I wanted to show you some pictures of my time at the Yu Gardens here in Shanghai. It was a great trip that was really fun and beautiful. We went in the afternoon right after class and were there till the late afternoon. The gardens were built during the Ming Dynasty by some guy who apparently, as the story goes, built it all for his parents. There were some amazing buildings…lots of zigzag bridges and some pretty fun doorways.

The first picture is a classic shot of one of the big buildings with the zigzag bridge in front. This was a group of 4 pictures that I combined in my camera software! COOL!

Right under where I took the picture of the zigzag bridge you could buy fish food and throw it into the lake and watch an amazing feeding frenzy…take a look at all those fish!!! I know my brother-in-law would like that…if only they were a bunch of smallmouth bass!!!

This next shot was a classic building along with a bubbling lake! Can you imagine living in a house like that?! That will be my dream someday! Enjoy the shots!

What did you do on Wednesday September 22nd 2004? Well to satisfy my ever growing fan base… I decided to try and log every moment of the day on 9/22/04. Gorey details have not been entered such as showering and WC breaks but most every other detail is recorded so read on and see what a typical day for me is in sunny Shanghai!

5:45am Alarm clock violently wakes me from a wonderful night sleep. I press snooze.

6:05am Alarm clock goes off again and alas I have no choice but to meet the day and shake the sleep from my head. I showered and got dressed. All the while my radio was tuned to CRI (China Radio International) which in the morning is just a cheesy English show where they speak really slowly and sound really dumb.

6:45am Out of the apartment and down my 93 steps. Hop on my bike and off to get some breakfast. This week I went down every morning to a husband and wife team in the marketplace who makes the best Shan Dong breakfast. Some egg dough and veggie spicy thing. It is too good! They are only 1.8 RMB which is about $.25 each and I buy two, one for the road and one for the office. This is me and the husband on another day as I was enjoying the food with him! They are pretty cool!

7:15am Teacher Meeting with my team…as I scarf down my breakfast that I had just bought in the market. We talked about the different things that we had planned for the day.

7:30am Arrived in class ready to teach. Ready to face the students… ready ready ready.

8:00am First class begins…today is a little different because we have chosen students to teach the grammar lesson. It sounds kind of lazy on my part but it really helps me see what level the students are at and really gives the students a great responsibility and they did really well! During the first class they specifically called on me to read some sentence and later as part of a game… it was funny!

9:30am Second class begins…I taught them about “blind date” because the students used it in a dialogue so I used it as a teachable moment. This class has an even number so I don’t get to work with a partner on group work…oh well.

11:00am Class ends and I met with 2 students and had lunch with them and talked and talked and talked. I am very low on my Sanda University Cafeteria Card (they give us money at the beginning of the month and I have already used it up during last week) so we went off campus to this great restaurant. We ate MA LA TANG. They taught me how to say “boneless chicken pieces” so I can get some good fried chicken on the street right outside the MA LA TANG restaurant while we waited. So we choose food and put it in a basket from the restaurant and then bring it outside to the big boiling vat of soup and some spicy stuff too. They take the basket of food and throw it all in a metal basket in the vat of boiling soup. After waiting for a while, since there were millions of students swarming the restaurant, we finally sat down with a piping hot bowl of MA LA Tang…delicious. I made sounds while I was eating, like, “mmmm…delicious” “wonderful” so the student told me she was happy that I enjoyed the lunch.

12:30pm I walked back with the students and noticed that the campus coffee shop was finally open. It was closed after the first week of school due to some stories of students getting sick from the sandwiches that they make there. I never would ever have the sandwiches they make there, I only have the coffee there so I have no worries! I got my favorite drink there which is a “ice 　mocha　 coffee” which is hard to explain but let me just say it is nothing like PEET’S COFFEE! After the coffee shop I said good bye to the students and went back to my apartment. Usually I return to the office and do work there but today I had to do some much needed laundry.

1:15pm After relaxing for a bit I put some laundry in the washing machine and then took a nap….

2:15pm Woke up from the nap and hung up my clothes and started a second load of laundry. When I say “load of laundry” I should say a few shirts and boxer shorts. The washing machine is quite small and plus I don’t have much place to hang all my clothes.

2:30pm Curriculm meeting. These are usually fun and informative. We figure out and talk about what we will do for the next week. I am the copy and printing man so I have to take specific note about what we need to print and copy for the next week. Then with the papers that are needed I will go to my good friend in the copy room…she teaches me a lot of Chinese and laughs at me when I don’t understand. But I get done what I need to get done, which is good.

3:40pm The meeting finishes with laughter and jokes…that is the reason it takes so long… then I hung up the second load of laundry. Look you can see my sheets hanging off my balconey. The picture is a close up of my clothes and sheets…blowing in the breeze.

3:50pm I am now running to ENGLISH CORNER. This is where we just sit around and talk English and have the students try and talk too, if they are bold enough.

4:00pm ENGLISH CORNER…this wasn’t a bad one…the students acutaully were talking and it was quite interesting. We talked about death and dying in China and the differences between America and China. Organ donating in China is not as popular as it is in America. That is one thing that I learned from ENglish Corner.

5:10pm Dinner with 3 students. We ate at the cafeteria which was good. We talked about TV shows and movies and stuff like that. Nice students and they are quite talkative.

6:30pm Went back to the office and did some work there. I also wrote a letter to my college friends in Chicago.

7:30pm Team Meeting where we talk about the students and share some more ideas about teaching and what is working and not working. After the meeting we decided to take a bike ride together.

8:15pm Ended up at a park and took a nice brisk walk around a lake.

8:56pm We were pedaling through some back streets near the school and stumbled upon about a hundred people doing ballroom dancing! I encouraged the girls to come and dance even though I couldn’t and so one of the girls, Ruth, agreed and we went out and made fools of ourselves. ALL EYES WERE ON US! Here we are…

Little did we know the dancing finishes at 9pm. We started dancing and twirled around a bit and the music finished and people all started to go home…I thought we crashed the dance party…but later found out that it finishes at 9pm…so it wasn’t our fault!

9:15pm We returned to campus on our bikes and stumbled upon a concert right outside the cafeteria. One of the first year students was diagnosed with leukemia. The concert was a benefit for him…it was interesting, because the singer sang Bon Jovi…first time I heard a Chinese Bon Jovi. Here we are with our bikes and listening to Bon Jovi…

9:30pm Returned home and got ready for bed…my bed with fresh clean sheets!

10pm I was getting ready and my balconey door was open and heard cheesy saxaphone music pumped through the PA system. Soon the words started and it was a Garth Brooks song, “The Dance”! Weird.

10:05pm Sitting down and did a little Chinese studying. I read some stuff and translated some more. I love doing that and really enjoy writing and getting the meaning. Whoa…getting tired…now.

10:57pm …finished with the Chinese work. I learned many important words like, “odd, abnormal” and “out of the way!” Good words that I can use tomorrow!

This past 2 weeks before the National Day (October 1st) we taught the students about Baseball and how to play. It was so fun to teach and on Thursday September 30th it culminated with a fun game outdoors of WIFFLE BALL! It was so fun and a lot of it was funny! Here are some pictures of us playing.

Here I am pitching the ball nice and easy. I was the designated pitcher because it would have been next to impossible to have a student pitch. Apparently there isn’t much throwing that young Chinese people do because the concept of throwing with one hand and over your shoulder was foreign. A few students attempted to throw like a basketball pass! It was too funny!

Of course swinging the baseball bat was a whole other thing! Here are two shots of the same team as they are eagerly watching their teammates and classmates play the game. Overall the games were really good and the students were very receptive and enjoyed it all! I love it how everyone is looking one way…but the one student is looking the other way…

Here is another angle…

Here I am trying to help one team. I was telling them some important tidbit like, “When you are fielding you must pick the ball up and throw it to a base…don’t pick it up and hold it…” or “when you hit the ball…don’t be so surprised that you forget to run to first base.”

By the way…I have no clue what the one boy with the red shirt was doing… maybe too much breakfast that morning…

First of all I want to wish you all a happy Chinese National Day! I am writing to you from an empty Sanda University. All the students have gone home and it is raining today. The end of September and then October 1st is a fun time of holidays and special days. This past week was the MID AUTUMN FESTIVAL. The evening featured a most unbelievable moon and many parties here on campus. This first picture is taken from my balcony with my cool new camera tripod.

One of the most interesting parties that us foreigners were invited to was on Tuesday evening. This was part of a group on campus called English Society. Now, a party in China isn’t exactly what we in America call a party…usually a party in China consists of a bunch of performances. So, if you ever come to China…practice your singing…because almost guaranteed: you will sing. Even if you can’t. So being good sports, my teammate Ruth, Lucy and I decided we would do a few songs. Ruth can play the guitar and her voice ain’t half bad so I thought of a few songs to sing. We decided on two JOHN DENVER songs. The entire country of China loves John Denver (may he rest his soul) for some bizarre reason. You can imagine, growing up and listening to John Denver’s Greatest Hits 2 and then coming to China it was a little strange that they knew those old and goofy songs. But we ended up singing the classic “SHANGHAI BREEZES” and then finished with a nice rousing “LEAVING ON A JET PLANE”. Here is the picture of us three singing along…

The past week saw me heading into Shanghai a few times seeing some sights. Here is a nice artsy shot I took of a typical Shanghai alley or what they call XIANG ZI. I like the perspective and just the look of it…

As some of you might know I have been doing lunches and dinners with some of my students. This has been really fun and it gives me a good chance to get to know them better and allows for them to speak english and have fun. Here is a good shot of me and 3 of my students as we eat in the cafeteria. We had tons of great food and good conversation.

This has been a great October Holiday! Let me just tell you in bits and pieces what it has been all about!!! October 2, 2004 the foreign teachers here at Sanda University were offered a trip to Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province. (Pronounced “Hang Joe” but not like you are “hanging” the laundry…pronounce it like you are German or Dutch or something guttural like that.) Anyway, a couple of us all agreed and 5:00AM we departed from Shanghai and took off to Hangzhou.

This is a picture of West Lake with a pagoda on the hill…

Now Hangzhou is a very famous city in China. There are many literary references to happenings there and the students will invariably tell me about WEST LAKE if I ask them about Hangzhou. West Lake was one of our stops and boy was it crowded! This was the second day of the official beginning of National day and it seemed like every Zhang, Xie and Li were on vacation along with us! (Little China humor there!) We rented a boat and took off on a nice tour of West Lake.

After a nice ride on the lake and many pictures of struggling boatmen lugging their nicely dressed passengers across rough water and after seeing a ferry so crowded with people that I think it was a ferry but now I am not sure…

This photo courtesy of my teammate Ruth…I was not quick enough to snap this classic shot!

We got back on shore and started walking.

Here is a shot of a very famous moon thing in the lake…

More pictures and descriptions to come…

Continued from Hangzhou I

After West Lake we found our driver, (how, in the ocean of Chinese people, I am not quite sure but we had a wonderful tour guide named Dennis who was quite knowledgeable and adept) we took off to one of the most famous Buddhist sanctuaries in China. Here I am in the midst of the many Buddha statues carved into the very rock!

This place was the home of the famous LAUGHING BUDDHA as you can see is quite popular…I couldn’t get a “people-less” shot.

Here is a picture of just how crowded the temple was!!!

Here is a good shot of the massive buddha in one of the many halls that contained buddhas. It was partially hiding from the foreigners and worshippers.

My return to Zhengzhou.

For the second half of my October Holiday I had the distinct privilege of traveling back to the city in China that I used to teach in during the 2000-2001 school year. The city is Zhengzhou and the province is Henan, which is situated pretty much in central eastern China just south of the Yellow River (hence the province’s name, He=river nan=south). I taught in a middle school there and had a good time. The teachers there were good friends and the places became very familiar to me and I always had a desire to return not thinking that it would ever happen. So you can imagine how I felt coming into the Zhengzhou railway station at 7:30AM Monday morning October 4, 2004. I mainly went back to visit with my friend who is studying now in the Chongqing Municipality, (used to be part of Sichuan Province in Southwestern China) at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. He was a student at the middle school while I was teaching and we became pretty good friends. He frequents this website quite often! So I went to see him for a while and in the meantime I would drop by some of my friends and see if they were still around. Here is my friend and I watching a movie at his parents’ place.

I went with a schedule totally wide open and soon it started filling up. I had lunch with old friends from the middle school and then dinner with other friends from different schools. I sat and talked with people and played ping pong with students and I even introduced myself to 54 senior level students who asked me many questions from my opinion of the American Election to if I have ever met any professional athletes to when will I come to teach them!! The last one was a tough one, I didn’t know what to say except that I already had a job I was happy with…SORRY.

One thing I was able to do was to pose (just my head) for the art class at the Middle School and they drew me. It was tiring but fun and the students did really well. Here is a good shot of me and my friend and the art teacher…you can see their art behind them! Good right?

It was interesting to see the changes that occurred in Zhengzhou in only 3 years. There were surprisingly few things that really changed…and only a couple shopping areas that have really exploded over the past couple of years. One thing didn’t change was a great coffee place called Margaret…I had myself a nice cup of Blue Mountain Coffee while I sat on the swinging wicker seats waiting for our pizza to cook! COOL PLACE! Good coffee.

The story of how I got my train ticket to get back to Shanghai is, of course, a story for another time and another page…

Continued from Hangzhou II

We had lunch at a nice restaurant and had typical Hangzhou food. Following that we were able to visit a special village called LongJing Village. Now those of you know your tea, this is where LongJing tea comes from. We got to see and taste the tea at its freshest and we were able to see this guy who was drying the leaves by hand!

The LongJing trip turned into kind of a sales pitch where we saw the tea and tasted it and then they asked us to buy some which created a dead silence…finally the lady brought the price down and I decided to get a few because the tea wasn’t half bad! This picture is the lady packing the tea into my canister…she was very skilled!

Then she gave me a small can of the most expensive one and we all decided to give it to Mr. Gong our FOREIGN AFFAIRS SUPERVISOR guy here at Sanda University. I think he will like it!
Here is a cool close up of what the tea looks like!!! YUM!

There were a couple of the teachers who wanted to stay in Hangzhou for a couple of days so we dropped them off at the hotel that they booked and the rest of us took off back to Shanghai. We had fast food on the way back to save time!!! McDONALDS!!!
Here is the scene as we left Lungjing village, the fields of tea…on what seemed to be every possible space available…they were everywhere!

Last night, I recieved a message on my cell phone from a student of mine, it read, “Tonight there is an nba games in Shanghai.will you watch it?”

I responded with a comment of I know, but I have no way of watching it…will you watch it?

He wrote back, “it will begin at 7:40 But i am in evening class.and there is no tv set.i want to find one.”

I responded with me saying Good luck in finding one.

He responded again with, “where will you watch the game, if you find where,please tell me.thankyou.good luck!”

This was a classic example of the fervor for NBA here in China. Even petit little girls will be going crazy for NBA. Let’s just say they put me to shame in terms of NBA facts and players’ names. When they hear about the place where you are from in America they will instantly think of the NBA team. They knew instantly that Boston was home of the Celtics, although they don’t pronounce it the same way…

So last night without really thinking much about the game I went down to the street next to our school to pick up some photos that I had printed for my class at the local Kodak branch. As I rode my bike down the street I noticed that the restaurants (with TVs) were packed with people. I got my pictures and decided…what the heck, I will just check it out! So I did.

Here is the first restaurant that I went to, DONGBEI RENJIA, they have the best dumplings in town and I scarfed down 20 while watching the game.

While watching the game I met with a few students who had, unlike my student mentioned above, escaped from evening class and went to watch the game. It was fun. Good old Yao Ming of the Houston Rockets was playing and he did well. Also Liu Wei, another Chinese player but for the Sacramento Kings, did well too. Yao Ming and Liu Wei were teammates on China’s national team and this was the first NBA game ever to be played in China. This is ground breaking and it was fun to be watching history take place. We enjoyed cheering but the restaurant became really hot, so my students told me to come with them to another place.

So here is the second place that we went to, you can see it is a bit different. It is a noodle place from the province of Gansu and the students told me never to go to that restaurant. But this time was ok because it was open and cool and the people there was much more enthusiatic.

But of course when I say enthusiastic…I mean it very conservatively. I thought of waiting for a picture of when Yao Ming did something great…the fans would go crazy…but it never happened…I guess I have to wait for a football (soccer) game to see the fans go nuts.

Also when watching the game it didn’t seem like there were any fans even watching the game. I asked my students why the fans were so quiet…they said that the rich people, who got the ridiculously expensive tickets for the game in Shanghai, have no passion for basketball. I agreed. Completely. Too bad.

Here is a wonderful installment of what I call “Signs of China”. Anyone who has seen my pictures from my first year in China knows that I have a keen sense for the linguistically challenged signs, or in other words, such darn funny english! So I present to you in small bits and pieces just four of the best signs that I have seen in my recent travels.

The first one is for a few of my college friends who were into this often misunderstood form of art, Grafitti. Of course here in Shanghai, we understand it so much that we will actually sponsor the grafitti and provide the surfaces for the urban artists. Here you see the best one I saw one night near Nanjing Lu, brought to you by DULUX! Whatever the heck that is?!

Here is a classic sign that sounds fine, but I just find it a wonderful reminder in my daily life so I decided to pass on this good advice to my friends and family. This is easily seen all over the subways here in Shanghai.

When I talk about signs I would be wrong to not include the often infamous “store names.” There are many that you see daily and quite often that are just weird. Some are just obvious attempts to have SOME English on our sign to attract more customers. Some defy logic and make me want to go to the store and see the dictionary that they used to think of the word. Here is a good example that makes me wonder what stuff they sell in there…

Here is a classic that I took while I was in Zhengzhou during the October Holiday. This became a joke that my friend and I told continuously through the rest of my trip. ENJOY and I hope you will always continuously have, “good fashion breath.”