the weather here's been cold for the past couple weeks. the change was really abrupt, on september 30th it was sunny and 80 degrees out and on october 1st it was cloudy and about 50 degrees, and it's been that way ever since, with one sunny exception. the lack of a gradual temperature decrease takes away from the autumn feeling around here, where you feel the first chill of the year and it reminds you of all the previous chills and autumns.

along with the change in weather came changes in people's behavior and habits, most notably with food and clothing. for some reason as soon as it got cold, a horde of popcorn vendors materialized on the streets, selling bags of popcorn that taste exactly like Honey Smacks the cereal. really, i don't see the connection here. street vendors also started selling sugar cane and chestnuts, which is one familiar thing at least.

the clothing change is the most remarkable to me. during the summer, the locals dressed really casually, in tank tops and thin white tshirts and slacks; when it was really hot the men would pull their shirts up and rest them on their nipples leaving most of their torso bare, it was quite attractive. as soon as it got cold, however, everyone started wearing dark-colored blazers and suits around town, really fancy stuff. it feels unnatural buying sticks of pork meat from a guy in a full on three-piece suit. i guess they don't really buy into the idea of sweatshirts or casual long-sleeved clothing around here. if the headmaster at my primary school thought i was young and immature before (the impression that i got), he must be thrilled when i show up to school in a bright yellow sweatshirt and sandals these days.

this past sunday me and duncan taught sunday school to five kids at kate's niece's apartment, our first one. i thought the kids would be like 9 or 10 years old so i prepared accordingly, but when we got there they were 14-17. we scrapped the black and white pictures for them to color and instead taught them the creation story using a chalkboard. it went pretty well, they were pretty attentive and asked a couple questions. afterwards they told us the buddhist creation story, at least the local version of it. this is gonna be a regular weekly thing from now on, next sunday we're gonna cover the fall.

one more thing, kate told me last week that she got CCTV-9, one of the nationally run television channels to agree to come down here in december and tape the chorus singing a couple christmas songs. i'm not clear on the details or the exact likelihood of this happening, but the idea of being broadcast on national tv to a billion people makes me miss my mommy, or the halcyon days of my youth. whatever.

i've put off writing about it for a couple days but i guess there's no point...our dog jiujiu died two nites ago. she'd been sick for about a week and a half with all sorts of diseases; she had worms, an eye infection, stomach and leg rashes, nausea, and a fever. we gave her local human worm and diarrhea medicine and had some special dog worm medicine sent in from the states and we took her to two doctors, one for humans and one for animals, and they each gave her a shot. we went to the animal doctor on the last day; after he gave her the shot she had a big seizure and went through a cycle of having a seizure, sleeping, and barking at nothing for the rest of the day, until she had an extended seizure for about two hours and passed away around 2 am.

we buried her in an uncultivated plot of land on campus. ben, our school liasion, brought tools and his little daughter brought some forget-me-nots to lay on her grave.

i dreamed about her last nite, for the first time. we had her for a month, 9/1 - 10/1...the students loved to come to our end of campus and play with her in the afternoons and the teachers always asked after her. so long, jiujiu, we miss you.

next wednesday is China's national Liberation (uh...yeah) Day, so we get 7 days off, from 10/1-10/7. of course this is china, so they're making us teach this saturday and sunday to make up for two of the lost days. doesn't that kinda defeat the point of a vacation? apparently the gov't just decided this today, so every school in the country has classes this weekend. i've said it before...freaking commies.

this afternoon i was already kind of put out because the primary school had informed me in the morning that i had to work this weekend and our dog's been sick and not eating for a week, and then at the basketball game in the afternoon the 'coach' didn't play me at all in the second half (i'm not sure why) and our team lost by 2, our first loss of the semester. i was just feeling pissy so as soon as the game ended i left and rode straight back to my apt at the middle school. so i can't make fun of immature nba players anymore, just the funny looking ones.

it doesn't seem like much looking back on the events of the day, but today i felt kind of cramped and suffocated here for the first time. after dinner i asked xujun to take me for a ride in the mountains and he took me to some random strip of grass near the river and we laid down and looked at the (shooting) stars. the sky was much clearer than it is in town, it reminded me of all the other times and places i've laid down to watch shooting stars. i'd make a joke about being comforted by a guy taking me to lay down in the mountains to look at shooting stars with him, but there's not much i can really add to that.

one day i was in town and i said 'good morning' to some acquaintances and they just stared at me and said 'what' in chinese, so i repeated myself and they laughed and asked me why i was saying 'big brother touches you'. i guess that doesn't make sense if you don't speak chinese, but i thought it was pretty darn funny.

the chorus finally started this week. it's about 40 kids, which is what i requested. it's pretty fun, we meet in the afternoons after classes are over and i can teach them whatever songs i want; i pretty much have complete control over my little workforce, i mean chorus.

nobody in the school stays up past 11 pm. lately i've reverted to a vampire so i end up roaming the halls of our apartment (ok hall) at all hours of the night looking for someone to ponder the imponderables with, such as, do they really show all 82 rockets games on tv here? the school gate even gets locked around 11 or 12 so i can't leave campus without having to scale the multiple levels of strategically placed glass shards to get back in.

by the way, chinese chocolate is the most disgusting thing ever. it tastes like stale fudge made from spinach and it doesn't dissolve; when you chew it, it flattens out like gum instead of breaking apart.

what's wrong with these people? why do they sleep so early? tara and duncan wake up everyday to go running at 5:45, the mere thought of which makes me fall to the floor and curl up in a little ball. i might have to start sitting out on the pavilion overlooking the river and softly murmur verses about the moon at midnight to myself. as they say, nighttime heightens, sharpens each sensation. actually nobody says that, unless you're the Phantom, which means you ride a horse dressed in purple spandex and nothing but. bedtime.

i need to start being careful of what i say and who i say it around. about 3 or 4 weeks ago a few of us were eating dinner at the main western restaurant in town with some teachers from the primary school. Also with us was the primary school's security guard, who i refer to as The Professional (this is the guy who's made comments such as 'I'm the number 1 citizen of Baojing...not number 2, number 1' and 'if you walk around town with me a couple times nobody will dare to mess with you.' one nite during the second summer camp he took me out to dinner at a nice hotel in town, just the two of us, and ordered a steak for me and a couple bottles of beer for himself. halfway through the second bottle he went to the karoake machine and serenaded me with three chinese love songs. you know, since i was the only other person in the room. i'm getting the shakes just writing this down.)

during dinner that nite at the western restaurant, i half-jokingly said that since the restaurant served western food, they should let me sing western songs on my guitar; all i would want as my fee would be unlimited drinks for all the foreign teachers (they have great pearl milk teas, milkshakes, and fresh juices). before i could suck another tapioca ball into my mouth, The Professional had the restaurant manager over and was excitedly jabbering at her in the baojing dialect. she left after a few minutes and i promptly forgot about the whole thing until three days ago when i went back to the restaurant. as soon as we sat down, the manager came up to me and asked if i could still come to the restaurant once a week to sing. i was kinda surprised so i said sure, why not, and she said great, how about monday from 7:30 to 8:30 pm?

so yesterday i debuted at the western restaurant. they made fliers and a big poster for the evening; the manager even came into my class at the primary school that morning and dragged me outside to confirm that i was still coming. it went off better than i expected, they had two mikes prepared and there was a decent number of people, not too many and not too few. the audience was pretty receptive though maybe they were just applauding me for bringing along nicky and tara for them to leer at. duncan even came up and sang a couple songs...next time nicky and tara are gonna do a few numbers too. at the end the owner of the restaurant came out and we all shared a pitcher of beer. i estimate that all together we drank about 70 yuan of drinks, or a little less than 9 bucks, which isn't bad for an hour. i also get free drinks anytime i go to the restaurant but i don't wanna abuse that power right off the bat.

i'm really relieved that the evening went well, since i thought the whole situation had a lot of potential for getting me run out of town, or at least the restaurant. i made a joke to the other foreigners that next week i'd give a sermon...they thought it was a joke, at least. heh. anyways, i do hope it can be a good platform for that kind of stuff. last nite i sang 'and can it be' by chrch of rhythm and asked the audience in chinese to guess who the song was written to. of course nobody understood the lyrics, but according to karen they were curious, and hopefully some people will ask me about the songs next time.

the children's choir hasn't gotten put together yet. i bug the music teachers at the primary school almost everyday about it, and they keep putting it off. yesterday they said they'd get it together next week; i think the hard part is figuring out which students to put in the choir and when and where to meet, since it'll have to be outside of regular class hours.

jiujiu is getting pretty fat. i don't get it, a week ago she was just another normal undernourished chinese dog and now she's like a plump little princess. we give her 3 regular meals a day and she's always bouncing around with a lot of energy...where is it coming from? is it just from being in my presence? is it possible that i have the power to enfatten the things around me?

we got a puppy yesterday...not sure exactly what she is, but she has a bit of wolf in her, she's 2 months old. we decided to call her jiujiu, cause 9 represents longevity in the chinese culture, and also it sounds like jojo for josephine. so now jo, you have to name your first kid after me. anyways, jiujiu is super friendly, she's always going up to strangers and sniffing. she's pretty smart too, after we yelled at her for pooping and peeing in the house yesterday, she's waited till we go outside today to do her business, and she comes when you call her name. pictures to follow.

today was the first day of classes at the primary school too, i had two classes of fifth graders today. i didn't manage to convince the headmaster to give me fewer classes multiple times a week, so i have 13 different classes a week for a total of 700 kids. i'm gonna spend the week giving everybody names and practicing them, soon we'll have 13 different rasheeds, tupacs, and arwens running around china. the kids are great and most of the teachers are pretty cool, though i did get thrown into another basketball game tonite almost on the spur of the moment. this one was important, since the primary school teachers were playing the best club in town; apparently the primary school teachers have the best teachers' team in town and they split the last two games with that other club so there's a nice rivalry brewing. i was feeling a bit sick so i only played a quarter and a half and we managed to hang on to win 73-72, pretty exciting. being in china has definitely gotten me into much better shape.

i really like this country, more and more as i see and learn more about it.

a lot of people here have asked if i'm korean or philippino, maybe it's the dark skin (my sandal tan is worse than ever, my feet look like optical illusions). when i tell people i'm american they don't believe me, since i look asian. apparently if you're born in america you come out of the womb a full-on white person, even if your parents are from taiwan.

one nite when we were in xi'an i got really annoyed at karen because i was talking with this guy, will (the son of one of the jishou college officials), about america and different attitudes and stereotypes that americans have towards chinese people, and karen cut in from behind and said 'pete's forgotten his roots and that he's not really american, he's chinese.' it wasn't the first time she's made a comment like that but for some reason i went off on her that nite and started rambling about the melting pot of america and how there're no 'real' americans anyways and such...to her credit, karen's always quick to admit a mistake and she apologized.

it's definitely been interesting being the only chinese-american in the middle of hundreds of thousands of chinese and a handful of white americans (plus diane, the black lady, but her perspective is a whole other story). in case you're curious, i am definitely not going through any sort of racial identity crisis. boo to those. for me, at least. i'm really glad for my background and i think there's several obvious advantages that come with it. for example, talking with people. by the way, mom, when i first got here and tried speaking chinese to people they'd start trying to speak english back to me, but now random people that i talk to think that i'm a local till i tell them i grew up in america. also, a huge part of the culture is already familiar to me since i grew up with it, even if i neglected a lot of it, heh. the advantages go both ways, being familar with both american and chinese culture and mindsets allows me to explain certain things to both the americans and the chinese, and the chinese can understand me without a translator (most of the time). it may seem like only a formality, but it really makes a big difference, even with something as simple as being able to stop and have a short conversation with a friend on the street.

the moral is that more chinese americans need to come here and keep me company, so we can talk about buying mcdonald's hamburgers for 29 cents and smelling like mothballs and that stuff.

i start teaching on tuesday. i'm gonna be the only foreign teacher at the primary school across town; the situation so far is that i'll have 13 different classes of 50 students a week (not including the chorus). that's 650 kids, unless my pleadings to the school officials have changed their minds.

the high school starts tomorrow so all the other foreign teachers (except nicole, who's at the other primary school in town) start tomorrow. i'm thinking of pretending to be a student to sit in one on of kevin's classes and standing up halfway through the lesson and screaming ' this is bulls---! comunism sucks! taiwan forever!'. since my chinese is just that good. (it's not, really)

650

ug

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.