A Random Story (Halloween Pictures)

This is me being plunged by Jenny. I know that's a really bad toilet costume.

Matt was a mummy

The other day while eating lunch, the table behind us had a soup with a sternoish can of flames beneath it. Deeming it hot enough one of the diners began to use his wooden chopsticks to fish the sterno out. The liquid within it spilled all over the base of the stand and the whole wide puddle of the flaming liquid was now heating the bowl. They pulled the soup off and finally removed and put out the flames in the can. One waiter decided to simply do away with the fire and yank the whole burning stand out of there spilling the liquid all over the table and the client. Thank God the client didn't catch on fire but the table now had a 2 foot stretch of flaming puddle across it. Another waiter thought that a paper napkin would be a good way to wipe at the edges of the burning puddle. This had obvious results. It was both frightening and utterly ridiculous.

Other than that, we threw a great halloween party. It was a tasty international potluck. It was mostly Korean and Chinese food plus Matt's (another Maryknoller) chili and my mushroom cheese sauce on bread. I dressed up as a toilet and had a small (new, clean) plunger, the combo lent itself to some great toilet-plunging dance moves. It was good to party with the people we live and take classes with. My friend Joe (From korea) had a good time putting small wipes of chili on the toilet paper component of my costume, it was really gross looking.

Classes have gone a bit better the last couple of weeks, I'm also getting to know my students better, remember a lot more of their names, and find out a lot more about them. A lot of students have the same names and many students have kind of odd (occasionally unfortunate) names which I won't go into.

This post has been in progress for a long time (I kinda forgot about blogging for awhile), but I've just realized it's November. I have 2 months until the semester break and still don't know exactly what I'm going to do for said break. My idea is to fly to some Southeast Asian Capital, see some of Southeast Asia, then make my way back up to China a little after the new year's craziness has died down.

Anyway, I've been cooking a lot lately (for the fun of it, I'm really not too sick of Chinese food yet, I'm convinced Northern food is better, much less greasy). Great veggies are cheap here (I love the available green leafies) and the mushroom situation couldn't get much better. Making simple soups or curries is pretty cheap. There's really very little in the way of standard ingredients I can't get here and cheese is the only truly expensive item.

I've been in China for a Little While

After returning from vacation back to my apartment and classes I've started to feel like I really do live here in China. Everything has begun to feel a lot more routine. Even my kabob-gobbling frenzy has died down to nearly-reasonable levels. I stay a lot busier on campus and make less runs into town. I've booked out Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday night for getting tutored and Wednesday night for helping the oral English club with "English corner"--basically extra spoken English practice for first-years. Teaching five sections of the same class does help a bit in terms of time spent planning.

I've felt like my classes have been a bit lacking so far. Though my Maryknoll Coordinator told me I did a good job after sitting through one of them (which was encouraging), I still feel like I need to come up with a bigger variety of ideas. As the course is Scientific English I do a lot of articles and discussion questions and throw in some more general English practice activities as well. The class goes pretty well most days in terms of getting people to speak English though I think that the students' past foreign teachers have made class a great deal more fun and exciting. The students want games and movies all of the time and I've done just a little bit of each so far. Informal taboo/catchphrase can be astounding for getting almost every student to speak a lot of English, the beauty is that the game loses it's fun if they aren't speaking in English. We haven't found anything else that does the trick quite so elegantly. If you're ever playing a game that heavily involves language use and you think I could possibly adapt it to English teaching, let me know.

I one of the things I've done is to pretty much ditch the textbook. Chinese textbooks seem to be whatever assembly of articles relating to the given subject which the editors could get away with paying the lowest royalties for. My textbook is a bunch of articles of random articles varying from Bill Gates' speech at Tsinghua University sometime in the late nineties to dated articles about the "future of the Internet" which are far less than relevant today and not even up to speed with the date of publishing (2001). My friend James teaches "Legal English" with a textbook containing at least a couple of chapters lifted straight from Wikipedia.

The Chinese is coming along slowly, I just added a second tutor and am now being tutored four times a week. Meeting with tutors is especially good as it encourages more studying, I'm a long way from conversational but I guess it's a good sign that I've begun involuntarily thinking about Chinese in my mind.

Other than that, I'm bracing for the winter.

Photos of Vacation

The post below has the written detail.

Behind us is where the lake should be. Astute Kevin experts may notice that my pose an alpine trekker derivative. However, in this situation it was quite neccessary.

This is the closest edge of the lake just coming into view.

Oh! I think we're gonna see the lake! (Imagine lots of excited yelling behind you as you see this.)

Now there's a funny looking guy in front of the lake.

This is how the lake empties and becomes the begginning of the Songhua river (which my apartment looks over, that picture to come) The staircase you see on the right was closed due to falling rock and we were sad we couldn't climb to the top of the falls.

This is what North Korea looks like.

You can see the river in there somewhere. One of the bushes under the bridge began to walk as we looked, no joke.

After close examination I determined that North Korea approximately follows the dictates of Newtonian Physics.

I saw some people playing cards on the ground, and some people walking around, and some really badly maintained buildings. All of it was way more interesting than it sounds, seeing bustling, loud, bright China butting up against this eerie ghost-town looking place.

I don't know that it's appropriate to pose and smile for a picture in front of North Korea, but there we are, the red line behind us is the bridge border.

Hiding in the concrete mushrooms.

Is it safe to come out now?

.

Back to School

I'm back home in Jilin after a week(ish) of vacation. We headed over to Yanji, capital of Yanbian Korean autonomous prefecture, on the border of North Korea. The town itself was not as exciting as we had hoped but the food was great with a lot of great cheap grill-it-yourself restaurants. We took a day trip from there to the small border town of Tumen. From there we could look across a river to an eerie, dilapidated north Korean town which was pretty much darkness at nightfall. All of it was in rather conspicuous contrast to the endless construction and the more than plentiful lighting behind us in China. Borders can be really interesting.

Anyway, the main goal of the vacation was to see ChangBai Shan. Literally "long (as in "constantly") white mountain" The top of the mountain (Shared by China and North Korea) holds heaven lake, which is the largest crater lake in the world. Many who climb the mountain don't get to see the lake due to fog, and I initially thought we'd be in that boat. However, after about a half hour on the crowded mountain (everything beautiful is put up for mass tourism in China) we started to make out the closest edge of the lake. The crowd started screaming with excitement and we were suddenly afforded a good ten minute long view of the lake. The fog lifted for a second time as we made our way around to the different viewing spots after a short snowball fight we headed back down to see the rest of the ridiculously crowded attractions on the mountain range which included some views of the sweet waterfalls, a hot spring with eggs being boiled in it. There was also a little mountainside pond whose informational sign had a comical mix of highly academic words and broken grammar giving us the greatest fun in its deciphering.

After the mountain, we hung out in the nearby town of Erdao/Baihe (two towns in one, basically) for another day, walking the local sculpture park and playing cards in a tea bar. We all became rather addicted to "Red tens" a Chinese card game whose sheer number of rules makes it feel like a few games in one. We played the whole train-ride home as well.

Budget traveling in China can be an adventure at times. Last time I really traveled by ground here it was in the middle of the low season. Travelling during a national holiday however, means you join quite a large portion of China's population in doing so. Headed out we had standing room tickets on the train which emptied enough that we were able to sit after just a little while. Headed back to school (and therefore toward the largest city in the province) the train got more packed as we went. Our card-games drew a great deal of spectating, as did another Maryknoller's ramen prep, as did just about everything we did.