ok

you asked for it, you've got it.

I know i said i was going to start blogging again and then promptly stopped. Part of that was because I got a bad cold, and then I was busy preparing for Mike to come, and then he was here. I'll try to be better.

I could write about how amazing it was having Mike here (really, nothing short of incredible) but I won't bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that it was hands down the best weekend of my life. Maybe I'll explain more later.

What I want to talk about right now is something that has been bothering me for a while and I can't get it out of my mind. It has to do with the heat/lack thereof situation in China. And why the windows are always fucking open.

In case you can't tell, i'm extremely bothered by the situation. Let me explain: in China, there is no central heating or central air conditioning. I might have explained this already before when it was hot and we were having issues regarding the ac but good lord is it a problem now. And I know that there are plenty of other countries in the world that don't have central heating either. I know that. And I know that it's not something I can change or something the Chinese teachers in my office can change. Not having central heating sucks, but it's something I'll have to deal with.

However, what I don't understand is why the Chinese teachers (and cab drivers, etc) feel it necessary to keep all the windows open, even when it's 40 degrees outside and we're all sitting in the office freezing, AND THE HEAT IS STILL ON. The administration told us that our heater/air conditioning units aren't made to stay on 24/7, because they will be trying too hard to produce the warm air to warm the room up to the temperature we have it set at. And yet....they want us to open the windows to get 'fresh air' all day long.

Apparently they think that if you keep the windows closed, you're keeping all the bad germs inside the building. If you open the windows (and therefore freeze), then it helps flush away the germs so you don't get sick.

I'm sorry. Maybe the Chinese think that this works for them, and maybe in this sense I'm being shocked, culturally. But all the western teachers (myself included) sit here in this office shivering while the cold wind blows in on us. And then they'll refuse to put the heater on, or turn it off, or turn the temperature way down. Our students open the windows in the classroom, claiming that they're too warm. I'm wearing long pants, boots, socks, a tshirt, and a wool sweater right now and I am freezing. Yesterday we couldn't figure out how to turn the heat on, so the a/c unit was blowing out cold air. We had to ask a Chinese teacher to turn on the heat for us, and she was shocked that we wanted it on. After two minutes, another teacher came in the office, turned the heat way down, and opened the window. It immediately got freezing cold and the Americans (again, myself included) started whining. One of the teachers was shocked that we weren't warm and I guiltily asked her if she could just close the window. They all looked at me like I was crazy.

Shannon sighed and said 'it's going to be a long winter.'

i like public speaking

So I realized that I forgot to mention something that I did last week (November 8) that is actually pretty cool. Remember how I had to give a speech on collegiate a cappella music in front of several hundred students from the local division of Shanghai High School? Well, one of my bosses called me a couple weeks ago, telling me that one of her former professors who teaches at China Eastern University of Science and Technology had contacted her, asking for SHSID to provide them with a speaker for their foreign language week events. My boss told me that she and the other boss thought that I would be the best choice, and offered me the opportunity to do it. The thing that really won me over? Getting paid 400 rmb ($50) to deliver a one-hour speech on something that I love (and better yet, a speech I had already given).

So I ended up going last wednesday to CEUTS, and spoke to a crowd of maybe 150. Everyone was SO nice to me and I even made them laugh a few times while I was speaking, something I was actually pretty proud of considering the language barrier. They really seemed to enjoy the music, and asked me questions for over a half an hour after my lecture. They also asked me, as my 5th graders had, whether or not I was famous in America. A couple of guys wanted a picture taken with me after, and it was overall a really awesome experience. Who knew that singing a cappella would actually pay off financially someday? HA.

Anyway, here are two pictures that the professor sent me. The first one is of me and her, and the second is from the back of the room while I was giving my lecture.

trying to get back on the wagon

I'm totally ready to try this whole blogging thing again.

Right now, I'm feeling pretty good. I went on a lovely weekend trip (which I will discuss in a bit), bought some clothes (it's just so...cathartic), and relaxed. School this week is totally laid back, and Mike comes next week. I've got about a million things to do before he gets here, and I get the feeling the time is going to go by pretty quickly.

Let me back up. On Friday, Shannon, Dania, Dania's friend from home (Graeme), Dee, Sanami, and I took the train to Hangzhou. The train seats were surprisingly comfortable (MUCH better than every train seat i sat on in Europe) and the trip only took about an hour and a half. The bathrooms looked sub-par, but that was to be expected and thank god i didn't need to use them. Squat toilets on a moving train...so not my thing.

We found our hostel, which was also surprisingly nice and clean. It was about 89 kuai per person per night (11 dollars) for the double rooms, and since there were 6 of us, that worked out nicely. The only complaint i have about the hostel was the fact that we couldn't figure out how to turn on the hot water. Therefore, I took one miserable shower and decided to stay dirty on Sunday.

Friday night was pretty low-key. We ate at a Thai/Cambodian restaurant that was pretty good and had a nice atmosphere. I really don't know what I'm going to do when I come home to the states and have to pay more than $10 a plate for restaurants like that. The whole "cheap food" in China is REALLY easy to get used to. After dinner we went to some random German bar and enjoyed the live entertainment. Ok, enjoyed is a strong word. Tolerated is perhaps a better choice. It was a 'band' of 3 philipinos, 2 girls singing and one guy on a keyboard. It was sort of like glorified karaoke. And they took requests. That is neat.

Saturday was a really nice tourist day that we spent on the lake. We took one of these touristy boats to a couple of islands on the lake (it's really pretty huge) and just sort of wandered around. Here are some more pictures that I took on those islands:
Basically, Hangzhou is a really beautiful place. That afternoon, we went to a temple and then sat down on a dock and watched the sun set over the lake:

Sunday involved a bit of a late start, hamburgers, and a trip to the Buddha caves. These were actually really really cool and I'm sad that we didn't have more time to spend there. Here are some pictures from that excusion:

From the Buddha caves, we pretty much just took a cab back to the hostel and then another cab to the bus station. That's right, I said bus. Apparently all of the trains were booked for Sunday night, so we ended up getting bus tickets instead.

Now, I was quoted to have said "I pretty much never really feel like i'm in 'China.'" That might sound like a strange statement to make, but think about it this way: I speak English all day long, am surrounded by Americans, live in a comfortable apartment, make a good salary to spend on things, and try to eat other types of food (besides Chinese) for dinner most nights (although I do have chinese food in the cafeteria every day for lunch). I go out for Starbucks coffee a lot (non-fat lattes are currently my drink of choice) and spend a lot of time on the internet. Granted, my internet is censored (come on, Google? Seriously?) and sometimes it's a struggle to get the Shanghainese cab driver to understand where we want to go...but really, I'm living a rather comfortable western lifestyle here in Shanghai. Even at most of the tourist destinations, everything has been Disneyland-ed. The Chinese remodel and redo and rebuild every 'historic' site all the time. So most of the temples, etc don't even feel old-- mostly because they aren't. They were 'redone' in 1998. My friend Dee even said that one time he visited some 'famous historical lake" and when he got there, they hadn't finished building it yet. Seriously. This leads me to feel like i'm not even really in China at all, but some surreal recreation of it.

Now...all that was pretty much thrown out the window when we got to the bus station. Shanghai Nan zhan (South Station) is the train station we left Shanghai from, and is immaculate and nicer than the airport. I would equate it to the new Northwestern terminal at Detroit Metro, but with cooler architecture and fewer stores. That was not the case with Hangzhou Dong Zhan (East Station). There, it felt like "china." Everyone was yelling at us "Shanghai! Shanghai!" (although in their interesting accent, it was more "Sanghai, sanghai!") to try to get us to buy tickets back to shanghai from them. I was intensely motion sick from the cab ride (unfortunately, that little problem has not resolved itself as i tend to get quite nauseated during a lot of cab rides) and when Dania told us that the bathroom was "worse than the worst bathroom i've ever seen," i almost laughed because it didn't seem possible. Well, as my stomach was already a mess, i walked into the bathroom and walked right out, trying really hard not to gag. She was right. The smell....oh China. If you have a particularly hard time with bad odors, please don't bother coming to visit me.

Surprisingly enough, the bus ride was great and totally painless. It only lasted about 2 hours and took us back to Shanghai Nan Zhan, which is very close to home. Shannon mentioned that one of the best parts about taking a trip is the good feeling you get when you come home. It's weird for me to think of 'home' as my tiny apartment here in Shanghai, but she was right. It was a good trip, but it felt good to get back.

let's see how much i can write in 20 minutes

I see that I really dropped the ball here. But, to be fair, I had no idea that i could access blogger just by going straight to the blogger homepage. I always just went to my blog and clicked on the blogger symbol at the top of the page to edit it.

anyway, there are about a million things that I should have updated about, but it's hard to think of them all at once. i went on another Hash run on October 21, which was really beautiful. We got to walk through rice fields and orchards of mandarin oranges. The weather was perfect and we once again had an excellent time. Pictures are on kodakgallery. The only downfall was that this time, the food was honestly the most atrocious stuff i've ever seen at a table. Really, you'll know if i've been in China too long if I don't get disgusted at a bowl of chicken claws (with the toenails and everything) sitting in front of me on the lazy susan. Puke.

The most exciting thing that happened the following week was the halloween celebration that we had, coupled with the fact that Mike bought a plane ticket to visit me for thanskgiving. So...if he can come visit me for 3 days, certainly any of you can come visit me for at least that long. If you buy tickets far enough ahead you can get round-trip for about $800...just look at www.kayak.com. Halloween was awesome-- the saturday before, Shannon and Dania and I decided to throw a toga party here in the dorm in Dania's room. We had a lot of fun, and went out to the bar after the party, in our togas. On Monday and Tuesday (the 30 and 31st), the kids dressed up and brought in candy and trick-or-treated in our office. We had halloween parties (read: showed movies) in our classes and it was really, really fun. So no need to worry about whether or not Halloween exists in China. I can guarantee you that it does.

Other than that, I haven't really been doing too much that is exciting. School has been pretty busy, since this week is midterms and all last week we had to prepare the exams and have them approved by the administration. A few weeks ago, we had parent-teacher meetings. They were completely surreal for me because I didn't feel like I was old enough or experienced enough to be talking to these parents about their children. I think it's funny the amount of responsibility that we've been given with little to no training. Oh, and one of the parents of one of my best students told me "You're so beautiful. My son told me that his English teacher was not very pretty and was sort of chubby, but I guess he was lying. " Seriously, what is it with Koreans telling me I'm fat? I wanted to hold it against her son but I just love my non-native students too much. They're in 6th grade, so the big topic of conversation almost every day is boyfriends and girlfriends. Apparently some other 6th grade students kissed in a class room during lunch and it was rumored that they were "going to do it again after school!!!" My students were so excited about it. I thought it was hilarious.

Other than teaching, I've been working on my law school applications and buying/watching dvds. It's so hard not to buy at least 3 or 4 dvds/tv show seasons at a time when they're less than a dollar for each disc. I might have already mentioned this, but I bought what I thought was the first season of LOST on the street for 20 kuai (about $2.50). It turns out that it's the entire first and second season. The only problem with it is that there are chinese subtitles that I can't get rid of...but that's only a problem when Sun and Jin are talking in Korean, and even then I can get the general idea of what they're talking about just by seeing the visual.

I also started trying to be more active, by running after school a few times a week. Once it starts getting colder I think i'll join the gym down the street...but since it's still in the high 60s or mid-70s every day, I think i've still got a little bit of time.

Anyway, I'll try to think of more to write about, but I apologize in advance if i'm not able to update over the next couple of days. Tomorrow, 4 of my friends and I are going to Hangzhou, a beautiful city 2 hours outside of Shanghai for the weekend, since we have Monday and Tuesday off from school (because of midterms). I'm looking forward to relaxing and trying to get my mind off of these applications...but somehow I don't think it's going to be possible to totally forget about them. Looks like i've got some serious work ahead of me in the next 24 hours (including grading all of these freaking exams).

More soon!

i'm sorry!!!!

i'm so sorry i haven't been updating...but the Chinese internet has seriously cracked down. There was actually an article in some newspaper recently about how China DOESN'T censor the internet. well, that's obviously not the case.

anyway, i promise a real update soon, now that i think i finally figured out how to bypass the chinese proxy. midterms are this week...how exciting. more soon!