detour and all things Hong Kong style

So i left my little city to explore all that China (and Vietnam and South Korea) have to offer. First stop, Hong Kong!  i met my friend Ashley in the Shenzhen airport and took a giant charter bus with only four people on across the mainland border to the magical land they call a 'Special Administrative Region'.  It is so special!  Once you get on the other side of the double set of customs you have to go through you are not in China anymore.  There are double decker buses everywhere, they drive on the left side of the road, and Twix is available in the 7 Eleven on the corner of every street! i left Shanghai at 7:40 am and didn't reach my hosts house in Hong Kong until 7:30 pm!  so i was a little tired from the days travels... had to take a train to Hangzhou, go to the airport and wait for my flight, then fly to Shenzhen, meet Ashley, and take the bus through customs and HK traffic at rush hour... boo!  But we were welcomed by our couchsurfing host, Vincent, and had a free place to sleep and store all of our stuff during our stay.  We cooked dinner, even though we were both exhausted, and managed to go to bed by midnight.  

Visas, and more visas.  We went to get our Vietnamese visas and it took literally 15 minutes!  But the new Chinese visas cost triple and took four days, why?  Because being American means you pay for the shitty visa system that the US imposes on the rest of the world and thus when you travel you pay the consequences with outrageous fees and having ti wait for forever.  

But there are worse places to be stranded for an extra two days than Hong Kong.  So we met our host again in the afternoon and he took us and another American he had gone to lunch with on a nature walk/hike of the south side of Hong Kong island and we walked from 3pm until the sunset.

So we hustled down the mountain so we wouldn't be enveloped by the darkness and then walk down to the would-be quaint fishing village, Stanley.  Now, it's more of an upscale shopping center with some bars and extremely expensive Western Restaurants.  The Sunset was nonetheless beautiful and worth the long walk i was not prepared for as i wore a skirt!

We woke up early and headed for a 6 hour bike ride of the New Territories to explore some  more of the nature of the islands. 

 The weather was perfect, but my butt was sore after the ride, stupid mountain bike seats!  Then Ashley and i broke off from our extremely attentive host and went to downtown Tsim Sha Tsui to watch the light show opposite the bay on Hong Kong island.  It was cool but not 

overly awesome...

The next day we went to Golden Beach, again so lovely, not hot enough to swim but i did make a mean sand castle!  Then we went on another one of Vincent's nature walks. We had a picnic and on the way down the mountain we happened upon a small village of vegetable farmers and bought some farm fresh lettuce for dinner.  Delicious!  Finally our last two days we left Vincent and met my HK girls, Grace and Celine, whom i met while working at ACRS.  They are possibly the cutest and sweetest girls ever.  They took us out to dim sum and then we went shopping. We had a famous Hong Kong treat, called Egg Balls, which is basically like a flavored waffle. We had taro and coconut-sesame, yumm!  

Our last full day in Hong Kong we went to 

Lan Tao island, and took a ferry, but the weather was less than favorable and it was pretty overcast so the view from the ferry was mainly fog.  Once on the island we took a bus to the main attraction, Po Lin monastery and Tian Tan Buddha, aka the Big Buddha.  

It was amazing and so bright once we got away from the waterfront.  There was a French tour group at the Buddha and Ashley and i just sat around and people-watched and eaves-dropped.  We went to the monastery also, bought some incense and did a prayer to the four corners.

  We were running late to meet Grace and go to the Peak so we took the MTR back from the island and got ready and met her went up to the 'magnificent viewpoint' of HK.  It took half an hour to get up there winding around the giant hill filled with the houses of the rich and famous of Hong Kong, but we took a tram straight down and it took 8 minutes! It was so steep and packed like sardines.  We went to a bar street with Grace after a very tasty dinner and drank a shot in honor of the inauguration of President Obama!  Later, around 1am Ashley and i watched the inauguration live on the BBC.  I can't believe he's president, it was so amazing to hear such a change in message and direction for the country.  i'm so excited to see that he carries through everything... (so far it looks really promising!)  

Last thing, all tickets out of Hong Kong to Guilin were sold out or way to expensive so we had to get out of HK by going to Guangzhou, a mainly industrial city with not a lot to offer but we got to live a bit luxury there and stay in a gated community, fancy-pants apartment with another couchsurfing host, this time a cool couple, dude is from Portugal, David and the girl is from Poland, Aga.  They were super nice and had the comfy-est bed i've slept on in all of China!  We ate Turkish and bought our overnight bus tickets to Guiling from there... so that's next... i'm so behind!!!

good bye Huzhou...

hello long road home!  My last week in my home for the last four months was very eventful.  i got to see Huzhou on my own and without having to work and it was pretty enjoyable. i spent good quality time with some students and prettied myself for the (Chinese) New Year with Penny.  i got a more Chinese-y haircut and bought some new glasses as well.  i was impressed to find that i got a free eye exam upon entry to the Xin Tian Di Yan Jing Chang (New World Glasses City) and my glasses only cost about $30 USD! what? yes, that is right.  So Penny and i got haircuts at a new place, called Jing Mei, which means golden dollar, and we waited for like three hours because there was only one hairdresser for five customers!  But it was worth it because it was 10 RMB. 

i spent all of Saturday with two students, Jane and Candy, and we had a great time! We ate on the 5th floor of Zhebei Mall, which is a cafeteria of sorts

 and had some bubble tea and Tang HuLu (candies hawthorne berries on a stick).  

Then we went to walk around and ran into a dream come true: a camel in the middle of downtown Huzhou! i proceeded to ride said camel for a photo-op and it was glorious. 

 

We also managed to squeeze in some Da Tou Tie, which is like going to a photobooth, on crack! You can choose from hundreds of backgrounds and then when they print out the pictures it's usually on stickers or you can pay extra to have them made into hard plastic mobile phone bobble (which i did, you shall see...).  Later that same evening i went to Candy's Grandma's house for dinner and to witness her mad skills at ping pong.  

i said a very unceremonious good bye to the city that has been my home for the last four and a half months: i bid Penny farewell at a city bus stop and i will miss her a great deal, but we will stay in touch and i really want her to come visit me in America.  Then i sent a mass text message to most of my other Chinese friends, and i ended up changing my plans at the last minute (so not like me) and catching the last bus on Tuesday night to Shanghai to visit Nellie for the last time.  i had to drop my bicycle off with a friend to give it away for me, and therefore i had to ride downtown with my messenger bag in the bike basket, my purse on the back rack, and my giant orange duffle bag i wore like a backpack. i have a lot of crap to lug around for the next five weeks! i hopped in a taxi to the bus station and caught the bus with only two minutes to spare and almost peed myself before i got to Shanghai! So now my Huzhou days are over, and i'm on to bigger (literally, a lot bigger) and better (arguably) things!

class 704, no one's looking, except for Lucy

the boys of class 704

grade 5 classes are crazy, especially once i broke out the camera!

being tackled by a gaggle of first graders during red light, green light...

it (was) the holiday season...

Sheng Dan Kuai Le and Xin Nian Kuai Le!  Holidays in the Chinas were very interesting but above all really, really cold!  i attempted to cook some things for Christmas and they actually all turned out well: i made salsa, refried beans and chocolate chips cookies, all from scratch.  Our foreigners in China Christmas was a little hodgepodge, but enjoyable all the same. (to the right you should note by bootleg tree, decorated by lights and earrings...)

We watched some holiday themed episodes of Futurama and a show called Robot Chicken, which i've never heard of before, but was just gross enough to be hilarious.  We then migrated from Nellie's cozy apartment to an incredibly awkward dinner at a Western restaurant near my school. We fit something like 14 people at one table and, then began to chat with the click nearest us.  The group that had come from Nellie's was already sufficiently stuffed with bread, cheese, salsa and cookies that we didn't really want to eat, but were forced to order something, being that we were all in the holiday spirit, and had been invited to dinner.  There were Chinese, Australian, Canadian, English and American people at this dinner and the age range was from 55 to 16, so it was like an awkward family dinner, but with more international flavor and miscommunications. More foreigners showed up and we mingled about to do a gift exchange... drum roll please... a tin full of hard candies!  The conversations were interesting and somehow Nellie and i ended up putting tinfoil on our teeth for entertainment purposes:

S0 that brings us to New Year's Eve, which i'm happy to say all of China took a three day holiday for.  Unlike Christmas, while i did end up getting the day off, i had to work the eve and the day after and make up my classes during other days of the week.  For the New Year's holiday i went to, can you guess? Shanghai.  Nellie has officially moved there and has an amazingly cute apartment in the French Concession.  So Gino and i stayed on her couch/bed and we let the good times role!  We were all three suckered into paying 300 RMB for a schmancy party at a club on the Bund.  It was said to have a fantastic view of the fireworks display.  While the Bund did look amazing, the fireworks were partially blocked by a 19th century european building, bummer.  The coolest part about midnight, which for the most part can be very anti-climactic, was looking up at the sky and seeing hundreds of giant, fire fly-like paper lanterns.  People light them on fire and they float up to the heavens; they're beautiful.  

From the point of the evening huddled around space heaters out on the terrace, things took a turn for the drunkest.  The reason the party was relatively expensive was because there was free flow vodka and beer all night + champagne. So, long story short: i almost vomited, but danced my way out of the nausea and Nellie got hit in the face when a Turkish and a German guy got in a fight because the Turkish guy sneezed in the other guys mouth.  We made it back safely and then proceeded to sleep until 3pm and go out for Japanese to start the year off in China, go figure.

Hope your holidays were at least, if not more, eventful than mine... bring on the 2009!

(ohhh, communist/capitalist China...what's in a name?  at least they still have money to burn...)

Chinese dreaming 梦...

on such a winter's day...

this post will be dedicated entirely to a sample of the dreams i have had while in the Chinas. Usually i'm not a rememberer of my dreams; they may shock me awake or cause me to have an odd deja vu later in the day but i rarely remember them in detail. the Chinas is different. i have had some of the strangest dreams of my life here, and what's even more strange is the fact that i can remember them with such vivid imagery. Thus please enjoy, and try hard not to think that i have gone completely insane (this second part may be difficult):

so the first really strange dream involved a large, almost anaconda sized snake and me. i was a man. a man of color. i can't be sure exactly what ethnicity, because i never saw my face, but from my vantage point i could tell that i was very muscular and enjoyed wearing short shorts. i was floating down a river with a large group of people. the scenery around the river was very beautiful, covered with mountains and trees. for some reason our group was not in a river raft or boat, we were instead, merely floating down the river with our heads barely above the water, no life vest, no nothing. it was kind of like sitting, but there was no chair. i'm not a good swimmer so this should have been scary enough, but to add to the stress a giant snake appeared in the water. it swam through the river and slithered amongst my muscular body. for some reason i thought it was a good idea to grab its head, like i've seen so many times on the Discovery channel, to expose its large, poisonous fangs. i think this was to prevent it from biting me, but i can't be sure. i then was overcome with fear at the fact that i had no idea what i was doing and promptly let go of the giant snake from my strong man hands. it continued to swim around me, narrowing in on my spine and going in for the bite... i woke up. throughout this dream i was very calm in my man body never speaking outloud. My mind was racing with thoughts like, "i'm not a man" and "this snake is going to bite my spinal cord", but outwardly i was a rock.

The next dream was somehow more terrifying and involves betrayal. i was in a house at night, just a random house, not my house. i was in a victorian nightgown and the window was open letting in a cool breeze to the bedroom where i was about to get in bed. My mom was already in the bed, asleep. On the nightstand next to the bed was an assortment of food: bags of mixed greens salad, a small and a large loaf of bread. On a table in front of the open window was a mouse who was, of course, talking to me. We were discussing how to keep the demons from escaping from their food prisons. The mouse told me i had to win one of the demons over to ensure that it would help me with the other ones. So apparently, all the western food that i miss so much, like salad, was possessed. So i got in bed after making a pact with the smaller of the loaves of bread. But for some reason, as soon as i lay down, i began goading the loaf of bread. it was not happy. when i looked at the table again the food was all missing. it had all dissappeared. i woke my mom "the bread dissappeared, we've got to get the demons back in the food or they will eat us!" we both got out of bed and went down the hall where the bathroom was occupied. i remained in the hallway while my mom went to the living room to turn on the radio. Out of the bathroom emergred an old, skeletal woman demon. She was kind of like a banshee, or the female Mummy with the giant mouth that unhinges... she was walking towards me and i was yelling for my mom. But my mom was oblivious and dancing to the mellow showtunes eminating from the living room. The last thing i saw was a giant demon mouth about to eat me!... i woke up.

i can't make this shit up.

Two more.  I had a serial murderer/mystery dream where i was sort of floating among the cops and victims and trying to figure out who the killer was while they also put the clues together. Maybe the killer killed me and i was a ghost seeking closure, i don't remember.  But the cops finally got a break and knew the killer was going to strike again at this old house where an attractive, single lady lived.  They tried to storm the house but the killer was already inside!  Guess who it was?  If anyone has watched Scrubs, it was the old senile guy who only said "pickles" over and over again.  He was dressed as a woman, complete with lop-sided wig and really frightening makeup.  There was a giant, ancient wooden door with one of those tiny doors for seeing who it is.  And in the "pickles" guy's killing euphoria he actually opened the little door all crazy-faced with lipstick all over himself.  My full field of vision was of his scary/clownish face.  He was of course cackling.  The cops busted open the door.  i woke up.  i'm not sure if he had killed the woman already or not...

The latest dream, about a week ago was my first, and hopefully only, zombie dream.  i was in a strange city and me and some friends were attending a huge party that was being hosted in a mall.  The stores had been cleared out and the different shops were just rooms with party-goers drinking and dancing.  Everyone was dressed up like it was prom or New Year's.  For some reason there were giant sheets of plastic hanging from the ceiling, signaling some kind of check-point within the party.  At some point in the night it became clear that something was terribly wrong.  Everyone started to run around, trying to get out... some people were infected.  With what i don't know.  They weren't the normal dead-looking, disgusting zombies, but there was something about there eyes that you could tell they were infected and wanted to eat you.  So the giant plastic sheets kept the zombies at bay for a bit while healthy people ran for the exits.  i lost my friends somehow but also managed to get out on my own.  i was then in a small cobble-stoned alley where there was a cute clothing shop and i went in.  it appeared that this part of town had not been infected, yet.  i think i tried on some clothes.  then i heard the proprietor and and salespeople plotting their escape from the city and i asked if could come along.  As soon as this happened though, some of the shop people's friends came in and i could tell they were zombies, the shop people did not seem to notice, so i ran out.  i was then on a strange college campus that had a large garden in the middle.  in the distance i could see Jackie, Nicole, Yesenia and some other people i haven't talked to since high school.  They were studying and seemed unworried by the recent zombie attacks all around the city.  i walked toward them but ran into Josh Short! (a boy i haven't seen since high school graduation) i asked him what was going on (he was our valedictorian, and very smart)  and he of course knew.  he had been working on some research with a professor and they found that pumpkins were emitting some kind of fume that turned people into zombies.  Yes, pumpkins.  He showed me all these notes and we happened to be sitting right next to a pumpkin patch.  then suddenly i realized that we should then, logically, be infected.  i grew fearful and realized that Josh was lying to me, when i looked at him again i realized he was actually a zombie himself.  i woke up.

what's weird about this one is that of late i have gained a new found appreciation of pumpkins as food, and can now say they're one of my favorite vegetables...

last note: i'm not the only one.  My friend Nellie has had some strange dreams involving me while in the Chinas too.  One in which my mom came to visit us here.  She's never seen my mom but in the dream my mom was Megan Mullally, (Karen from Will & Grace) and we were bickering. she kept trying to talk to me and make me feel guilty that i wasn't paying attention to her and i was on the phone telling her to shut up, "i'm on the phone!".  Other than my mom being Megan Mullally, this dream is surprisingly accurate.

The other one involved another foreigner here, her name is Ellis, she's only been here a little over a month.  In Nellie's dream Ellis and i were getting married.  We were wearing victorian-era, lace wedding dresses and getting married in the park.  Nellie was frantic because she didn't know what kind of gift to get us...and because she was shocked to learn that we were lesbians.

So, in conclusion, China is giving me a serious case of the crazies! 

huo ji tian zai zhong guo (火鸡 天 在 中国)...

and what a day it was... well not really anything to write home about. But it was interesting to see the substitutes that i and my fellow foreigners made to try to keep tradition alive. We had a small feast for Thanksgiving - China style: including duck a l'orange, where no turkey (or fire chickens, as their name translates to) could be found; stuffing made of the usual dry bread; pumpkin nangua 南瓜 pie with ginger; also an intriguing chutney of pomegranate and orange, a little spicy. All of which was created by Ellis, our resident culinary expert. That is putting it lightly. This girl lives for food, constantly takes pictures of food, i think if possible she would rather breath food than air...

anyway Nellie made cornbread and a blueberry tart, blueberries being a rare commodity we savored every spoonful of the juice left over.

A Chinese friend, Lulu, was also in attendance and she brought the essential snacks for grazing pre-dinner:

sure pistachios and peanuts are great, and so is, the uniquely Chinese, twice-popped corn kernels, but i still would have loved a veggie platter and a cheese ball! All in all, it was a surprisingly good Thanksgiving in the Chinas. i think i have to attribute the reason for this, for me, being that i made the mashed potatoes and even acquired sour cream (rather a sour cream want to be) from Shanghai! The Chinese don't know what they're missing with the beloved tudou 土豆, mmm potatoes!

Enough about that. i know you would love me to regale you with an epic poem about my love and fervent admiration of tubers and dairy but i won't do it.

Turkey day was good, despite the fact that i had to work both on the day and the day after! Here's looking forward to working Christmas and the Eve. Bah Humbug! At least it should probably be the last time that i have to do that for a long, long time. So enjoy your days off, you lucky Cratchets. China is like the biggest Ebenezer Scrooge ever! If you can guess i have started gearing up for the impending Holiday Season in my heart by listening to Christmas music (downloaded and courtesy of itunes holiday radio) and decking everything i can in tiny, twinkly lights! A side note: copious amounts of hot chocolate have also been consumed in the name of "the Season", or so i tell myself.

i'm mentally preparing for my last month of teaching in China, but i'm also preparing my bank account by trying to save money for the month of traveling i will do before i take the long flight back home. This means that i will only be making two more trips before i leave Huzhou for good. One of said trips was last, last weekend to Nanjing. One of my most beloved professors from Seattle University, Kan Liang, is doing research at Nanjing University for this semester so i went to visit him. He's really the reason i am in China now. i took his China in a Changing World history course a year and a half ago and came to China for the first time with that class. Without that experience i would never have dreamed of coming back to teach.

It was a great reunion with a familiar face and Nanjing is an amazing city. The one thing i didn't get a chance to do last time i was here was to see the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall. i think for justifiable reasons, this war memorial reminded me strongly of the Holocaust Museum in Berlin, both in subject and design. Despite its very sobering affects i was very thankful i was able to see it.

i had just enough time to see the devastating exhibit, get dinner with my mentor, engage in a heated debate over ice cream with John, Gino, Ellis and Kan and then the next morning i did a little shopping in the Fu zi miao district near our hostel, ate some egg tarts and grabbed a 3 hour bus ride back to Huzhou in time to tutor at 4pm. It was a quick trip, but i had a good time due in large part to the wonderful location of our hostel.

i strongly recommend staying in Fu zi miao, it may be a little touristy but its really beautiful in a kitchsy way. i really enjoyed myself as i walked around the surprisingly busy shopping district in the early morning. It was kind of refreshing to see Chinese tourists, i had many "they're just like us!" moments while i people-watched. Sometimes it's important to remember that sentiment amidst the daily bureaucracy of school, banks (choice curse word), the post office and constant public spitting (on bus floors, in super markets, you name it). i think one reason that i really love this time of year is that i buy into the crap about remembering what's really important. Maybe i'm naive or gullable, or maybe it's just because i'm so selfish the rest of the year. but i'm trying to appreciate my time here a little more and really enjoy the Chinesey-ness of it all. that's right i said it. Happy Holidays everyone!

ICE COLD!

seriously, what a difference can be made from standing in a courtyard flooded with sunshine and, i don't know, say a flourescently lit classroom... it's like the difference between standing next to a bonfire and being locked in a walk in freezer for 40 min.  Every day i wake up at 7:30am and i never want to take the covers off.  i know as soon as i do i will step into icy slippers and when i go into the living room the air from the drafty windows will hit me like ice picks.  It's only November, right? i feel for my students. They don't have heaters in their rooms.  Granted my heater only warms things that are within a 3-foot radius, but it's something.  The real shock i think is that i was not prepared for this cold.  i'm in a city about two hours outside of Shanghai.  Shanghai is pretty far south, but apparently not south enough. To keep me warm i have a twill jacket and a cozy grandma sweater + some scarves and multiple pairs of socks... i have to wear at least three layers of clothing at all times.  Including, but not limited to wearing my leotard under my jeans!  It's not going to be enough when the temperature starts dipping below freezing in a couple weeks.Noodles also help combat the cold.  There's a great halal noodle place right near our school that we often frequent.  They make the noodles right in the tiny shop on a counter in the corner.  As i slurp up the broth i hear the familiar slapping noise as the guy beats up the dough and strips  the noodles into a boiling pot.  Here's hoping i don't get frost bite, or become a solid human block of ice, so that i can no longer go to class... wait that might not be a bad idea.

With only seven weeks of teaching left, time keeps on slipping, slipping into the future.  They took away some of my grade 5 classes due to one of my co-teachers retirement half way through the year. What? Weird, but i'm not complaining too much.  Now it's the grade 1 kids that are killing my soul slowly.  Sometimes they are cute little angels, other times they become monsters: kicking each other, hitting each other with their books, yelling about nonsense. i can't handle the randomness and lack of attention span that 7-year-olds have.  It's madness i tell you!  When i'm not teaching them though and see them around campus they're so cute and inquisitive i have to forget that earlier that same day they made me want to shoot myself.  i kid (not really), it's not that bad, but through this experience i've learned that educating elementary children is not my forte.  In the beginning i dreaded the middle schoolers, but they turned out to be my favorite class.  

This is a good thing because i got my final placement, and i accepted my position in the 2009 corps of Teach for America, and i will be teaching middle school science in New Orleans!  i'm very excited, but it's going to be a lot of work.  i can tell simply by the registration process and the preparation for training, not to mention the 5 week intensive training this summer! i think i can handle it after five months of not understanding a damn word/being understood... consider me prepared for many more things and my patience infinitely expanded.  In other news, i bought my return ticket finally!  i will make my triumphant return

to the States on February 24, 2009.  Rejoice, rejoice!  i will spend a couple weeks in the Tri-Cities and then head up north to Seattle to perpetually couch surf for a couple months, looking forward to it!

Last but not least, some random things to share that are a little strange: pickled roses.  They look a little bit like alien babies, and at first i thought they would taste the way it does when you accidently get some of your perfume sprayed in your mouth. But, no.  They actually are a delightful snack, something like dried cherries or other sweet, chewy snacks, but it's best not to look at them too long, just pop one in your mouth and it's quite nice.  Secondly, China has not especially impressed me with its hygienic practices, but this was really thoughtful: microphone condoms. So many people spend their time at the KTV, 

and who knows where their mouths have been! So each patron is given a nice foam cover for their microphone, as shown in the diagram, slip it on and it keeps oral herpes at bay. However, i wasn't surprised that after examination of the package it's actually Japanese.

Wan Sheng Jie (万圣节), Hallowe'en, Dia de los Muertos

Halloween in China, much to my surprise, was a lot like previous Halloweens of y'or, my costume was wack (i was Jem, from Jem and the Holograms, the '80s cartoon), some people are always resistant to dressing-up, and drinking & dancing are generally involved. We went to Shanghai for the blessed occasion, to a club called Candy and got our dance on! Huzhou had nothing going on and most people have never even heard of the holiday here, in fact they tend to confuse it with Thanksgiving (speaking of which if anyone wants to send me a can of cranberry sauce now would be the time to do it...whole berry is preferred, but at this point i can't be too picky, or can i? it is me we're talking about...) i digress.

As i was saying, most Chinese don't know what Halloween is so i gave a lesson on it to my Junior 1 class and learned a little myself  in the process.  For instance, did you know that it should really be spelled Hallowe'en? Apparently the progression of the word went from the Gaelic Samhain (pronounced like Sau in), to the old English-Catholic influenced three day festival known as All Hallow's Eve Oct. 31, All Hallow's Day Nov. 1 and All Soul's Day Nov. 2 that was created out of thin air to discourage pagan rituals and to bring in converts. Hallow, meaning saint, as in hallowed be thy name... holy, saintly etc. you get the picture. Funny that this holiday kinda represents the opposite of that now. So the Chinese name for Halloween literally translates to 10,000 Saint's Festival. Which means, no one knows why we parade around in scary costumes and ask for candy or we will TP your house! Then again, do we know why we do this? i'm done being teacher for now, suffice it to say i got a few creeped out 14-year-olds when i showed them this:

also i wore a bright pink wig to class and gave them skittles, am i good teacher, or what?

Back to the weekend in Shanghai... it is such a major metropolis i really don't know what to do with myself when i'm there. This trip, my one and only goal was to find a caesar salad and eat it. Ambitious, i know.  Mission accomplished. i also did some chilling, coffee drinking and window shopping.  Shanghai is famous for its impressive, and somewhat other-worldly architecture and the neck-breaking speed with which it has developed into the international hub it is today and it continues to do so, reportedly adding a suburb the size of Houston, Texas every week! (Source unknown, but someone told me this, i'm sure of it) i promise to take pictures of this famousness the next time i go... but what i have taken pictures of and what has caught my eye in all of China, not just Shanghai, is the way this whole country operates on a system in tandem. Old, traditional cultural relics stand amongst sky shattering modern monstorsities, gleaming of glass and metal, or in less developed areas hulking masses of concrete. 

They all work together some how... i don't know how.  This is Jing' An Temple, really close to the hostel we usually stay in and it is an actual temple but it's on one of the wealthiest shopping streets in the city and the sides of it have been turned into storefronts themselves.  Along the temple side you'll find Burberry, Rolex and Pizza Hut hocking their wares among other luxury items... luxury used lightly in regards to the Hut. it's mind boggling.  The golden temple would be really beautiful nestled between the towering office buildings but with the bright lights of Louis Vuitton blinding me i don't really even want to go in... is that wrong?

in other language-related news: 赫伊! this is my Chinese name, or rather the way they pronounce and write Hoy (said he yi). it's a bit difficult to write... why is the alphabet so wonderful? in studying Chinese, even at my basic level i have come to appreciate the roman alphabet like you would not believe... i don't just know my ABC's i love them and miss them dearly. Another interesting thing about my name is that in the local, Huzhouhua, dialect my name, Guen Hoy, loosely translates into "beat you, ok?"

湖州新世纪外国语学校  体育场路  355 号 

湖州  浙江  中国 313000

this is my mailing address in Chinese, pretty cool, right? right? our computer in the office has a program that lets you type in the pinying and then pick the correct character, i'm slowly learning how to use it based on the very minimal number of characters i know. but still i'm impressed and therefore you should be too! So the English/pinying translation of this is:

Ms. Guen Hoy

Huzhou New Century Foreign Language School

Huzhou Xin Shi Ji Wai Guo Yu Xue Xiao

Ti Yu Chang Lu No. 355

Huzhou, Zhejiang, CHINA  313000

in case you wanted to send me a much needed care package...mail takes about three weeks to arrive and i only have 11 weeks left at this address. what? that ish is crazy. so getta sendin' if you're gonna be sendin'. 

also everyone better vote on Tuesday, it'll be Wednesday here, but unfortunately i will not know the outcome of the election just by virtue of being in the future... as my friend Nellie said, say your Obama prayers! eg. keep Obama safe and let him be elected the next president of the US of A...