Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Playground Hell
Monday, January 30, 2012
Links of recent photos
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Saturday, January 28, 2012
One silly thing I did see
Friday, January 27, 2012
Notes taken on my Ipod during my Beixin Spring Festival Sojourn
One more day!
Compound: an open area that is enclosed by wall or fence. I call the place where J's parents live the compound. V was wondering why I call it that.
Maybe go to Taixing today; maybe not. That was the plan but J's father poo-pooed the idea. J says we can sneak there.
I still have the HyLite cough. J insists this is because I go outside w/o jacket -- I do, but for a short time.
To be in a KFC during CNY -- not my idea of a good time.
I am in the KFC in Taixing. Tony was miserable till he espied the playground. Till then, he had his fingers in his ears. Telling him that there no fireworks meet on deaf ears, or plugged...
Go for beer walk with V last night.
J really mad at me last night. I had to apologize 100 times. What did I do? I used the face cloth to wash my feet. What was I thinking? I used the familiar cloth.
I went for a walk after lunch. I bought gloves -- 5 rmb. I then walked past fields and I saw a church -- a Christian Church. The CC not in a prime location -- it is located off a main road behind a loading area for trucks. It can be seen from fields but not from a great distance. It was only by luck (grace?) that I found it.
Now, I listen to a CHP podcast.
Tony don't like fireworks
Fingers always in his ears. It is a phase I tell myself.
Last night, we go to bed early. Guess who had to plug his ears at midnite?!?
Garbage I see gets me to thinking. It says so much about modern life anywhere.
There is not much I can say that I haven't said already.
I walk without Tony. He doesn't want to leave the compound.
No showering for me. I wash myself with a basin of hot water and a wash cloth.
Bus station: everything running smoothly
Vaughan gives me beer.
Snow
Sent from my iPod
First Links of the Dragon Year
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Beixin, China has a Christian Church
Back in the Expatdom
Friday, January 20, 2012
Happy Spring Festival! Happy Chinese New Year! Happy Lunar New Year! 新年快乐!
- This will be my last entry before I leave civilization for four days. When I say leave civilization, I mean that I am going to my wife's countryside home where I don't think I will be able to get Wi-Fi. And when I say four days, I mean hopefully four days. I'll never forget the time that I thought we were leaving the countryside; and I was all packed and ready to go, only to learn that they couldn't get a bus ticket out of town until the next day. It was five minutes of extreme cursing till I had to resign myself to the fact that I was stuck out there for another 24 hours.
- I have plenty of things on my electronic gadget to tide me over for those four or five days. I have about eighty e-books uploaded on my Ipod to read, and fifty podcast episodes of Chinese and Roman History to listen to. This article by the esteemed Victor David Hansen lead me to download nine more titles from Project Gutenberg. I have fifty episodes of the Chinese History Podcast!
- When teaching classes about family, I always ask the only children in the class, of which they are many, if they wished they had more siblings. The girls often say they wish they had an older brother to protect them -- older brothers are prohibited with the one child policy. Last night, one young male student gave a very cheeky answer, telling me that he wished he had a twin brother. The answer garnered sniggers from the rest of the class. I had to ask the boy why he wanted a twin brother, and he said that they would be able to copy each other's homework.
- I turn on my VPN and then use Itunes to download my podcasts now. I was surprised to find one podcast, Outloud Opinion, requires payment, but was free if you accessed it via an RSS Reader.
- I don't know who I would abslutely like to win the Republican Party Nomination for the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election. Newt is inconsistent, and I am starting to come around to the point of view that he is a windbag. He will say something seemingly brilliant only to contradict himself and say something really stupid. And the brilliant things, on scrutiny, aren't so brilliant after all. It isn't the President's job to make children do janitorial work in school. Newt should stick to talking about what Presidents can do. Newt would still be a better president than Obama, but that's not saying much. Mitt Romney does a poor job of defending himself on things that should be a slam-dunk to defend if he really had a core of conservative principles. Rick Santorum doesn't look or sound presidential -- despite his many good qualities, he has the misfortune of living in a superficial time. He is the guy I favour now, but I don't want to jinx him. My previous stated favorites dropped out as soon as I declared my hopes for them. Ron Paul is the candidate of the druggies, with foreign policy ideas that could only be formulated by someone with a serious drug problem.
- A bad cold is going around work. Its' symptoms are an annoying cough and an overly-sore throat. Last night, about one in the morning, I had a bout of coughing that lasted about twenty minutes and Jenny was telling me I should take the day off from school. I haven't, but I fear my Chinese New Year in the Countryside is going to be more unenjoyable than I was expecting.
- One more thing. I was born in the year of the dragon!
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Yahoo! There is a newly-opened Italian Restaurant near our school!
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Less than a week till the Lunar New Year
- Some students have told me that they are in a holiday frame of mind, and so they can't concentrate and feel giddy. I tell them that in the West, people get in this frame of mind in December as Christmas approaches.
- I am not in the holiday frame of mind. I got five days of the countryside to look forward to as well as lots of crowds and traffic jams.
- Most of the students tell me they will visit with their families during the Spring Festival. Exciting? I ask. Not really, they say.
- It is not as easy to put podcasts on my Ipod Touch as it on my Nokia phone. With the Nokia, I could do a simple cut and paste from any computer. With the Ipod touch, I can download podcasts directly, but because I am in China, many of favorite podcasts can't be downloaded. And so, I do have to sync the Ipod with my laptop at home. This involves manually deleting old podcasts in different places in my computer files and in the Itunes program before I sync. Still, I love my little Ipod touch.
- Pardon the lack of blogging. I got a cold and and I got Tony. Both take away from my blogging.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Standing Room Only
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Protests and Riots
Links
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Last night, the School had its Annual School Chinese New Year Dinner...
Thursday, January 5, 2012
An English Chinese New Year (Spring Festival) Song
In the West, there are not too many New Year's song. Certainly none about Chinese New Year. So we have decided to compose one: The eight days of the Spring Festival. It is based on a famous Christmas song and our observations of Spring Festivals past.
On the first day of Spring Festival
my true love gave to me
Money in a red envelope!
On the second day of Spring Festival
my true love gave to me
Two bottles of Baijoe,
and money in a red envelope!
On the third day of Spring Festival
my true love gave to me
Three cartons of cigarettes,
Two bottles of Baijoe,
and money in a red envelope!
On the fourth day of Spring Festival
my true love gave to me
Four chicken's feet,
Three cartons of cigarettes,
Two bottles of Baijoe,
and money in a red envelope!
On the fifth day of Spring Festival
my true love gave to me
Five sets of new clothes,
Four chicken's feet,
Three cartons of cigarettes,
Two bottles of Baijoe,
and money in a red envelope!
On the sixth day of Spring Festival
my true love gave to me
Six sets of quilting,
Five sets of new clothes,
Four chicken's feet,
Three cartons of cigarettes,
Two bottles of Baijoe,
and money in a red envelope!
On the seventh day of Spring Festival
my true love gave to me
Seven fireworks a-bursting,
Six sets of quilting,
Five sets of new clothes,
Four chicken's feet,
Three cartons of cigarettes,
Two bottles of Baijoe,
and money in a red envelope!
On the eighth day of Spring Festival
my true love gave to me
Eight dragons dancing,
Seven fireworks a-bursting,
Six sets of quilting,
Five sets of new clothes,
Four chicken's feet,
Three cartons of cigarettes,
Two bottles of Baijoe,
and money in a red envelope!
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
A few things on my second day back at work.
- I have asked some students what they have heard about Mao Xiao Ping, the Wuxi Mayor who recently became the former Mayor. What they have told me, I could ascertain, was via rumor, not on a news report. One student told me that the former Wuxi Mayor was in prison. Another told me that he had committed suicide. The new mayor, I learned, is a woman, a Mrs. Hong.
- Yesterday, I was a street so that was so jammed that I, as a pedestrian, couldn't make my way through. I was walking down a side street, about one and a half lanes wide, that was blocked both ways by cars so close together I couldn't walk through. As well, the sidewalks on both sides were full of parked bicycles tightly jammed together. The two cars were so close to the bicycles that was no space for someone as thin as me to walk through. I had to get behind one of the cars and follow it till I could fine some daylight on the sidewalk.
- It is tricky for me, at school, to load podcasts on my Ipod. If I do so, I would wipe out everything that I had put on my Ipod at home. So, I will have to make sure my libraries on Itunes, at school and at home, are the same. But this will mean having to download some books again (I find that manybooks.net is a good sight to find epubs).
- I have uploaded Scenes from My Life 2 onto Youtube. You can watch Scenes from My Life 1 here.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
First Day of work in 2011
- I am all out of sorts. It panned out that I had the first three days of 2012 off and that during that time I also got a new electronic device: My Ipod touch. It is like I got an Iphone without the phone. With a new electronic device, one feels like one has got a new body part and that in the process of getting used to it, one is not one's normal self. With my new electronic device, I am going to be doing things different. And till I get the new routine figured out, the things I do that require concentration are going to suffer, like my blogging.
- I spent most of my time, on my long weekend, at home. I spent far too much time on the computer. Tony saw my Ipod and was begging to play with it. Trying to placate him on this account was no easy matter. My wife began stewing at me so that I was looking forward to dealing with lazy and inattentive students.
- I did go out when Tony briefly on day two. We had Hot Pot with some friends, and then went for a walk around Nanchang Jie, the new bar street in Wuxi. You can visit here, here, here and here to see the photos I took.