The Quick Version

A week or two ago, I started to write a blog post, but held off posting it because, frankly, it was depressing.  Now, I have probably 6 more hours of teaching and a heck of a lot of packing to do, then its Thai Time.  No longer, depressed, but enter: stressed!  A much more productive option, for me at least.

So this was the second half of the semester: not quite as exciting, sometimes frustrating, and, at times, hilarious.  The semester has an altogether anticlimactic end point, with a lingering week of classes after exams in which the students have no motivation or incentive to behave well, much less do work.

Peace Corps paperwork, etc., is progressing.  I have had all the needed labwork done except for the ever-elusive G6PD.  Now its just a matter of how flexible the Peace Corps plans on being with regards to lab results having Chinese written all over them.

Other ongoing events in my life:
1) Recurring trips to our now well-known, usually lovely, occasionally frustrating tailoring shop of choice, FeiFei's.  Between trips to the fabric market, late night/early morning revelations about what I would love to have made for me, and communicating this with the maker of the clothes, fabric has taken on an incredibly interactive and rewarding role in my life.  I have 3 beautiful dresses, a nice tunic-y top, a linen pencil skirt that stretches a little too much when I wear it for more than 15 minutes, and a pair of shorts and a jacket on the way.  What fun!

2) The balcony garden continues to seem fairly self-directed.  Despite both neglect and excessive care, all our mints were determined to die.  On the other hand, the cherry tomatoes insist upon growing up to the ceiling, but are entirely uninterested in producing something edible.  The original basil champ has withered with the mints, while the two basil runts have flourished.  The rosemary does nothing, neither growing nor dying.  I feel like the fate of this garden is directed by some secret garden elf that tells all the plants what to do, no matter what I do.

3) Planning for Thailand: perhaps better put: a lack thereof.  Although John and I like to remind each other that we need to plan, it keeps falling to the bottom of the priorities list.

4) Eating exciting food.  It happens.

In terms of future plans, I will be in Thailand from July 15 til August 4th.  Soon after that, I will be flying to Seattle for Anna's wedding, then I will make my way back to the east coast of the homeland.  After that, things are still pretty up in the air, largely depending on finances and Peace Corps.

Sorry for the long absence and the lack of pictures.  I plan on taking beautiful and exciting pictures in southeast Asia that I am very excited to share with you all, whether it be via blog or in real, live, person.  Happy summers to all!

An Island-y Vacation

We went on vacation.  It was awesome.  Here are the pictures:

John playing in their rugby tournament.  They came in fourth out of ten after a full day of wet, drizzly, hot, humid spectating and playing.

At the beach party that night, which was Hawaiian themed for the Aardvarks.  Hence, John's fantastic fashion statement of a shirt.

Performing the team's haka on the beach the next day.

We went to a small Taiwanese island for some excellent touristing, conveniently combined with a visa renewal for both of us.  The place we stayed had some very nice horses, but one took a small munch out of John's shirt.

On the island, they were preparing for a Buddhist festival the next day.

It was hard to get a good picture of the awesome architecture at night, but here was a good try:

John discussing dinner with the soup ladies

John discussing late-night snacks with the fried stuff ladies

We took a refreshing and lovely scooter ride around the island, and got to see some of the really neat buildings that have stayed in tact in their old fishing villages.

It is clear, however, that the island is most definitely a military island, and was recently under attack from the Chinese, as evidenced by bunkers like these that dotted the island.  (This one is getting re-purposed as a laundry drying device.)

After all, we are well-rested, slightly sunburnt and peely, and tentatively ready to go back to the grind for a couple more months.

Near and far

Another eventful month has passed in Beijing, and my - how time is flying.  I was talking to a coworker about how if the first 3 months went so quickly, the next three are bound to go even faster, which is a bit of a daunting prospect.

Most of the events from the past few weeks are illustrated with pictures, however, the KISB news is pictureless, and worth noting.  This past week was packed with midterms: 3 per morning for every student, 7th through 12th grade.  Although I balked at the memory of myself in 7th grade if I would have had to take a midterm exam (much less 12 of them), the students seemed perfectly attuned to this schedule - I suppose it is the system they are prepped for.  In my new teacher naivete, I had assumed that a good strategy across the board to get my classes to achieve the required 80+% average would be to give students a study guide with all the questions on it that were on their exam, let them figure out answers, go over the answers with them, and let them know the correct answers if they hadn't gotten them on their own.  The exam results were a clear indicator that I was simplifying the process far too much.  My lowest level seventh and eleventh grade classes still had averages of 63% and 65% respectively, mid-level tenth grade hovered almost precisely at 80%, and my mid-level twelfth graders killed it with a 90% average.  Clearly, I will need new tactics for the second half of the semester for my lowest level classes, but I thankfully have another week of vacation coming up to sort that out.

We made a quick trip out one afternoon to the Tiananmen square area to see what it was all about.  We were too late to see the pickled Mao spectacle (maybe another day), but here we are outside of his solemn mausoleum.

A couple weeks ago, I made the dreaded visa run up to the Mongolian border, marking the end of my first 90 day stint in China.  To make sure all visitors to this desolate border town know that their true claim to fame is dinosaur fossils (not, as most tourists may think, cheap visa renewals) they lined the sides of the highway between the airport and the town of Erlian with hundreds of these statuesque dinosaur re-creations.

And here I am, inside the shining chariot that carried me across the border and back.  Things you can't see in the picture: the steering wheel column was held together with electrical tape, the entire "trunk" was crammed with suitcases full of crappy cheap clothes to be resold in Mongolia, and the jeep eventually became packed with 9 people.  

Here is that chariot, sitting majestically in the central square of the border town on the Mongolian side called Zaman Ud, I believe.

Also in that square: open air pool tables amidst the swirling dust storms.

The following weekend was blessed with the much more pleasing adventure of taking a 10km hike along an unrestored section of the Great Wall that led to the touristy area of Mutianyu, where the wall has been restored.  The first hour was a relatively icky vertical ascent that definitely made me breath heavily, but here is the view through one of the windows of the gaurd tower that it lead to.

 Red-faced me, still recovering from the climb.

 See those clouds in the back?  We were preparing to get hailed on briefly.

 My good-natured companion, and coworker, April.

 My first rugby game.  Tolerated with a few tepid beers, and several moments of thinking "Ah! Who's the one on the bottom of that pile of hefty men? I hope it isn't John..."

Finally! We made it to the fabric market!  The top stack are John's fabric choices, the bottom one are mine.  

So belated... but here!

I am aware that I have wholly fallen behind on my commitment to be a more frequent blogger, but things have finally started to settle down and so here is a picture tour of a few of the things we've been doing.

Not in the pictures: The job at the Korean school is a fascinating learning experience for me. The students are so varied in their willingness to try and their interest in learning English that every class seems like a balancing act. I gave them their first real tests on Friday and Monday, and the results are fairly discouraging, so I think I may have to change testing tactics if most of them need to pass the class.

But anyways, onto the pictures...

We investigated a park that is about a 25 minute walk from our apartment called Ritan park, I believe it historically has something to do with sacrifices to the sun. These were some neat trees in the entrance to the park, and there is a bit of a hill in the middle that the next picture is taken from, and the tall building on the right is (maybe) the tallest building in the city.

We visited the site of a rumored protest, which was interestingly scheduled to take place "in front of the KFC" in a shopping district. We found that upon getting to the area, we were heavily questioned by multiple policemen who were concerned with making sure we weren't journalists but claimed they were doing a "regular immigration check." We soon found out that in this one-block radius, there were 3 separate KFCs, with groups of accusatory policeman in front of each one - not to mention we were briefly followed by a man who had a very conspicuous curly cord coming out of his ear. We were questioned probably 7 or 8 separate times while we were in that area, and then we moved on to go to another park in the center of the city. After walking for about 20 minutes, we passed this other KFC that was entirely outside of the area where protests were even rumored to have been happening. The two people sitting in front of it are wearing red puffy vests that identify them as what John described to me as "Good communist party members." They weren't exactly security personnel, they were just stationed around the area (and apparently in front of every single KFC in the larger area) to signal a presence of the communist party. Very intriguing tactics. It gives some idea as to why protests in China have fallen short of the success that they have had in other countries.
This is from the hill in the park that we were heading towards: The view includes a fantastic panorama of the forbidden city, that glass dome towards the back and right is the opera house, and I think the thing with all the red flags around it is Tienanmen square.
A picture of us, below the pagoda on the top of the hill that has a good view.
The greatest surprise we found in the park were the singers. Although I wouldn't call the weather "springish" yet, at the point these pictures were taken, the older population in Beijing were ready to celebrate Spring anyways, and took to the park in droves to sing about it. The first picture is one of the larger groups that was singing folk songs.

This was a much smaller group that was singing Great Leap Forward era songs from the Beijing opera - touting the loveliness of communes. Again, very intriguing.

We have tried our hands at gardening, and the results are mostly encouraging. We planted yellow and red cherry tomatoes, purple and regular basil, and what seems to be purple chives. The purple chives and the red cherry tomatoes have sprouted very successfully, but the yellow tomatoes and both of the basils seem very hesitant to let themselves be seen, so I am trying to be patient. Here is John getting the tray ready for some seeds:

Here are the plants we have acquired over the past few weeks: the rosemary and mint were from a really neat plant market we went to on "Lady's Street," and the mysterious red flowers and yellow cactus came from a man who sells them in a subway station, but who appears to be deaf and mute, so we have just been watering them when the spirit moves us, for lack of a better idea. They seem to be doing OK.

Here are the completed seeds: the windows on our balcony have a blue tint on them, hence the eerie blue tint in this picture.
So that is the piecemeal and haphazard update on life! The next month will see many more days off of work for me (yay!), probably a quick jaunt up to Mongolia (yikes), and the writing and grading of 50 odd midterms (grrrrr) - So hopefully there will be more news soon.

Catching up!

I was trying to delay a blog post until I could include some of the touristy destinations we have been trying to get to, but I finally faced the fact that these may be a bit more in the future than I had originally thought. Instead, here are a few snapshots from the past few weeks:

Beijing finally got precipitated upon! I was later informed that the government makes it rain/snow, it is not naturally occurring. Apparently if clouds are in the area there is some sort of rocket they send up, containing precipitation-invoking chemicals... or something like that. It sounds suspicious to me, but I've been told from a variety of sources that it is, in fact, true.
Valentine's Day happened. It was on a Monday, so we celebrated a day early with a super swanky brunch. I tried many new things, among them were prawns, oysters, caviar, and some strange fruit. I have yet to try any animal that truly makes me regret being a nominal vegetarian, so I think I'll carry on for now.
I got a new job! I'll be teaching English classes at the Korean International School in Beijing, probably in the secondary school, but maybe primary. To celebrate, we went to the "Blind Masseuse" to get massages, and we got a package that we later found out included two traditional Chinese medicine techniques (scraping and cupping), in addition to the usual body and foot massage. They were running short on masseuses, (none of the ones we had were blind), so the Chinese traditional medicine doctor man started my massage until a regular masseuse came to his rescue.

The doctor man informed me that I was not "hot" enough to do the scraping/cupping routine, so I stuck with just extra massage time. John was not so lucky, and below you will see the evidence thereof. The vertical long red marks one either side of the spine are the result of the scraping, and the circles are from the cupping. I was frustrated I didn't have my camera during the procedure, because he looked quite comical. Maybe next time...Finally, for the less extreme: I had been telling my mom about the very annoying clothes washing process that the machinery in our apartment necessitates. Although I don't think I captured it that well, here are pictures of filling up the washer (must be done with the shower head, unless only cold water is desired), and the transfer of clothes from the "wash" to the "spin" cycle. Our dryer is the balcony.

Happy Year of the Hare!

A week-long ferocious celebration of the Chinese new year has finally ended. We spent the new years eve celebration at a small lake in the city. Around midnight, there were the requisite fireworks (they say it is to scare off evil spirits, I suspect its partially due to the fun factor as well), but these were better than any I have ever seen before. Instead of having one group of people set off fireworks, the whole lake was surrounded by individuals setting off their own private stash of fireworks, so it was probably more than an hour's worth of avid fireworking around the entire lake. It was beautiful.

After 24 hours though, the non-stop fireworks had gotten a little wearing - and that was just the beginning. They finally stopped a week later (yesterday), and a shell-shocked me was very grateful.

During the week, there were several "temple festivals" around the city, and these pictures are from the one we went to.

It appears to be ice skating, but on chairs. We didn't attempt.
Some performers.
A wide variety of meat on a stick.
Writing with water (a song about teeth brushing, we were told)
Some people from China's paramilitary that were roaming around the festival, trying to herd people out at closing time. Apparently they are responsible for some not so nice business, which seemed to clash for some reason with the one guy carrying the stuffed bunny and the briefcase.
We got a coconut.
Other news:

-Today I start my night teaching class. They just called to inform me that I will have to teach until 9:30 instead of 9p, so these students may end up with a class on The Western Art of Napping.

- I have two interviews tomorrow for other teaching jobs, lets see if anything more suitable shakes out.

- A nice young Irish lad moved into our spare room. His second person singular usage results in referring to me as "ye," which makes me feel kind of regal. I like it.

Major Steps

Over the past week, many important important steps have occurred in my Beijing adventure. 2 of them are depicted here.

1) I ate a duck. The restaurant was in an old courtyard house, meaning in was really neat, but required outerwear during the dining experience.
Please notice the chopsticks. This was my second chopstick-required meal. Not disastrous, but not easy.
See that plate of duck I'm chopstick-pointing at? I ate almost all of it. John only helped with the last little bit.
Check out our spread. In the front - To the left: eggplant yum. Middle: fried duck carcass. Right: garlic broccoli.
2) I am employed. Very part-time. These are the two nice statues that stand guard outside of my building, which is the one behind them and to the right. It is in a complex of lots and lots of towers that look too similar, called Jianwai SOHO. So far I am just scheduled to teach 4 evening classes a week (7-9pm), to a small group of students that are considered to be advanced-intermediate. We will see.