29 November, 2008

Life going on

So my school took me and 20 teachers to escort about 300 children to a theme park on thursday...all out insanity. although the kids really enjoyed themselves. It was pretty insane though, i can't imagine doing that in the states...too many kids running rampant and possible lawsuits. It was great to get to know more teachers around the school though. Rode a bunch of rollercoasters with them to prove I wasn't scared...and they all grabbed on to me for safety...psh, act like they're so tough...

It was intersting getting to spend some time with teachers outside of school though...learned some are buddhist and pretty much none are from Shenzhen. They all come from all over China and have pretty cool stories. One teacher spent a year in England and thus "knows how to drink like wetserners" according to her. And the PE teachers, I have found, can really keep up with our American drinking styles...haha. At least better than most of the lightweight Chinese.

I have befriended a bunch of people that work on the island by my apartment now. They all work at a bar that I frequent, but they say they don't like it when I drink there because they think it's too expensive and feel they must treat me to beer, not let me pay...so, we often go to the beach and hang out, go climbing together before they have work. It's a little tough with such different schedules but it's pretty entertaining...most of them have promised ot take me back to their hometowns with them too which is exciting...meet their families and all...

anyway, that's most the update for now...more to come...

17 November, 2008

Nice break

So the bro in law came to china this week doing some business. It was nice to see some family and get out of town for a bit. He showed me aroudn to some pretty cool stuff in Hong Kong, so I think I am finally warming up to that city. Went to a pretty cool rooftop bar there, overlooking downtown HK which was pretty badass. Got to catch up a little on events back home too which was nice.

Other than that this weekend was pretty uneventful. I made some new chinese friends that are really nice and fun. They work at a bar next to my place, but we go to the beach and hang out sometimes during the day when they're not working. They speak pretty good english I think for being waiters...they want me to teach them and ask me for translations all the time. They're from all over which is kind of cool too, one from sichuan who is going to teach me the sichuan dialect which will be awesome (in exchange for english) (oh and he's a migrator of 16 years old...crazy. he looks older though. the rest of them are my age...but i can't imagine leaving home at 16 and not knowing when you're going back...)

Other than that things are as usual. Going out as usual, having my chinese mafia friends taking me places and getting me free stuff...you know, the average life...haha. oh, apparently there is a volleyball tournament coming up that me and ben are expected to take part in...so that shoudl be interesting/fun. can small chinese people spike the ball? we shall see...

11 November, 2008

More School

So I think the whole “new kid” at school thing is about over...I'm mostly adjusted to the school and everyone knows me. I guess this is routine...

Anyway, guess the most recent interesting news is that one of my students tried to hit me actually...and also said some profanities...I guess I did hit him on the head first for acting out, but still, i don't think this warrants a kid trying ot get back at a teacher. Anyway, we had some words after that, and the class was not so happy for hte rest of the class, but of course the way kids are, the hard times were over by the end of the day and htese kids were back to following me around and coming to my office to play...

Met some more Mexicans and Colombians here last night at a friends dinner party too. they had some kids running around the restaurant who I played with for a little bit while we were at this brazilian place. I think they follow me to China because I meet more spanish speakers here than any americans...

Other than that, things are going swimmingly...I enjoy classes, am learning a good amount of Chinese, and have made a few friends, but have started to miss some of the smaller things back home finally. God I want a thundercloud sub...

31 October, 2008

of course...

i'm surrounded by the most random people/events...i think i'm destined to be south american or something...i met colombians today walking, so we had a chat and hung out for a bit, talking shit about chinese and such...but just so random that i'm in the smallest town of shenzhen and there are 2 colombians by my school...kind of fun to not have to think about translating and stuff though, good to just talk to someone since my english has gone to the wayside...my vocabulary is shot since all i teach is "this is a cow, this is a pig" sort of stuff...

other than that, school has been pretty interesting...we just celebrated halloween here. we had a big festival with mummy wrapping, bobbing for apples, and such with face painting which is what i did...of course, with my 12 year old maturity level i ended up in a paint fight with all my kids...destroying the school in the process and taking out a few teachers (they're not my biggest fans at the moment...)

anyway, my new costume for tomorrow will be a chinese student...wearing their uniforms and all, so i'm pretty excited...hopefully the bars won't think i'm too young to get in... :)

20 October, 2008

during economic recession, I...


Gangsters wearing some visors in war ma...all the workers in the streets wear these, they're badA


Ben being attacked by our daily riot of midgets...


My advertising foreign teaching pose...


My favorite kid...he's the funniest kid I have ever met who doesn't speak english. he wanted to "gangsta pose" instead of smiling so he made me take the picture with him...


Playdough face...my favorite class


The daily eye exercises....too much reading means they have to play with their heads and massage their faces...it's kind of cute really

Still enjoying the teaching and liking some of the kids more every day and disliking others just as much. It's been a trip though. I have been teaching pretty consistently since philippines and now am pretty exhausted, but i trek on. haha. i actually do the normal 8-5 hours here...well almost...2 hour break for lunch and i'm done around 4ish 3 days a week, but it's pretty long anyway, plus teh lesson planning

I've been watching hte market crash slowly from over here...it's kind of crazy. Mostly sad because I watch my money slowly shrink away as I wish I had just hid it under my bed like old people do instead of trying to invest...who knows if we will ever really come back from this. Asia is pretty affected as well, but investments aren't as big of a deal here, no one really makes money of the markets on the mainland, that's more Hong Kong style...the westernized parts.

As for the rest of my life here, I have befriended some gang members (that I didn't know were mobsters originally, promise). We go out pretty often, and its' fun bc they don't speak any english so i like the challenge of getting my ideas across...so i've started discussing politics and stuff with some chinese people, which is cool that i now am able to do that...i also have them teaching me cantonese, bc it sounds cooler than mandarin...

The main guy A Fo 啊佛 is pretty gangster...he pays for everything and for some odd reason has taken a real liking to me especially...i suppose I was the one who introduced him to the rest of some foreign teachers, but still...

so that's my life in the past 12 days mostly...class here, class there, english here, chinese there. there is a lot of routine ot growing up though which has begun to bore me horribly...in need of some more travels soon...pay day is soon, which is good news

08 October, 2008

philippines baby

A not very comforting sign painted on our boat as we headed into a typhoon to get to another island and away from manila...
braving the choppy waters to get to white beach...we're so brave, i know
hiking to a waterfall where we proceeded to swim and have fun...good day
drunkenly riding back on the back of motorcycles bc that's how the locals do...it was awesome.

Fire twirler guy for the last night...this was pretty badass




beautiful sunset to end the trip...taken from the airport...at least the philippines can boast nice sunsets, no?

06 October, 2008

Ma ni la!


So just to start out, I'm going to tell y'all that Manila is probably the craziest place on earth. It really is the sin city of the world...there are no rules and everyone does as they please. The area of Manila that we first saw had nothing but pimps and prostitutes...like Vegas x100. haha. Other than that, we saw some pretty cool stuff though, such as the hobbit house that legitimately had little people to serve your drinks to you...so moral...



The other thing that I loved about this city were these things called jeepmeys. They looked like the old Jeeps made in the old days but extended so that they could act like a bus...there were 1000s all over the roads and all individually painted so that they had their own personalities...I think they were also the driver's personal car as well as the public transport. haha. Some of them had awesome stereos and stuff too so that you would party on the bus on your way somewhere. They also had these extreme pedicabs that were with motorcycles instead of bikes...those were pretty awesome as well. I've got to admit, other countries have such cooler ways of getting around than the USA.
Here's the roomy with who turned out to be a prostitute....like i said, everyone was a prostitute...even though she was cool and just told us about manila and philippines/what to do around there...she also did believe though that i was from the philppines, ben was from spain, and my asian friend phong was from norway...
We boarded a random boat because all the ferries were cancelled due to the typhoon in the philippines at the time....this is what was printed on our boat....it probably wasn't our most intelligent decision to take a boat into a typhoon, but isn't the water the safest place during one?

22 September, 2008

2nd weekend of shenzhen

sooo, these blogs are completely sporadic, i know that...but i thought this weekend deserved a write up.

spent a big chunk of my thursday in the police office doing interview things for visa applications...it was dumb and pointless as is much of the bureaucracy of china. then the weekend came and friday we went out to futian and i slept on a floor for 4 hours before waking up to stumble my way home...to find that i was locked out of my apt. THEN i spent the rest of the day with a friend in another part of town to waste time until i could go home. so i went to an art expo area of shenzhen to see the very talented replicas that chinese people can make of famous art....seriously, not 1 original piece. (oh wait, some of this was saturday).

sunday, i guess, is the day i really wanted to write down to remember. So my friend Nick Chen (pictures below) and I hiked to the top of the highest mountain in shenzhen or in this province or something like that. it was a long hike, but worth it at the top. Made a few chinese friends on the way up which was cool...i have been completely impressed with how friendly everyone here is for such a big city.

anyway, the funny part came on the way down off the mountain. we got to a point where there were a few routes down and decided that we didn't want to go the same way down so we asked a few people if we could take a different trail. They of course encouraged us and said all the trails lead to the end and go down the mountain...i guess it would have been useful to ask WHERE the trails led....so we hiked for an hour and 1/2 without seeing a single person/pass an abandoned station/through a worker village/to the bottom of the sea port. NOT where we wanted to be...very far actually. So we ended up hitchhiking with a man named benjamin who gave us a lift for the about 20 minute drive back to the apt where we left from...

so that's my story for you people who read this...kind of long. anyway, news on top of this is we have national day off which means we have teh week sept 29 through oct 5 off and we're planning our vacation. So far it's fujian province, guilin/yangshuo, or philipine islands. what's everyone else's opinion? ps - we're still waiting on visas so it's entirely possible i might just be stuck here....

pics of new pad!MY ROOM!
ROOMMATE BEN'S SMALL ASS ROOM

17 September, 2008

teaching, teaching, teaching.

so this whole lesson planning thing takes a lot more out of you than i thought. i have newfound respect for all the teachers i've ever had. its such a pain not having an exact plan and not knowing what will actually get the kids involved...and on top of that being at a good school that requires me to grade and do all that stuff, i thought this was going to be fun! haha

anyway, done with the first full week of classes and on to the second. I haven't had a monday class yet though...holidays and started on a tuesday, so i've only had 3 day weeks thus far, but not lying when i say they are jam packed with classes. I have 17 classes a week, which may sound easy, but on top of that i have to lesson plan for each one because i teach 3 levels...so naturally they need different levels of english and it's hard to remember sometimes which ones are the better classes and which aren't...

So i know this is a lot of complaining to do in one sitting, but i guess it's just one of those days. I love being here, living RIGHT on the beach and making some good chinese friends, but this humidity/heat is killing me. it's austin heat with houston humidity...killer. and i teach classes without AC...

Lastly, just an update on the more interesting stuff, social life, I have made a few chinese friends who are all really nice and fun to hang around. Some of the teachers here are cool too but a little older usually. This weekend was the first real weekend we have had without training or things to do so we got to hang at the beach and go to the city to party which was fun. Ended up out until 8 am bc i thought it was a good idea to just party until the buses started working again bc taxis are expensive.

Oh and last night my friend got a "chuanr" stuck through her foot on the street...for those who don't speak it's basically just a huge toothpick that holds food together with a sharp pointy end. So she's in the hospital now. And as for the rest of my life, i'm still waiting to move into the permanent residence, living now in a studio with a roommate...

06 September, 2008

Nervousness


This is Darragh and Nick.  Two guys in program. One from Ireland and the other from San Francisco.  Kool kids.  

Our first adventure night out in Shenzhen.  Ben and Jeff.



Went on a hike/walk today and found tons of these freaky spiders (one of which almost attacked Nick's face...)

So tomorrow I will finally meet my school teachers and headmaster.  Kind of nerve racking...none of us know what to think...i'm kind of glad i have one person from the program with me at the same school so at least it won't be one on one all the time with the chinese folk.  I have lost a lot of my chinese so it has gotten a little frustrating trying to communicate sometimes...especially bc i have to be the translator for 1/2 of the people seeing as they don't know much of the language.

Anyway, crazy night out last night again...went to an entirely outside barstreet place in futian.  Drank too much as always and ended up eating KFC for the first time ever.  Here it's ken de ji.  Only had french fries and ice cream though...

some contact info here: my new cell # is 86 755 158 155 977 93 (#'s are so long here! although that includes the country and city codes)




03 September, 2008

Certified?

So finishing up all the training finally...thank god.  It was truly boring, but kind of fun to get to know a new area of Chinar.  Took a test this morning to get certified and we have a ceremony at 3.  I have to dress up...this sucks.

The presentation I was working on before went really well.  I was asked to be a teacher at a key school actually, which is one of the schools directly controlled by the bureau of education.  I don't know how I feel about it though...involves much more work and more supervision...

Anyway, thought I would just leave a quick update on life here.  Went to the beach last night to drink and chill with some friends.  Took a chill night which was nice again.  I think I've calmed down too much in my old age.  haha.  well until next time...

31 August, 2008

1 week in 一星期以后

So as I sit here working on my presentation for Tuesday's lesson, I realize that I have been here a week.  Can't believe how fast time flew.  I'm exhausted and am surprised by how much work we actually do.  I mean, don't get me wrong, this kid still parties, but it's amazing that even JUST out of college can make me feel old.  I get questions of what I do for a living now and if I'm married.  I guess that's a whole other off topic subject though.  Although I do feel old now.  I used to never get tired, but I guess partying with these Chinese has finally made a challenge.  We're up at 730 every morning (and sometimes out till 4...haha).

So to talk about this city a little more for those who are interested...it's a cool town.  Not really all that huge for China.  I think it's a very popular vacation destination for Shenzhen families and people from Hong Kong.  Sometimes the accent in Mandarin here is pretty funny because a lot of people speak Canto.  It's nice though...beachy, so I can't complain.

Friday night I had the first late night like I'm used to back in the states.  A few friends and I (Ben, Jeff, and Phong) went to a bar street.  So there are 2 here: one just called bar street (酒巴街)and the other is Hooker street (莲花路).  So Hooker street was friday.  Not to say that we get a lot of hookers in the states, but we drank quite a bit and didn't get home until 4 am...which made waking up for class at 730 kind of difficult...so I didn't.  I made it to the rest of classes though and was 1 of 3 that missed a pointless class so I didn't worry.  Plus my Chinese teacher loves me so I don't worry.

So now I continue with training.  3 days left in Zhuhai and trying to finish a final presentation.  I'm exhausted, but will probably still force myself to go out in order to celebrate finishing the first Chinese test today.  So I haven't changed too much just yet, don't worry.....guess I'm not all that old.

27 August, 2008

yup, finally here. 终于到了!!

So it may have taken an extra 20 hours, but i finally made it to china...got annoyingly delayed in san francisco as I guess I should have expected with my flight track record.  Anyway, it was actually a good thing, got to stop and hang out with Julie for the night and finally see san francisco since i didn't get to go when my sisters lived there.  Got to say, I actually like it!  Reminds me of a taller austin with less cars

So, next step was the second flight to Hong Kong.  About a 13 hour flight, which stretched to almost 14 in the end (again, just my luck in traveling).  Anyway, also with my luck and just something you would definitely expect of me...I met the ONE mexican on the flight.  He was a cool kid.  about 19 i think and moving ot Hong Kong for college!  studying engineering for the next 4 years because he wanted to be different and not go to the states like his friend.  anyway, gonna end up meeting up in hong kong when i go to visit so i can get my fill on mexicans on the other side of the world since I will be so deprived on this side of the world.

Last bit of news updates, Chinese class is going well.  I love Professor Qiu.  She is probably the funniest Chinese person I have ever met (which i guess doesn't say all that much, but she is hysterical).  We're going to lunch tomorrow because for some reason has taken a liking especially to me and has decided to "raise the bar" when grading me?  sucks.  but i guess it's better than her hating me...she for some reason prefers me even to the chinese kids in class (sort of typical too of chinese people. hyper critical of chinese)...TEFL classes suck and are boring me to death...hopefully they'll help somehow when i start teaching though.  I'm hoping desperately I get high school kids.  I will hate myself if i have young kids.  Oh and apparently someone was telling me that I should teach spanish here.  I can tutor kids and make an additional 180 RMB an hour (about 25 bucks an hour).  They don't have anyone to teach it here so it could be good for me to do since some people want to learn that in addtion to english.

One week left in Zhuhai (city for training) which is this awesome beach city.  really clean and nice.  lots of money here which is a nice break from the rest of china.  pics to come eventually...

14 August, 2008

1 week

So beginning to realize that summer will end once again/I am actually leaving/I'm going to China in 1 week.  Don't really know if I'm actually ready, but I guess I'm getting bored anyway.

As one would expect, I have procrastinated quite a bit in getting anything done for this excursion.  I officially just sent in my information for health insurance (apparently quite impt and actually required by the chinese govt?).  It was actually due July 18...but I guess I get an exception...

Off to the middle country officially on August 21 and landing there August 22 (the whole intnat'l. dateline thing scares me).  Anyway, welcome to my blog where you'll be able to view some of my adventures/thoughts and such about my at least one year living East.