong), watched his shoes while he prayed, got bit by a million mosquitoes, gave up on the bus, caught a taxi, decided to stay in the touristy area instead (because it's by all the tourist attractions) wandered from hostel to hostel until we found one with a vacancy,* and went to bed.

The next day we saw the world's largest reclining Buddha:

That temple also had a lot of other normal-sized gold Buddhas. Here are some monks’ fancy mosaic tombs:

We wandered outside around the presidential palace for the rest of the afternoon, I think. We also got pressured by an information booth guy who wanted to sell us to a guy with a little open taxi for a tour of the city, except since it was “a national holiday” (a common scam to derail your plans and convince you to go along with them) everything we wanted to do was allegedly closed. He said we couldn’t even buy beer anywhere, so we told him to forget it.

That night, we had dinner with Will, who is Thai and had gone to high school with Boyfriend, and his wife Stick (?). They took us to a night market, where we avoided the “Ping Pong Show” (Boyfriend was initially interested, because he thought they said “ping pong qiu” which is how you say ping pong in Chinese. I explained that this was a show, presumably involving ping pong balls and vaginas. So we didn’t go.) We bought souveniers: Candles for my coworker who helped me out with my banking, a fancy popup card for Wenfu, and muy thai boxing shorts for Nathan (who NEVER wore them, despite many plans to go to a club wearing nothing else). Then they gave us a night tour of the city, including the street where the anti-government protests are usually held.

The next day we had smoothies at a place with this reassuring sign:

And took this boat,

driven by this couple

to the “floating markets,” which I don’t have a picture of because in the city it’s apparently one guy selling bananas and beer from a boat. They also take you on a canal tour, so you can see all the little houses on (or in) the water.

And temples:

Most of the houses had little shrines outside.

And then you go to real solid markets. These things are fruit tacoy things, not cheese. Still yummy.

Then Boyfriend got a straight-razor shave from a 97-year-old who was watching muy thai boxing on TV while holding a blade to Boyfriend’s throat.

Then we went to Cabbages and Condoms for lunch, where the money goes to pay for food for orphans and condoms for grown-ups.

They have informational posters all over the place and mannequins wearing only condoms.

Then Will and Stick picked us up and we stayed at their house outside the city. She showed us their wedding photos, which are done Chinese-style, in a huge, beautifully edited book, with lots of locations and costume changes, rather than a bunch of individual pictures. At 5am, Will drove us to Pattaya, which is supposed to be pretty seedy but we were there a little too early in the morning to witness many shenanigans. We just took a van, then another van, then another van, then a ferry, then a leaky truck (it mostly leaked right above my head and right above my suitcase…) to a shack on Koh Chang, Elephant Island. On the ferry, you could see the storm clouds and there were butterflies flying around and we knew it was going to be great.

Here’s the shack:

We slept under mosquito netting and there was a lizard in there and cats outside that ate my sandals and an ant infestation in the bathroom and Nick had to kill one GIANT cockroach everyday that we were there.While we were there, we did the normal island things:** nap, swim in the sea (the water was really warm—you couldn’t stay in the really shallow parts because it was too hot), get sunburned, look at the water, eat large amounts of incredible food, and ride an elephant through a rubber plantation.

I look scared in all the pictures because I’m riding an elephant, for crying out loud. That shit’s scary.

Side note: Koh Chang is so named because it’s supposed to look like an elephant. Elephants aren’t native to elephant island. They brought these here for the tourists. They’re retired from whatever they used to do (circus, paper delivery, whatevs) and supposedly have a nicer life on the island than in some stuffy elephant retirement home on the mainland.

Ok, bye!

*I originally typed "cavancy," which seems like it should have the same meaning, no?

**-drinking, for the most part, because booze at the hostel bar was overpriced and we couldn’t be bothered to go anywhere else

P.S. Sorry I can't figure out formatting like a normal person.

Holiday in...

2009-08-13T14:57:00.014+02:00

Hey: long time, no see, right guys? Well, we have more factors to blame that on this time than just my laziness procrastination. Blogspot has been blocked since May, preventing me from being a good little blogger and posting information about my life. The VPN I downloaded worked, then it didn't, then I had to delete and reinstall it, then for a while it seemed that I spend all my time on the internet just trying to access the internet...

Anyway, I went to Thailand and Cambodia in May and the statute of limitations is now up, so I'm free to tell you what went down there. (See boy and girl, that's called "overselling.")

(Editor’s note: This blog is wholly unoriginal, being inspired by an email Nick sent to his people an copied, in part, from my facebook captions)

We flew into Thailand, but had decided to head for Cambodia immediately the following morning. From my research, it seemed that you had to spend a day on the bus (12 hours, start to finish, Bangkok to Siem Reap) and hope that you arrived in Cambodia before the visa office/border crossing closed down. Try as I might, I couldn't find any information on overnight buses, which would have made more sense. We also looked into direct flights, but everything we could find on the internet was waaay more expensive than the tickets we'd already bought to Bangkok.

When we arrived in Bangkok, we decided, for the heck of it, to check out flights to Cambodia. We found some that were much cheaper than the ones on the internet, so we went for it. They were still more expensive than the bus, obvs, but we were going to save two days, basically. We were now faced with a dilemma. Well, not really, I guess. There was no way we were going to drop a bunch of cash to get into town from the airport, get a hotel, sleep for a few hours, and pay again to get to the airport. So, we found a nice corner and set up camp. I should tell you about my favorite thing in the Bangkok airport: Travelators. They're escalators an inclined moving walkway. They have them in all the supermarkets in China, but for some reason (lack of sleep? Awesome name?) I was really enamored of the ones in the airport. This is especially noteworthy since I am kinda scared of escalators. This could be related to my fear of heights or to a contestant I foggily remember on Double Dare who said that she got her shoe or pants or hair or something stuck in the escalator.

Uh, anyway, we got as much sleep as we could, then at 8, we were off to Cambodia!

We did not look that comfortable, but we were happy. Sleep deprivation reminded me that it is really fucking cool to look down and see clouds and rivers and fields and stuff.

When we got off the plane, our glasses fogged up. The airport was really beautiful and hilarious. They had seven or eight guys in a row, each with their own job: One guy glues something into your passport, one guy charges you a whopping $5 for passport photos (which are, of course, just taken with a webcam and not even printed), one guys stamps here, another guy initials there. Then there are four guys at the end who make sure that you are the person in your passport and the person in the photo guy #2 took of you and then you're in!

We changed money into...uh, what's the currency there? (google search...) Riel! This was a mistake. We should have changed our RMB to USD. We kept doing the conversions to RMB, as that's our home currency, and it was clear that things cost less in dollars than in riel.

I made Nick promise at some point that he wouldn't be disappointed in me for not riding on a motorcycle taxi. A girl has to have a rule or two. Mine are: No Motorcycles and No Gin Before 4PM.

We took a taxi into town, ostensibly to an address in the guidebook. However, he actually just took us into town and dropped us off. We never did find the place we were trying to stay. It didn't matter, as he dropped us off near enough to a cheap enough place. We checked in, crashed for a couple hours, then went to see us some temples.

We flagged down a tuk-tuk, drive by a guy named and he took us to the temples. We looked around for a while, climbed a hill to watch the sunset, but ended up not waiting, as it was too cloudy to see much anyway.

We woke up early the next morning, because sunrise over the main temple is one of the most beautiful things ever.

There are a million temples around it and they are all different and made of intricately carved stone. Many of them had crumbled and are in the process of being reassembled.

We took a million pictures, which you can see here.

My favorite temple is Ta Prohm, which was taken over by trees. Trees are growing over the to

p of the walls, tearing some of them down, holding others up. When those trees die, the temple will probably fall, but for now, it is breathtaking. My pictures don't do it justice.

After three days of intensive temple touring, we went to Thailand to relax. I'll tell you about that, someday.

Golly!

2009-07-15T11:00:00.001+02:00

I downloaded a VPN and now I can get to the whole internet!

My apologies for the lack of posts. I'll post a good one soon.

hearts and sneakiness,
Dani

My dad came to China (again).

2009-04-27T12:56:00.007+02:00

I haven't told you about my dad's visit last month. It's not too exciting (well, it totally was, for me).

First, he thought I was going to meet him at the airport (I meant the gate of the apartment complex...), then I felt bad for not meeting him, but then I had to work. Like most people, I don't want to go to the airport if I don't have to. (This excludes our high school airport visits, because those were about being weird and wasting the best years of our lives without the help of drugs and alcohol.) I guess it's easy to get to the airport, but somewhat expensive.

I figured out my address well enough for him to show a taxi driver, but I still had to talk to the driver to get it clear. I should tell you that my street is like a mile long and divided into north, south, and middle sections. This, plus the building number, did not make the driver think he could find it. The man needed a cross street. They always want a cross street in this city.

We were all ready for my dad, with blankets for the sofa-bed and Jameson, bananas, and instant coffee.

He showed up, stayed with us for the weekend and checked into a hotel for the week. Nothing terribly interesting to report, except that he wanted to go out all the time and we hardly ever go out, so I was really tired the whole time! Luckily we had found out from our friend Will about these bars not too far from our house. They are cute and had Jameson, so my dad was happy.

I didn't go to church and dad accidentally went to a mass in Chinese, which kinda made me want to go to one. It was in Chinese! I'm not sure if it would be as exciting for me as it would have in 2007, but I'll have to check it out later, I think. He walked home and went to the dumpling place near our house for these, the most delicious ball of pork ever to be wrapped in dough and then steamed / fried:
They are about 1,000 degrees when you get them. You should take a tiny bite, then slurp the broth (read: melted fat) out, maybe dip it into a little cooling vinegar, then go for it. If you aren't careful, molten broth with fly out and burn your pretty face. It burned my dad's pretty face. That artery-clogging deliciousness went straight up his nose and he had a sad blister on his upper lip. I felt bad, but he agreed that those dumplings were totally worth it.

Then on Tuesday night, after the trade show was done for the day, my dad came to my school for the St. Patrick's Day party. I had never seen or been in charge of such a thing before so I have nothing to compare it to as a measure of success. Although, I think most of the school parties lack the drinking games that we had in abundance. And the green beer! Don't forget the green beer. A student of ours works at Heineken and they donated a few cases for the party. We didn't think the students would drink much,
but we were wrong.

Luckily, our Heineken employee called the morning of the party and insisted on bring several more cases, including bottles. The boss* refused at first, as you must, but finally accepted. Then the student asked if he could talk about his company for a few minutes first. Now, Heineken is not Guinness, but it is beer and this was a St. Patrick's Day party, so it went. He gave an overview of the beer then asked quiz questions and gave out sweet bottle-openers as prizes. (I got one just for being pretty.) This was good because we worried that there wouldn't be enough activities for a million people for two hours. I already told you (see below) what we were going to do, but I should add that there were about 3x as many people as a regular English Corner and it was approximately 300 degrees in there. (300 degrees Celsius. I'm not in America.) It was great, the beer flew, my dad played "I have never..." with a bunch of students and I sweated and yelled a bunch.

Then, we were gonna go to the Irish bar, but people from other schools were going to this one cheap bar called Windows. (They have a Y20 bacon cheeseburger and Y15 or 20 GnTs! I think that's cheaper than McDonald's!) Dad approved of it, so away we went. We got in on a bottle of Jameson, Dad made me call Mom, and we didn't stay out too late.

Dad was working and stuff the rest of the week, but I had Saturday off, so I planned a Revolutionary Walking Tour. Start at Mao's residence, then to Sun Yat Sen's house, then the place where the first communist meetings in China took place (or something), then the art street to finish. Great, right?
Mao's house was closed, then we went to Sun Yat Sen's and got museumed out. If you don't know anything about the history, stuff like that is fairly boring. ("Look, it's a picture of a guy whose name I can't pronounce which was presented to the wife of this guy--who seems to be important--on the anniversary of an event that apparently happened once!") So we skipped the communist meeting hall and found the art street. We walked through this building that was all landscapes and "photo-realistic portraits."** (My dad kept saying "photo-realistic" and it was driving me nuts.) Then we stopped at a cute, over-priced place and had a beer. We were immediately in need of naps. So we took at taxi home, as we'd been walking forever already, and napped. We went out again after Nick got home.

The next day we took the subway together, except dad was going to the airport and I was just going to work. It makes me so sad to say good-bye to people. I was bummed out all day.

*I had the B for Boss capitalized, but that made him seem like Bruce Springsteen and, despite the RayBans, he's not that cool. (My super yellow knock-off knock-off RayBans are cooler, but they still don't make me as cool as The Boss.)

**The next time we went, we tried to take a shortcut through one of those studios and the guy made us stop and watch a slide show that demonstrated their computer's ability to make fat, bumpy, speckly people seem svelte and even-toned. "You don't wear make-up. Our program works better than make-up, in less time!" And we found out that they are printed, then painted over, for a real portrait look! Awesome! This is similar to the initially impressive pieces of framed embroidery I've seen. Printed, then stitched over. Easier than counted cross-stitch, I bet.

I hear the secrets that you keep

2009-04-21T19:22:00.002+02:00

So, I talk in my sleep. Not all the time, but sometimes. This last week has been one of those times. I was kind of aware that I was doing it because I woke myself up a few times, but I woke poor Boyfriend up more times with my gibberish talk.

He said that it's confusing because he assumes that I'm talking to him and tries to understand me. He also said that he tries to figure out what I am dreaming about, but it's not possible.

Sunday night, I woke both of us up. I was teaching in my sleep all night (I was so tired in the morning) and at this point I was trying to get my students to come up with synonyms for "bank" (the money place)*. We know this because I was sitting up a bit and really addressing Boyfriend (I guess my eyes were open and everything, which kinda creeps me out). I just kept saying, "Bank. Bank!" in this exasperated voice. Then I woke up a little, apologized, and went back to sleep.

I haven't had much feedback about my sleep-talking as an adult. (Katy? Vee? Any insight?) And, as far as anyone knows, I haven't sleepwalked. I think I'd be even clumsier while asleep, so we would know if I did this. (Unless my clumsiness is due to some psychological affliction/complex that isn't active while I'm sleeping...)

My mom used to work late nights and came home many times to find me talking. Sometimes I'd be sitting up in bed, once I was clapping, and another time she was gonna kiss me good night or something and I punched her.

I don't know of there's a pattern to it or what. It was happening last week independent of my work/alcohol/coffee schedule, but maybe it has to do with the change in weather or the fact that I was temporarily at a different school.

Who knows? Anyway, I should shut the hell up and get to sleep. I'm hopeful that it'll be a quiet night.

*I can't think of good, pithy synonyms for bank. Nor can I think of a reason that I would request such a thing of my poor, beleaguered students.

Macroblogging

2009-04-10T03:38:00.004+02:00

I think facebook has ruined my brain. I was in the shower, thinking about how behind I am on my blog and thinking about what I should write while I am waiting for my phone date with Vee, and I kept thinking in the third person. Aargh. Not only was I trying to be pithy and cute, I was trying to do it in the third person. In my head. Now, I have an ex-friend who would occasionally talk in the third person, which was pretty ridiculous and annoying. I thought there was something wrong with her brain. And now it's happening to me. Damn you, facebook!

That said, and my five blog drafts notwithstanding, I don't have the energy to put into a macroblog, so I am going to microblog, even though I'm over here, not over there.

1. I got somebody else's haircut yesterday and I am trying not to hate it. Apparently the gesture that I thought meant, "cut it to here" actually meant, "make the longest bit about 1.5 inches above here, add some layers, and thin it out a bit, k?" He did cut of 99% of the pink, though, so I have only my (puke) natural color happening now.
They always make my hair so smooth and silky that I can't bear to wash it out and try again, even when I'm so disappointed. When I do it, it will not be so straight and non-fuzzy.

2. I am going to Thailand and Cambodia. I had better catch up on my blogging before then so I can feel free to tell you all about it when I get back and it's fresh in my mind.

3. I am still waiting for Anton's project and I do not appreciate being called imaginary.

4. The weather is beautiful here.

5. Yesterday, after getting somebody else's haircut, we were going down to buy out Thailand tickets and realized that I had no bankcard. This is distressing on multiple levels.
a. I had to borrow money to pay for Thailand.
b. I will have to borrow money to pay rent (three month's rent is due this week).
c. I have to bring a Shanghainese (not just Chinese) person with me to the bank to get a new card because I had more than Y5K in there. And I'll have to bring the same Shanghainese person back again next week.
d. I always secretly judged people who permanantly lose important stuff like this. I misplace things, even important things (passport, birth control pills, glasses), but I always find them again. So I kinda think I'm stupid. Nick thinks the lesson here should not be that I'm stupid., but rather that people who lose things aren't. But my brain is stubborn and won't listen.

On the plus side,
a. My account still has more than Y5K in it.
b. My account is now frozen
c. I just changed my pin from 654321 to something complicated.
d. Lilian, my awesome coworker is going to accompany me to the bank this afternoon.

6. Shopping, even in Shanghai, is super disappointing. I am not fat, China, make some pants in people sizes! Also, the average foot size is getting bigger, so maybe you should carry some shoes besides Cons in my size.

7. I wore my new purple Cons yesterday and I'm a little blistery but they're sweet and I got them for Y50, no problem.

8. After getting some help with the bank, I read in the park for a while then went home to nap away my bank-induced headache. THEN, we went to an all-you-can-eat Indian buffet. So yummy. I actually ate more than I could and still feel gross.

Oh, Vee is here. Screw you guys. (jk! heart!)

P.S.

2009-03-12T18:02:00.003+01:00

A. The link above "Nationals' General Manager Resigns" is included because I thought it said "Nation's General Manager Resigns." And I was alarmed, then I was confused, then I felt like a bad citizen (because I don't know who our General Manager is), then I realized it was about sports. (Baseball? I dunno, I didn't read the article.)

2. More importantly, Rachel, my tiny and adorable former coworker at Cubs, is teaching English in Korea.
"But I already speak English," you say, "and I'm not in Korea. How does this affect me?"
I'll tell you: She has a blog. And it's way better than this one. She talks about being a foreigner and not understanding what the hell is going on and stuff that is really similar to my Asia experience, but I can't seem to put into nice paragraphs like she can. She is friends-only, but I know the Katy Brandeses among you are already friends with her and the rest of you... well, you ought to be, so there.

D. I just sent my bf a text reminding him not to be a cockblocker. I find this hilarious. Our new goal is to find out what the word for cockblocker is in Chinese and the literal translation to English, and to start using the literal translation all the time. Either that or we have to find out how to say "get in the way of the rooster" in Chinese and start saying that all the time.

爸爸！

2009-03-12T16:59:00.003+01:00

My dad is coming to visit tomorrow! He comes to China on business and I was lucky enough to get to see him three times last year (twice in Weihai and once in Shanghai). Because of the economy, we didn't know if he'd be able to come at all this year. But, there's a big show and an opportunity to visit several clients, so here he comes. Of course, I'm so excited. I don't know exactly what his schedule will be like during the week, but I'll have next Saturday off and we'll be able to spend it together before he leaves. I haven't finished cleaning the apartment and I haven't figured out exactly what we'll do (depending on the weather, I guess).

But. I've been kind of edgy lately and have been getting hives on my face. (This is what edgy people do when they're feeling especially edgy. Welcome to my stratum of high-strungness). I didn't really know what the deal was: was it because I work more during the week than last year and can't constantly entertain him? Am I afraid he's going to tell mom how dusty the apartment is and together they will worry about my lungs/asthma? Is it because he asked me to show him where the "hip clubs" are (and before tonight, when we went to a jazz bar with international micro-brews, I had no idea)?

No. As I walked home in the rain (sans umbrella because, although I'm a list maker with a spacious purse, I am often caught unprepared), it dawned on me. I have known it the whole time and not acknowledged it. It's because my dad is coming to stay with me and my boyfriend. Yup, I'm a cohabitator.* Or, as my dad said when I was home over Christmas, "So, are you and Nick going to be roommates?" Yes, one bed(room apartment) roommates. Not much like the other roommates I've had.

And my dad will be sleeping on our couch and judging us and trying to get me to go to church at 6am. (He figured out how to get there on the subway and emailed it to me. eek.)

I think it'll be okay, really. I'm just afraid he'll wanna talk about it or something. Probably not, though, as the aforementioned conversation consisted of the above question and my no-eye-contact, "yep."

In lighter news, he will be spending St. Patty's Day with me again this year (last year I was visiting him in Shanghai), which should be fun. It's on Tuesday and we're hosting a party at the school (which I think he'll attend) with Celtic cross-making contests (I'll try to get him to keep his shirt on), limerick recitations, and of course green beer and drinking games. I probably haven't given it as much thought as I should have, but it's basically a two hour English Corner with twice as many students and two teachers. Plus beer, so what could go wrong? Well, because I have this tendency to picture the absolute worst thing that could happen**, I have imagined being deported for the cross-making contest, but that seems unlikely.

I mentioned a few of these things to my coworkers: Dad and his giant cross tattoo, him trying to make me go to church, and his staunch support of St. Paddy's Day celebrations, and somehow people were under the impression that my dad was a preacher. And a hardcore Catholic. Now, maybe you know more about Catholicism than my coworkers, but uh, most Catholic priests don't have kids, since they're not allowed to marry. I think the ones who do are widowers. I tried to make some joke about how he was just coming over here to preach the gospel of semiconductors, but that didn't come across at all, and the boss just started talking about how Dad could bless the beer. We'll see what happens.

* Spellcheck wants to change "cohabitator" to "cohabitant," which sounds kind of zooey to me for some reason. I left it my way.

** This is what I do when I get scared driving. It seems counter-intuitive, I know, but picturing my Saturn flipping into the air and bursting into flames when I go more than 25 mph thought the Lowry Hill Tunnel helps me acknowledge how silly my fears are. This doesn't work with everything: for instance, picturing elevators plummeting down the shaft with a broken cable tends to scare me. (Note: I'm not crazy with this whole elevator thing; only the ones with glass walls (and 97% of escalators) scare me.

Out my window.

2009-02-21T15:24:00.006+01:00

At spring festival (Chinese New Year):

On a clear day:

Tip 1 (lazy link post!)

2009-02-12T03:48:00.004+01:00

To avoid being productive, get occasionally hooked on web comics whose RSS feeds don't include pictures (grr.) so you have to go to the site every day.

It's preferable if they also have a huge archive and you start reading them from the beginning.

Here are a few to get you started. (I already linked to a couple of them, but maybe you haven't had a chance to chack them out, you jerkface. So, here's a reminder.)

Questionable Content (thanks, Andy)

Anders Loves Maria

Bellen!

Girls with Slingshots

There are others (these have the pictures in the feed, so you don't have to go to the site. yay!)

XKCD (Thanks Anton)

Pictures for Sad Children

Dog Hates Me

Exploding Dog Pictures (Even though he hasn't drawn anything from the titles I sent, and probably hates me.)

Most of the other ones I like haven't updated in a while.

Oh!Oh! You should also check out This is Why You're Fat. Which is apparently blocked in China. What the hell!? I'm not too proud to say it made my mouth water on more than one occasion. And it made me miss the State Fair. I haven't had enough cheese melted on stuff/stuff on sticks these past couple years.

I would like to say this. [Procrastination] is not something you can do on your own. Many, many people contributed to my [procrastination]. I would like to thank my parents for never ever giving me a ride to school, the LA city bus driver for takin' a chance on an unknown kid, and last but not least, the wonderful crew from McDonalds who spend hours making those little egg McMuffins without which I might never [procrastinate].

-Travis, Clueless

I'm a local?

2009-02-09T17:55:00.002+01:00

I got asked for directions in Shanghai.

This actually happened back in March when my dad was here for some work thing and I was wandering around a park alone one morning. It was an old white lady who asked me. Probably 'cause I look like I speak English. (I totally do.)

Last week, however, the tourist dream came true. The dream where someone thinks you're a local and asks for directions. A dream I thought was unachievable for me in Asia. (I guess T.Y. was right about my ability to blend with Asians.)

That's right, I got asked for directions by a Chinese person. IN CHINESE. I didn't know what she wanted (she was asking to find the neighborhood we were in, so I was confused), but I showed her my map. The map probably made it look like I was the tourist, but nevertheless, there was a song in my heart as I headed toward the subway and home.

Look at what's happened to me,
I can't believe it myself.
Suddenly I'm up on top of the world,
should have been somebody else.

Believe it or not, I'm walking on air.
I never thought I could feel so free.
Flying away on a wing and a prayer,
Who could it be?
Believe it or not, it's just me.

Looks like the light of a new day,
Hit me from out of the blue.
Breaking me out of the spell I was in,
Making all of my wishes come true.

Believe it or not, I'm walking on air.
I never thought I could feel so free.
Flying away on a wing and a prayer,
Who could it be?
Believe it or not, it's just me.

Who could it be?
Believe it or not, it's just me.

MNIC

2009-01-28T09:34:00.003+01:00

If you ever accidentally mentioned public education or charter schools in my presence, went to the state fair with me (they have a charter school booth!), or knew me sometime during or after 2004, when I became actively involved in secondary education in Minnesota, you might know a little bit about MNIC, the school I volunteered and then worked for until I moved to China. I loved loved loved MNIC and really thought of the English Language Academy as a fine example of what charter schools could be and how they could benefit a community.

I went back for a visit while I was home, 13 of 14 months after I left. There was hardly anyone I knew.

Things have changed a lot there since I left in October of 2007. Maybe you should stop now and read the City Pages article about charters and my beloved MNIC. (Look! There's my friend/roomie/coworker Becky on page 2!)

One of the reasons charter schools are great, in my opinion, is that they don't have the years and years of routine and bureaucracy that make change difficult, if not impossible. Unfortunately, this means people don't always know exactly where they stand when the shit goes down and leaves things open for power-hungry individuals.

I was so happy at the MNIC ELA because it was a large group of people who were there because they cared about the students, the community, and about making secondary education accessible in Minnesota. This NYT article highlights some of the difficulties ELA students face. The teachers they mention in the article: Vin McMahon, Becky Bahr, John Breyfogle, Bahar Hassan, Hassan Hilowle (and Sandra Hall, though unmentioned), and former principal Jeff Dufresne are people I was lucky to even know. Their dedication to students is immessurable and I couldn't fully recount it here (although, if you ask me about them, I promise you we could talk for hours.) I think my time at MNIC, with those people will probably have a greater effect on my teaching than my years in China.

The school seemed empty while I was there and students seemed to be wandering around with nowhere to go. The staff members who remained seemed hesitant to answer my questions, whispering, "He was terminated..." "Her job was terminated..." and looking very nervous. I question how they are getting along without a majority of their teachers.

The ELA had the majority of the students in the district, and if you ask me, probably suported the rest of the district financially. With these dedicated people gone, will the ELA still draw students to MNIC? I am afraid that Mr. Byrne never understood how important the ELA was to the district and that all of MNIC cannot possibly survive without it.

Even though I probably could have stayed home and worked there through grad school, but decided not to, I kind of hoped to come back to MNIC after my travels and schooling. I would be less sad to hear that my own high school was being closed than this news of MNIC's strange direction.

上海人 (Shanghai person)

2009-01-26T07:47:00.002+01:00

Hi guys,

I live in Shanghai now.

We got an apartment and have spent a week there. We had to buy sheets and blankets and everything, but we haven't gotten plates and kitchen stuff yet. I forget how much stuff I just took from home when I moved out! It's Chinese New Year, so we're going to have a little time off work, but the stores are PACKED, so it's not a good time for shopping. We spent an hour in line at the grocery store (more like a supertarget) trying to buy laundry soap and a pad for the bed (you could count the springs before, I swear, but at least it HAD a mattress.)

The apartment is a 10mn walk to the subway station (Jing An Temple) in the Jing An district, right in the middle of town. The streets are lively with a zillion little shops everywhere and people walking around. I'm still trying to figure out the wireless internet. I can never find the place to put in the new internet username and password when I move.

I trained at the central office/school for a week with Nick and two Britons, and then started at my own school, which is a bit bigger than Nick's. I'll be tipping the scales here toward the American side of things and there are three other Americans (but no other foreign girls). It was lovely to start teaching actual students again after all that training, but the training WAS good; I was prepared when I got in there, even though it's a different way of doing things.

We tried to watch a movie last night, but it turns out that the "DVD Player" in the living room is just a cable box. Drat. We watched Be Kind Rewind on my computer instead and then went out and looked at fireworks.

We're going to walk to our schools now (we work at two different centers and we've been taking the subway), as there's not much else to do. You can't clean the house today because you'll sweep out the good luck with the bad. All the stores are closed (probably, but I'll bring the shopping bag and the list anyway). You can't get a haircut (we did that a few days ago) and you're not even supposed to wash your hair (which I forgot and did anyway).

It's pretty cold here, so I don't even want to go out, but what are you gonna do? They say it's colder outside in ShanDong province, where I lived last year, but colder inside in Shanghai. What I hear is that South of the Yangze river (which dips north to include us) you aren't allowed to have radiators, or something. I know the heating is centralized and you pay the government for it and they decide when to turn it on (November 15th in both BeiJing and ShanDong). The little cheap restaurants we go to don't have the heat on and the air conditioner in the living room seems to only make things colder. A space heater is on the list.

Okay, gotta go. Xin nian kuai le!

Visa!

2008-12-21T19:10:00.002+01:00

I got my visa, so I'll be heading back to Zhongguo in two weeks. Then I have ten days to find an apartment (in the 12th most expensive city in Asia) and training at my new school starts on the 15th. eep!

I can't believe I'm leaving again. This close to the trip last year, though, I was having a MNB (Minor Nervous Breakdown) which lasted 2-3 months. Now, I'm excited to go back and see what else I can see and do.
I'm not afraid of you anymore, China. Let's have some tea and noodles and oh, no thanks on the baijiu.

so...

2008-11-27T03:05:00.002+01:00

I'm in Minneapolis (techinically, at the moment, Robbinsdale).

You and I, we should, you know, hang out...

I will be at this show on Saturday. This will be good in case you think things will be weird since it's been so long. I know I'll be awkward! But we can dance around and it'll be loud and you can buy me drinks. It'll be awes.

P.S. I know I haven't responded to your email. It's not because I don't like you, I'm just a bad friend. See you soon, stay sweet!

Um, sorry.

2008-10-22T11:44:00.004+02:00

Hey you.

(Unless you're Katy, Mom, or Dad) It's been a while, huh? Sorry that, while I'm pretty okay at typing, I'm pretty shitty at getting around to typing.

It's weird that, even though I've lived in China for a year, I haven't been able to establish a blog-(or email)-writing routine.

Wait. Back it up.

Yeah, I meant it with the whole "year" thing. As of Sunday (well, Monday, depending if you count departures or arrivals), it was a year. Weird. I still think it's strange to imagine ever moving out of Minneapolis (except for that awkward St. Paul rental, which totally doesn't count because I still spent more nights in the city than in StP.) and I am so proud/weirded out by Katy and her whole moving-to-Texas-to-live-in-a-community thing.

But, even though I'm having a good time here, I miss you guys. That's why, upon completing thirteen months in China, I'll be coming home. Only for a visit, but you can't imagine how excited I am. Maybe you can. This is how excited I am: close your eyes and pretend that you just gave me a Tanquery Rangpur and some fancy tonic (is there really fancy tonic?) and you're wearing a sparkly dress and we're going to play farkle. Then DDR. Oh, and I haven't seen my best friend in approximately 369 days. (Oh crap, I just imagined it, too. Excuse me while my head explodes.)

Whew. Back. We have one job offer in Shanghai (OMG, plural pronouns: sexy [OMG, sexy: my least favorite adjective]), but we're looking at another company. We want something that has the right mixture of:
1. Teaching (you'd be surprised how often this is overlooked in a language school)
2. Free time
3. Money.
We have been okay at studying Chinese almost every day (writing and a Chinesepod), and we want to add art/craft hour and GRE studies to the mix. This rigorous schedule should help us save money while living in the 12th most expensive city in Asia.

Oh, but I was talking about visiting! Six weeks (approximately) at home, including Thanksgiving (and hopefully crippling amounts of karaoke), Christmas, and (gasp of fear) a road trip with Mom and Dad to see Kink. And a New Year's party with you, whom I like a lot. Plus, I am going to eat so much stuff with cheese on it. Just wait. Cheese, like gin and tonics, is more expensive here than at home. The small brick of LandOLakes (damn right they have LandOLakes!) is pushin' seven bucks! And the LandOLakes is almost the only real cheese we have besides a couple varieties of cream cheeses and CANNED brie that tastes funny.

Hmm, what else has happened? Oh! I now get picked up in a taxi at 6:10 AM three days a week to teach a VIP at a big Korean company. And, two of those days I have night classes, too, which is rough. It used to be three nights, but I was over contracted hours, so Nick had to take it over. That means I drink with Jesus Wednesday afternoons because I can. And also because I have to go to bed at 10 PM.

It's pretty neat, though, and it meant I could no longer teach kindie. Even though I'm finished 45 minutes before kindie starts, I'm pretty sure that sort of double header would kill me.

I think that's it. Time to awkwardly end this blog.

OH! P.S. Confidential to Andy Dolan: My shared posts may not be worth it (but they probably are), but Google Reader definitely is. I love it. I wanna hire a surrogate to have it's babies. It is so super. But, if you're not ready for this kind of awesome, give me your email address and I'll hook you up.

P.P.S. When I got home this afternoon, I was sure that Kermit, our inherited pet turtle, was dead and I knocked on the glass of his aquarium like a crazed woman until he finally looked at me and hid in his shell.

P.P.P.S. We went to the Eastern tip of Shandong province on Monday (not the Eastern tip of China, as advertised, as there are like 2.5 provinces further East, but whatevs) and it was fucking lovely.

P.P.P.P.S. Verity has ruined my life by telling me about the Modern Materialist, similar to the way Andy Dolan ruined my life a few months ago by telling me about Questionable Content and the way the guy who draws that ruined my life by telling me about Bellen! because I like all three so much that I had to read all the archives. And thus fall behind on everything else.
Except voting, because I voted last week.

Let's get political, political

2008-10-10T12:28:00.005+02:00

No, not debate/election related, although the big news there is that I fell asleep during both presidential debates (I blame my new get-up-at-5AM schedule, but it could also be because they were boring and I'd heard it all before.) but I stayed awake during the vice-presidential one. The main outcome of that was me being extra self-conscious of my Minnesoooota accent, because god forbid I sound like Sarah Palin.

I was just going to post this to my Google Reader shared stuff, but then my shared note got so long, I thought it deserved a quick blog post. (Again, if you wanna be in on my totally awesome and informative shares, let me know.)

These articles about the Uighurs at Gitmo. More for their Chinese Muslim content than for the Guantanamo stuff.

The plight of the Uighurs is interesting because it shows how China treats their ethnic minorities. If you are interested in Tibet and the problems there, pay attention to the Uighurs, too. They are a religious and ethnic minority who are repressed by the Chinese government in many ways. They aren't as popular in the Western media or with the hippies as the Tebetians, but they have many of the same problems: Han (the ethnicity of the majority of Chinese) people being shipped in by the government and controlling the region politically and often gaining an unfair economic upper hand and restrictions on religious practice (boys are not allowed to go to mosque until they are 18), all while supposedly being autonomous.

I can't find the big seven page Times article I read a while back, but their Uighur info is concentrated here.

All this being said, maybe those guys were terrorists, I certainly don't claim to know, but they will certainly not be treated well in a Chinese prison--almost certainly worse than at the hands of the Americans, even in this day and age.

Okay, I'm gonna go clean up before the feds come and bust me.

Love,
Dani

Beijing Holiday

2008-08-22T14:09:00.002+02:00

Here are some adorable pictures from when Katy and I visited Beijing.

They are pretty well captioned, but I should probably still post about the trip, eh?

This is it for now. I'm going back to Korea on Sunday night (I hope), so maybe this time I'll take pictures...

Democracy is so exciting.

2008-08-21T16:01:00.002+02:00

Probably even more exciting then the Olympics.

I sent in the forms for my absentee ballot, downloaded from Overseas Vote Foundation (you can also get there from the MN Secretary of State's site) a while ago. Yesterday, I got a big ol' envelope from Hennepin County and I was so excited! I waxed rhapsodic about how this is my third presidential election and how nice it is to have a voice in the process, etc. (Maybe it wasn't rhapsodic, exactly, but I did clutch the envelope to my chest and jump up and down.)

Alas, when I sat tonight down with a gin and my ballot, I was disappointed to find that it was mostly the primary ballot, as well as some judges. I have never voted in the primaries because I eschew party affiliation and aren't they over anyway? But I feel like I ought to vote for the judges, even though I don't know who they are. Otherwise it's like I walk out of the voting booth without doing anything.

I always get there and see columns and columns of names I haven't ever heard and feel like a bad citizen. Now I have an opportunity I don't usually have in the voting booth: I can google these judges (or potential judges) and see what they're about.

But I still don't know. If the primaries are over, won't these judgeship elections be over, too? I think I need to look it up.

But, more important than my thinking out loud is that if you're an overseas citizen, you can register to vote here. It was my first time actively registering, since Minnesota has the Motor Voter stuff and I think my dad may have vouched for me the first time. The documents needed depend on your home state. If you have a friend living abroad, give 'em a nudge, eh?

Now I'm gonna go google some judges.

[EDIT: I'm a doofus. The primaries aren't until September 9th. This info was found on the SoS's site and confirmed by the ballot I was holding in my hand. sigh.]

Olympic Fever!

2008-08-18T06:11:00.004+02:00

Nick got to go to two basketball games on Saturday: China v. Germany and U.S. v. Spain. They were good games, at least the half of each that I saw.

We watched some men's and women's gymnastics last night while eating Peking Duck and drinking Tsingtao and fancy tea. That seems so Chinese touristy wen I type it all out, but there you are. It was delicious.

My heart is a bit broken about Liu Xiang, the Chinese hurdler with the messed up hamstring. I was so looking forward to seeing him set a new world record during the finals... but he false-started (which he as a history of) during the heat and was disqualified. He was limp, limp, limping after the false start, so I didn't know what was up. Or maybe he stopped running because of the injury? I can't tell.

But I did install a medal count over there on the left, so you can see how much China is kicking our collective asses, World. I'm totally torn up about this, naturally. Who am I rooting for, anyway? (Edit: I tried to post a medal count, but none of them would EVER EVER load.)

Love,
Dani 丹妮

P.S. If you an I become google contacts, you can get e-mailed the things I share over on the left there. I think. Katy says she thought I was e-mailing her things, but I was just sharing them. I'm gonna add the people from my hotmail address book and see what happens.

yay olympics!

2008-08-10T09:10:00.002+02:00

China plays the US in basketball at 10:15 tonight (that's 9:15 AM at home, guys)!

美国加油!!!

internet

2008-08-05T17:47:00.003+02:00

I'm struggling to get to any of the places internetfreedom.org (accessed via proxy, natch) recommends for free (as in unhampered) web browsing in China and wandering through firefox add-ons because I thought I remembered hearing about something that would make it easy to get around the censorship.

Meanwhile, I'm reminded of this article about increased security in China and surveillance being one of the legacies of the Beijing games. Note the security cameras behind Kink and I in the picture below.

Another question: Is it just because I live in China or has this whole Olympics thing been covered way more than usual? I don't remember being this interested, even when it was in the states. I think it just seems that way because I gravitate toward news coverage of China and I may not have even been reading much news when it was in the states... Maybe it always seemed like sports coverage before and this is certainly less sports and more politics.

some stuff.

2008-08-05T14:14:00.005+02:00

I dunno if there is a way for me to add a website to my shared list (over there on the left under "From my google reader"), so I'm just gonna post them here.

I can't remember how I came across the first one, and the second came from there.
world changing
city cargo

very interesting.

Have you heard about the power shortages in China? They're mostly in only a couple of provinces, Shanxi and Shandong (where I live). The power to my my home and work haven't been cut off yet (knock wood), but the company where I just started teaching had the power cut off three days last week and I guess the higher voltage used for industrial stuff is being cut off a lot of places and offices are ordered not to use the AC and stuff. hmm. Maybe we should start enforcing building codes and reap the benefits of energy efficient windows and stuff? Nah!

I think I am suffering from all the smoke we inhaled at dinner Sunday night. (Korean bbq places put a coal fire into your table and cook stuff right there, which usually isn't an issue, but something must have gone wrong and the place was FILLED with smoke. Why we didn't leave, I dunno.) Following that up with KTV was also probably not helpful. Maybe I reinjured the ol' tonsil holes? Anyway it's gross and feels bad.

And I got 17 mosquito bites on my legs at dinner last night. But it was a lovely bbq near the beach. And I'm totally going back. Possibly after renting rollerskates on the boardwalk next Monday. Fun!

Back!

2008-07-26T17:10:00.002+02:00

OMG. Holy crabby-face complainer, Batman!

I totally wanna take down that last post, but that seems dishonest, so it'll stay up. For now, anyway.

Holiday was great, but I was really tired and edgy for a while beforehand and during because I was just so darn excited about Mom and Katy coming, I was pretty wigged. I mean, they came to MY country. I need to make sure their every China wish is fulfilled!

I think it was pretty good. And I think I managed to mildly impress them with my Chinese, but probably not as much as Katy impressed me with her crazy haggling skills at the Silk Market in Beijing. The girls from nearby stalls would come out into the aisles to watch her work!

Anyway, I should get to bed, I'm still tired and I want to rest up for my birthday celebrations. It's weird that I'm gonna be birthdaying, though, because without Vee and my fam and maybe all of Minneapolis, it's hard to believe something like a birthday can even happen.

Here's a little picture to tide you over and leave a happy taste in your eyes.We're riding bicycles in Beijing! Sweet!

crap (ie. boring rant, or a girl's gotta vent)

2008-07-06T16:16:00.007+02:00

Today was a crap day.

it actually started last night...or maybe a while before.
You know I don't work at a normal school, but an extra school, so after regular school or on the weekends rich kids come to us for extra English practice.
These kids get some time off in the summer, just like everywhere, so summer is supposed to be our big time and we're supposed to be working six days a week (starting three weeks ago) because we'll have to many classes during the week (it's stipulated in our contract. our required hours go up by 150%).

Well, they started advertising the intensive period (as we call it) about two weeks ago--about a week in. And by advertising, I mean we've been forced to get up early on Tuesday (formerly our Sunday) and wait at the gates to secondary schools with fliers. And yes, our fliers are the nicest of all the English schools who have morons standing at the gates (five or six other schools, every time I've gone), but we're also by far the most expensive. Do our fliers say we have classes at any other time? No. Do they mention our adult classes (in case the disaffected teenager brings the flier all the way home and it's not carpeting the pavement with the other 90% of them)? No.
We're not doing anything to set ourselves apart. Us media-savvy westerners are crawling the walls, but the Chinese staff has no time to listen to our jaded marketing methods. Their grandmothers handed out fliers, and by god, they will too.

Anyway, for the intensive, we suggested many things, as an alternative to handing out fliers. demo-lessons, perhaps? there was one scheduled, at a jr. high, and the fliers weren;t ready, so they handed out business cards. To 12-year-olds. Didn't throw a less glossy version of the flier together or anything, just handed out business cards. To 12-year-olds.

So, we suggested having a party at the beach (the cleanest beach in china, okay!?). We should invite the students to bring their friends and we'd each have an activity prepared that would last 10 minutes of so. Then there would be a drawing (as advertised) for awesome stuff like an MP3 player, a turtle with a fancy tank, and/or a volleyball. (All totaling less in price than the damned fliers, even if you replaced them with black and white photocopies on colored paper and took that into account.)

So, they compromised. We'd bring out our Sunday evening kids for the last half of class to the government square, a huge granite flat area surrounding a non-functional fountain. We'd rotate through 10mn activities and meet people hanging around with their kids on a Sunday. (I had suggested just going to teh square with ine Chinese person to a westerner with lotsa fliers because there are many people there with their kids at rollerblading lessons and stuff. (Yes, I said rollerblading lessons. This is why they can afford our school.)

Then, Saturday afternoon, they said...well, we're gonna try it out today, and if it works, we'll do it on Sunday. Easy enough, right? but instead of entertaining 5-6 eight-year-olds for an hour, I'd be entertaining 17 fourteen-year-olds. Minor Change In Plans.

Also, I didn't actually plan anything, since small children in a new environment are pretty easy to entertain. You mainly keep them from wandering into traffic. Teenagers... well, I didn't have ANY idea what to do. Red Rover was suggested. Playing on the grass was vetoed.

So we played Red Rover for 15-20 mn, and they were just getting the hang of it when BAM. A kid is flat on his back on the granite. He hit his head, but no one is sure how hard. He goes to hospital and I now have 16 teenagers to entertain without allowing them to run around. We play hand clapping games, where you clap in a circle...

Well, the hospital said the kid who hit his head was okay, so they gave him some dragon's blood (I wish I was somehow embellishing the ACTUAL NAME for what they gave him for a lump on the head), not ibuprofen or an ice pack...

As you can guess, he started ralphing in the middle of the night and had to be rushed to hospital again. (The dragons' blood didn't make him invincible? I'll be damned.) He has a concussion, but I guess he'll be fine. As you can imagine, we'll never be allowed to do a marketing activity outside of school again. Nor will they even again listen to our western marketing ideas. (Never mind the fact that we suggested an outing to play ON THE BEACH, not the friggin' granite government square...)

So, that happened. A really nice student of mine, in the hospital. Sort of my fault.

Then, I had a parent show first thing this morning. At the end of every book, we have a demonstration of what the kids have learned. They always either freeze up and look way worse than normal or pull their shit together and look way better than they ought to (usually only if I'm trying to fail a kid). Apparently, there were supposed to be two happening at the same time, so there weren't enough extra chairs in the school to accommodate the parents. So, my students were supposed to get tiny plastic chairs from the preschool room and then perform like nothing was totally weird. Then, five minutes before class, they were going to move us all to a different room, so I was mad crabby. (I turned the AC on in my room to 18 degrees so it wouldn't be unbearable when the 35 people who were allegedly gonna show piled in there.) The kids all froze up and performed like crap. I waited to talk to the parents, and none came, so I was making photocopies to get ready for my afternoon class, when 30 mn later, someone wandered along to tell me I had an hour of teaching left to do and a roomful of kids. Was I informed of this ahead of time? no. Was I prepared? Of course not! But we had a long game that I had been slowly teaching them (like a giant memory game on the floor with "how many?" and "What color?" questiong mixed in.) that we could do, so we did it, in the least effecient, most convluted way I could imagine, to make it last the whole class. (a group of 13 seven-year-olds is not something one should approach unprepared.)

So that sucked.

Then, my second class was SUPPOSED to be canceled (and I sort of refused to teach it last week) because it's a review session and only three boys showed up. Yup, three high-energy 10-year-old boys (two of whom are identical twins). SUCK. Also, below my professional standards, I'm sure and nothing I'd even agree to on its own. So I had a lot of boring book work prepared (basically cover three-four weeks of material in one super-boring review session). And, as I told them to tell their moms, it was boooring. People's hearts almost stopped beating, they were so bored. If you plan for three students like you plan for nine, you have to plan like 30 times as much. (get one sentence from every student...um that takes 4% of the time it's supposed to.

So that was a bunch of crap parent-appeasing time-filler.

Then, while getting ready for my last class (the bane of my former boss's existence, plus three kids who failed the book), I caught my foot on the metal thing that makes the transition between the (faux) wood floor and the (probably somehow faux) linoleum tile at work and totally bit it. Like HIT THE DIRT in front of parents, staff, kids, etc. Luckily, even though I tore my toenail to shreds and completely ripped the metal transition thing into a dangerous sharp mid-air contraption at eye-level with many of our students, no one rushed to make sure I was okay. That would have been so embarrassing. Yup, had anyone who saw me hurt myself cared even a little bit, I would have been humiliated. As it was, I was completely annoyed with the staff members who didn't interrupt their conversation with 11-year-olds to make sure I didn't die of tetanus right there between classes. I mean, come on. It's not every day that an adult (even one such as myself) faceplants in their nice work clothes right in front of you. You could pause and make sure she wasn't completely impaled.

Okay. Thanks. I'm gonna try and be done with the crabby-apple-time here. I just needed to get it out, you know? So thanks. On to the good news.

THE GOOD NEWS:
(non biblical)

I am going on holiday tomorrow. I need to leave the house at 5:30 AM, then I'm meeting Kink at the Beijing airport and we are going to tourist the hell out of that town. (forget the thunderstorms that are predicted for all eight days of our time there)

AND GOOD OMENS:

The last time I went on holiday alone with Katy, we went camping, and I ripped my big toenail the first night on the rope to our dining fly. So, I'm taking this toenail ripping to be a good omen. Katy and I had tons of fun in Hibbing, Buhl, and surrounding ports of call. So, I imagine things will be similarly awesome in Beijing, except I'll be impressing Katy (or not) with the Chinese I've been studying for an hour of more six nights a week.

Anyway, We're totally gonna have fun.

Oh, man. I'm in a better mood already. I almost forgot that I can't access facebook/play scrabulous from home AND that I forgot to mention that at dinner last night I sustained a blistering (literally) burn on my right knee. Okay, I need to go to sleep. I'm getting up in like four hours! eek!

Thanks for letting me vent. Love!
Dani

Happy Birthday, Kink!

2008-07-03T02:24:00.002+02:00

Call my wonderful little sister STAT and wish her happy birthday!

***

In other news, China is now blocking anonymouse.org, which I used to use constantly to look at blogs, news articles, or whatever else China seemed to be blocking for no reason. Now I'm constantly looking for a proxy server that will work with this or that article, but I keep getting 404s! Darn it all, China! I just wanna stay informed about American politics! Sigh.

Maybe things will open up after the Olympics.

****

Katy is headed off to Korea tomorrow! She and I will meet in Beijing on Monday! I'm so excited I'm going to OD on exclamation points!!!!!!!!

!!!
!

photos

2008-06-20T08:34:00.002+02:00

I've been remiss about uploading photos to flickr and I think I'll probably just delete the account. Here are links to my Facebook albums instead. I included all the ones I've posted so far, so they go back to my birthday last year, when I first sold my soul to Facebook.

Notice the latest one with pictures of my kindergarteners! Cuteness! I will miss them.

classroom/kindie

random Weihainess

Yantai May Holiday

Goodbye Jackie/GameDay/Weihai Landmarks

Liu Gong Island

Winter 07/08

First Weihai Album

Beijing Album

Countdown (MPLS)

Baby's gone digital

Birthday 1 (Polaroids)

Birthday 2

Birthday 3

Have I mentioned that my awesome baby sister and mom are coming to visit? I'm meeting Katy in Beijing, then mom will meet us in Weihai. Woohoo!

alive and well

2008-05-16T15:37:00.002+02:00

Unless you've been under a rock or on a sequestered jury or participating in a media deprivation study or something, you know there's been a giant earthquake in my adopted country.

Many people have expressed concern about my well-being, and I thank you so much for that!
I was completely unaffected by the earthquake, as I live all the way in the East of China and apparently far from any faultlines.

The destruction is vast and makes me kinda glad that the language barrier insulates me from the media, as I'm sure it's everywhere.

just wanted to let you know

2008-05-12T17:01:00.002+02:00

I'm nowhere near the giant earthquake.
Or the smaller one.

Katy News Update

2008-05-06T17:21:00.005+02:00

While I'm gorging myself on Chinese food and high-fiving kindergarteners all day, my kickass little sister is out being awesome again.

She says:

"On Saturday May 10th, my roommate Krista and I, in the quest to get out biking more, are going to be riding in the National MS Society - Bike MS: Allianz Twin Cities Ride 2008. What this really means is that we are biking 30 miles this Saturday, May 10th! Yikes! I have never been a great biker, but I intend to someday soon make biking my primary means of transportation, so I thought this was the perfect challenge.

My good friend and former roommate in Duluth has MS which is why I picked this ride and is what makes it so important to me. If you would like to support the National Multiple Sclerosis Society (and me) my making a donation to help find a cure that would be great! Click here to visit my personal page and make an online donation!"

I know my blog readership isn't very high, but if both of you go right now and donate, we can help her achieve her goal of 10 people at $10 each!

If you wanna get something for your money other than a warm feeling and a tax deduction, you may be interested in what the St. Joseph Worker Program is up to.

"On Friday May 9th the volunteer program that I am in is having a fundraiser! It is Friday from 4-9 at the Carondelet Center (1890 Randolph Ave. St. Paul MN) There will be a silent auction, used books, baked goods, and art for sale! In addition to items for sale there will be music and dancers. All proceeds are to benefit the St. Joseph Worker program! Stop in after work, or come after dinner - there will be wonderful things (such as Peace flags that I am sewing and buttons I am making) for any budget! It would be wonderful to see you there!!"

Additionally, you should go the the SJWP thing because I can't and I'll be way jealous. If you don't know about the cool stuff she does every day through this program, or if you're a woman interested in a way to change your lifestyle and give back to the community, check out the link above. There are also pictures of Kink and her roommates wearing matching tee-shirts and ready to take on the problems of the world (or at least Minneapolis-St. Paul).
Seriously. These girls are awesome.

One of my students?

2008-05-06T16:29:00.002+02:00

Chinese Class Clown Executed

BEIJING—Known among schoolmates for his spirited antics and ability to make light of almost any situation, classroom jokester Wei Xiang, 11, was put to death by the Chinese government for drawing a mustache on an image of Education Minister Zhou Ji in one of his textbooks, sources reported Monday. "An enemy of the state has been dealt with accordingly," government spokesman Xu Qi said following Wei's execution by firing squad. "Let this be a lesson to other children considering wising off or otherwise wasting valuable class time." The fifth-grader previously served a six-month term in solitary confinement at Qincheng Prison after referring to the Tang Dynasty as "the Stank Dynasty" during a history lesson in 2007.

This part isn't funny at all.
According to my Lonely Planet, the Chinese government executes more people than the rest of the world combined--an average of 27 people a day. I dunno where their info comes from, as the official number is a state secret.

You can read the Wikipedia article on executions in the PRC here. (I'm a little nervous because I was able to directly view the article when Wikipedia is generally blocked. I've also heard that sometimes when one is viewing banned information on the internet or when one conducts searches on sensitive subjects, instead of it being blocked, a pop-up window will appear, informing you that you're currently being monitored by a government official. Scary.)

The article points out that China executes even more prisoners per capita, so the disproportionate numbers are not entirely based on the fact that 20% of the world's population is Chinese. It also mentions the speed with which executions are carried out, the broad range of crimes for which execution is applied, and the unusually large percentage of women executed.

One of my coworker's students, in a discussion on censorship in China (you know that the state owns all TV and radio outlets, right? And that non-licensed/credentialed newspapers are punished harshly?), made an interesting point. China is different because there are SO MANY PEOPLE here. It's questionable that other governments could do it better. The government has to find a way to keep the populace from going wild and to protect people (and property, duh). I'm not saying that I support capital punishment and no free press, of course, but I think that's something we forget. And with the Olympics coming up and various anti-China things being said in the Western media (or things just perceived as anti-China or rumors of things that are perceived as anti-China), the government is working hard to maintain control of nationalistic fervor.

I don't really know where I was going with this, but, especially with so many people pointing out China's faults, it's interesting to wonder how EXACTLY China could do it better. Plus, knowing even what little I do about habits that seem to be such a deep part of Chinese culture (like the built-in corruption at all levels of bureaucracy which seems to be generally simply accepted), it's hard to see how China is going to change. Some things are changing fast, but, as it's a system based on not questioning the system...I dunno.
It's an interesting place to be.

Happy Labor Day!

2008-05-01T15:58:00.003+02:00

Note: this entry is fraught with exclamation points (and parentheses!) because I was having a good time, okay? Consider yourself warned!

The first of May is Labor Day in the rest of the world, my fellow Americans, and what a beautiful day it was here in Weihai!

Before I relate our holiday festivities (because of course we didn't have to work today!), I want to remind you that we occasionally go bowling at the Blue Sky Hotel, home of the only bowling alley in Weihai. (Last weekend's activities proved this to be sort of untrue, but that's a story for another day.) Last time we went, (maybe on Wenifer's birthday?) I scored an 88 on the first game. Not a very good score, but remember, we are in China, so that's pretty lucky. Then I remembered that you can win prizes for achieving certain scores! There is a poster on the wall showing the high scorers for the week and the month (only the lane record score is actually recorded, a 289 achieved sometime in 2006) and listing the prizes. What, you may ask, is the prize for getting such an auspicious score as an 88? Why, it's 100 bullets!

This may seem to be a very odd prize, but the hotel has all sorts of amusement facilities in the basement (including several perpetually unoccupied rooms devoted to card playing or mah jong and a beauty salon), so it must have a shooting range as well! Upon looking at the prize listing, we realized that Nick's score was also a winner. For 158 you get half an hour of ping pong! (If I remember correctly, Wenifer actually won the game, though no prizes were awarded for that.) We played another game and Nick managed to match his score and win another ping pong session. Awesome!

After we finished our games, we asked to see the ping pong and shooting facilities. Ping pong was as expected, a room near the bowling alley with a coupla tables in it. Shooting was something else, though. I was getting all excited to hang my man-shaped target (like the ones you see in the movies) with bullet holes in it on my bedroom door (to frighten intruders, duh, although it would be more likely to frighten ME in low light), even though I've never shot a gun. I even skipped the day of gun safety training (something my parents forced me to do) when you go to the shooting range because I had NO interest in it. As I've gotten older, however, my passion for new experiences and free things has only grown. The fu yuan (or fuyuAR! in Weihaihua) took us down to the second basement where we saw...a room decorated with pictures of army guys with guns and wild game (elephants and tigers and stuff) with a bunch of rifles in a locked case, some fake rocks (a duck blind or something, maybe), and, disappointingly, two giant screens on one wall. I'd won electronic bullets. Oh well, free's free.

Now, back to the present. Our schedule is all messed up because they decided to give us holidays on Thursday (no choice in that, really. I think it's somewhat government mandated.) and Sunday. "What about your Sunday classes?" you ask, "Isn't that your busy day?" "Why yes, it is," I answer. This was solved by moving our Sunday classes to Friday (tomorrow). I think there are three reasons why classes will be very small/nonexistent tomorrow: many of our students will have school (it's FRIDAY!), and even if they don't, many would just not show up anyway because you always lose some people when you shift a schedule like that, and it's the day between the nationally mandated holiday and the weekend and lotsa people are probably not around. Plus, this has traditionally been a three day holiday. This is the first year that the government holiday is only on the first. I'm not complaining, mind you. I don't mind an easy weekend once in a while. Whoever shows up will get a little extra review, then we can work on craft projects (more flowers for the wall!) and play games. Plus, it was really nice that they wanted us to have at least part of the holiday next to our normal days off (hence Sunday, Monday, Tuesday). It did mean we needed to do all our planning for the weekend on Wednesday, which was a bit much and I didn't quite finish, but if classes are canceled this weekend, I'll be all planned up for next week!

So, ANYWAY, back to today! We decided to have a game day. We'd head back to the Blue Sky Hotel and play basketball (or at least horse) on their court, use up our ping pong and bullets and maybe throw some bowling balls. Hello, fun! And, since we paid for bowling ages ago and won almost everything else, hello cheap! Because if there's anything you don't wanna do in Labor Day, it's spend all your hard earned money!

There are a bunch of hotels on my street and this morning they all seem to have these inflatable archways that Chinese people seem to hire for all sorts of things, from sales to weddings. There are also paper cannons, balloon archways, firecrackers, and fireworks. Apparently, this is a big day for weddings. It came as no surprise then, that when we got to the Blue Sky hotel, driveway was lined with cars and the area outside the door was strewn with streamers and balloons. They were taking down the pink archway and popping a million pink and white balloons. It is the only time I have seen non-bowlers in parts of the hotel besides the lobby. We asked in the lobby about the basketball facilities and were led partway back down the driveway near the driving range (I told you, this hotel has everything) where we were disappointed to see that wedding guests were parked all over our basketball court! There was no indoor court, so we were forced inside to the ping pong tables.

If you have ever seen me attempt something that requires a lot of coordination, like eating or walking, you can imagine how well I play ping pong. There was a Chinese man and woman at one table, so we played on the other. Wenifer and I were on one side and Nick was on the other for a while. When the couple left, we got all crazy and were trying to play on both tables at once (without pushing them together or anything), which was great fun. Wenifer and Nick did play one actual game, but the rest of the time we were all just makin' like the Williams sisters and bouncing ping pong balls all over the room. Then we went to use up the bullets. It was like a giant game of duck hunt, but the ducks only flew in straight lines, so once you set your sights it was pretty easy. meh. Not as fun as ping pong.

There were more people than usual in the bowling alley, too, although they cleared out when one of them totally bit it on the approach. I think the fall was due more to the freshly oiled lanes than to wedding-related baijou drinking. Our group's only injury was a broken nail, but Wenifer just dipped over to the beauty parlor and got it all fixed up, so no worries. Nick won half an hour of billiards and I won another 100 bullets.

We went back outside to head home and lo and behold, the basketball court was all freed up! It was only 10 yuan an hour each to play, so we went for it. We just chatted and took shots and then played horse. I was, predictably, out first, but it was certainly fun nonetheless. I hope we can do it a bunch more times this summer! Then we went and got ice cream and watched Arrested Development at my house. We were going to do some shopping and cold noodle eating at the night market, but I had a scheduling conflict. We'll certainly do that a million times before the end of the summer.

All in all, it was a super fun Labor Day. I hope you're having a great one, too.

Love,
Dani

P.S. I forgot that I was thinking about doing a list-style entry to catch you up on everything I have done while on blogging hiatus. That's easy enough and probably forthcoming!

kindie update

2008-04-16T06:23:00.003+02:00

I don't think I've told you that when one tries to get a Chinese four-year-old to say, "umbrella,"
what comes out of their mouth sounds, about 50% of the time, like, "I'm a banana!"

I don't know how it works, but it's awesome. Try it today!

Also, "x-ray" has approximately 14 syllables, depending on how serious you are about it.

It's ALIVE!

2008-04-05T02:04:00.006+02:00

Sorry about the lack of everything. For the last week or so, I can blame it on my home internet, which is on the fritz. Apparently the people who provide the internet can't provide me with the password so I can plug directly into the broadband (although they were able to help me out when I went to pay the bill, thinking that was the problem) and the router is allegedly broken. I dunno if the thing is actually broken; the guy who came to fix the connection probably gets a kickback if I buy one, this being China, and even if we HAD the manual, I couldn't read it to fix it myself, since it would be in Chinese. The manual may be available on the internet for download, but... I also don't want to buy a router as my roommate is moving to Australia in about a week, so I may be moving in with Wenifer or vice versa and I think she has a router. Oh well. So I'm at the coffee shop where the internet is apparently going in and out, as I can only get pages to load
about half the time and things keep popping up for me to log into the broadband thing, since I tried that once. It's driving me nuts. I'm gonna try to load this, then add the pictures where indicated. Cross your finners.

[note: the internet at the coffee shot was intermittent and I couldn't load blogger. It took me another week or so to get it set up at home, including six Chinese guys in my apartment to fix stuff (none of whom would read the Chinese directions to my new router, the ONLY thing I asked of them, as I just couldn't figure out where to input the internet password. Aargh!) but here we are. I still have to upload a couple more videos to complete this blog to my satisfaction, but as Canadian Roommate is moving to Australia on Tuesday (sob!), I wouldn't hold out much hope for this weekend. but do check back, k?]

Okay, so you know we went to Qingdao, right? It's the big city to us kids. They have stores with western goods, western foods (or just non-Chinese food), and shoes that come in the giant sizes our feet require. Normally for Spring Festival, one would go home to spend the time with their family. This wasn't really feasable for us, so hanging out in Qingdao was the next best thing. We got there February 5th or 6th (I can't remember and I'm sorry this is so out of date.), whichever day they set off all the fireworks. And they set off TONS of them. Seriously, Spring Festival makes the 4th of July look like it's run by a bunch of sissies.

We stay at a nice enough hotel there, fancy enough to have a window from the bathroom to the room, which I guess is considered a positive thing.
Being a "Business Hotel," it also has a selection of genital washes in the bathroom and mirrored ceilings in the lobby and elevator.
The hotel down the street, however, is fancy enough to have western restaurants (inside) and MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF FIREWORKS (outside). Sorry the video is sideways, I'm bad at stuff and the strings of firecrackers were so long I HAD to take the video in that direction.

[firecracker video]

We stood out there and watched them set off strings like this at least three times. In between, while they were setting up, they lit these huge boxes of fireworks, you know, the kind that shooot up in the air. These boxes are full of tubes of explosive. You light the box and they shoot up one after another. Here's a shot earlier in the day of my pals thinking about spending hundreds of kwai on explosives, followed by video of the fireworks.
[fireworks video]
Then we went to one of the few open restaurants (the "cafe" in the fancy hotel was out of our budget for Chinese food and sandwiches), which was Vietnamese, I think, but we had western food. They didn't have dumplings, which we wanted to eat to bring us fortune in the new year, but Jackie and Wenifer did share some fish, which is supposed to do the same thing. I guess the word for fish sounds the same as the word for having a surplus at the end of the year, so you eat fish so that you'll have a surplus at the end of the new year. I can't remember what I ate, but it was cheesy and delicious, plus I had a long island iced tea (they're safe in China, where bartenders seem to be incapable of making a really stiff drink) and a Tsingtao.After dinner we went outside where the staff of the restaurant was setting off firecrackers. Then these guys were looking through the papers on the ground for unexploded ones, lighting them and throwing them at their friends! Crazy! I wonder how many people lose fingers over the month of Spring Festival.Here's one last cute picture of my friends with fireworks.
According to the order pictures are in on my camera, the next thing we did was climb a mountain to a temple. Here are pals on the way up:
Here's Wenifer lookng adorable.Here's pals on the way down.
I apparently took no pictures of the temple itself, but it had tall doorways going in--well, not tall doorways, but like the bottom piece of wood in the door is tall, so you have to step over the thing on the way in, which is apparently to keep zombies out. I guess Chinese zombies hop, instead of staggering like western ones do, and they can't hop over the tall thing at the bottom of the door. Up there, along one end of the courtyard, there were three small rooms/big shrines which were facing the courtyard. We lit incense, maybe said prayers at the shrines, and headed back down. It's important to honor the ancestors at such holidays, I think. Wait, look! Jackie took a picture of us fighting with our incense sticks in the doorway.
That night, we tried to go to a club, but you had to buy a bottle for the table for like 400 yuan. Too much. so we went and got massages instead. I was nervous, and it tickled my feet a little, but it was awesome.

The next day, we went to the Qingdao Underwater World! Don't we look cute with the mascot?
How many people can you fit in an autoretrado with a sign?They had little outfits on all the turtles. It was sad. I don't know what that character says.

They also had a mermaid show, but we had to wait around over an hour for it, so we ate ice cream and played bear/hunter/maiden, which is a paper rock scissors style game. You have your backs to one another and turn around on the count of three. You have your arms up over your head with your fingers curled into claws for the bear, hands like your holding a rifle for the hunter, and hands under your chin and around your cheeks for the maiden. The hunter shoots the bear, the bear eats the maiden, and the maiden woos the hunter.
That night, we went to a little bar near the hotel. It was all wood and normal bar looking, so that was nice. Our friends Walter and Wei and also come in to town with a couple of their friends. Here's my only picture in that bar. Note that Nick's sweatshirt matches his beer.
We weren't at the bar very long when there was a bit of a commotion inside. Some girl was screaming about or at her dad, literally screaming, and throwing chairs. The dad was drunk and seemed to be getting into some altercation with this skinny drunk guy who had talked to us earlier. The skinny guy's friends we trying to get him outside, but he kept coming back in. After a few minutes of this (much of which happened right in front of our table, since we were at the table between the big group and the door), Walter rather violently twisted the skinny guy's arm behind his back, pushed him out the door, and told him not to come back in. There were a couple of Americans sitting at the bar and one of them came over and told us who the skinny guy was: the owner of the bar. Walter tried to go buy him a drink (most of the big group had left, but you could still occasionally hear the girl screaming outside and the bar owner had come back and was sitting with the staff at a small table across from us), but the bartender thought he didn't need another one. Wenifer, who is allergic to alcohol, had half a drink and needed to go home, then Walter, Wei, and their friends left, and Nick, Jackie, and I chatted with the two Americans for a while. They were (surprise!) English teachers in Qingdao. Nice folks.

The following day, we went the the Tsingtao brewery! It was way fun.
Jackie can't decide what to drink...We got to see how beer was made, had some free samples, and went in this optical illusion room with a slightly tilted floor, but the pictures on the wall made your brain try to correct your body and lean this way and that. It was pretty funny.

Well that's about it, except for a little shopping here and there. OH! and all of our favorite places to eat (the German place that makes their own amazing sausage, the hot pot place where they cook on the table and put like six heads of garlic in your food, and the lady on the corner by the dvd shop who makes poached eggs in a buscuit) were closed for the holiday, so we were disappointed culinarily, although we checked each place every day that we were there. And the hot pot place did open the last day, I think. So good! But Walter found a mexican restaurant, so we have another favorite! And we ate at a really fancy (expensive) italian place, but I was too full for tiramisu. Oh well.

So, that was Spring Festival. Blogs about the Winter Intensive Camp at school and our next trip to Qingdao and out trip to Shanghai all will follow. Or maybe just a list-style overview to get us caught up to the present, who can tell?

Kisses!
Dani

Address

2008-03-07T11:47:00.002+01:00

Okay, so I've been promising my address for-ev-ver,
and here it is!

Weihai EF English First Language Training Center
5th Floor Baowei Building #1-3
Gaoshan Rd. 264200
Weihai Shandong China

高山街1号内3号宝威学堂5楼

Some advice for sending stuff:
Put both the English and Chinese addresses on there. (And my name, duh.)
Don't send me things that will get me deported or something.
Don't bother with express mail of some sort, because it'll probably get tied up in customs or something anyway. Plus, it'll probably be expensive to send something this far anyway!
The main thing I'm missing is food, but as it will probably take forever to get here, don't send food. (My roommate has been send both Mandarin oranges and bagels. Neither of which worked out.)
And most of all, thanks for being awesome! You're so cool, sending me stuff!

And I KNOW I owe you like so much blog, it's not even funny. I'm so lame.
I went to Qingdao AGAIN since I last promised to write about it and I'm going to Shanghai in a week to see my dad!
Okay, more soon. Kisses.
DAni

xin nian kuai le!

2008-02-14T10:50:00.001+01:00

More about our Spring Festival holiday later.

For now:

Oh, yeah, and happy V.D.!

Love,
Dani

恭喜发财! (Gōngxǐ fācái)

2008-01-31T13:31:00.001+01:00

It's almost Chinese New Year and oh, dear. There is a bit of a weather problem here in China.

I don't know what you know about how this holiday is celebrated. (Go read the wikipedia entry, k? You'll learn a lot about China, I think. And all the homophones they mention? Imagine trying to communicate like a stuttering tourist in this language. It's a challenge, but thank heaven for gestures and patient Chinese people!) And, honestly, I don't know THAT much about it. Last night was the "little new year," which I know nothing about, except that lots of people were setting off fire crackers just under my window as I was trying to teach.

Anyway, for New Year, you eat mooncakes (chewy blobs made of rice starch or gluten or something sticky with bean paste inside: pretty good), clean your house (a kind of "out with the old" attitude, I think), set off fireworks (to scare the monsters or bad spirits or whatever away), put these red banners on your door expressing your wishes for the year in the form of a couplet (the bad spirits are afraid of red. Jackie and I bought these, but I'm gonna ask for a translation before we hang 'em up), eat dumplings (do I need to explain this? What's wrong with you?), and go home to be with your family.

Now, I know that Thanksgiving is supposed to be a bad time to travel, but imagine a country with an estimated population of 1,321,851,888 (who all get maybe one day off a week and everyone has vacation at the same three times each year) where everyone is going home at the same time. Wikipedia calls it the largest human migration. It's the most important of the major holidays and the number of travelers exceeds the population of China! I guess that's because in addition to going home to your family, you also go visit friends.

So anyway, you can imagine that, under the best of conditions, this is a treacherous time to travel and it's really hard to get train tickets to where you're going.

I can only assume that you've heard about the strangely bad weather we've been having here. I got three emails about it today, so the BBC has apparently thrown everyone into a panic. Parts of southern and eastern China have been blanketed by snow and dealing with extra coldness. Trains have stopped, highways have been closed (or only opened during the day with heavy police presence to make sure people go slowly). In Guangzhou, there were hundreds of thousands of people stranded in the train station. HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people stranded in A TRAIN STATION. However, I live in Shandong province, where it is only extra cold (but not as cold as home). So this will not be me:

We ARE traveling a bit for the holiday, however. We're heading to Qingdao again, which is only three hours away on the bus, and if worse comes to worse, we can even take a taxi there. It's close enough that travel won't really be an issue, but we'll still get outta the hood for a while. Plus, I have come to the conclusion that there are NO shoes in Weihai in my size, so hopefully the big city will have something for my big feet. (Even though it's bad luck to buy shoes on New Years because "shoe" sounds like "death" or "the plague" or something, we're gonna take our chances.) And we're doing the Tsing Tao brewery tour! Woohoo!

Anyway, cross your fingers that everything goes smoothly and all those nice Chinese people get home for the holiday.

That's me in the red coat in the middle, waiting for a bus.

Not really, but it totally could be, huh? Except that we don't have that much snow here.

P.S. I added a new goal to my list at left.
P.P.S. I decided to come up with a resolution for Chinese New Year since this is my Chinese year. Any suggestions?

I've been reading this blog...

2008-01-28T15:15:00.000+01:00

called People Reading.

She photographs people she sees reading on the street or where ever and asks them about books. It's making me want to start a new reading list. I'm in the middle of the first book of Outlaws of the Marsh, a Chinese classic, but I'm not very motivated to read it. Next on the list is A Picture of Dorian Gray, which I picked up in Beijing and expect to like very much.

Below are the books I want to look into based on the million People Reading blog entries I've bookmarked. Sometimes I'm not even sure which book I found interesting or why I marked it at all, but something struck me initially, I guess. (The links go to the blog, not to Amazon or something, but I don't know how well they'll work, since I get the blog via RSS feed and would have to use Anonymouse to get there otherwise.)

The Omnivore's Dilemma (I want to learn more about the food cycle. I think that's probably important. Plus, maybe Anton just told me he read this?)

the book he can't remember (The description reminds me of the English Patient, which I loved. I just bought a DVD of it, but haven't watched it yet.)

Hooker to Housewife (I read some diary or something of a prostitute, I wanna say on Salon, a number of years ago. Maybe that's why this interested me?)

Island of the Secret Love Nun (duh)

Persepolis (a graphic novel. I bookmarked this and bought the a DVD of it totally separately. I bought the DVD solely because it looked cool. There is no English on the package; I only hope there are English subtitles or dubbing.)

If on a winters night a traveler (about readers reading?)

Dune (I think a few people featured in the blog mentioned this one, so...)

A Prayer for Owen Meany (This guy has been reading in the same bar every evening for 7-10 years, he says.)

Breakthrough: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility and Absalom, Absalom! (I like politics and environmentalism and I haven't read any Faulkner.)

so that all shall know/paraque todos lo sepan (Did I want to see photos of war and genocide? I don't think so; maybe I was interested in that guy's socially conscious art?)

The Lost Language of Plants and Be Here Now (Intriguing titles, no?)

call me by your name (The reader says he's writing a love story about Picasso and Einstein. I'm interested.)

Fun Home, A Family Tragicomic

Self-Reliance (Didn't I read this is high school?)

Metaphors We Live By (Up is good; down is bad.)

Cowboy Bebop (I bought some CB DVDs in Qingdao, but I've only watched one episode.)

In Search of the Miraculous and Rumi (He reads for greater understanding. Who can argue?)

Letters to a Young Poet

Wild Swans (banned in China! eee!)

Fooled by Randomness

Dune --again (This guy lived in China for two years, so if he likes it...)

The Sound and the Fury (again, haven't read any Faulkner)
Tales of the City (I wish I knew more about the Fitzgeralds than that they lived in the StP)

Blindness

Girls of Riyadh (Racy book in Arabic)

Everything by Steinbeck. In order. (A Steinbeck reading contest? Um, awesome!)

Demian (I've only read Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. Maybe I should read something else, too.)

Ishi in Two Worlds and For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Language Older than Words (Because I've been meaning to give Hemingway another chance. And the other two look interesting.)

So, now I just have to decide if a blog where I just repeatedly link to some other blog is more or less boring than my usual posts...

thievin...

2008-01-18T16:03:00.000+01:00

Since I'm in China, it's okay to do a little piracy of my own, right?

So, I've been downloading music online and I tried to download TV shows (specifically Flight of the Conchords), too, but.

I've got them, and the audio comes through fine, but there's no picture! I've erased it and downloaded it again with the same result.

The file extension is .avi and it wants to open with Windows Media Player. I tried to import it into itunes to watch it there (the Midwest Teen Sex Show came in fine), but I don't think it makes it into my itunes library.

In this, my (New Zealand jokey pop duo-free) time of need, I turn to you, dear friends with internet connections and mad skillz. I know you be downloadin movies and stuff. How do you watch them? Is there a player I need to install? Another file extension that would work better? Or am I a moron for whom the internets is too complex?

I'm about to check out the .avi wikipedia page, but even if I figure this one out on my own, your piracy tips are welcome.

Kisses,
Dani

miskallaneous list (with digressions galore)

2008-01-17T14:33:00.000+01:00

1. I promised I would post pictures of the snowman when I got them. Here you are. You can see how little snow there was on the ground! Crazy!

We got more snow later. This is me with Hazel and Kevin near school. If the picture was clearer, you could probably see how awesome they are. See that orangish sign near those two people in the background? That's Two Steps Up. You turn left right before that to get to my school.

2. I don't have the right shade of blue thread to finish the cross stitch project I've been working on forever, and I may just go for it and finish it with the almost right color, because at least then it'd be done.

3. Speaking of cross stitch, I can't figure out how to save my patterns in a file format that I can email to myself and open on another computer. Since I don't have a printer, this is key. But I've emailed them, so a solution is surely pending.

4. I need to cross stitch because I haven't been and I have the kind of underlying crabbiness lately that can only be cured with some This American Life and buzzed sewing. It would be best if this was followed by an evening or two of me getting drunk with Verity (not really drunk, just weekday drunk would do the trick) and being really annoying for several hours while I sort everything out.

5. Kindergarteners are cute. They're growing on me, these small children. Maybe I just like them because I see them in small doses and I'm more concerned about timing and making them giggle than anything else.

Have I explained how kindie works yet? Hold on while I go through a proxy server to view my own blog and then... Okay, I didn't think so. OMG, I have told you nothing about school. I have really neglected you.

We work at a franchise of EF English First, an international English school. The people who own this franchise own a few other schools, including the kindergarten. Two of us go there three days a week and teach. We have seven classes and spend 15 minutes with each one. My classes are a bit younger (a kid had his third birthday a couple weeks ago. Isn't that like, super young?), so we're doing the alphabet in all of them, but they're not all at the same place. One of my classes got to Z last week, so now we're reviewing. I'm going to do four letters a week and pray that lasts me until someone else takes a turn, because I don't know what to do next. Writing the letters, maybe, instead of just saying a word that starts with each? The four letter review includes tracing the letter with your finger, singing a song ("the A says 'aah'" to the tune of The Farmer in the Dell) in English, picking the letter out from the others, and phrases in Chinese that will help us remember how the letter looks (that is, if you think the A looks like a qui qian, swing and the D looks like a da duzi, big stomach).

Anyway, in the rest of my kindie classes, we go through the letters and what they're for (A for Apple, W for Witch, etc.), then the kids say the newest word and the word before that one-by-one. Most of my classes are on S for Sun, as of today. Next, we play some sort of game involving the new words (playing "ring, ring, sun" instead of "duck, duck, grey duck" or having them run to their chairs or switch chairs when they hear the magic word.) If there's time after that, we play another game or sing a song like Itsy Bitsy Spider or I'm a Little Teapot. I'm pretty much out of cute songs with hand motions and simple games, though. I need to do more googling "preschool ESL alphabet game" or something.

Anyway, just because I like the children (my mental list of "favorites" seems to grow every day and includes about three little girls who for some reason remind me of Katy. I think it's the haircut.) doesn't mean I've changed my mind about them being gross. I get sneezed on and sprayed (those darn Ss) and I put my face very close to tiny people whose upper lips cannot be seen under that crust of boog. Then I give them I high five and a tickle. If we play duck, duck, grey duck, I also hug them. Then I move on to the next bunch.
High five 'em and leave 'em. That's always been my way.

6. Back to the list. Did you remember that we were on number six? Because I almost forgot!

7. One of these days I am going to post a list of all the books I am interested in reading someday because of the People Reading blog. I was going to link that, but I think you should take this opportunity to peruse the sweet links I have placed over there to your left. I just added a few more, like Idiot Comics and Mary's Mexico blog. You should also check out my shared links above it. I update those even when I neglect to blog. Now you'll know what I'm doing when I'm not blogging and emailing you. There are funny and serious things, as you can see. Go! Now! WAIT! Just kidding, finish reading this post and then go. Or go and come back, whatev. Do what you feel.

8. Did you know you can count to ten on one hand in Chinese? I might have told you this before I left because I learned it in my summer class. It's so cool! I was reminded of it because before I rearranged my list, this one came right after number six, which is totally like "hang loose" or something in Chinese hand signals. (See below.)

The picture shows 10 as the plus sign (which is basically the character for it), but you can also make a fist. This is really handy (oh! pun alert!) when you're asking how much something costs and you're all flustered and can't understand spoken Chinese easily, even though these are words you know. Plus, when you make the hand signals back while bargaining, I think it lets them know they're not dealing with any ordinary lao wai (foreigner) who can't understand Chinese, they're dealing with a lao wai who can't understand Chinese but knows the hand signals! And one who will, therefore, not pay too much for this sweater!

You can actually count all the way to 99 with one hand, using the fist-as-ten method because thirty in Chinese is just three ten. So, when I'm holding a purse and I ask how much it costs, the saleslady can grab it with one hand and tell me "five ten five" with the other. Then I say "too much" in Chinese and say "three ten" with my mouth AND my free hand. Then she laughs because that's too cheap, so I walk away and she says "four ten!" and I say "three ten five" and then she gets what she wants, probably.

I should have chosen an article of clothing for this explanation so that I could digress about how I have twice (TWICE!) been dragged behind a curtain and forced to try something on. Once after I had already left the store. At least that time they let me dress myself. The first time I got help.

9. I'm done with this list and I wanna go to bed, so now, for no reason other than I just acquired the photo, is a picture of Jackie and I drinking Tsingtao in Qingdao on our pre-Christmas trip. The restaurant pictured also happens to be the only place in China where I ate food I didn't like. (Besides celery with my host mom, but that doesn't count because it wasn't gross, I just don't like celery.) Oh, and we had these wormy things which were pretty gross, but the other food at both places that served that was good, so it doesn't count, either. But look! Tsingtao in Qingdao! Hilarious!

10. Oh, AND. Voice recordings are the greatest thing ever. Seriously. Mad high fives to Dan and V for making my week with that shit. And if you guys do mail Zach to me, could you enclose some breakfast cereal and an Illuminati set in the package? kaythanksbye.

Tuesday, et al.

2008-01-09T15:26:00.001+01:00

I woke up Tuesday morning after having stayed up too late losing at cards and tried to do laundry quietly so as not to wake Nick on the couch. When he did wake up, I put on The Triplets of Belleville, another pirated DVD purchase. When it was over, I was thinking about going for a nap, but Wenifer texted me about going back to the workout parks. I suggested lunch instead, so we met at the Lunch Noodle Place for mao er dua, a yummy noodley/minestroney soup that I eat all the time. Then Nick suggested that we actually go all the way up the mountain.

So we did. The whole time we were climbing up, I had "the Bear Went Over the Mountain" in my head.

"The other side of the mountain,
the other side of the mountain,
the other side of the mountain,
was all that he could see."

The series of three photographs thing was started in Qingdao and will continue on whenever there are groups of three people who are doing something that needs to be documented.

And someday I'll get the third picture, which is only on Wenifer's camera, and complete the set.

This is the direction we were looking--back the way we came, into the sun, towards home, and all that. While we were hanging out up there, looking at Weihai and planning future picnics, someone noticed people on another peak. We could see them and hear them shouting. Nick shouted Ni hao! ("hello" in Chinese, literally "you good") to them, and so naturally we had to go over there. Plus there was a little shrine to see. Climbing up a hill is one thing, climbing along the rocks at the top is another, especially for a girl as nervous and clumsy as I am. But we made it and I was only a little scared. (Meaning I only said "I'm scared" once out loud, in the tiniest little girl voice.)

And once we got there, the guys who were shouting took our picture.

Autoretrato with the Buddha.

Lots of flags tied to the trees around the shrine.

From the other peak we could see the new middle school, which we had all seen before from closer range. But now we could see a roundish building with a gate and some other interesting structures, which are hidden behind it when viewed from the road. So naturally, we descended the hill so as to get a closer look. Well. There was one building with the red circle and five gold stars that all official buildings seem to have, and an empty building that Nick trespassed in, as well as lots of little courtyard areas with stone benches and tables. I took a bunch of pictures of things so I could ask the Chinese staff at the school what the place was. But the pictures aren't terribly interesting (at this point, I'm over the excitement of seeing Chinese characters absolutely everywhere), so I won't post them here (unless it turns out to say something really cool).

Next time we go, we need to bring cards; those stone tables are too inviting. I know we should probably play mah jong or something, but I don't know how and the tiles are so heavy to carry all that way! Anyway, I think it would also be a nice place to hang out once the weather gets warmer. Most of the benches are positioned under trees and the tables are under little roofs of vines, so it might stay a little cool there. I'll bring a book down there and try it. Maybe a sandwich, too. I do so love a picnic. I'll let you know how it goes.

The big empty building had a ramp up onto the roof and stairs to go down into the building itself. This is Wenifer on the roof, with the sun setting behind her. So nice.

Here's Nick, standing to Wenifer's right. Behind him you can see the little vine-roofed area with the tables.

While Nick was checking out the big empty building, Wenifer and I hung out with this lady.

Funny/Not Funny?
(There must be a temple that way or something. We didn't go check for Nazis. We'd been climbing around all day; we wouldn't have had the energy to get all Indiana Jones on their asses if we had found some, anyway.)

This is looking back on the whole little area at the bottom of the hill behind the school. Pretty cool, eh? You can see the mountain in the background and the buildings the other pictures are from are on the left.

We didn't know exactly where we were, so we continued to walk down the same road and found some pretty awesome produce markets. The stuff looked way better than in the JiaJiaYue or DaRenFa (where the bananas are always bruised and the tomatoes are either pink or exploding and mushy) and is probably cheaper (certainly more fun!), plus there was tons of fresh fish and shellfish (is that redundant?) there, which makes me want to learn to cook the stuff. Since we didn't know where we were, we didn't know how we'd get back there, so I took a picture to show to a cabdriver next time. I also took a picture of the first street sign we came across. I want to go back!

We decided it was time for dinner. On the way, we ran into Simon, Wenifer and Nick bought camera cases, and we stopped at Nick's to pick some stuff up. We went to a new place for dinner, around the corner. It was good, except we accidentally ordered some wormy things that we didn't like. (We all totally tried them at Sunday dinner, so we knew: they weren't just gross looking.) Then Nick suggested that we get some ice cream. "You know where to get ice cream!?" I asked. Nick said, yes, he did. The same place we had all gotten ice cream last week. Duh.

Last weekend, I got a banana split. This time, I just got the regular ice cream. You know, regular ice cream covered in elaborately cut fruit. Plus we got coffee, as the day had gotten cold. All that sugar and caffeine is what got the last blog written.

After all that, we went to DaRenFa. It's like a Supertarget. Clothes, household goods, liquor, and non-perishables upstairs and fresh foods downstairs. DaRenFa has a bigger selection than even the big JiaJiaYue (oooOOooo, right?), but it's a little further away, so you need to take a cab, at least to get home with all your crap. Sange difang (three stops, to drop us each off) later, I was home again and tired and wired.

I'm sure at this point you're wondering (being the detail-oriented mofo that you are) "Doesn't Dani have some roommate or something?" or "Whatever happened to that Canadian?"
I'll tell you. My roommate Jackie's parents and other family came to visit her! They spent the weekend here and we got to meet them (and when it was my turn to toast at dinner I said they were from "Canadia") and now she's off on holiday with them!

Here, for good measure, is a picture of Jackie and I on the way to work between Christmas and New Year's. See how the ground is white behind us? That's called "snow." We got just a little bit, but with determination, warm mittens, and Nick's insistence that it was enough snow to do it, we were still able to make a snowman in the government square after work that day. Someday I'll get a picture of that from someone!

Since I was so close to having a winter without snow (it doesn't count if it doesn't stick and yes, not snowing until late December counts and being close to not getting any snow, even though I, as a Minnesotan, know that most snow comes later in the winter), it is now a life goal to pass a winter without any snow. I haven't decided if it counts if I come home for Christmas next year and there's snow, if I technically still live in China. The details will have to be hammered out later. But new goals are always fun, especially those that will force you to keep wandering the world.

This Weekend in Weihai

2008-01-08T16:40:00.000+01:00

I've been pretty lax on the blogging front lately. I wrote a note to complain about Anton's lack of blog action and it was pointed out that I have an even worse posting record of late. And I've been bad about sending out emails and stuff, too. I've procrastinated so much that I don't even know where to start, so I'll just tell you about my busy weekend and see how many pictures I can post in one blog...

First, I should mention that by "weekend," I mean Monday and Tuesday, which are our days off since Saturday and Sunday are our busiest teaching days. I also teach kindie WedThuFri and I have an adult evening class on Wednesdays. On Wed we also have a teacher's meeting and Chinese lesson and a workshop Thursday afternoon (which I'm doing this week. Topic: use of the board in class. Hm). Okay, here goes.

I took this picture on the way to work on Sunday, I think. They're unloading the truck at my neighborhood grocery store.

This is the door to the staff room. New teacher Wenifer drew us all on the window! A. Dorable.

Monday morningish Wenifer and I went up into the hill behind our apartment, henceforth referred to as "the mountain." There are a lot of cemetery areas there, this mound (covered in tissue paper and surrounded by what seem to be yellow prayer flags and an inordinate number of magpies) being one of the more colorful mounds.

I didn't notice these geese until they scared the crap out of me by honking really loudly so that I clutched poor Wenifer for safety. I think the sign says "beware of geese" in Chinese.

We were just looking at this, which I assume is filled with water in the summer,

hence the boat. There is water now, but you can see that the level is pretty low. It also seems to be solidly frozen, considering that it was around 38 degrees that morning.

We were walking around on the hill looking for these exercise parks that are all over the place. We tried all the stuff (except the ones we couldn't figure out) at each park we came across, working out in a total of six different spots, but we flaked and didn't do the one in the park that's seriously just outside my door (and visible from my bedroom window).

After walking down the hill (and breakin' a sweat in a park IN town), we texted Nick and met up for lunch at a noodle soup place. (We tried to go to the donkey dumpling place next to school, but the lady told us mei you le--she doesn't have any.) At the soup place, they bring you a bowl of boiling water (maybe it's broth) and a bunch of fresh veggies and noodles, which they dump into the bowl. Then you take what you want into your smaller bowl and add vinegar and pepper paste to your heart's content. Wenifer and I were saving some room to buy roasted sweet potatoes off the street. They just give you this hot potato in a plastic bag and you go to town. It's pretty awesome. I have no pictures of this food I'm describing.

We got the potatoes on our way to the small commodities market, a three story building that sells...well, lotsa different stuff. While we were looking for notecards (we found an acceptable substitute), I found this photo album which I could not take a clear picture of, but it has your typical, grammatically questionable paragraphs about love, friendship, and happiness all over it, except in this corner, where there is a little grammatically questionable paragraph about Bill Clinton withdrawing his nomination of Lani Guinier to be the Something of Civil Rights due to political pressure, even though she's like, totally cool and would have been way good at it. She is a law professor who wrote Tyranny of the Majority (among other things but this is the only one I've read), which is about stuff like redrawing district lines for political gain, rather than to better represent the interests of the people. I liked it. The book, I mean. I didn't like the photo album enough to buy it, although I contemplated mailing it to Bill Scheuerman, my favorite professor, in whose class I read that book. I thought it was funny.

After the commodities market, the ladies stopped at the Jiajiayue (see above) for some perishable essentials and then met Nick for dinner at "The Place Near Wenifer's." (We don't know the actual names of the places we usually eat, so they're called stuff like Donkey Dumplings, Lunch Noodles, Two Steps Up, Two Steps Down, The Barbecue Place, etc.)

After that, we went bowling. We brought gin and whiskey to the bowling alley in the Blue Sky Hotel, which is the only remaining bowling alley in Weihai. It's super nice and fancy. Nick and I had previously taken some students there and taught them bowling vocab in English. Some of the students had never been bowling before! It was way fun. And we found out that if you buy a stored value card for the bowling alley, you get a 60% savings on each game! So, we paid the 400 RMB (pricey, but worth it) and have gone three times now. There are five lanes and it was hoppin' when we got there. We sat around on the sofa in back and sipped our beverages (you're totally allowed to bring in outside food/beverages in China, as long as you buy something else) until a lane opened up. We ended up between a nice family of pretty good bowlers (who were the only ones to see my lone strike. Even I missed it.) and a lone businessman who had a crazy, crouching-spinning, gutterball-and-strike-inducing approach.

Wenifer told us her secret to awesome bowling (she and Nick tied for the high score of the evening, but I think she had the best average, too). When you throw the ball, you have to follow through, right? She described it as "throwing suitcases," as opposed to what Nick's theory of coming up to "shake the hand." They both release with their right palm facing left, as you can probably tell. My palm-up method, which is not to be recommended, could only be described as "goosing."
While it's good bowling advice, "throwin' suitcases" just stands as an awesome phrase and it will now be used to describe any situation where you do well. For example, if I ask how your job interview/rock show/attempt to pick up a girl went, you would reply (assuming it went well, you smooth mother, you) "I was really throwin' suitcases in there! I got the job/rocked out/didn't get slapped this time." See? It's totally cool. Try to use it today!

They came over and we watched Shoot 'Em Up (which was mostly in black and white, due to my bad luck with pirated DVDs) and played cards until all hours. Good times.

Okay, I'll tell you about Tuesday tomorrow (probably), as I have to get to bed so I'm fresh for kindie in the morning!

Weihai Weather

2007-12-21T16:07:00.001+01:00

Wondering about my weather?

Wonder no more.

It's not true, I love you more!

2007-12-20T14:18:00.000+01:00

Oh, darlings.

What have I even been up to?

Well, Jimmy, my TEFL teacher in Beijing, seems to have cursed me and I'm teaching Kindie three days a week (that's kindergarten to my North American friends, but isn't "kindie" cuter?). I can't decide how I feel about it. I mean, I know I don't want to teach tiny children forever, and I don't find it particularly rewarding teaching a letter a week to preposterously small humans, but what other opportunity will I have to sing "I'm a Little Teapot" ten times a day?

Jackie, Nick, and I went to Qingdao last weekend to do Christmas shopping. We have Secret Santas at work and we're cooking for Christmas and need lots of imported and weird food. (They did NOT have the condensed soup that is a staple of midwestern cooking...I'll see what I can do with some cream and powdered cream soups...) We ate at a German restaurant there. Qingdao, which you might know better as Tsingtao--as in the only Chinese beer you know--was a German colony. There are western-style buildings there and it's the birthplace of Chinese beer! I know it seems ridiculous to talk about western food and buildings when I'm in China, for crying out loud, and I mostly eat Asian food when I'm in Minnesota! butbutbut. I've been here for more than two months (!) (wo)man can not subsist on dumplings alone. A person needs the occasional mashed potatoes and some real sausage every so often (assuming that person has given up on vegetarianism). One could even argue (and many have) that one also needs good beer, although I've found that the occasional gin-tonic can really do the job nicely.

I don't know if you noticed that I've been here for more than two months and Christmas is coming. um, weird. Time has really flown since I've been in Weihai...I forget how the days fly when you're working! I had my first Chinese payday last week (it was delayed a day because the computers at the bank were out of order--go figure) and we had a Christmas party for the 5-10-year-olds today. Oh. my. god. We all wore Santa costumes. I'm sure pictures will be forthcoming. It doesn't feel like Christmas-time. I was briefly stressed about gift shopping, but other than that...there's no snow on the ground--you can barely see your breath! It feels like March, not December! Plus, Christmas potluck or no, Christmas isn't Christmas without family!

It feels like I've stepped out of time or something. I'm not sad to be away during the holidays...because there aren't much holidays here (I say this even though they play "Jingle Bells" in Chinese at the grocery store). It's just not the same. This isn't to say, of course, that I don't miss home. And especially my peoples there. I think I have to continue to not drink gin because it makes me miss Verity so so much. The first drink is fantastical, that soothing piney taste, but by the end of the second...well.

This isn't much, but it's all there's time for. goodnight, loves. kisses. Please tell me about home, okay dears?

a bone.

2007-11-30T15:32:00.000+01:00

Blog Content, eh?

Onion article:

Underfunded Schools Forced To Cut Past Tense From Language Programs

Pictures!

2007-11-27T17:15:00.000+01:00

I posted more pictures on Flickr, including a bunch of MPLS ones that should have been on there before and I started a second attempt at Vee's birthday pictures (which I could never view) when I ran out of room. This is why there's three pictures of Dan singing karaoke in September first thing. I also grouped pictures by city name. They all contain new pictures, so be sure to see them all!

And with my flickr account maxxxed out, I forgot to post pictures of my apartment as requested. Here they are, in the blog instead.

My huge bed.

My huge bed and my hotel curtains.

The spacious living room.

Front door on left, dining area, kitchen is behind the sliding glass doors, spare room to the right of the tiny fridge.

Bathroom. We were doing laundry, that's why that shelf is under the shower. Do you see the water heater which is plugged in all the time? Hot showers, kids. I've hit the big time.

That's right, there's the washing machine! With the hose directed down the drain.

A little bit better view of the kitchen and the tons of fruit I've been eating.

Anyway, that's where I live.

It's on!

2007-11-24T15:26:00.000+01:00

Guess who taught their first (paid) English class (in China) today?
.
.
.
I know the suspense is killing you, so I'll let the cat out of the bag: it was me.

I taught 12 to 14-year-olds how to ask for someone's phone number (not in a sleazy way, but for number practice, duh!) and how to plan a party and invite people to it. Tomorrow I have three classes, six full hours of teaching.
I'm going to need a drink. (Afterwards. Well...yes. Afterwards.)

I was getting all nervous, thinking about how this was my first class, but then I was like:
Hey, we taught actual classes in Beijing, so this isn't even my first time teaching in China. To say nothing of my three weeks of summer school. That was six hours a day, four days a week! Before that, I got to occasionally substitute teach and before that I was a classroom volunteer. I've pretty much eased my way into a legit English teaching job and it's not scary at all to be in the front of the class. Of course, I need some time to get to know the students and better tailor the lessons to their pace and abilities, but that's something I'm going to have to do with every new class for the rest of my career. The more experience I get figuring out groups of students, the better and faster I'll become.
Right before class started, my boss asked me if I was nervous. Of course, I said yes. He told me that he still gets nervous before he teaches a new group. That's just the way it is. That was really nice. I know that sometimes I get so I kinda wig myself out about things, so it's nice to hear that my anxieties are normal. Some of them at least. I've also had loads of support from home (as well as from the awesome teachers and staff here) including tons of emails and some gmail chats, and a long Thanksgiving phone call from Kink and my folks. That has helped me so so much!
Of course, your first day on a new job, you're going to be nervous. I don't think I was even that nervous. (Okay, yesterday I was a bit chatty and I cleaned my room. But I didn't do laundry. Well, not much.) At least I don't get mad sweaty like I used to. Cold, stressy sweats: yuck. Zahra probably sprayed me with air freshener after I taught Becky's health class (the one those kids got expelled from) the safe sex chapter. The best part was when Baby Ali was trying to find out how I got to be so knowledgeable on the topic. Ha! So, teaching is fun.

We went to dinner after work and, naturally, it was great. We had barbecue on skewers, among other things. I ate two octopus halves (I'd say I ate an entire octopus, but I didn't match the halves up beforehand, so I'm not sure). I like that it's totally normal that we go to dinner together, instead of all rushing off in different directions after work. After dinner, my roommate and I stopped in a bakery so I could get some bread. I got bread and we got a baked goods sampler. Totally different than home, and maybe not fulfilling my current yen for pie and french toast, but it'll do. I really like the people here and I need to wander around the town a bit more. I'm pretty sure I know what to say when I get in a taxi so that I can get close to home, and if I have my phrasebook, I can chime in with a "turn here!" when I need to, so I don't have to worry about getting lost.

My friend Alan, who took the TEFL course with me in Beijing, seems to be settling into a school run by the same company in Dalian. I'll have to take a ferry and come visit him one of these days. He's just across the sea (further than Korea, I think). He's keeping in touch via email and I'm glad. He's good people and a super teacher.

Finally, the radiator heating is still not working in the apartment. However! The "air conditioner" (they both heat and cool) in my room is up and running now, so I'm super cozy. I just did the conversion and it's a toasty 68 degrees in here! Can't argue with a standard, can you?

Time for bed!
Love,
Dani

P.S. I've been reading Serene's teaching blog and Anton's friend Mary's China Peace Corps blog. Serene did such cool stuff (um, you rode an elephant?) and has great insights into teaching. It's another awesome side of an awesome person, who I'm really glad I got to meet. I just started Mary's, but I'm very interested, as I considered joining the Peace Cops [sic] for a long time, before deciding it wasn't for me, and she was in China, too.

Weihai, step 1.

2007-11-19T11:05:00.001+01:00

So, I was a little hungover on Saturday morning, after the KTV, whiskey, gin, and rum binge.

By "a little hungover," I mean it was my worst hangover in recent memory and I wanted to die. Instead of dying, I woke up at 6:30, repacked and left the apartment by 7, miraculously did not puke until immediately after exiting the taxi at the airport, and didn't puke anywhere else in the airport (except the garbage can by my gate...), but it was a very close call after that goddamn moving walkway. Those things are a rough ride, I tell ya. And not in the sexy way.

You may know that I get a little emotional when I'm sick. (I also have a head cold.) Plus, I was puking in public, during the day, and I was going to get on an airplane, then get picked up by my new boss. So, by the time I got on the plane, I was a little weepy. The flight attendants were super nice and I was getting off at the first stop, so I got to ride up in first class. I also finally got to use an airsickness bag for its intended purpose. I was the last one off the plane (I was busy) and I was guided the back way to the baggage claim. The center manager of the school was waiting for me with a big sign that said "Dani" and flowers. She was very concerned. She called her friend who's a doctor to get advice about my, uh, airsickness. He said I was to go to sleep, so I slept all the way to Weihai and we went to my apartment and they settled me in and told me to go to sleep there. So I did. I was supposed to have a look at the school, but.

After a while, I started to unpack and discovered our wireless connection (yes!) My new roommate, Jackie, who's 27 and Canadian (and totally supports my belief that all Canadians are super nice and friendly) called and asked if I wanted to come to dinner. She swung by to get me and I got to meet some of the other teachers, too. Two of the Australians are going home this week and I'll take over some of their classes , I guess. There is also a guy from the Netherlands and a kid from Oregon who took the same TEFL course I did.

The next day I went with Jackie to school and met with the Director and met the rest of the teachers and staff. I got to observe a couple of classes and learned a bit more about the books I'll be using. I'll do more observation this week and next weekend I'll start teaching! I'll have two groups of teenagers and two groups of younger kids. I'll get my actual schedule on Wednesday.

Sunday night, we went out to dinner to say goodbye to the two who are leaving and hello to me. Then we went to a Korean cafe for beers. (There are lots of Koreans here because we're only a ferry ride away.) We ended up playing categories with a die, rather than cards, and I kinda like it that way. Here's how it breaks down: 1= Categories (if you don't know w, 2= for you (you give a drink), 3= for me (you take a drink), 4= on the floor (everyone touch the table, last one drinks), 5= in the sky (or something, everyone put both hands in the air, last one drinks), and 6= Bust a rhyme (you say a sentence an look at someone and they have to say a rhyming sentence and then they look at someone and so on, without repeating the last word). It does save the trouble of looking up what every card means, but it's missing the "massive weed toke." I suppose, under the right circumstances, you could replace four or five, if necessary. Anyway, it was fun, and I got to hear lots of stories about goofy stuff they've done in the past.

Okay, maybe more tomorrow, if you're good.

Bye, Beijing!

2007-11-17T11:05:00.000+01:00

Finally did karaoke last night. It was Dolly Parton who really got me going.

And now:
I'm in Weihai!

money is the root of all evil...

2007-11-15T04:33:00.000+01:00

I'm trying to figure out if the appreciation of the yuan against the dollar is a good thing for me, since I'll be bringing some (tiny amount of) money home eventually, I hope. Or is it part of the general depreciation of the dollar which is bad. for me. when I happen to be abroad. Do you think its too selfish of me to consider international finance and currency value only as they apply to me? It seems nearly impossible to think about such things any other way. I don't know enough about the intricacies of such things to consider it objectively. I'm trying to learn, though! I'm reading economic articles, too, but I think it'll take a while to get the base knowledge I need in order to really understand.

Basically, what I'm saying is: Could you save me the trouble and just tell me if it's good or bad?

Don't sleep on the subway, darling...

2007-11-14T03:06:00.000+01:00

I think my host parents are chopping onions, my eyes can feel it, even with the door shut. There are a bunch of people talking in the living room, but I'm shut in the bedoom, studying. (I do have some homework I was/am/will be finishing.) There were three of us in this one bedroom apartment until this weekend.

Friday, I went with some classmates to a place where they serve western food. I hadn't gone for western food yet (except for oreos from 7-11 in a feeble attempt to curb my chocolate cravings) as I pretty much love Asian food and I'm, you know, IN Asia, but the idea of cheese melted all over something was really too good to resist. I ended up not getting the cheese over my eggs as I had planned, but we did split nachos for an appetizer. I had two bloody marys, then I switched to white russians, because I was thinking about chocolate cake, but there just wasn't room. Now, there are plusses and munuses to drinking on a full stomach: +you don't get drunk as fast, -you don't get drunk as fast. I can't think of anything else, except that if you're drinking weak drinks and/or beer, you might never get drunk at all, only a headache. That's what I got. After the western breakfast place, we went to the Muslim restaurant near where my classmates are living for beers. (Yes, we had beer at the MUSLIM restaurant. Must be a different bunch of Muslims than the ones I know.) I could only drink one before I was too full. Darn beer and hashbrowns for being so filling! Oh, well I'm giving my liver quite the vacation here, unless it has something to do with filtering out the pollution in the air and/or whatever weirdness may be in the food and water. In that case, sorry, liver! I hope you're enjoying the new challenges, but I promise to switch back to clean air, vegetarianism, and drinking someday.

At any rate, my Host Mom (HM) hadn't texted me on Friday night, so I didn't worry about it, and I crashed on the sofa at my classmates' apartment. It didn't replace Zach's green couch or Josh & Dan's grey sectional in my heart, but it was suitable for a night's sleep. When I came home Saturday morning, no one was home, but there were six giant suitcases along the living room wall and tiny clothes hanging everywhere. I had completely forgotten that my HM's sister-in-law was coming with her two little kids. They live near San Francisco, so they speak English! exciting! The girls are 7 and 4, I think. And their names? The older one is Ellen and the younger one is Katherine. Um, those are MY sister's names. (Well, Kathryn, but come on!) They had left one sister at home, and no, she is not a six-year-old named Dani. She's the eldest, Jessica. The kids are adorable and fun. The littlest one is super chatty and loves me. The middle girl is a little more shy, but still cute and funny. She was drawing princesses held captive by monsters yesterday. It's so funny to hear them chat, "chinesechinesechinesePWINCESSchinesechinese!" I asked them about their days yesterday and had to ask the older girl a million questions about climbing the wall to get her to talk. The I asked the younger one what she did and she said "I pooed!" and reinacted how it all went down in the squat toilet four times in a row before going step-by-step through the playground activities of the rest of the afternoon. Seriously, when you don't see them very often, kids are so cute!

I don't know how long they're staying, but I hope that they can help me communicate to my host parents that I'm leaving Saturday morning and could they help me get a taxi? I decided to fly to Weihai (well Yantai, actually, but because the Weihai ariport is so far out of town, it doesn't make much difference). AND I'm taking a taxi to the airport, rather than the shuttle. I feel kinda bad about it because I've been reading more news lately* about climate change and acting sustainably and I want to make changes in my life to that end, but then I take a one hour flight over a 15 hour train ride and that probably out weighs all the showers and toilet flushes I've skipped. So, now whenever I am traveling within country without ALL my worldly posessions, I should more seriously consider train and bus travel. I could buy carbon offsetting credits or whatever you call those, but they have always seemed to me like I was bribing my conscience or something. I guess I could buy them AND try to make more environmentally friendly decisions. Ugh. Did I tell you how our teacher was talking about these vegetarians in China who were dying super young (like mid-40s) because the ground the vegetables came from was so polluted? How's that for awesome?

I skipped school today. I feel all congested and achey and super tired. I was supposed to go to a basketball game with my classmates tonight, too! It seems like such a normal thing to do, even if I haven't done it in ages. Finally, it wouldn't matter that I can't speak Chinese; I can barely understand English-speaking sports announcers, so who cares! I'd get just as much out of this game as any other, except for that weird pride you have to have in your local team, even if you don't follow sports. I should have gotten sick tomorrow, when I have to teach a grammar lesson I haven't yet prepared! Yucko! Oh, well. I'm gonna take another nap, then I'll do my lesson for sure, I swear!

*[After a month of only getting news from Anton's blog and the occasional glance at China Daily, I finally used my google reader (GR) addiction for good: I subscribed to a bunch of news feeds and then weeded out those which point to news organizations that China blocks--it's just too much trouble to go through a proxy thingamajig every time. Then, instead of just opening up the archives of Style...a Work in Progress, Ugly Outfits of New York (about 20% of which I think are kinda cute), and downloading all the Overheard sites to GR, I open up a million windows and tabs with news stories that I can then read at my leisure when I am internetless at home. It's working out pretty well, except that this morning, I didn't open up any of the second pages of the articles. So I'm only getting half the story! Oh, well. In China, that's pretty good.

Unemployed? (bits and pieces)

2007-11-10T10:30:00.000+01:00

Not for long. I got the job in Weihai and I move there next weekend.

I successfully procrastinated for a full four hours on the internet at the coffee shop and still don't know how I'm going to get there. Oh, well. And I didn't send you an email yet, sorry. I'm such a jerk sometimes.

For like three days last week, I could look at blogspot blogs, then...it was blocked again. But then: anonymouse! And I'm back to procrastination with fashion blog archives. (Style, a Work in Progress and Ugly Outfits New York right now) Can someone say hi to my closet for me? I miss my weird clothes.

By request, I captioned some of my flickr photos. Do the ones on the second and third page load for you? I didn't caption them because I can't see them!

Seriously, sometimes people just stare at me on the subway until I am SURE there is something hanging out of my nose. I don't even have weird hair anymore. What are you lookin at?

Anyway, now that you know my future neighborhood, when are you coming to visit? It's a friggin resort town, people. with AN OCEAN. Hello.
Okay, you can wait to buy your ticket until I buy mine...

Finally, I miss the people I love. And some of you assholes, too.

Simple questions.

2007-11-06T09:39:00.000+01:00

Can you believe I've been in China for two weeks? Me neither. It seems like it's gone fast, but I also feel like it's already been forever since I've seen my friends. And I'm so nervous about trying to get a job and actually teach, but at the same time, I'm sick of teaching in front of my teachers.

Have I told you how school works? We learn about teaching and grammar and stuff in the morning, and we teach in the afternoons. Our morning teachers, Greg and Jimmy are awesome. Greg seems to have taught in every situation, despite not looking much older than me and Jimmy knows everything and is super funny. (He has killed chickens in every tense of the English language.) We're broken up into two groups for teaching, one with the upper level students and one with the beginners. We watch everyone in our group teach and two of our teachers observe and at the end, we all talk about what you did well and what you could have done better. I've been teaching the beginners, but starting tomorrow, we teach the upper level. Since our lessons are longer now (an hour), we don't all teach every day, so I have tomorrow off. I'm glad that I'll get to watch them teach the new group for one day, so maybe I'll have an idea of their actual level before I get up there. (At least, that's the excuse I'm making for not doing my lesson plan ahead of time.) Also, I'm sick. All my classmates have been sick or sickish for at least a week and I, usually the first one on the illness bandwagon, haven't had a problem until now. I'm still not so bad, but I do have a red nose and I'm super sneezy, which at least is a funny way to be sick.

Did you google Weihai yet? Good. You've figured out that your girl Dani, who has worn a bathing suit approximately 12 times in the last five years (counting Branson), is trying to move to the beach. Being Minnesotan at heart, I like to be near water, and I thought I'd test out Verity's much disputed theory that oceans are better than lakes and rivers. Plus, the winters are supposed to be "mild." I am not totally sure what that means, exactly, but being Minnesotan, I'm excited to find out.

So, I got this cross-stitch pattern software, right? I've been perfecting these patterns and getting really excited to do some embroidery, and can you believe that I brought with me only ONE unfinished project and NO TREAD. I can't even finish what I remembered to bring! I think my dad's coming, though, and he's totally gonna have to bring me some things, foremost among them, thread and fabic. I'm such a dope. I'm sickish and tired and I'd really like to put a movie on the computer and do some stitching. But, no.

Is 4:30 PM too early to go to bed? Probably. And too late for a nap. I have homework to do anyway, but I'm getting sleepy!

Can you guess what I had for dinner on Friday? No, you can't, so I'll tell you: some fruit, half a personal pizza, four beers, three scorpions, a cocoon, a bunch of stinky tofu, and a seahourse. And I forgot my camera, so you'll just have to take me at my word. My classmate had two giant scorpions, four cocoons, three crickets, a centipede, some fruit, two seahorses, and four beers. Just another weekend in Beijing, guys. Dinner Saturday was even better, dumpling soup or something, sososo good. And again for breakfast this morning! I love dinner for breakfast! Having that meal twice in a row, all I need is a gin and tonic and a kiss, then I could die happy.
Oh! I should probably see the Great Wall first, so if we could put that dying thing off a bit, it'd be great.

Does anyone else feel like their iTunes is a little psychic sometimes? I started listening to my music library on shuffle because listening to Joel's MIX and working on Verity's mix was making me homesick and it keeps picking songs that are either about home or remind me of some good times. I picked you to make me feel better, Party Shuffle! Not to find new ways to make me feel sad! I'm sure that, because of the universiality of many songs and them all being about love lost or love found, that no matter my mood, it would seem like it was matching it. I guess every Promise Ring song and every Dean Martin song would make me think of Joel and every Tulip Sweet song (because she loves her) and every Frank Sinatra song (because she hates him) would make me think of Verity...but whatever. It still seems weird.

Addenda

2007-11-02T06:00:00.001+01:00

1. I also love plaid coats.

2. I CAN see your comments, blogger is nice enough to email them to me, so go ahead.

3. Look up Weihai on wikitravel, please.

4. I can't remember what else.

Hello Pictures!

2007-11-01T01:41:00.001+01:00

I set up a flickr account.
It is here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/arealwinner/

OMG, I'm so tech savvy.

LOVE!

Stuff I like

2007-10-31T01:47:00.000+01:00

So, I'm basically famous, since Anton gave me another link and here I am in China, unable to read his blog in its original format. However! Despite the fact that I'm in Beijing, the historical and poitical capital of the world leader of blocked websites, I can still get (almost) all the content of my favorite blogs and sites. Have I sung the praises of Google Reader in this blog yet? Because I'm basically in love with it. If it wouldn't be horribly awkward to hold hands with a computer program, I'd totally be putting the moves on Google Reader. I can even download it all quick when I'm at the coffee shop and read it later at home if all that will cure my woes is somethin' stupid from Overheard in Minneapolis.

Thus, In honor of Google reader, I am going to publish here a list of my current top likes:
(I would post a list of corresponding dislikes, in honor of my best girl Verity and the glory days when she still blogged, but they are all about pollution, confusion, and missing you, and I don't wanna talk about that. Let's focus on the positives.)

Belts over coats. Hello, adorable!

As much as I've bitched about Windows Vista, when I save a picture to my desktop, the icon is a tiny version of that picture, so I what I like is that I have litte closeups of everyone that I love over there on the left where I don't even have to click to see them.

Subways. I don't care if it's crowded and everyone is rude. I like them.

Joel's mix CD. Please stop being perfect. It's killing me. (jk. Keep it up. It looks good on you.)

Finally getting to put the phonetic alphabet that I had to memorize on FOUR seperate* occasions in college to good use.

72% of all women's shoes/boots that I've seen in China, as compared to maybe 40% in the states (and that's after I edit out all the lame running shoes.)

My red coat from Cliche.

Knowing that on the other side of the world, Vee is wearing a red coat from Cliche, too.

Chinese food.

Eating with chopsticks, even when I suck majorly.

drinking hot water.

That my classmates range from 26 (I'm two days older than the youngest girl) to 71 and come from five different countries.

When my Host Mom (HM) and I can understand each other.

That my host family is the cutest ever.

My ToEFL course. I love school; I love teaching. We have class in the morning and teach in the afternoon. I'm okay with that.

Boots over pants. OR knee high boots with knee length shorts, with or without cute tights. I'm not even mad that I'm too hippy for this outfit, that's how cute it is on these girls.

The idea that three weeks from now I'll be teaching. (I sure hope so!)

Feeling like I can kinda see how the next five years of my life are going to go, and liking what I see.

THIS

*Okay, so two of those are the same class that I failed and had to repeat, but don't you think that makes it suck more? Plus, on BOTH of the other occasions, I had my #1 all-time least favorite professor or teacher ever. Blech!

China 1

2007-10-28T05:40:00.000+01:00

THE MOST BORINGEST AND RIDICULOUSLY DETAILED BLOG EVER, started 10.21.07

Oh, my gosh. I've probably been this tired bfore in my life, but I have no idea when. It's almost 7 and I've been barely conscious for 3 hours now. What have I been doing since yesterday in New York? I guess it's really the day before yesterday anyway...

I got to JFK at 10:30 AM and my flight to Beijing wasn't to leave until 4:30. (Did you catch that foreshadowing there? "Wasn't to leave..." What could that mean?) They started boarding the plane at 4. The busiess class section was upstairs. Upstairs! Just like "Snakes on a Plane!" Eek! Luckily Samuel L. Jackson was nowhere to be found, and the similarities ended there.

Katy told a story Thursday night about how she slept right through takeoff once. I decided that was a good idea, so I settled in, got one earbud to stay in my ear (with much twisting and cajoling), blew up my neck pillow and slept right through the 2.5 hour delay. This meant that my the time the plane started actually moving toward the runway, I was ready to get up for a walk and a trip to the bathroom. It also meant that I will never know why the plane as delayed for so long.

The next couple of hours were really turbulent, so we had to stay in our seats. Actually, they NEVER turned off the fasten seatbelts sign, even when things smoothed out, so I guess we were supposed to sit forever. (Gosh, I'm sleepy.)

On the video screen, they played what appeared to be tapes of Air News-I didn't plug in my headphones, so I just read the subtitles. The food on the plane was super good: cabbage and tofu and sticky rice for one meal and noodles and onions and mushrooms for the other. Between movies and news, the screen would show the progression of the plane over the world. And I do mean over. We went right over the top. At the end of the flight, I watched "MOnster in Law." Don't judge. Everyone in it is very attractive. And you know how I love J.Lo.

I worried about two things when we landed: did my luggage come and would someone really be there to meet me?
My bags came through in all their floral-ribboned glory (thanks to V and the hot-glue gun!) and after clearing customs and being unable to get any money from the ATM, I followed the exit signs, and there was a railing with a long line of people crowded there. I felt like there shouldn't be so many people there in the middle of the night, but it was only 8PM. It just felt like some ungodly hour. There, about 2/3 of the way down, stood Henry with a sign reading "Miss Danielle Brandes." I was so sleepy and relieved to see him that I didn't take a picture as planned.

He helped me with my bags and we took a cab past the school so I'd know what I was looking for on Monday. Then we went to my Host Family (HF)'s home. He wasn't 100% sure where it was in the dark, but the taxi dropped us close by and we wandered around until we found building 20 then hauled all my crap up to the 4th floor. Oops! Right building, wrong unit. Down and out we went and twos doors over to Unit 3 and back up to the 4th floor where Mrs. Liu met and welcomed us.

Henry says this is a typical Beijing apartment. There is a tiny bathroom, a living room, kitchen, and bedroom. There is also a hallway off the living room that runs the length of the apartment and seems to be half storage. And there are what from the outside seems to be a glassed-in balcony--mostly storage and a bunch of potted plants. My HF has a daughter in Chicago at the University of Illinios. They are super nice and speak no English. So, we have a lot in common, because I speak no Chinese.

Henry walked me to the subway and showed me how to take the trains to school. He kept pointing things out, but as I'd been going for a million hours, it was all pretty overwhelming. Then he hung out for a while and chatted with my HF. They were worried about the mattress. I said, "no problem." Matt B had told me that the mattress would be super thin, but I'm pretty good at sleeping, so I wasn't worried. We go into the bedroom and...there's a bamboo mat on the bed, which is a raised, flat board. Oh, crap. Well, when in Rome, eh? But then they tell Henry that they ordered a mattress, it just hasn't come yet because of a government holiday. Henry explains that every five years there's this holiday when they release the official government report and new officials are elected. Insert airquotes where necessary.

Anyway, the couch folds out and that's where I'll be sleeping for the time being. The mattress is still very thin by US standards, but it's thick enough and it's supported by slats of wood, not a straight board, so that helps. The pillow is also foreign to me. Have you ever seen those commercials for pillows that are filled with buckwheat or sand or something and they tell you it's an ancient Chinese sleeping secret or something? I think this is it. It's way flat, but when I fold it up, it's fine.

Henry leaves and we talk about toothbrushing, towels, and showers using facial expressions, gestures, and props. Bedtime. I fall asleep almost immediately, but wake up around 6. I keep trying for a couple more hours, until they get up, too.

HD cooks and HM runs out and gets a couple of things, two kinds of buns and something crepe-y that we eat with the egg soup. All totally good.

After breakfast, I take my shower, but I forget to turn on the water heater in the kitchen, something I don't remember until I'm naked and wet, so I just do it up quick in the cold. The bathroom: The showerhead is on the wall to the left of the toilet with the drain right below, so the whole bathroom is the shower. Before you get started, you go in the kitchen and turn on the water heater, then you cover up things that can't get wet-toilet paper, radiator, etc.-with plastic bags and a shower curtain. Then you run the water into a bucket or the sink until it's warmed up...or, if you did something wrong along the way, until you realize it's not going to warm up.

After my shower, HD dressed and left and HM was in the bathroom forever. When she came out, she said she was dyeing her hair because it was turning white. I showed her some pictures of me so she could see that I dye my hair, too!

She showed me pictures of her family: younger brother who lives in San Francisco and his three daughters, her younger sister at her birthday party, her daughter-who is only a few months younger than I am. I showed her pictures of my mom, dad, Katy, and Ellen: mama, baba, meimei, jiejie. My few words of Chinese. We talk a bit with a dictionary and a piece of paper. Then, she suddenly explains that she's going to take me to the park and what time do I want to eat? I'm all swept up and I fill up my water bottle with boiled water, practice operating the housekeys under her guidance, and away we go.

She took me out of the apartment compound a different way than Henry did and it's daytime, so I recognize nothing. Luckily, once out of the compound, we just followed one street to the park. she had her bicycle with a bunch of stuff in the basket and she walked it beside me. When we were across the street from the park, she waved "bye bye" and watched me cross. I see that the park is the Temple of Heaven area and they're charging admission. Then I realized that I had no money and I had forgotten my wallet at the apartment, anyway! So, back I went, after she had ridden away. It was easy enough to find the apartment complex again, but kind of confusing to find the right building. I got there eventually. Then I left the complex the way Henry had shown me so I could go to the mall by the subway. This mall is way huge. If it had all the space between stores and random open areas, it would so rival the MOA. (Of course, it would also need a Hooters.) But it's in China, so everything is smooshed on top of everything else, but it's really bright and fancy and expensive-looking. I got some money (bless the ATM for being in English, too!) and wandered around looking for a place to buy a phone card, but I had no luck. I went back to the apartment complex and tried to leave the way HM had showed me, (following my method of always returning to the known point, rather than trying to find the shortest distance) but I couldn't figure it out. I did, however, still have a compass on my bag that I got at the State Fair, so I knew I was wandering in the right direction. After a few zigzags, I was there. I paid 35 RMB (less than $5) for a through pass, even though I didn't know what that meant.

I wandered in, trying to always keep in mind the direction that I came from (I get nervous about being lost somewhere I can't speak the language OR read the signs). It was lovely there, but the trees on some of the side paths were trimmed so low I was banging my head. Then I came to the temple or Prayer for Good Harvest. So, SO beautiful! Three perfectly symmetrical tiers tiled with dark blue like the sky, surrounded by three buildings where animals were selected, sacrificed, inspected, and burned as an offering. I think one of the buildings was where the monks fasted and prayed for like five days or something before the ceremony. The emperor has a special palace that he fasted in. I took a bunch of pictures. All the ceiling tiles and everything is so detailed. Everything is in multiples of nine, the emperor's number. Inside the side buildings, they had all sorts of information about what used to go on there and pictures of people restorin it with brushes and little bowls of gold paint. I think this is the one that got struck by lightening (a bad omen) so the emperor burned it down. This was in the late 1800s. A few years later, he (or his successor, I can't remember) had an exact replica built. They had to ship in timber from Oregon because there weren't any pieces in China long enough.

I left that area through a gate, then walked down the Danbi (so close!) bridge and checked out the building where the emperor used to change clothes before the ceremonies. Along the bridge, there are little lantern looking things, many of which have speakers in them. Not understanding Chinese, I don't know what the voices coming out of them were saying. Some of them had music instead.

This is where I stopped writing in my notebook and fell asleep. You can wikipedia Temple of Heaven for the rest or just shut up and look at the pictures.

Eventually, I came home to the apartment. No one else was home, so I tried to write everything down before I forgot and eventually, I just put my head down on the armrest of the couch and fell asleep. I woke up a while later and was writing again when HM came home. She cooked dinner: cabbage, bamboo shoots, a little bit of assorted meat and rice. Yum! We sat down and picked up our chopsticks and she suddenly looked panicked and jumped up, saying a bunch of stuff I didn't understand. She gestured toward me and the chopsticks and started for the kitchen, but I gestured that everything was okay. I can totally use chopsticks, kind of. So we served up, then she pulled out a can. She pointed to the picture on the side (which appeared to me to be a shark and some tomatoes) and said some stuff in Chinese before opening it up. I'm gonna eat shark! Awesome. I picked some out and took a bite. Totally tuna. But way better in these huge chunks with tomato sauce than the canned tuna I'm used to, so I'm only a little disappointed that it's not shark. She said I was good at using the chopsticks, which makes me think that the last person to stay with them must have been missing a finger or an arm or something because I am anything but coordinated.

A while after dinner, HD comes home and they're asking me when I need to leave for school. I was pretty sure we were understanding each other, especially since I kinda know my Chinese numbers and we used the Arabic numerals, too, but HM was pretty sure we weren't. So she got on the internet (I didn't even see that computer there under those dust-protecting cloths!) and called her daughter on MSN. They have webcams and everything. Just like my mom wants! It was, however, 7:30 AM in Chicago, so we had woken her poor daughter up. (As I type this, it's 7AM Central Time Saturday and they're talking to her again...) So, they point the camera at me and between yawns, she says, "My mother wants me to ask you when you have to leave for the language school." So I told her that I needed to leave at 8. Shortly thereafter, the line cut out and they tried to reconnect. I moved over to the sofa to wait it out so I could ask to email my family when they were done. At some point, I fell asleep. Two hours later, I woke up. They had spread HM's sweater over me. They were still talking to their daughter. When they saw that I had woken up, HM set me up in the bedroom with the sofa cushions on the bed. I was out pretty quickly.

And that was my first day or so in China. I've been here a week now, started school, started teaching, had two half hot showers, but I'm too sleepy to write about that now. Also, I can't read my own blog, so I can't read the millions and millions of comments I'm sure I've gotten.

Oh, And!

2007-10-19T19:26:00.000+02:00

tonight, you MUST go to Trash Film Debauchery in the West Bank Auditorium.

FREE

at 8pm, The Man With No Legs.
great, right? I wish I was there.

following that, at 10, TRAPPED IN THE MOTHERFUCKING CLOSET.

Um, if you don't go, we can't be friends anymore. Did I mention that it's free? And that it's TRAPPED IN THE CLOSET! The Urban Opera, R. fuckin' Kelly!

It's on a million bus routes and no one looks at you funny when they catch a whiff of that GnT you brought.

GO TO THIS, dudes.
fer serious.

OMG! ATA ASAP! jk.

2007-10-19T18:57:00.000+02:00

10/19/07 10:30 AM
Well! I have arrived. JK.

I'm in NYC at JFK unable to get anywhere that has an actual wireless connection. It's 10:30 AM here, and I have no clue what time it is at home. Everything I have that tells the time is automatically updated. This also means I have no clue how long I have been awake. Weeks, it seems.

Except for the flight here. I bought a "snack box" on the plane, since I was too wound up to eat at the gate (despite there being a French Meadow location right across from my gate. oops!). It contained crackers, cheese (excuse me, "pasturized prossessed cheese food" because you know my favorite thing to eat is something that's so questionable it has to be labeled "food"?), rasins, trail mix, etc. etc. It wasn't a bad deal, certainly better than buying the same stuff at the terminal newsstand places, but I like airplane food. I want some adorable little squarish entrees! I'll get to eat on the next plane, though. Although, I hear that booze isn't free on Asia-bound flights like it is on ones headed for Europe. AND! Tres tragic! My earbuds won't stay in my ears! My anti-tragus peircings are the culprits, methinks. Well, time to pay through the nose for electronics that will cost me WAAAY less in China.

Oh! There's totally a bird in the food court! Two! We're indoors, guys, what are you doing here!? They got some snacks and now they're sittin by the window. I wonder if they want to be here or if they just can't get out. What if they hate each other but they have to be friends because they're the only two birds dopey enought to get stuck in here. Maybe they'll start a whole colony indoors which will evolve differently that their NYC brethren on the other side of the glass. Living on peanuts, pretzels, and spilled Starbucks instead of hot dogs and cigarette butts.

Katy just texted me a joke about a horse and yesterday Joel told me a joke about a cow. This is probably because my favorite joke is chicken-related.

Many thanks to Katy and V who re-packed my suitcases and hot-glued pretty ribbons to my to-be-checked baggage while I panicked. Did I ever tell you about when I saw the world's largest collection of ribbons? It was in St. Etienne, France. They also had a coal mine which totally scared me. Have you seen my Europe pictures? The panic in the coal-mine ones is palpable. I'm such a wimp.

Well, I'm gonna let my computer focus on syncing my podcasts, since I'm halfway gone on battery power (and I don't have a power adapter! What's the voltage in New York, anyway?) And you won't get this until whenever I can achieve wireless connection! Maybe after 12:30 when the people from my airline show up and I can get to all those places only a boarding pass will take you (like the concourse!).

Love you!
Dani

Cheeky

2007-10-11T19:48:00.001+02:00

If you don't think this is the best picture ever, does being so incredibly wrong feel icky?

Hey, Horoscope!

2007-10-11T15:50:00.000+02:00

Cut the crap. You sound like my mother.

Your Horoscope for OCTOBER 11, 2007
If you were offered the opportunity to take off on a trip around the world, where you would see wonderful palaces and experience a timeless love affair, would you take it? The total freedom would tempt you, without a doubt. But would it make you entirely happy, DANI? Have you considered the possibility that you can create an environment right here at home that gives you that same sense of freedom?

I am unmoved.

shopping

2007-10-09T20:58:00.001+02:00

I could have spent all day at MNIC. Well, I certainly have in the past, but it's weird to stop for a visit. I feel like I'm trying to get attention or something. You know, more than I normally am.

REI was lovely as always. The bag I liked on the internet turned out to be HUGE in person. I got a Timbuk2 computer bag instead. Still big, but then, so's my laptop.
I went to Soho for pizza (not as good when I'm sober). And then I went to the Apple store, where I spent about $30 a minute. Luckily I didn't stay long.

Every trip-related purchase I make, I expect to feel more ready. I don't. There have been about 700 things that I have done or that have happened where someone (maybe me) said, "Well, that makes it real, eh?" I've sat and looked at my plane ticket (a paper one, weird, huh?) or my visa and expected something to come over me. Some feeling that makes it less like Tuesday and more like NINE AND A HALF DAYS BEFORE YOU MOVE FAR FAR AWAY. But it still doesn't feel real.
Maybe it'll be one of those things that only really seems like it happened in retrospect. I'll be too busy having new adventures to ever let it sink in. I hope that means I won't miss you as much as I'm afraid I will, Minneapolis.

This, I assume, is Beijing:

2007-10-09T17:07:00.001+02:00

I'll be going to school in #7, the Chao Yang District.

Still don't know where I'll be living.

I've been going through all my stuff and trying to sell things that are salable (less than I thought) and taking boxes to the thrift store every day. I've been avoiding taking my room apart because it bums me out like majorly! I did move all my clothes to my parents' house yesterday, though. And my books have mostly been there for a while.

Now, I'm going to stop by my old school to invite people to the party and then I'm going to REI to get a couple things: maybe a metal water bottle and a travel alarmclock and a laptop bag (the one I really like on the website has a magnetized flap. Uh, is that okay?).

Update: 10 days from right now I'll be sitting in an airport in NY.
FREAKING OUT.

Here I go again:

2007-10-03T16:14:00.000+02:00

Well, I'm moving to China. Friday was my last day of work at the school I love and after a couple weeks (okay, 17 days) of Minneapolis-ing hard core, off I go. I have a one-way ticket and a vegetarian meal. I haven't packed. I have no job there, no friends. I don't speak Chinese.

But it's not as scary as all that. I'm taking a month-long teaching certificate course starting the Monday after I arrive and I'm doing a homestay, so that should be really cool.

Let's all just mellow out and watch the 30 seconds of bad karaoke below: