Christmas Time

Well, it's been awhile since I updated this thing, and now it's less than a week until Christmas. This will be my first Christmas away from home, and also the first time I have spent a Christmas in 70 degree weather, it doesn't feel very much like the holiday season around here. The only ting that really reminds me that the holiday is coming up is that I am preparing and grading finals, and that various stores have christmas trees and "Merry Christmas" signs hanging in the windows, it's all a bit strange.

This past weekend was our school organized trip to Wuyishan, or Wuyi Mountain. It was described to us as a very beautiful place with tons of things to do. At least half of this proved to be true. We took a 30 minute flight to the northwest of fujian province to arrive at Wuyishan, and once we got off the plane we were herded onto a bus, and handed hats. This was bad sign, around Xiamen I always see large groups of people who have on the same hats, they are usually following a guide who holds a small flag on a pole high above his head so that everyone can follow them while yelling things into a megaphone. Sure enough, after handing us these hats our guide grabbed his megaphone and proceeded to yell. I felt chinese, and headache coming on, because I was sitting a bit too close to the guide.

Wuyishan was a pretty place though, except for the part of town we stayed in, which our guide described as "developing" it's kind of sad to think that this town is being transformed into a tourist dump, with every store selling the exact same thing, and losing some of its chinese traditions in the process. The places we hiked through in the mountains were not the secluded nature hikes I had hoped for, and instead were replaced by paved paths loaded with people pushing from in front and behind while watching the yellow flag sway back and forth above the heads of the crowd a few feet ahead as our guide yelled things, and we followed the flag. This picture illustrates this perfectly, although I can't figure out how to turn it right side up.



The trip started with a bamboo raft ride however which was pushed down a river by two guys with long poles while the guy in front pointed out various famous rock names and things to us along the route. The pic shown is from when we were just leaving shore and about to head into the rock formations in the background.

This ride was a fun time, althogh due to the river level being low it took an hour and 45 minutes. The best part was that we sat on bamboo chairs, and had to raise our feet on bamboo blocks because 4 inches of water seeped through the raft.

After this we went on an hour long hike to see this:


What these are, are 5 DaHong Pao or Rock tea plants which are considered to be the mother plants of this tea plantation. DA They're over 350 years old and are supposedly worth $10k a piece. Exciting huh? Yep, plants.

Here you can see how the tea farmers have adapted to the rugged terrain by terracing the hillsides in order to increase their plantation size.

At the end of the hike we were told was a beautiful waterfall. Although since we had been hiking along a dry stream bed for an hour we were a bit suspicious about the size of the waterfall, when we reached it, we saw this. Ah, as it turns out we are in the dry season our guide told us. The saving grace of this is that this cliff face was at least 200 feet tall, and that building you see in the picture was a small buddhist temple which is actually behind the water when the falls are running, too bad it was the dry season. Sorry about the pic, once again I can't figure out how to turn the image right side up.

That about sums up my trip to Wuyishan, sure there are some more tales to tell but I am not writing a novel here. Anyways I need to get back to grading exams and popping vitamin C tablets as I try to kick this cold which has beaten me down for the past few days.

Once again, thank you all for your emails and I hope you have an amazing Holiday wherever and whoever you spend it with, myself I will be working on Christmas day, I do get Christmas morning off however. Before I forget, last week I received a care package from my family, and inside it was 2 toy helicopters which can shoot each other down with lasers. I have not stopped playing with them since and people love watching them. Truly the single greatest gift I have ever received, well that might be pushing it, but they are pretty awesome.

Have a great holiday everyone.

Wo de putonghua BuHao

Xiamen island from top of hill behind Nan Putuo Temple.

The mandarin phrase in the title is a phrase I have gotten to know quite well over the past few weeks. It means My mandarin is very bad. Granted it is much better than what it as when I first came to Xiamen, but I still mess up enough tones to make it hard for people to understand me. When you mess up the phrase “my mandarin is very bad” people usually get the idea that it is really bad. The toughest things for me to figure out about this language are the tones, one word, said with four different inflections means 4 different things, which is needless to say, confusing. The second thing is the chinese sentence structure. As I start to understand the sentence structure I gain a better perspective on my students “Chinglish” english words in a chinese sentence structure.

I am beginning to get more and more acclimated to this place, I notice this the other day when I nearly got hit by a car for the umpteenth time and didn’t flinch or even make a fuss. Also when seeing older people spit copious amounts of phlegm onto the ground in front of me or in any direction I didn’t bat an eye, I still think it is disgusting, but it is just something I have gotten used to. The biggest thing I have gotten used to is the weather and the temperature, I now consider “cold” to be around 55-60 degrees. When it gets below about 65 I need to wear a jacket now. In other words, I have become a huge wuss, my apologies for those currently living in 20-30 degrees in Minnesota. Beginning to understand a bit more of the language hasn’t hurt either.

Thanksgiving here was a pretty quiet affair, one of the teachers found a place where they had live turkeys, you picked one out, they killed it, plucked it, and gave it to you to cook. So we did have some turkey, various attempts at mashed potatoes, some corn, and chinese cabbage, as well as sweet and sour chicken with rice. It was about the best Thanksgiving one could hope for in China. I hope yours was great wherever and whomever you spent it with.

Last Friday some other teachers and I participated in a roundtable discussion on U.S. government, and how it worked, and differed from than of China, it was really interesting to talk with students in a closer setting where they could ask you any question about U.S. politics, the difference between state and federal laws, etc. The apartment search had ended last week with us finding a nice place that we all agreed upon. However last week one got word that a parent in their family has become severely ill, so they will have to return home in February. So, we will not be getting that place, on a more important note though it is important for them to be with their family during this time. In case you were wondering, I am keeping their name out of this to respect their privacy.

We also finally received word on the school planned trip, which will be happening on December 14th to Wuyi Mountain, not exactly the Shanghai trip we had all been hoping for, but it is supposed to be a beautiful place to travel to nonetheless. It is located in the Northwest of Fujian province, or the province I am located in right now, hopefully it will be snowing!

Wuyi Mountain Area...according to google images





Pictures of Different Buddhist god in ceramic figurine form on the walk up the hill behind Nan Putuo Temple.

Thats about all from me, I’m off to play beach football and take advantage of a 70 degree day on November 28th! Thanks for all your emails and hopefully life is treating you well wherever you are. Enjoy it.

The Epic Battle

When some of you read this title, you may think to yourself something along the lines of good vs. evil. I propose to you however, a battle older than perhaps time itself, I am referring of course to Man vs. Spider. Last Thursday morning while I was preparing to shower, I turned on my water heater, it was the same as any other day. Once I got into the shower, I grabbed the shower head and began to wash, unfortunately for me the shower head slipped out of my hands, spraying water behind the water heater, which forced a "neighbor" to come scurrying out from behind the water heater and into the shower, over the shower door, and behind the toilet.
This neighbor was a spider the size of my hand. As many of you may know, I am not very fond of spiders. Upon seeing this one, I screamed like a little girl, opened the door to my room, and ran into the hallway, about 10 feet into the hallway I realized that I was nude. So I stepped back into my room with my heart pounding. Then I slowly walked back into my bathroom, and grabbed the only weapon I could find to defend myself from this great foe, the plunger. With the plunger in one hand, and the shower head in the other, I forced the great beast back into the shower from behind the toilet, once pushed back into the shower, I sprayed it with continual bursts of water until I deftly trapped it under the mighty plunger. However, two of it's legs were still sticking out and twitching, so I brushed my teeth and got out of the bathroom as soon as I could, leaving the behemoth to be dealt with later.

In class that day I told the story to my students, who praised my spider battling abilities, but mostly just laughed at me as I reenacted the parts where I screamed like a girl, and pretended to run around. I also told them about halloween, and we did a pretty interesting lesson on how to make a jack-o-lantern. We didn't have any pumpkins though, so it was all done with pictures, but they were fascinated nonetheless.

Halloween here was a blast. I went as a clown, but a clown you would be more likely to see in a city like San Francisco. Ben went as a nude devil, and steve was "spider man at 50" due to his growing gut, and his unhealthy appetite for McDonald's here. We had a great time, and ben and I won the costume competitions, each winning a free bottle of Vodka, and some free drinks. We have become good friends with some of the bartenders at a bar we frequent, and even helped them to create various halloween drinks the night before Halloween.

More recently I have joined the Xiamen touch rugby team. It has been a great time, we meet every sunday and play rugby for 3 hours. The are planning to travel around china, and play touch rugby against other teams made up of foreigners. The team here in Xiamen is made up of guys from the U.K., New Zealand, the U.S., South Africa, Mexico, Denmark, and a couple other countries.

Other than that classes are rolling right along, I am having the students do debates this week, with some of the more interesting ones concerning Gun Control laws in the U.S. and how they could be applied to China. They also enjoy talking about the 1 child policy, as well as Iraq, but I am trying to shy away from that. We are still looking for an apartment, and most likely won't move into one at the earliest next week, because we are all pretty broke, and don't get paid until next monday.

This is a picture of the view I see from the balcony in the guest house, it is a pretty mountainous area around here. What you can't see is the Nan Putuo Temple, which is a huge buddhist temple surrounded by a botanical garden, with ponds filled with turtles and fish, both of which hold special significance for Buddhists. A week ago, we were coming back from watching a live NFL game, and around 4 am the temple was packed with people, so we went inside, and watched as people bowed to various forms of the buddha, and lit incense, according to my tutor, it had to do with the lunar calendar reaching September 18th. I couldn't quite understand everything she was saying, but I'll try and figure out more info for my next post.

This is a picture of the beach, which is a five minute walk from where I live. Hundreds of ships and smaller fishing boats cross this stretch every day. I take a ferry across this water to go teach at the ZhangZhuo campus, which is on mainland China, and not Xiamen island. The sand isn't too bad, however I wouldn't recommend swimming in the water, because at low tide you see many large pipes draining some liquids into the water. Such is China...





The Beach



Hello to all of you back home, or in various parts of the world. Thank you for your emails, I will try to keep you updated on my happenings. By the way, I can go to the beach on a 75 degree day in November, so I guess you could say life is pretty good. Hope it's nice back in Minnesota or wherever you are!

Ignorance is Bliss...

Well, as of today I have officially been here for 3 weeks, and have finished my second week of teaching. I only teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So to say I have plenty of free time would be an understatement. Teaching is much more fun than I ever expected, all the students are extremely curious about me, the US, and want to know everything there is to know about college life in the US, what americans think of china, iraq, taiwan, and everything else. One of the coolest things is that my students got the chance to pick their own names. Some of the more strange ones are: Bat, Coke, and Pop eye, and Battle Cruiser, which is by far my favorite name. The students who hadn't already picked their english names asked me for names, so I brought in names and told them what they mean, all students want a name that means something cool. For the most I usually make up their meaning, or simply ask them what they like. I asked one student what he likes, he told me that he liked Coca-cola, so I dubbed him Coke.

All told I have 14 different classes, One week I teach eight classes one week, and six the other. It gets pretty hectic on the days that I do teach, and I am happy when the day is over. After teaching, we usually head out into Guan Jo, I am probably spelling this wrong, but that is how it is pronounced. There we eat ShaoKao which is like an open air barbecue where you pick up a tray and then put things things in it that you want grilled. My favorite are the prawns and the chicken wings, mainly because I know what those two things are. When I eat there or at most other chinese places I heed my uncles advice "If you like a food in china, don't ask what it is." So besides this I have tried a bunch of stuff, and in my ignorance of what the item is, I enjoy it. I have learned how to say I don't want dog meat, so for the time being I hope I have avoided eating any puppies. Every time I say I don't want dog meat I think of Boru, as the way to say I don't want dog meat rhymes with his name, "boo yao goru." However for the most part the food is very good, and while we eat we order beer. The first night we went to eat shaokao we drank about 40 yuan of beer between the three of us, which at 3 yuan a piece is very cheap. In china, when you finish a bottle of beer they do not take it away from the table, so pretty soon we filled up half the table. On Thursday night when we returned and walked down the shaokao row which is lined with these outdoor barbecues all the vendors shouted out to us "Piju! Piju!" which means beer, beer. We had become overnight celebrities.

We have also started looking at apartments, and this has shown us a little of the shadier side of china. In china you need to go through a realtor to look at apartments. So before arriving at apartments we ask our assistant what we should expect to pay, what the realtor and landlord end up giving us is usually 1000 yuan or higher than what we should be expecting. These interactions highlight the huge language barriers we have here, in that we know we are being somewhat ripped off as the landlord and realtor laugh at us under their breaths, but there is little we can do to stop it. We have looked at some really nice places however, and hopefully we will move in and get settled soon.

Other than that my near death experiences have now totaled in the low 80's since my last post. With nearly every experience showcasing the reckless driving of a cab driver. The latest instance includes speeding the wrong way down a one way street into plenty of oncoming traffic at around 110 km/hr, and then just before a head on collision the driver will veer the car onto the sidewalk and continue going, all while I see my life flash before my eyes and in desperate need of a change of pants.

Ben received a football in the mail, and a small crowd usually forms when we throw it around, so we show off a little bit and bust out the Heisman; or do some ridiculous touchdown dance like Terrell Owens, which typically ends in applause.

My great Aunt Ruthie passed away last week. She was one of the greatest people I have ever had the privilege to know. Always humble and greeting you with a smile, even though she had endured many hardships in her life, having outlived her entire family including her children; but her smile and warmth never showed this to anyone. I am very sorry that I was not able to attend her funeral. I was told that she died in her sleep surrounded by those who loved her, and I think that this is what she would have wanted. In the end we can only have faith in whatever it is we have faith in, and know that she is now with her loved ones.

Thank you for all your emails, and I will try to post pictures with my next post.

Intro to Xiamen...

Well, I have arrived, the plane ride was long, and hectic, but I got here. Upon arrival I was swept into a cab by my assistant. The cab, which was blocked by traffic in front immediately drove onto the sidewalk nearly hitting a policeman and some pedestrians, neither flinched at all. The cab then wove in and out of traffic for the 20 minute ride, nearly getting crushed by numerous semi's and buses. I just closed my eyes. This is what traffic is like in Xiamen, and my current near death count is at 13. Xiamen is a very prestigious university in China as my assistant told me, and it shows, the campus is huge, and really nice, with palm trees, a lake, and the ocean near by. They have around 35,000 students on two campuses. It's been an adventure just walking around. The last few days have been fun, I am here with Ben Harper, and Steve Johnson from SJU, and we have slowly discovered some pretty cool people and places. I am however, not proud to admit that my first meal in China was McDonald's, mainly because it was easy to just point at the menu. But I am proud to say that my new favorite place to eat has a plethora o duck carcasses hanging in the window. The duck there is amazing, and we have dubbed the place Daffy's. I am also not happy to admit that I went to Wal-Mart yesterday. As we walked through it, everyone would stop and stare into our carts, and mainly I think at Tony the Tiger on the frosted flakes boxes, I think we were the only two people to ever buy that cereal there. It was massive, and had multiple levels, it took Harper and I like 30 minutes just to find a way out, and another 20 minutes to get a cab to bring the groceries back, we had to fight off plenty of other people in order to get the cab.

The first week we got here is Chinese National Day, which means that everyone has the week off. The streets are packed with people and many chinese take vacation and visit Xiamen. The adjustment hasn't been too bad, my only complaint is the beds are like sleeping on 2x4's covered in sheets. But I guess my chubby American backside has grown weak the past few years with a pillow-top bed and I think I'll live. Other than that, it is hot, us westerners are easy enough to pick out of a crowd, and it only makes it easier when we are the only people drenched in sweat. I am glad I brought a lot of T-shirts as I sweat through a couple a day.

Thanks for al the emails, they help whenever I get a twang of homesickness.


Well, thats all I got for now, I'll keep enjoying my week paid vacation, hope everything is as good for you, wherever you are.

Waiting...

Well, I was supposed to take fly off to my home for the next year Today, but I awoke yesterday and thankfully was told that the flight I would be on to chicago was cancelled. Thank god my wonderful aunt chrissy told me this or I would have spent an entirely pointless day at the airport waiting for a plane that I would most likely never be able to travel on. So for now I wait until Thursday, plenty of time, to pack, re-pack, and continue the iron grip that my stuff has on my parents "antique room."

So here's hoping that everything goes smoothly on Thursday and that I get to china without forgetting my underwear. Thank god for my family because they pinned it to my suitcase.