PC Training, Part II

Cooking over carvao

 little sister - Caro

 Mama (on her way to sell at the market) and other sister, Mahone

 Finishing up our permagarden

 Final product

 Baby Moringa tree - look it up!  They are awesome.

Mama and me went to catholic church this morning!

All is still well, love to all.

PC Training, Part I

Classes out on the varanda with our Profesora, Amelia.

Our improvised gym - one volunteer used to teach circuit aerobics and is passing along his skills. Its awesome.  I've been running a lot of mornings with a few other volunteers and my host brother at - gasp - 5:30am.

Namaacha is wonderful!  Family is incredibly educational, and soooooooo patient.  My host mae sells food down at the Swazi border, so lunches and dinners usually come out of that.  I've eaten a lot of delicious peanut-coconut-y sauces, chicken, salads, potatoes, rice.  She cooks over coal, so I'm learning how to do that.  Showers are bucket baths every morning, and it is "winter" here, so the process can be very chilly.

We've been starting class at 7:30am 6 mornings a week, and usually go until about 4.  We usually head out to a bar for a beer for a dinner to do some decompressing, then dinner happens about 8, and I'm in bed and asleep by 9.

More to come!

2011 Part 2

The rest of 2011 and beginning of 2012 have been both exciting and unexpected.  John and I traveled through Thailand and Laos, and it was incredible to see bits and pieces of a region that was completely unfamiliar to me.  The people were absolutely amazing, the countries were gorgeous, and the vacation was entirely too short. At some point towards the end of the vacation, I suddenly decided that instead of returning to the states for the rest of 2011, I would return to Beijing to teach one more semester at the Korean International School.

After the vacation, I went almost straight to Vancouver Island (via Beijing) for Anna's Wedding Part I.  Seeing family was a treat, my grandparents' place is astoundingly beautiful, and the day of wood splitting and stacking  (followed by a few days of painful back) was just right for staying humble.

I got to spend a few days in Chapel Hill to regroup - my wardrobe and my wits - before heading back to Beijing to teach my second semester at KISB. The second semester there was easier in the sense that I already knew the system, but I became increasingly frustrated with the way the school was administered, and ended up feeling completely exasperated by the time the semester ended.  Thankfully, Anna had Wedding Part II in October, so I had a very good reason to return to the US for a few days.

I moved back to Chapel Hill at the very end of December, promptly had a beautiful getaway to Puerto Vallarta for a few weeks, spent some time with the Yentes-Quinns when they came down, road-tripped up to MA with Anna and Ada, and have started a Portuguese class.

Why Portuguese?  Why, I'm going to Mozambique, of course!  My Peace Corps assignment finally came through (for Honduras), was promptly was cancelled (safety), and then I was reassigned to Mozambique!  I will be leaving at the end of May, so I have a few months to cool my heels, get loose ends tied up, and embark on a few more adventures.  

Thailand 

Momma and baby in the elephant nursery 

 Laos

Stop Arguing Buddha 

 Back to Thailand

Thanksgiving

Toaster Oven Pumpkin Pie

The Kitchen

The Living Room

China

Lucky Bell

Silver Pagodas

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.