well i'm back from the two week vacation we took around china, it was pretty incredible. first off, lemme say that you can't really grasp china's population problem till you travel around. for example, we went to the northeast part of china, what used to be manchuria, and visited this city i'd barely heard of, called shenyang, which happened to have over 10 million residents. i mean, come on now.

the itinerary (for illustrations see the pictures that i'll hopefully put up soon):

beijing - we first took a train to beijing (24 hours) and spent a day there; we didn't really do much of note except eat peking duck, which was really really arughfhwughaaaa....

northeast - from beijing we took a train to the northeast part of china (14 hours) and spent 4 days there, in the cities of ben xi, shenyang, and dandong. we went to the biggest water cave in china and a famous buddhist mountain called qianshan, which was gorgeous. the highlight of the trip was definitely going to the border of north korea and trying to spot hidden nuclear caches and smuggle koreans over. seriously though, the difference between north korea and china is like night and day; the chinese side had large skyscrapers being built and the korean side had fishermen sitting on half-rusted boats. in shenyang we went to the palace where the first emperors of the qing dynasty lived, when they invaded china from manchuria.

beijing - we went back to beijing after the northeast and spent a couple days there; we went to tiannamen square, the temple of heaven, the summer palace, the great wall of china, and the forbidden city. beijing is an awesome city, it has this incredible combination of history and modern pop culture, like we drove past a random 500 year old imperial garden on our way to one of the night marketplaces. it's humongous too, both its area and its population, which is between 13 and 15 million people. i really loved it there, hopefully i can spend more time in beijing later.

xi'an - from beijing we took a train (12 hours) to xi'an, the old capital of china, which has about 8.5 million people. there we visited the city wall, built during the tang dynasty around 1300 years ago, the wild goose buddhist pavilion, where the stone monkey's monk stayed for 17 years on his way back from india, the huaqing imperial springs, and the tomb of qinshihuang, the first chinese emperor ever (ruled from 220-206 b.c.), where we saw the pits of the terra cotta soldiers, the '8th wonder of the world', which were discovered about 20 years ago.

luoyang - from xi'an we took a bus (4 hours) to luoyang, one of the 7 ancient cities of china, and went to the grotto by the yi river, which has over one hundred thousand buddhist figures carved into the cliffside, ranging from 2 centimeters to 17 meters tall. we also visited a shaolin temple and watched a kung fu demonstration by young shaolin acolytes. once again, why did my mom make me take violin lessons as a kid? from there we took a train back to jishou (15 hours) and took a bus back to good old baojing.

the sense of history around china is amazing - i'm really glad i read up on it a bit before i came here, it added so much to the tour, especially walking around the old imperial palaces. i have to say, chinese people really know their history; they can rattle off emperors and wars and important dates like nothing, even the ones who didn't graduate junior high school.

of course i ended up buying tons of crap everywhere we went. among them were some small imitation terra cotta soldiers from the tomb of qinshihuang, a long knife from the shaolin temple, a small bamboo flute from beijing, 8 dvds from xi'an (for about 85 american cents a piece), and a large chess set carved from cattle bone from a jade factory outside beijing. i totally splurged on this one but i knew i had to have it the moment i saw it; the pieces are carved into the likenesses of qinshihuang's army, with one set painted and the other left plain white. the original price label was 1880 yuan (mom and dad don't flip out), but i argued them down to 600, which is about 72 american dollars. so far i'm undefeated against kevin, duncan, and xu jun (our cook), rock on.

we met up with the rest of the foreign teachers in beijing, so now the full crew for the year is assembled. a quick run down:
me - me
kevin - 25 year old white boy from tennessee
duncan - 23 year old white boy from lake tahoe, graduated from berkeley in may
danny - 40 year old white fisherman from hawaii
diane - 27 year old black lady from all over the place, born in south carolina
tara - 22 year old white girl from baltimore, went to college in the northern part of new york state
nicole - 22 year old white girl from an island off the coast of washington state, went to university of arizona

we also met up with some of the teachers who'll be teaching in jishou. one of them is a 60 something (i'm guessing) lady from maine, who actually grew up in red bank, nj, right next to holmdel. how random is that?

finally, after much scientific examination of the empirical data, here are my final power rankings of the hotness of the girls in the cities in china that i've been to so far:

1. beijing - one of the early favorites that managed to come out on top, like maryland basketball a few years ago; very deep and fundamentally sound, can overwhelm with sheer talent when necessary.
2. xi'an - a solid and safe bet, like picking kansas to win the ncaa tourney every year.
3. jishou - the southern illinois of china; a random 'town' of only 300,000 in the middle of nowhere, the salukis are definitely china's cinderella city.
t-4. ben xi, shenyang - corporately, they're like gonzaga; manage to outperform the name recognition and rep.
6. shanghai - completely abandoning college basketball, one can note the rams-like descent from heavy favorite to completely missing the playoffs. despite all predictions from the so-called touts, shanghai was completely unimpressive. of course i was only there for a couple days, so who knows.

not applicable - shenyang, dandong, luoyang; not enough time spent in these places.

alrite, enough from here. school starts in 3 days and most of us haven't even learned which school we'll be teaching at yet (there's four schools in town which will have foreign teachers). actually i'm the only one who knows for sure; i'll be teaching at the primary school across town (i bought a bike a few days before the tour, for about 22 bucks). of course this hasn't led me to do something as ridiculous as preparing lessons and materials in advance or anything. good nite!

i've never really had an excessive amount of taiwanese pride, not compared to other taiwanese-americans i know, but the ignorance of the chinese here is infuriating.

today on our field trip to the hydro-electric plant (yeah i dunno) one of the local english teachers asked how it felt to be visiting the motherland for the first time and i somewhat jokingly replied 'taiwan is my motherland' and she responded with 'but taiwan is part of china anyways' at which point i very curtly said something along the lines of 'actually it's not and it never will be' and changed the topic.

later at dinner the subject came up again (ok i brought it up) and we entered a full on argument. i laid out what i knew of the history of taiwan, mostly gathered from the search for modern china and the numerous times i've been to taiwan, which was different from her account, though unfortunately i was wrong on some points. i asked them what kind of country would threaten one of their own 'provinces' with missiles (and not in a no-nonsense squashing-rebellion kind of way) and sit idle while a major earthquake affected thousands of taiwanese, to no avail. the most frustrating thing was when i told her (and the other local teachers at dinner) that the entire world, including the UN, regards taiwan and china as two separate countries, they shook their heads and flat out refused to even consider my words. they said taiwan would inevitably return to china, just like hong kong did, even though that had been an issue of british colonialism from a contract signed 200 years ago and hong kong had tried to prevent the annexation as much as possible, simply not the same thing at all.

this kind of thinking seems to be common in china. i came across an example that captures this attitude when i flipped through a chinese date book that someone had left in our living room the other day. in the beginning was a list of the area codes for all the different provinces and major cities in china, and stuck at the very end, at the bottom of the page, was 'taiwan province - taipei'.

time to sleep...if you don't hear from me for awhile, it's either cause i'm on our vacation around china, from aug 15-29, or i got censored and thrown in jail, in which case send me some tasty cookies and snacks please.

this is so stupid -

some pastor in texas gave a sermon condemning the Episcopalean Church's approval of the gay bishop. a quote from a member of the congregation: "I have never in my life applauded a sermon," Mr. Breckinridge, 51, said as he and his wife, June, left Christ Church Episcopal after the 9:15 a.m. service. "But I did today because this is so important." how is a sermon condemning the installation of a gay bishop more important than a sermon about the good news? shouldn't any sermon about Jsus be more important? and what's with kenyon martin and the nets? i'm very frustrated here.

well, today was the end of an era, and the beginning of a new...era. the camp officially ended yesterday, and most of the foreign teachers (chris, jd, charlotte, sam, dan, and liuliu) returned to their homelands, leaving just me, duncan, kevin, and danny. today the school felt like a totally new place, since a lot of the new high school students moved into the dorms today, and so many of the teachers were gone. for the next 6 days me and kevin'll be teaching 3-5th graders at this primary school across town, with classes of about 40 kids each. we're teaching them english, as well as the history of american music, that should be interesting.

due to the heat, me and kevin have taken to walking around the house in only our boxers on occasion. this morning, alan, our nerdy liaison, knocked on our door around 9 am, while we were still sleeping. he knocked for about 5 minutes until i finally got up and answered the door in just my boxers and stared at him for about 10 seconds before i remembered to say good morning. later today, around 4:30 pm, he knocked on our door again while i was taking a dump, so he knocked for another few minutes before i went to answer the door, again in just my boxers. when he saw me he made this 'how much lovin do you guys need to do everyday' face before he controlled himself.

yesterday was full of ceremonies. there was one in the morning for a student who got accepted into beijing university; over a thousand people showed up at 7 in the morning to celebrate this kid and they unearthed this humongous vat of baijiu that they had buried on school grounds. about baijiu: it's translated 'white wine' but it's not wine at all, it's disgusting putrid barf that's made of corn, rice, monkey toenails, buttsweat, and other things. the percent alcohol varies between 50% and 56%...for some reason, the miao and tujia minority people love the stuff and drink it at every opportunity. anyways, they broke open the vat and poured cups of baijiu for everyone in the audience, even though half of them were kids from the summer camp. after the ceremony i wandered over to my class where they'd been seated and found them half-drunk and begging me for water, though unfortunately i didn't have any.

return of the mickey mao club: the closing ceremonies were last nite and they included performances by the classes and the foreign teachers. i didn't think we could top the sweater song from our performance last time, but we totally blew it away. we decided to do three songs, basketcase, creep (by radiohead), and the climax of the entire camp, ice, ice baby. kevin rapped the entire song FROM MEMORY, i did beat box on my own mic, jd played the background riff on guitar, and chris and dan danced around the stage. when we walked off we were greeted by 'i love you' shouts and marriage proposals from every schoolgirl in the audience.

a funny thing was that today, me and kevin had dinner with some officials from the primary school we'll be teaching at this week, including the school's two music teachers, one of which is said to be the best chinese fiddle player in baojing county. they told us that they'd been at the ceremony the nite before and could tell we were good musicians from the performance and listed ice ice, baby as their favorite of our three songs.

kevin, henceforth to be known as ice, is hilarious...he has the mentality of a sharp-witted urbanite but he's from south carolina, so everything he says comes out in this slow, measured drawl, even though the actual words always sound like something out of the new yorker.

the day before yesterday the principal of the school took all the teachers on a boat ride down the river. while the boat was still in dock i saw this big old white dude walk up with this guy from the jishou teacher's college, and it turned out to be art simpson, the guy i'd talked to on the phone a couple months ago, who was trying to build a chrch in baojing. we had a long conversation on the boat, but i'm not sure what to make of him. anyways, i asked him if he could tell me how to find the underground chrches in baojing and he couldn't. luckily, duncan seems to be a believer, he went to first bptist chrch in berkeley, the one across the street from first pres...we've talked about our faiths a few times, not in depth yet though.

a few nites ago karen, one of the local english teachers, took a bunch of us to a local karoake place. about halfway through, me and jd snuck out to go see a show put on by midgets from all around baojing county. they sang songs and danced, and at one point during the dancing they dropped all semblance of order and began a full-on brawl; the midgets began tossing each other across the stage and trying to rip off everyone else's clothes, it was the most bizarre thing i've ever seen in my life.

anyways, i need to sleep, tomorrow we're waking up early to teach...word to your mother.

two days ago, the school told us that we were gonna take a two day trip to a nearby scenic spot to do some hiking, which i thought sounded cool. so yesterday this guy alan, who takes care of foreign teachers and is incredibly nerdy and polite, knocks on our door at 6 am to wake us up and drag us to the riverport.

(a bit about alan: one of the guys from hawaii, jd, has taken to saying vulgar things to alan whenever they interact cause we're never sure if he understands our english; i must have laughed for ten minutes straight when alan handed us copies of the new schedule and jd shouted 'sweet beautiful breasts!' in his face...i said it was vulgar =9)

when we got to the riverport we all got on boats with our students and ended up taking a 3 hour boat ride to this gorge, where we climbed for about 4 hours along the craziest hike ever...it was seriously the most dangerous thing i've ever done in my life. about two full hours of it was spent clinging to chains nailed into the side of the gorge while we dangled above the river at the bottom and under random waterfalls, walking on thing 6-inch wide logs, thin metal ladders, or my favorite, metal spikes nailed into the cliff spaced about 2 feet apart...a lot of the time i was climbing more with my arms than my legs. sometimes we climbed straight up the mountain, using tiny footholds carved into the rock, and i cursed my (relatively) large, ungainly feet.

the most amazing thing was that the chinese kids, even (and especially) my students, who're the youngest, flew along the path. i'm telling you, they're made of freaking rock. when we took breaks along the river at the bottom, some of my kids would catch small crabs with their bare hands and eat them raw. i really don't understand why the chinese army hasn't won a significant war in the past 150 years or so.

i took a buttload of pictures, but unfortunately the coolest ones didn't come out, which i was really pissed about, since i defied death to take them, climbing one-handed. so no one will ever believe how dangerous the hike really was, which sucks. i would pay money to ship a busload of 10 year old american kids here and force them to go through the gorge.

afterwards, we stayed in local farmers' houses which had no electricity, so we slept around 9 pm and woke up before the sun. seriously, the kids are more like bedouins from the gobi desert than chinese schoolchildren. on the way back to the school, we stopped at a town with a lot of small shops and markets, where i bought an old set of small bottles with river scenes somehow painted on the inside, a beautiful hand-dyed batik, and a hand-weaved grass hat, for a total of seven bucks. china rules!

for some reason, half the girls in the summer camp have decided to pick me as their summer crush. i can't pass a group of them without hearing them giggle like schoolgirls (...) and the occasional 'peter i love you, marry me' shouts. jd and chris tell me about how their students sing this song that goes 'i like peter, i don't love peter, i like peter, i don't love peter...'. i dunno why i'm writing this, probably cause my ego has outgrown hunan province. it's intriguing though, since chris and jd are both good looking guys, and authentic white foreigners to boot, and jd can even speak chinese. who knows what goes through the minds of these crazy banshees. i hope i use my mojo for the forces of good and not evil.

speaking of which, i still haven't found other believers yet. i've talked about my faith with a few of my chinese co-teachers, i haven't really gone in depth, but they seem pretty interested. us foreign teachers also had a discussion about religion, thanks to the news about the gay episcopalean bishop. i taught the song making melodies to my class, but they had no idea who the 'king of kings' is, and didn't really understand my explanation. one step at a time, i suppose.

we took a two day field trip to a nearby miao village this week. on the way there, my soldier (every class gets a soldier to train the kids in military drills) led the kids in singing communist army songs, and they began shouting for me and kevin, the westerners on the bus, to sing american songs. we obliged by alternating Jsus loves me this i know, america the beautiful, and silent nite with their commie tunes.

at the village, there was a big ceremony with lots of performances at nite, there must've been over a thousand people gathered. the school asked us foreign teachers to put something together, so i played a phil keaggy piece on guitar, chris sang a hawaiin song, and then me, chris, kevin, dan, and jd played and sang 1979 and the sweater song for them (we called ourselves the micky mao club). me and jd did the mini dialogues in the sweater song in chinese, we rocked all of them.

a normal day, which happens about half the time, looks like this: teach for and hour and half in the morning. that's it...the rest of the time is free. sometimes there's activities the school has for us, like when they asked us, five minutes after we finished dinner, to play basketball for their teacher's team in a game that was beginning then. they gave us all uniforms and threw us in the game at the 2nd quarter, that was interesting, it was the first reffed game i've played in since those rec leagues in 3rd grade. i had about 10 points, a few assists and rebounds, and 100000 turnovers in about 30 minutes. unfortunately we lost, i blame it on the hole our team got into during the first quarter.

today su-jin, the cook (who's in his young twenties), took me and chris on his motorcycle (3 man sandwich) to this spot in the mountains to go swimming. at first he took us to this stream right off the mountain road, but when we got there it was packed with butt naked 50 year old men, so he took us to another place and dropped us off, where we hiked to this super random mini-waterfall and pool in the middle of the mountains, which soon became populated with naked 22 year old men. it was beautiful, and so was the scenery. seriously though, it was exactly like the one described in balzac and the little chinese seamstress.

it's so hot here, the average temperature is 40 degrees Celsius, which is 104 degrees F. it's too bad the river right outside my apt is dirty, otherwise i'd jump in everyday.

that's it for now, tonite we're heading into town to get massages, 2.50 (american) an hour! stuff is so cheap here, i love it.

notes from Game 2:

8:50 pm: spurs go on 7-0 run to open the game

8:50.1 pm: run upstairs to put on jason kidd jersey, force grandmother to watch basketball (for added karma)

11 pm: nets win 87-85

11:01pm: allow grandmother to go to bed. haha just kidding she went to bed around halftime

11:02 pm: see kmart and jason kidd making out at halfcourt, feel jealous

11:45 pm: watch dikembe mutombo interview, start thinking of cookies and become hungry

12:25 pm: eat some cookies

12:30 pm: farewell and good nite!

man, i just had the worst phone interview ever, with my mom's own company. the interviewer was asking questions about stuff that i learned in college, but i kept blanking and couldn't remember anything, so he kept dumbing questions down, but i still couldn't answer them.

interviewer: so what can you tell me about deriving the coefficients of an ARIMA(2, 2) model and using them to forecast?
me: gah?
interviewer: hm...let's move on to data structures. what's the most common order of retrieval in a hash map?
me: er...geh?
interviewer: i see. so in your engineering economics class, did you learn how to do continuous compound rates?
me: uh...e to the...guh?
interviewer: what's one plus one?
me: ...
me: i wash myself with a rag on a stick

haha, sorry jesse, i recycled some lines. here's one more: i've resigned myself to sitting in my loft in my parents new condo and eating peanuts all summer. i'm also considering changing my name to mr peepers.

so we have an unnamed friend who's having an issue with this guy she kinda likes who's been spending a lot of time with this other girl. she's discussing it with jesse, and then as if it was relevant AT ALL, she asks him, 'i mean, how would you feel if you saw pete hanging out a lot with some other girl?'

another quote:
me: yay, game 1 [nets-spurs] is finally here
bing: yeah, seriously
bing: too bad i'm gonna be at the justin timberlake concert tonite

how the freak did bing get married? to a woman??

please, come visit me. i'll have plenty of room, and peanuts.

first quotes ever postBHOT, freudian slips from jesse:

j: i need to find someone i feel comfortable with and who shares my interests
j: i can't be a girl forever

j: gotta go, installing dead IAM
j: err, dead AIM

j: i like a girl in fifth grade

haha...ask mister wordsworth himself if you wanna know what he was really trying to say with those...

a motherly quote:

mom, to my sister on her birthday: you're 25 and ben's 25, so the two of you added together are still 1 less than me

i just picked up the book no man is an island by thomas merton...it's pretty gripping already. From a couple pages in:

This matter of 'salvation' is, when seen intuitively, a very simple thing. But when we analyze it, it turns into a complex tangle of paradoxes. We become ourselves by dying to ourselves. We gain only what we give up, and if we give up everything we gain everything. We cannot find ourselves within ourselves, but only in others, yet at the same time before we can go out to others we must first find ourselves. We must forget ourselves in order to become truly conscious of who we are. The best way to love ourselves is to love others, yet we cannot love others unless we love ourselves since it is written, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' But if we love ourselves in the wrong way, we become incapable of loving anybody else. And indeed when we love ourselves wrongly we hate ourselves; if we hate ourselves we cannot help hating others. Yet there is a sense in which we must hate others and leave them in order to find God. Jesus said: 'If any man come to me and hate not his father anid his mother...yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.' As for this finding of God, we cannot even look for Him unless we have already found Him, and we cannot find Him unless he has first found us. We cannot begin to seek Him without a special gift of His grace, yet if we wait for grace to move us, before beginning to seek Him, we will probably never begin.

The only effective answer to the problem of salvation must therefore reach out to embrace both extremes of a contradiction at the same time. Hence that answer must be supernatural. That is why all the answers that are not supernatural are imperfect: for they only embrace one of the contradictory terms, and they can always be denied by the other.

wow that was long...deep tho...like the grand canyon...