China

I stopped by Jared’s blog the other day and noticed a post entitled “coryandlacey“. It was written a while back, but I took the time to run it through a translator. This is what Jared said:

“Cory and lacey had to return to homeland, had the trifle moved! Once together was spending together the happy time regarding these two american, I now did not know had to say any! Only can be wishes their good luck! First time meets by chance is in Yucheng in the one, had not thought after the college entrance examination the summer vacation could in the more than half month time, at that time we become the friend together! Has the friend to come from the distant place, delight! Much less is two foreign friends! Did not know because any they must return to homeland ahead of time, the summer vacation distinction became parted forever!”

It was a really nice post. It was written in Chinese, and there are simply no good translators on the internet to make it sound right, but you get the idea.

Thanks Jared, we miss you too!

Apparently McDonalds thinks so. Ads in China can be pretty crazy, and it’s always great to see something that makes sense to a Chinese person come out completely crazy when viewed by a westerner.

In this ad Yao Ming is either making bull horns while encouraging people to eat beef, or he’s worshipping Satan. You be the judge.

From: One Billion Users and Shanghaiist

[tags]Yao Ming, Satan, McDonalds[/tags]

China holds a special place in my heart. Lacey and I lived there for 9 months, and have only recently returned. Whenever I hear interesting news about the country, and especially it’s relation to the US, I plan to blog about it.

That brings us to today’s news from Atlanta. A panda cub has recently been born, and in a ceremony was named “Mei Lan“, or “Beautiful Atlanta“.

You can check out the article here, and here’s a short video of the MeiLan taking her first steps.

Technorati Tags: China, Panda

Sorry its been so long since we’ve posted! I’m not that great at it (I don’t even know how to put pictures up with posts) and Cory hasn’t felt like it. He says that now that we’re not in China nothing is exciting enough to post about. I figure people still want to know what we’re up to. Anyway, we haven’t even posted galleries from our Meizhou trip or our parents in Beijing yet. So hopefully we’ll get some of those pictures up soon. Basically, Cory’s right though. We aren’t leading that exciting lives anymore. We are trying to find jobs in NE and SD right now, looking at three cities mainly. We are just pingponging back and forth between our parents’ houses. So we are still jobless and homeless. And we miss China. But things are going pretty good. We are getting excited about a few job and art opportunities, excited to be home for Christmas, and have had fun doing a lot of talks in churches about our experience in China. So thanks for all your support and we hope you have a very happy Thanksgiving and are home with family to enjoy it.

 Yes our parents and Cory’s brother who have never travelled out of the country have arrived safe and sound in Beijing! Besides wearing them out with all the walking, I think they are doing good and we are having fun teaching them about Chinese culture. This is a picture of us at the Forbidden City!  

There are three new galleries up. One is of our trip to Grape Mountain and Yantai. We went with YaNan and Kyle to eat and buy this area’s famous grapes. They were delicious. Then we decided to go on to a city on the coast, Yantai. Yantai is a port city with some European history. We didn’t find too much to do there but ate at Pizza Hut and went to Wal-Mart which felt a little like home. We also went to a Daoist temple to look around. click here to see The next gallery is of a day of playing in the park with two of our students that also go to our church and we hang around with sometimes. click here to see The newest one is of a day we spent visiting with some church people. We all went to a church lady’s date farm. It was a lot of fun. We picked dates, shoveled peanuts, and did some cricket chasing! There are no pictures of our cricket chasing but we have some videos that I think Cory will post later. Yes, we caught a lot of crickets and yes they were for the church people to take home and fry them up to eat! click here to see

Well, we’ve been to the big grape mountain, a city called Yantai, out to play on the net bridges at the park, and to a date farm where we chased crickets in the last few weeks. We of course have pictures from all these excursions and I’ve been waiting on Cory to post them, but I think I might have to take matters into my own hands! He’s been working with a new movie website he wants to start and hasn’t got around to posting them. So I guess I need to figure out how to save them to the flash drive and post them on the website so that you guys can get an update on what we’ve been doing. So hopefully within the next day or so there will be new galleries and posts. Thanks for your patience!

Jim and Melanie had Hannah Avada on Sunday, September 10 at 3:36 AM.  Congratulations!
Stats:
18 1/4 inches
6 lbs, 1 oz
+2 Ch/-2 Str

Ok, so this is a little late, the wedding was two or three months ago, but we would like to extend a heartfelt Congratulations to our friend Allison and her new husband. Our friend Emily just sent us some more pictures from the wedding that made us miss all you guys even more. So we thought we’d publish a little congratulations-sorry we couldn’t be there, hope everything is wonderful-on our website. We love you guys!

Pingdu has a very rich history, longer than that of Qingdao, Hong Kong, and many of the major cities in modern China.

Before the first Chinese emperor, in what was known as the “Warring States” period, Pingdu was a capitol of a Warlord’s Kingdom. This particular Warlord was fighting the kingdom of Modern Day Beijing. While the enemy army was camped, the Pingdu army fixed swords to the horns of several bulls, lit their tails on fire, and sent them into the enemies camp.

The bulls killed many soldiers, and sent the camp into a frenzy, allowing Pingdu to win the war.

The picture is from a large statue on the highway into Pingdu.

We have 2 new galleries up on the website. One is from Lacey, Kyle and Yanan’s trip to Lao Shan (Old Mountain). The second is from Lacey, Brett and I’s trip to Lao Long Wan (Old Dragon Bay). Check them out at the gallery page here.

Our German and Italian friends, Lara and Domenico, have opened up an ice cream shop in Qingdao! They serve Italian gelato ice cream. Its wonderful and their cute shop is doing wonderfully! We are so happy for them. I had mint ice cream for the first time in China! While we (Kyle, YaNan, and I) were there, a little puppy they had rescued from the street was very sick. It was amazing to see how caring they were. While busy with a newly opened ice cream shop and two kitties at home, they stayed up all night taking care of the poor little pup. We hear he is doing better now, hopefully for good. They are amazing people and we are so proud of their wonderful Italian ice cream shop and so thankful to have them as friends. The best ice cream in Qingdao! Check out pictures of the shop here

Last night we had our third “English Worship” at our local church in Pingdu. We sing songs, read Bible passages in English, and assume that the church people will glean a little English knowledge from our presentation.

I was responsible for planning last night’s meeting. Part of this includes translating Bible passages into Chinese, and I found out that this is a little more difficult than you might think.

Our lesson last night was on the Beattitudes. “Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the Earth.” Now, does ‘Earth’ refer to the planet Earth (Like a Revelation New Heaven and New Earth kind of thing), or does it refer to the soil (an agricultural thing). This was anintellectual debate, I opted for planet, but I could be wrong. A couple other things were a little more problematic.

Luckily, when Chinese poeple read something they don’t like or understand they grimace just a little bit. I was able to read the congregation pretty well. In translating the Beattitudes I stuck to the big words exclusively. “Blessed are those who are persecuted for Righteousness’ sake.” Verbs aren’t conjegated in Chinese as they are in English, so I had to translate Persecuted as to Persecute, making the passage look like “Blessed are those who persecute for righteousness’ sake”.

The craziest mistake I made was leaving out a character from the title of a song. I translated “I am a C” as “I am a Christian” when I presented the song to the congregation. Unfortunately, I left out the last character in “Christian”, effectively making the tilte “I am Christ”. I don’t think they would have enjoyed singing “I am Christ” very much.

Fortunately, we were able to edit “I am Christ” when it came up. And I offered to persecute Lacey in front of the congregation (I gave her a loving shove) and explained that while I was persecuting she was persecuted. I think they understood.

If nothing else, at least we didn’t have to speak over the drone of firecrackers like we did the previous week. If you remember that was the Money God Festival. Rest assured, Chinese Christians don’t celebrate the Money God Festival.

I wanted to let everyone know the bad news.  Our internet is gone.  :-(  Our 6 months came up and we were unable to renew it at the school. 

What does this mean?

• No pictures.  Most net cafes don’t allow use of flash drives or other such nifty devices, so we probably won’t be able to upload a bunch of photos anymore.
• Less frequent chatting.

What doesn’t this mean?

• We won’t drop off the face of the Earth.  Everyone will still hear from us via Email and this Blog.  If anything, emails and blogs will take a heightened priority in that we won’t be able to procrastinate writing them anymore.
• Cory will go insane without regular internet fixes.  This may happen, eventually, but for now there’s a net bar down the street and (though the first floor smells like the toilet) we can go there pretty much whenever we want.

With any luck our internet hiatus will be resolved within a month our two.  We’ll keep you all posted!

Here’s the school’s new logo. It’s two pandas, and if you look closely you can tell that they’re actually two “Care bear” pandas. They’re proudly displaying our country’s flags.

Hey everyone! I hope you all know that today is 财神节. China’s Money God Festival. Let’s all get together and pray for money! After that we can light off really obnoxious firecrackers. I don’t know what it is about Chinese people and firecrackers, but they love them. They’re always lighting them off to celebrate. For instance, if someone opens a new business, you light off firecrackers. If someone has a celebration, like a wedding or anniversary, you light off firecrackers. The worst is the holidays. Over Spring Festival there were 2 days where the whole city sounded like a war zone.

Today isn’t quite so bad, but it’s still really obnoxious. Of course, I think any holiday celebrating the God of getting more money is a little obnoxious to begin with. Anyway, I wouldn’t be a good Chinese ambassador without letting you know of today’s significance.

I’m going to post a pic of the Money God in all his glory in hopes that I’ll find a few more bucks in my pocket later on. I’ll let you know if anything mystical happens ;-)!!!

We rented ad space on a bus, maybe the best bus in Pingdu (it goes all over town). We shellacked a bunch of pictures on it,
and sent it off through the town.

Here are the pictures.

Those bears are pandas, Care Bear pandas, in fact. We stole them off of a website, and they’re the new school’s logo. Hehe.

Just to let eveyone know the summer program, as of yesterday afternoon, is officially over! We’ve had a gruelling three weeks, and it all comes to an end tommorrow. You may or may not hear from is in a few days, as we’ll likely take some time off to recuperate. When we come back we’ll have a gallery of summer program shots and a score of new videos.

We had a party last night. A bunch of people came over and we made dumplings and ate until we were full!

Here are some pictures.

Yanan and Jarod (a visiting student from Yanan’s hometown) are hard at work cutting cabbage.

Andrea is one of our employees. She is going into high school next year and has amazing English. This is her friend Hudson, but you can call him Handsome.

Brett and his girlfriend for the evening. We couldn’t get him to say if she was really his girlfriend. Apparently all of Brett’s women are on lease.

Here we’re hard at work making dumplings.

Yanan did all the cooking. Here she is relaxing for a spell before another onslaught of dumplingy goodness.

Happy Chinese Valentine’s Day to everyone. Here’s a quick pic of the bouquet of flowers I brought Lacey this morning. It includes Lillies, Gerber Daisies, and something else that Lacey told me what they were but I forgot… Oh well.

Tonight we ought to be enjoying dumplings and other goodies. I’ll let you know how the evening transpires.

…and I had to walk through this.

and this

and this

Not only did I have to walk through it all, I also had to drag Werewolf through the mud.

Fortunately I had the boots. Werewolf is hurting, though.

This Monday is Chinese Lover’s Day, and guess which two young lovebirds got their pictures in the paper!?

That’s Kyle and Yanan. The headline reads: “Foreigner” Husband Celebrates Chinese Lover’s Day.

Yanan is quoted in the paper as saying, “My husband is an American. We only celebrated the Western Valentine’s Day before. But, this year we got married. Now he will celebrate a romantic and warm Chinese Lover’s Day with me!”

We’ll see rather or not Kyle really does it!!! I know I’m skeptical.

Apparently my mother was dissatisfied with the last post. It’s so difficult to please some people (even with Transformers!). I suppose she is my mother. Anyway, here are some pictures from the middle school class I teach everyday. They’re hard at work writing dialogues which they’ll present a little later in the class. Further down is a video I shot with my camera after telling them to “be crazy”.

The video is not on the front page (since those of you with dial-up tend to complain about those sorts of things, Mother! The two main characters are Brett and Mickey, Brett being our goofy but lovable school employee, and Mickey being the rowdy middle schooler. Hope you enjoy! Read the rest of this entry »

We meet a lot of weird people in China. And weird people in China are generally attracted to us because, I think, Chinese people do their best to ignore them. One such person we’ve met goes by the name of “Everlasting Peter” (Yes, Everlasting Peter-he gets upset when you call him Peter). He speaks poor English with a voice that squeals and squelches like chalk on a chalkboard.

Lately, he’s taken to writing Kyle instant messages. Lots of them. These bizarre messages have been collected over a period of about a week and a half (and apparently he thinks Kyle is Tyler).

Mr. Tyler. After one quarrel with one sophisticated conservative stranger involved with Chinese law problem. I lost merry heart and English brain. I had supposed…

A party and strive to do something with friends. But, disappointed. I admire your abundant hands on experience. Your English club will be booming no wonder.

Congratulations. Invite you for dinner someday. I can see from your eyes that if I only know some English, I’ll be embarrassed one day. We are really in common.

A party and strive to do something with you friends. But disappointed. I admire your abundant hands on experience. You’re English club will be booming no wonder.

Mr. tyler. Welcome to my hometown mincun to enjoy watermelon festival. Free buffet. Free ticket. Travel the Chinese word mountain shape mountain landscape.

han dynasty resort spot, jiao lai large canal. taste the biggest and sweetest melon never you saw. Sincerely, Everlastingpeter

Mr. Tyler. I’ll detail you the historic mountain word mountain campaign between Communist party military and Japanese military, national party military. Exciting.

Mr. Tayler. Welcome to my hometown. Xana du mountain word mountain. No traffic mess, military and terrorist tumult. But measureless cavern and ancient valley.

Mr. C. Sunny greenery and singing river, Black bird and cicada. You can hunt scorpion under stone cave with girlfriend. No legacy of Bushshi or Saddam’s missile bomb.

Mr. Tyler. I wonder why you do love China more than America. Tamiflu was invented by America. One year later, China announce itself has created the drug authorized.

In market for sale. Skateboard is in fashion America current. Then popular with China. Maybe you mainia. Or with other indication as scout. Or refugee or illegal AM.

Mr.c If you distribute a gift case packing tamiflu drug. Maybe you’ll be tycoon but illegal in china. hope you wanna not.

Damn hilarious joke!

Mr. C as you know, Bush prefer spicy food for aspiration. Otherwise restrained to be coward.

Hot spicy food. i love you too from today. i love bush.

HOW ARE YOU UP? MR.C. Have you seen today’s isle news? China vice military chairman guo bo xiong visit America claiming for cooperative military rehearsal.

Converse the former neutral policy! Gotcha or no? What a prank! Look and go ahead! Although you resident in China, someday we all perhaps be terrored by terrorist.

Mr.c my new nickname is Gottlieb Nistelrooy. Paradice dream!

MR.TYLER. BUSH attempts to access china agriculture market. Aim to disable China farmer.

Deploy the APEC. WTO FREE trade organization to crack china quota and single rule. Gottlieb. nistelrooy. Yours ever

actually. China agriculture supply is not abundant. So in China materialism is major predominance. Agriculture is basis for others. so after WTO. America overplus.

Matter maybe average China, but China farmer is ignored eventually. As you know. America always encounter historical overplus crisis. Maybe on the house for china.

Mrtayler. Currently US dollar change rate is down. Maybe caused by America overplus productivity. As bush promised to his country. He will realize without…

…doubt. Maybe in Bush’s eye China peasant is more terrible than Iraqi. So with the implication to promote China agriculture productivity. Can you recommend any…

…high productivity species? I admire western tomato festival. If do me great favor. I’ll pay you price. gottlieb nistelrooy. yours ever

China peasant is not clever than Korea. Fraud by official WTO propaganda. Never realize this point. But Korea protest intense. So you can see Korea is occupying…

…China land potentially.

Gizmo – A free phone for your computer

Many of you have heard about Skype, and my parents and I have talked frequently using Google’s gTalk program. These services allow you to use your computer as a telephone, and can allow you to call someone’s landline phone.

The Gizmo project has just ended prices between China and the United States. So, any of you who download this program, and sign up to the service can call us here in China for free! Also, we are able to call you. I suggest poeple download this and sign up for it. And let me know if you do.

[tags]Gizmo, Gizmo Project[/tags]

We’ve just started our summer program. Three weeks of intense, grueling work, with about 75 new kids. It’s pretty crazy (especially since Sunday night we really couldn’t tell you what we’d be doing Monday morning). Lacey and I each have 4 new classes a day, while Kyle takes the brunt of it with 5.

Kyle is the workhorse of the operation. He teaches in the early morning, and leads a group of the 30-40 kids in singing in the afternoon. There was a farmer had a dog and bingo was his name-o. B-I-N-G-O…
Lacey has 4th graders in the morning. And leads the big group in games and crafts. On Monday they made paper-bag puppets, and yesterday name tags. Today we’ll be having a raucous and rowdy game of upset the fruit basket.

I lucked out and got the 7th and 8th graders. It’s shaping up to be a pretty fun class. We’ve been discussing movies, soccer, Charlie Chaplain, and anything else that tickles are collective fancy.

We’ll have pictures up soon.

Just a quicky!  Our galleries from our vacation to the Forbidden City and Suzhou are back up at the gallery site.

The Forbidden City is here, Suzhou here.

It’s not easy getting a bike fixed in China. Especially if your problems are out of the norm for most bicycle repairmen. Unfortuneately Werewolf (my bike that I mentioned here) had a bad axle. And when I rode my bike it grind as I pedaled. While riding my bike would go errrrrrk…errrrrrk…errrrrrk. We went to Bike Alley (the street where 99% of Pingdu’s Bikes are sold) to get Kyle’s battery fixed, and my pedal fixed, AGAIN. We began with Werewolf’s paw (you may remember about that from this post). I have had constant problems with Werewolf’s paw since the day it fell off. It grinds when I pedal it, and the nut loosens. The local bike shops only hammer the pedal on and tighten the nut. They literally take a big hammer, whack, whack, whack, whack, and tighten up the nut. I’ve had about 6 different people do this when the pedal had gotten loose. They tell me the bike’s fixed after that. I ride a little bit. After a few days, or a single day, or in some cases 10 minutes, it grinds again. Finally, we decided to take it in to the peoeple that I bought the bike from. They looked at it a little, whack, whack, whack, put a washer between the nut and the pedal, and told us it was fixed. No matter how many times we said it wasn’t fixed, they told us it was fixed. It creaked as I rode it away. Then we went to get Kyle’s battery fixed. It had potentially gotten fried from the power surge. We were pretty nervous about this operation, but our fears were relieved as we talked to a very friendly, and very skilled repair man. He new his electric bicycles inside and out. He opened up the battery case, checked the three batteries inside, and put everything back together. We asked him to plug in the charger for a few minutes because it tends to start smoking. He did this, and replaced it when it began to smoke. The coolest thing that this guy did was replace the glue inside the battery. Often when you buy a new product there’s that plasticy/rubbery glue inside. It’s reminiscent of dry rubber cement, and the battery’s wiring was held in place by this stuff. He pulled out the dry stuff when he looked at the battery, and then asked us for a lighter. He needed a lighter to remelt the dried glue, and drip it into place so that the wiring would stay secure. We don’t smoke, and no one around had a lighter. His answer was as cool as it was crazy. He took an old bicycle battery (which looks like a tiny car battery). The two poles were flat pieces of tin, and were clearly exposed. He placed a long metal stick between the poles. It instantly began to grow a brilliant orange. You could tell the man had done it before, because he was quick to whip it away before ig got too hot. He then held the violently orange stick against the globs of plastic, allowing the wet glue to drop in place on the wires inside the battery. When Kyle and I watched him doing this our eyes widened. At first we were sure he was going to hurt himself, but we soon saw that he could do this all day. Just puttin’ a metal stick on the battery to make it hot.

Church founded by Lottie Moon leaves small temple for new building

Check out this article Kyle ran across today.  Our church in Pingdu was started by a renown Missionary to China, Lottie Moon.  Apparently their relationship to the church runs considerably deeper than we thought.  Members from a baptist church in Alabama come here frequently, and were here when the church opened in May.

The article itself is pretty interesting.  Go check it out.

The entrance to our house not only contains a small swamp, but also contains a large metal box which is the hub of every electrical wire coming and going to the apartment. It just happens to rest under the 2^nd floor ledge, and I presume much of the sludge ran over it on it’s waterfall plummit out of the upper levels.

I think the machine is broke.

We enetered our apartment just as the sun was beginning it’s decent into the pacific. As the rooms began to darken we realized that our lights were funny. They worked, but they’d flicker. We realized that the TV didn’t work at all. We went back and forth through the house testing plugins and realized that, while our lights turned on, the plugs didn’t work at all. We discovered this while hosting high schoolers during a movie night. No TV, no DVD player, but we’re having a Movie Night.

We called our people again, and they were able to turn on the power. It turned on with a bang. Lots of bangs. I don’t know what in the world they did, but the filament in the livingroom’s lightbulb exploded. The glass bulb was intact, but the rest was a gray-streaked mess. Everyone jumped when the light blew up, but we assumed that the power was functioning correctly. We were wrong. Kyle plugged his electric bicycle’s battery into the socket in order to check the electricity. He did this before the next round of power surges hit the house. The battery began smoking. Our high school girls were still a little on edge from the first power surge, but were even more freaked out when fumes began streaming out of the battery. I calmed them by telling them that these things happen in America everyday. Of Course they don’t happen in American everyday!

Despite these problems we were able to calm down the girls, and open up the snacks. The one male in the class began talking about how kids with bad test scores can still get into good colleges if they buy off the admission officials. But, apparently the practise is illegal. We finally put the movie on the laptop, and everyone huddled around on the Che’s Lounge for a relaxing eveing of the Chronicles of Narnia. The battery died towards the end, and we walked our guests out of the development, and into the safety of the streets.

Two days later it was time to fix that bike battery…

* * *

Just when China can’t get any crazier, it exceeds your expectations. We had a movie night on Tuesday with some of our High School students. We watched the Chronicles of Narnia, and are considering having them read The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe as part of their english class.

The experience didn’t go quiet as well as we had planned.

We got to the house and realized that the water was off. We’re not surprised by this. Apparentaly, the pipes leading from our drain are sub-par, and all of our waste has apparently been piling in the 2^nd floor apartment’s bathroom. Now, I say waste, but I mean something entirely more putrid. The owners (who fortunately aren’t living there now) called to let us know about the mess, and politely asked us to stop using our toilet.

We couldnt’ poop and pee at our house for 2 days, and although on the second day they fixed the problem, they forgot to turn our water on. It wasn’t turned back on until we called them, while our guests were at the house.

Now, I say they fixed the problem. I use the term fix lightly. As I mentioned before our waste (poop and pee) had been collecting in their bathroom. To fix the mess they busted the threshold off of the front door, opened the pipes like a fire hydrant, and flooded the cement floors. This pushed all the material out of their house, where it collected in the garage where we park our bikes, and on the floor of the house’s common entrance. Thanks guys, thanks.

There is currently 2 inches worth of sludge on the bottom floor of our house. When I first saw this mess I knew we’d have to step in it if I didn’t do something. I picked up a piece of brick and cement, and tossed it on the floor. This was to provide a stepping stone in between the entrance and the first step. Little did I know that there was so much muck on the ground. The brick was quite heavy, and the splash it made mottled my shirt and shorts with large drops of muck.

After that I went upstairs to host our guests. (I had to change shortly after greeting them).

*  *  *

Look for more tommorrow.

We’re celebrating the 4th here in China! We don’t have any fireworks, or grill outs, or any patriotical singing, but Lacey and I hummed the Battle Hymn of the Republic while putting a flag up in front of the school!

Here I am on the school’s balcony. I had to climb through a window to get out here, it was fun.

This is me putting up the flag, the sidewalk is below.

The fruits of our labor. After putting the flag up Kyle, Lacey and I stood outside the school and sang the National Anthem while some construction workers next door stared at us. Oh say can you see?…

Since coming to China Kyle began calling me “Mr. Cory” almost immediately. It’s become the name that many of the kids use to talk to me. They either call me “Cory”, or “Mr. Cory”. Yesterday, I was given a new nickname. Yao Guai. Yao is roughly translated as “evil”, “ghost”, or “devil”. Guai simply means “weird”. Put together, Yao Guai is the Chinese equivalent of calling someone “the Boogey Man”.

I’m pretty proud of this nickname. And I’ll tell you how I got it. Every Sunday afternoon we have a class of 17 1st and 2nd graders-mostly boys-that raid and pillage our school for 2 hours. Almost all of these kids are a little naughty, and some are really naughty. In between two 45 minute classes they get a 30 minute break. We used to try and have organized games with the kids, but we soon found out that the favored game of 1st and 2nd game Chinese Boys is the get chased around in the attic by the scarey white guy.

I tried to avoid the kids yesterday. I got to school shortly before the break started, and attempted to hide in the computer room, checking my email and doing a little reading, until it was my turn to teach. I thought I’d be fine, but after 5 minutes of break time a little hand opened the door, poked his head inside, screamed, and began running up the stairs. When I turned to look, I realized it wasn’t just one little head, but about 10. They all screamed as they clambored up the stairs, and becuae of their tenacity I decided I was obliged to chase them.

I’m no stranger to chasing these kids. I’ve got it down to a science. The room we go to is a large rectangle with pillars spaced down the middle. It gives the kids just enough cover to run around so that they think I won’t catch them. But, although they can squeeze through the narrows where the two pillars are nearest to the walls, I always manage to meet them on the other side. At this point I spread my arms out wide, and slowly force them into the corners. Eventually they have no room to run, and often slide a bit on the tile, ending up on their haunches.

At this point the magic happens. I stare at them right in the eyes, and wait until they start to wonder what I’m doing. Then I roar and begin tickling them on their stomachs and backs. They squirm and giggle, and love it. And, maybe, I love it too. After all, I am the Yao Guai.

Ok, so those of you that I’ve told the weather is like Valentine, hot and dry, I was wrong. Apparently June is their rainy season. This is great for the plants and to give us a break from the stiffling heat. However, if you have just moved into a contruction zone and your only mode of transportation is a bike, this is not good news. This morning as I was dragging my bike through the mud (which is not like Valentine mud, but lilke Iowa mud unfortunately) and it was caking up on my slip-on sandles so that my feet were beginning to weigh about ten pounds each and I was in great danger of losing a shoe in the mud, three construction workers ahead of me began laughing hysterically. This is not unusual, we are actually their morning entertainment and we do a pretty good job of it. We usually ignore them, being slightly annoyed by their mirth, but trying not to show it. This time I began to laugh too. I could just imagine what it would look like to see a crazy foreigner dressed in a blouse and capris and slip-on sandals dragging a bike through the mud because the mud is so caked on it the wheels won’t turn anymore and stepping in about three inches of mud each time she lowers a very heavy muddy foot through a construction zone that she lives in. They really must think we’re crazy. So this time, apparently because I was willing to laugh with them, one of the workers walked toward me, yelling at me and still laughing hysterically and grabbed my bike, lifted it up, and carried across the muddiest part to higher ground. He just laughed when I thanked him and said something like “she can talk!” This was the highlight of my day, and I’ve decided that we need galoshes!

Hey everybody. Here’s a little picture of our Chuar Lady. Chuar is brilled food on sticks, and it’s delicious. She’s a cute little lady that stands outside of Jia Le Jia and makes us food.

10. No neighbors. We can be loud, obnoxious, and pretty much do what we want.

9. The doors. Every door in the house is a sliding glass panel. They remind you of Japanese style paper doors, but are a little sexier. One interesting tidbit about the door is that the glass is textured to prevent viewing, but one side is more transparent than the other. It’s freaky that, in the bathroom, you can see people clearly as they walk by. And get you get a little nervous each time you use it that they can see you too.

8. Ceiling. We live in an attic. Usually in China that means that you have to crouch whenever you’re near the walls of the apartment. This isn’t the case in ours. Our ceilings are really, really high. They’re open air and lovely.
7. Light. Along with the airiness provided by the ceiling we get a ton of light in the house. The kitchen is immaculate. The living room as a particularly interesting triangular window. It’s only drawback is that you can’t open it. We hired a guy to fix it…but he never did. (Probably doesn’t want to climb the stairs, I think).

6. Church. We don’t go to church, church comes to us! We’re so excited that there is a church just around the corner and down a block from our apartment. It’s really cool too, it’s on the second floor of a grocery store. The pastor is Korean, and they sing praise songs before the message. Last time we went someone actually played a guitar (though it was horribly out of tune.) The people are uber friendly and we like it a lot.
5. Washing Machine. In the last apartment the washing machine was in the kitchen, but rather than draining into the sink it drained through 30 feet of tubing into the bathroom. It also leaked a whole bunch. We installed it in the kitchen of this apartment, and drilled a hole through the wall so that it can drain into the bathroom. Showering turned into a unique experience when you were suddenly met with cold, soapy washing machine water at your feet instead of the traditionally warm and clear shower fair. However, we were able to fix this by running a tube directly into the drain. On top of that our clothes dry crazy fast on the balcony.
4. Balconies. Which brings us to our next item. The balconies are cool. We can cook on them, eat on them, throw our garbage off them, anything. OK, OK, we’ve never thrown our garbage off the balconies… Unless we don’t want to carry it downstairs… Which is pretty frequent, but c’mon, it is a construction zone!
3. Satellite TV. Now this is cool, and has already been mentioned. We have satellite TV. We get CNN, HBO, Cinemax, Starz, Cartoon Network, and several other top name channels. All for the low low (and one time) price of 1000 RMB. (That’s $120, giving us big name cable for ETERNITY!) It’s OK to be jealous. We understand.
2. Furniture. The couches at the old apartment were slightly nicer than sitting on wood. Slightly in that they don’t splinter… But now we have the plushest most comfy couches ever. Also, we have a coffee table that makes me want to reenact early Hebrew festivals. The table is a 2 inch slab of granite resting on wooden legs. I could easily buy a ram, slaughter it on the table, and burn it without harming the table at all! It would be worth it just to prove it’s true.
1. Bathroom. Finally, the greatest thing about the apartment is the bathroom. The western toilet puts the world back to how it should be. And, the shower tank is cool. We can set it to turn on and off in the morning before we get up, so that we can shower just as soon we crawl out of bed.

We know you’ve all been pining away, waiting for us to take pictures of the new apartment. Well, they’re here.

Update: We added a few new pictures to the gallery.

Nothing like a new mug to spruce up one’s coffee consumption in the morning. Lacey and I found these gems in a little market near our noodle restaraunt.

Her’s features Hello Kitty (what else), and Hello Kitty’s friendly golden ram. …Golden Ram… I don’t get it. I don’t think anyone does. But it’s a ram and Lacey’s a Ram, so I guess it works.

Mine has a funny looking stumpy guy wailing on a guitar that’s twice as big as he is. He looks pretty crazy, and there are dancing carrots in the background. Or maybe those are umbrellas…

In the post Movin’ Out I made reference to Indiana Jones style “Leap of Faith” jumps. I think I need to explain that a little more.

This is image was taken in front of the door leading to our house. That is a large, ugly ditch, that completely surrounds the door like a moat. That plank going across the ditch is the way we get inside. We have to climb onto it (and it’s a little wobbly) if we want to go inside the house. We’re all afraid that it will eventually break, but it’s a risk we take daily.

I guess that’s what we put up with living in a construction zone. Whose idea was that anyway…

In this picture you can see just how deep and muddy/watery it is. The whole ground of the develop is like this. It’s really muddy and crappy when it rains. When we first moved in that plank wasn’t there, and we literally had to jump across the ditch onto the threshold of the door to get inside. Thus, the comparison to Indy’s “Leap of Faith” in Last Crusade.

I had a horrendous experience on my way to school this morning. First of all, Werewolf has seen better days lately. (Werewolf, for those that don’t know, is my bicycle). And his left pedal has been making more and more noise the past few days. I realized yesterday that the nut holding the pedal together was loose, and had it tightened. Unfortunately recovery wasn’t instant and he a severe relapse. This morning on my way to school the pedal, and the piece of metal attaching it fell off.

So, I had to walk pretty much the whole way to school this morning. It was a half hour’s walk. And, it was raining. Thunder storming actually. I did have an umbrella, but the walk was pretty miserable with my umbrella in one hand, dragging Werewolf along with the other.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. I think I’ll have to take a Taxi home tonight, and try and have Werewolf looked at tomorrow afternoon. I hope it doesn’t rain again.

Here’s gimp Werewolf.

Here’s the basket that contains the severed appendage as well as some drenched fliers sporting our English School.

Incidentally, Lacey’s bike is named Unicorn.

You know how when you flip through the radio stations you can just tell which one is the Christian station because the music sounds different? Well, it was like that when we tuirned the TV on last night and heard some band singing about Jesus and Jesus’ love. Lacey and I couldn’t believe it. I’m sitting at the couch this morning, drinking coffee and watching TV before Lace’ and I leave for Chinese Lessons. And the program that’s on is about two missionaries travelling through Tibet. We’re doing this in the middle of Communist China.

We’ve heard rumors from different people here about a magical device called Satelite TV. We’ve been told that’s it’s legal for foreigners to have it, but local Chinese people can not. We moved into the new apartment and quickly found out that all of the utilities Kyle paid for aren’t ready to be hooked up yet (cable, gas, telephone). So yesterday they went shopping for satelite.

It was great because they installed the satellite the same day that they decided to buy it. We have about 60 channels total, but most of them won’t work until the guys set up the box this morning. We did get two stations instantly, however. One of which I’m watching now. The first is TBN, a rather dry religious programming network. Currently there’s a guy plugging his book. The other is JCTV, which plays a lot of music videos and other blatantly religious programming.

After thinking about it, I’m not entirely surprised. The fact is that a large proportion of South Koreans are Christians, and many of them move to and work in this part of China. What’s really cool is that the first two channels that pop up (which don’t need to be set up) are the Christian channels. Also interesting is that the few Chinese language channels we have are from Taiwan.

It’s hard watching Chinese TV. Obviously we can’t understand a lick of it. It’s also really corny. There aren’t really any news programs that we watch. There are a lot of concerts on TV where they rehash the same songs over and over and over again. Unfortunately Chinese pop stars aren’t all that talented either. I hope this television gives our Chinese friends a new perspective on live. On life for Americans and Europeans, and for other Chinese people, like the Taiwanese.

Other great channels we ought to get: CNN, Fox News, ABC 5, ESPN, Nickelodeon, HBO, and my personal favorite Cartoon Network.

Update: We have all those channels and more. I have Cartoon Network in China, yeah!

Hey, just thought I’d drop a quick link to our German friend’s blog. Especially since they have a few pics up from our trip to Laizhou together. Their name’s are Lara and Dominico. You can find them here. They speak English really well, so be sure and leave a comment. (And find a good translator if you want to read anything, maybe babelfish, or Google).

I wrote this on Wednesday afternoon, 6-7-06, right after moving out.

Tuesday morning we were telling our new Chinese teacher that we would be moving to a new part of Pingdu sometime in the near future. It’s Wednesday afternoon now, and I’m in the new apartment. Living here. It happened pretty quickly, let me tell you why.

It happened on account of the following two things:

1. Our landlord asked us to get out. We made the mistake of mentioning to him early on that we’d be leaving several weeks before we actually left. I think his relationship with us was significantly severed at that point, and he hunting for a way to get us out quickly (and get a new renter in).My suspicion is that he has people in mind who want to rent the apartment now, and they’ll probably pay him more than we have been.
2. Our apartment is falling apart. All at once it seems. The bathroom had been leaking significantly about a month ago-we got that fixed. No sooner had we done that than the kitchen sink began leaking. Yesterday afternoon our neighbors underneath us showed up. I’d never seen them before, but they stayed around until Kyle told them 15 times that he’ll fix the sink-and even then they were unhappy he wouldn’t go down to look at their apartment. Besides these things, the shower head fell off the wall, the washing machine’s hose broke, and more of the coffee table’s finish wore away. It was certainly time to move before the apartment detached itself from the rest of the building and fell down onto the market below.

So we moved out. Last night was hectic, as we had a mad scramble of packing up all of our worldly possessions in rotted cardboard boxes and skinny plastic bags. We were still packing when the movers came to the apartment at 7am this morning. Lacey, bless her, was up at 4:30 this morning packing. She, by far, gets the award for most items packed.

We loaded our stuff onto a truck this morning and drove to the new apartment. Our apartment is brand new, so new that the landscaping and several of the other buildings are nowhere near complete. Our first order of business was to find enough planks to traverse the three ditches between the truck and our door. Thus negating the need of Indiana Jones “Leap of Faith” style jumps, which we’ve previously been accustomed to. Once we accomplished this there was the matter of the price. True to Chinese custom the movers said “this is too much work, we need more money” as soon as the truck was parked. In this particular instance I think they had a valid point, but I imagine they give this line to everyone they move for. The bargiaining began, and they were able to double their wages.

They moved up our stuff without a hitch, by tying it in bundles on their backs and trudging up the stairs. I was impressed. One guy carried our refrigerator up 6 flights of stairs by himself. They were friendly and efficient, though maybe a little greedy. So now it’s 3:40 in the afternoon. I’m tired and a little cranky. I’m writing this in OpenOffice (as we don’t have the internet here yet) and want to fall asleep. Hopefully we’ll head to the market soon and buy ourselves some furniture-like a mattress-so that we can sleep tonight.

Earlier this spring we taught an English Corner at a local Elementary School. It was during the week that Jessica came to visit us and I took some pictures. I hope they give an insite into what elementary-age Chinese kids are like.

Look at them here.

So yesterday’s post was a bit of a downer. So, since I’ve taken my second trip to the local web bar I thought I’d drop a bit of good news so that everyone knows things here aren’t totally bad.

We officially moved out today. We talked with the landlord, gave him our keys, and oficially ended the business relationship. He inspected the apartment, complained about a few things, and gave back our money (we moved out earlier than we had planned to).

This is significant for a few reasons. First of all, not only was there a fair amount of rent to pay back (which we were supposed to use, but didn’t), but there was a fairly substantial damage deposit.

Kyle, has been brooding over this meeting for days, feeling sure that we weren’t going to see a dime of that money. He was thinking that the landlord would cheat us out of it. That sort of thing happens in China frequently. When money changes hands, it doesn’t always find it frequently stays in those hands (even with deposits).

Our landlord is a nice guy! He’s a little gruff and rough around the edges, but he gets us our packages when we recieve them. He’s friendly and sociable to us most of the time. And he’s treated us fairly. There are decent poeple in China.

Hey everybody! Those of you in the know realize that Kyle recently bought a new house in another part of Pingdu. We had some problems with the landlord recently, and in two days were able to pack and move across town. We’re still getting adjusted to the new apartment, and don’t have internet there yet. I’m actually writing at a net cafe now.

Things are rough in China. We just moved, we’re trying to get things ready for our summer program, and the four of us our having some difficulty getting along with each other. …well, not all of us… I may or may not say more on this later. At any rate, your thoughts and prayers at this time would be appreciated.

Lacey and I, most of the time, are doing well. Lacey’s excited to get our things put away and organized in our room. We’ve bought a bunch of furniture already. On Tuesday we’re planning a painting extravaganza. Probably just white (no crazy stuff). The paint that came with the house comes off whenever you brush up against it. Our clothes and furniture take on a white sheen when left unattended. And despite our protests to our landlord the place didn’t get painted before we moved in.

Needless to say life in China is currently stressful, busy, but always exciting! We appreciate everyone who reads this blog frequently. We hope you enjoy the new look, and we hope to get it up to snuff very soon.

Incidentally, I’m looking at 93 hits in a few days, but NO comments!? Com’on people!

So we were wondering if the Great Wall really is all that great….It is. We all (Cory, Jessica, and I) decided that it’s pretty darn cool. Nixon even said, “It sure is a great wall.” He must have been left almost speechless if he couldn’t think of anything else to say. The Great Wall was built to defend China from raiding Mongolians. Apparently, this did not work, as the sentries could be bribed. However it worked great as a road to get across the mountains. While visiting the Great Wall we made many jokes about avoiding the invading mongolians and also about becoming real men. Mao Tse Dong once said, “You are not a man until you have climbed the Great Wall.” The thousands of steep steps upward into the mountains are pretty grueling. We went as far as we could go on one side until the wall turned into rubble. Jessica, Cory, and I have become real men. To see photos of this adventure, Click here

OK, not really, but they did go to a wedding photo shop together and had pictures taken in Qi Paos. The Qi Pao is the traditional Chinese wedding/formal gown, and the ladies look lovely in theirs.

While viewing the pictures in the gallery you might want to entertain yourselves by answering the following questions:

1. How many umbrellas can you count?
2. Are those firecrackers real?
3. What is that stringed thingy?
4. Who’s wearing the fake hair?
5. And, just how much make up did they have to put on?

Oh, and at the end of this gallery is a pic of Lacey with her very own custom Qi Pao. It was made from SuZhou silk (which is quite famous over here) by a local tailor here in Ping