David Warren on China

David Warren on China:

China is gutted today; gutted by the worst effects of both the prevailing materialist ideologies, "socialism" and "capitalism." Her own best traditions were abandoned in seeking false goods.

Clink on the links to read all Warren has to say at his blog and at the Catholic Thing.

November 2014 AKIC Notes

Just one entry to cover AKIC goings on in November 2014:

• Here's a confession. I can't stand the sight of some students. In fact, knowing that I will have them in my class makes me feel irate. Something about their manner, usually their laziness or their haughtiness or their scowling, gets my goat and I'd wish they'd get out of my sight and consciousness.

• The previous entry should not be an indication of the tone of this collection of notes. They are written – except for this entry which I am making at the end of the month – one after another as they occur to me during the month of November 2014. If you read on, you will see my mood fluctuates.

• But then, some students are great and make me think there is hope for the human race.

• I was listening to the Journey Home, a show on EWTN about people finding or rediscovering the Catholic Church. One of the guests was a successful businessman, who among other things, said he had spent seven years among the atheists of China. He couldn't wrap his mind around them and their not being able to contemplate the idea of there being a God. He was also taken back by the utter cynicism of China as the business he was working with had no scruples about cheating to make money. Listening to him, I certainly had to concur that many of the Chinese seemed utterly lacking in soul (as well as imagination). His time in soulless China did however make his conversion to Catholicism much easier because he witnessed the grimness of a society without a belief in something higher than an earthly power. I hope my time here will result in a similar finding of a home.

• I took the 25 bus to get home one day and saw a poor person get on board. He brought four bags on – that be cotton bags not suitcases – full of all his possessions I would guess. He had to have been going to the bus station and had to have not had enough money to take a taxi there. He wore a suit jacket that was torn at back at the seam joining the jacket vest to the jacket sleeve. His collared shirt was frayed from constantly being worn. His shoes were the green khaki sneakers I have seen for sale at work wear shops that would never be seen anywhere near the more expensive shopping malls.

• I was on that 25 bus – a rare thing for me to be, now that I can take the Metro – because I had gone to downtown Yanqiao. I hadn't been in Yanqiao in months and was disappointed to see that it was being renovated. Yanqiao's downtown, with its narrow streets and 1970s socialistic architecture, was being torn down and replaced by more modern commercial store fronts. A shame I felt, because I had found downtown Yanqiao be quaint in a strange way.

• To get to Yanqiao in the first place, I chose to walk instead of take the bus and so I had some men on bicycles ride past me and scream "hello!" There were of course saying that because I was a foreigner. I pretended, best I could, to have not heard their greeting but they probably saw me stiffen up my shoulders. Having "Hello!" said to me as I walk about the streets of Wuxi's Hui Shan District is not an unusual thing, but it is rare for me to respond to it. The reason I don't return these greetings is that I don't perceive them as being friendly. So often these hellos are said in a "well what have we got here" or "looks like we gots ourselves a foreigner" sort of tone. They are also delivered in a drive-by-shooter like manner. Wuxi locals are racist in a manner that would give PC police types in the West heart attacks. But as GK Chesterton said, differences are meant to be laughed at, and the locals, having not imbibed western political correctness are maybe acting in a sensible way.

• A businessman told me about a government official who was dealing with a mob by looking for money to pay them off..... The businessman's company had been forced to relocate from an industrial zone in the Wuxi area so developers could build a shopping mall. Along with his company, residents had also been forced to relocate from the area. One day, it just so happened that when the the businessmen went to the government, to deal with a government official, his meeting was delayed because the government official was looking for money to pay off an angry mob of those residents.

• I watched the first two periods of a video of a NHL game played between the Winnipeg Jets and the Tampa Bay Lightning. The home team, the Jets, looked nondescript and its fans were quiet to say the least. Will the Jets leave Winnipeg again?

• One day, on two occasions, I swore at locals. When I say they were locals, I mean they were Chinese and I am assuming they were from the area where they were seen by me. And when I say I swore, I swore aloud so that they could hear me; although from their reactions, I don't think they understood me.

• I first swore at this woman who had cut in front of Tony and me at a KFC. What happened was that a bunch of customers were in a gaggle around the counter so that it was impossible – still after all these years – for me to determine who was next in line to be served by the staff. And this woman, who I would call bitch ten times aloud, walked right in front of me. (I should have physically brought attention to the fact that she cut in front of me, I know, but even in a rage I have to hold myself back because something much worse, than swearing profusely in public among people who don't understand, would have happened.)

• Then, I was on an elevator with Tony & Jenny when these three men came on with freshly lit cigarettes in their mouths. One of the men instantly dropped his cigarette to the ground but the other two ignored entreaties from Tony that they put out their cigarettes. I couldn't resist the urge to use the words pigs, apes, baboons and monkeys as I spoke aloud in the elevator at them. On this occasion, however, one person understood my swearing: Jenny, who told me to be quiet because the men didn't understand me. I pointed out to Jenny that signs were posted in the elevators prohibiting smoking but these idiots were ignoring them, and even if they didn't understand me, I wanted them to deduce my meaning from my tone.

• Which reminds me of another one of my pet peeves. Some idiot is always leaving his cigarette butts on the stairwell floor of our apartment building.

• On my day off, I was walking around the Hui Shan Wanda Plaza and saw two foreigners. I tried to pretend that I didn't see them. (The idea of talking to them fills me with revulsion for some reason).

• Wuxi's Hui Shan District is a horrible place for foreigners! Don't move there! Don't even go there to visit! (This is what I want foreigners to think. I want the place all to myself.)

• This phrase in a review about a book about Stalin caught my attention:  the old-fashioned Russian èmigrè view that the Russian Revolution was made by 'Jewish brains, Latvian rifles and Russian stupidity. I never knew about the Latvian rifles and the role they played in the Russian Revolution though I was well aware of the Jewish role and have thought about Russian stupidity. This phrase will stick with me for the rest of my life. (My parents are Latvian.)

• The reaction to the results of the 2014 U.S. Midterm elections has resulted in euphoria among Republicans types – at least, that is the impression I get from listening to the political podcasts that I do – but David Warren who is my favorite reactionary and my current intellectual and blogging hero, seemed unimpressed and pretty much said that the elections were just politics as usual in the Western World.

• On November 11^th, I had two Chinese Drivers annoy me. (What else is new? I know.) I made my daily stop at the small shop near the entrance of the complex containing Casa K. Just after having bought my supply of Halls and gum for the day, I exited the store just as a van zoomed right by the store entrance. You must understand, that area just outside the store is a pedestrian area. I can understand wanting to drive there in order to unload things – the area on either side of the store is one of storefront businesses – but it should be done slowly. If I had exited the store a second earlier and went in the direction I was intending to go, I don't think the van could have stopped quickly enough. The asshole driver was probably doing about 50 km/h. I thought about how Tony just rushes out the store entrance as well and gave the driver a glare – not that he noticed – as he opened the side door of his van to unload some things.

• The van driver so annoyed me that I momentarily forgot where I was heading. I was supposed to wait for the 637 Shuttle Bus at the stop that is right by the store, but I instead walked toward this other bus stop that I used to go to before the Shuttle Bus started operation. I realized my mistake when I was crossing an intersection and the Shuttle Bus I had meant to take drove pass. Fortunately, I knew I was able to catch the 637 bus that was going the other way (the 637 route has two buses starting off at the same time from the terminal station but each going around the route in the opposite direction.), so I turned around and recrossed the intersection. And then it was a case of a Chinese driver trying to make a right turn around me as I was walking and I had the right of way. The car instead of stopping, tried to make a wider right turn around me, but I would not yield and made the car come to a halt. As I got to the other side of the intersection I had to see what the driver looked like: it was a woman.

• November 11^th is a solemn day in Canada. It isn't so in China where, because of the multiple ones in the date, the day is called Singles Day, and now, because of a promotion by Alibaba's Jack Ma, is also a day for shopping on the Internet and getting supposedly amazing discounts.

• I am not sure what Chinese singles did on November 11, 2014, but the non-singles either went in for the shopping in a big way or didn't bother at all. One student told me that she had spent 12,000 rmb that day. Another said, she had gotten up at one in the morning on the 11^th to get her shopping done. Jenny, my wife, said she didn't have time, thank God.

• I was on the train one Thursday morning when I looked up and saw that the electronic sign indicating we had arrived at Nanchang Station (南禅寺到了 is what I saw). This was my station but I hadn't been paying close attention and I hadn't anticipated that the train was approaching the stop and only noticed that the train had arrived just as the train's doors were closing. So, I had to take the train to the next stop and then wait six minutes to catch a train going back, for me, to the Nanchang Station. It was the first time in my Wuxi Metro riding career that I had made such a mistake.

• With the nights getting colder, the Kaulins family has gone back to the habit of everyone sleeping in the same bed.

• I am the same star sign as Jesus Christ (my birthday is December 24)and was born in the same animal year as Bruce Lee (I was born in the Dragon year of 1964). Yes, I am so cool.

• On the train one day, Tony was sitting between me and this young man. The young man brought out his mobile phone and asked Tony if he could take a to take a selfie with him. Tony didn't want to and so he ran away and sat with Jenny who was on my other side.

• On the Internet, these are writers who I read often: David Warren, Theodore Dalrymple, John Derbyshire, Peter Hitchens and Anthony Esolen. Beside the fab five, I am keen to read things written by Thomas Sowell, Taki, Jonah Goldberg, Marc Steyn and Anne Coulter.

• The Kaulins boys got haircuts at a downtown salon one afternoon. The salons, I have seen and gone to in Wuxi, have mostly male staff who are young and seemed to be dressed in the height of fashion. The high degree of hipness that they have make me wonder if my assumptions about the coolness of hip culture being western are incorrect. It would seem that coolness or hipness – I use these words to describe a certain teenage and young adult manner – is a universal thing.

• In Arts & Letters Daily, I read an essay written by an award winning author from a major newspaper who was in his late fifties but had no money, and was living a dismal life having to depend on relatives and government services to survive. I thought I was reading my future.

• Some of the poor that the author encountered as he trudged about dealing with government assistance service departments included teachers and fellows who could speak several languages.

• Doing a little more research, I read that the author was divorced, and thought it funny that he hadn't mentioned it in his essay.

• I get a break from my transcribing work and so I have time to concentrate on other things in my free time at work like blogging, coding, and studying Chinese.

• Tony is shy, or as the Chinese would say: 害羞 (haixiu). Sometime, locals will try to talk to him but he will deliberately ignore them.

• One good thing about being in China is that I can watch a recording of a CFL game and not have to worry about overhearing the game's final score or having someone accidentally telling me it. So I am watching the Western Semifinal between Saskatchewan and Edmonton two days after it happened, over a period of two days.

• Only problem with the recording was that I knew how the game would end because with seven minutes left on the recording, Saskatchewan was trailing by eight points with three minutes of game time to play. There was not time enough for Saskatchewan to come back. The game would have had to have gone to overtime, and there was no way that was going to happen in seven minutes.

• Towards the end of the month, I still have the cold I had at the end of October. Sometimes, I don't cough but when I am teaching (talking), I cough like a two pack a day smoker.

• One night after having gotten home from work, I was asked by Jenny to guess what score Tony had gotten in a Chinese test he had written that day. She was laughing as she asked me and so I was slightly confused. I had come to expect news of Tony getting poor scores on these tests, so I thought for a microsecond that maybe he had done well. But I thought better of it and guessed that he had gotten eight percent. Jenny then told me that he had gotten zero. It seems that he is unable to associate the character with its proper pinyin. The next day, I tried to ask Tony about this but he did a very lame "I don't know" response to my questioning before going all silent and mute on me.

• I thought winter was finally going to come to Wuxi and I then looked at a weather report of my mobile device which forecast a high of 21 Celsius for the next day.

• On my spiritual journey, I am all alone where I am. I will have to write somebody who can help me. In my mind, I know it is the right thing. But there is the physical fear and the fear of the total incomprehension of those who do know me. Could I bear the torture?

• 25 years ago, the Berlin Wall fell. Being in China, I can say that the anniversary has not been well observed. Students I have asked did not know much about it.

• The anniversary of the fall of the Wall causes me to have this reflection on my personal political beliefs. When I was younger, I was on the Left side of the political spectrum. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the ouster of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua were the two events that caused me to change my mind, adopt a right wing view of things and take on a deep animus to any form of leftist thinking. So, I have been a conservative/reactionary/libertarian for over twenty years now. I hesitate to call myself a libertarian because it does encourage some kooky thinking and is often atheist. I label myself a conservative because I want to be as far from the Left Wing as I can be without becoming an anarchist. I am probably more properly a reactionary because I am aware that the kingdom is not of this world.

• I am still using Windows XP. In late November, I booted up my computer and got a message saying that Microsoft had stopped updating XP sometimes in April. The message also wanted me to download some software to verify if I in fact had genuine software. This being China, I didn't.

• One Saturday morning, I saw two bad habits of Chinese drivers result in a near collision. I was able to witness what could happen when a car, driven by a Chinese driver, tries to aggressively pass another car on the right on a single wide road while approaching the entrance of an apartment complex from where a car – driven by a Chinese driver who typically does not check to see if traffic is coming from his left – makes a right turn. I saw a near collision and two cars making very quick swerving turns.

• I was disappointed that the two cars didn't collide.

• Studying Chinese experiences. 1) Sometimes, my guess at a character is correct, but it is difficult to find confirmation, even when I type the correct pinyin into the typing app which converts pinyin to Chinese characters. Case in point, the following characters: 哔啦哔啦 which appeared in a textbook which I was using for my pinyin typing exercises. The pinyin is bali bali. I guessed that right away, but I couldn't find the characters in my pinyin typing app. After ten minutes of searching for them there and then in my dictionary, I gave up and asked one of my Chinese colleagues who told me it was bali bali as I had thought. I was able to hold off my feelings of frustration till after I thanked her for taking the time to give me the information. 2) I study Chinese on the train and it attracts the attention of locals sitting nearby. One evening, I had this feeling that the man sitting next to me was intently watching me read a Chinese text on my Ipad while typing out its characters, to test my knowledge thereof, on my Ipod. My intuitions proved to be correct and the man, in broken English, offered me the following advice: "Don't try to enter so many characters at a time when typing them in the app, only try to type in two or three at a time, enough for a word." In other words, press the enter key to transform the pinyin into Chinese characters after a few keystrokes, not after so many as he saw me doing. I did as he said while he was around, but thinking about his advice afterward, I found that wasn't so helpful in some instances because there are some characters that will only show up if you typed in a whole phrase instead of just a few words, parts of the phrases, as it were.

• I was told the following by a Chinese colleague: In America, the dream is to get rich and earn the respect of others; in China, the dream is to get rich and move to America. She also told me that President Xi and his ilk were making lame efforts to brainwash the Chinese population.

• I observe the events in Ferguson, Missouri, USA with interest. I have read some thoughts of others on what is happening there and I don't think I have any thoughts I can add, but I will try nonetheless. First of I will tell you, my rare and not so gentle readers, that I think the rioters and protestors are idiots, and that President Obama blew it. Instead of trying to be equivocal about the incident, Obama should have put the blame for it on those who were clearly responsible: the Brown character who went on a stupid crime spree and the protestors who tried to make more of the incident than what it was. But that would have required Obama to admit that people who he disagrees with on matters racial are right about the pathologies that plague Black America. White Racism had nothing to do with what happened in Ferguson.

• I read John Derbyshire's take on Ferguson and he said that there was nothing that could be done about it. That is, white progressives will keep trying to push for policies that are counter-productive to whatever it is they are trying to achieve, and an almost absolute unanimous proportion of blacks will carry on as they always have, acting like blockheads.

• Unexpectedly on American Thanksgiving day, I found myself participating in the making of a video for the school that would be shown on Wuxi Metro video screens. It turned out that a change in plan combined with class scheduling made me the only person who was available to do it. So, I and three female colleagues from school took a taxi to the Roxa coffee shop located at the BCM Life & Arts Center. (BCM is in on the canal near the Baoli shopping mall.) I was to say a few lines about grinding coffee. But when I got there, the plan changed and I was to fiddle around with a coffee grinder on screen and brew a cup of espresso. I did the best I could.

• The Roxa was a nice place, I thought. It had high ceilings, shelves of books and wine bottles, lots of comfortable sofas for lounging, a bar serving coffee and other beverages, and a scenic location with a patio deck overlooking a canal. It was a nice place to spend an afternoon with a book.

• The owner of the place actually introduced herself to me and told me about her business. I wondered if the location – somewhat off the beaten track I was afraid – was busy enough to make a profit, but I learned from her that the coffee bar was not open in the evenings and that in fact she made her money by selling coffee beans to local restaurants and cafes. I also found out that she was married to an Englishman and spent a lot of time in England where she lived in a countryside house that was a half hour from the nearest supermarket. She told me her home in England was nice in Summer but she preferred to be in the more urban setting of Wuxi most of time.

• Her manner of speaking English in which she ended her statements with a lispy particle reminded me of another Wuxi woman I knew who was married to an Englishman: Lilly Rudkin, wife of the 2013 – and more than likely, also the 2014 – Shanghai Expat of the year, Paul Rudkin. Lilly had also spent some time in England and spoke English with a Wuxinese English accent.

• The Roxa owner, told me that Italians like to come to her shop for some espresso. I haven't seen any Italians in Wuxi since the Italian restaurant near our school closed down which goes to show that I don't get out that often to areas with paths where foreigners can be seen.

• Whether I need to go to paths where foreigners can be seen is a question on which I am conflicted.

• The Roxa owner said she recognized me and my face from somewhere but couldn't place me. She then told me that she had seen me at Ganesh's, an Indian Restaurant near the Nanchang Jie Bar street, and that she saw then that I had a Chinese wife and a son. But she then added details to the story of seeing me there that didn't jibe with my recollections of going to the restaurant. I suggested that she maybe saw me on the bus videos or on the subway videos, but she told me that she didn't take those forms of transportation. So, I was mystified as to where she had seen me and was even thinking that there was foreigner in Wuxi who was also tall, also slender, and so looked like me and also had a Chinese wife and a mixed blood baby. But then a friend of hers said that she had seen my Youtube videos while she was in Miami and was homesick for Wuxi. That explained it.

• For me, the incident was remarkable because I had so discounted my degree of presence on the Internet that it had never occurred to me to have made mention of it as a place where my face had been previously seen.

• As November was drawing to an end, I still couldn't shake my cold that I had had at the end of October.

• Angel, my Chinese teacher, says my pronunciation and tones are getting better. I observe that the tones are still not second nature to me and that I have to make so much of a conscious physical effort to say them properly that I find I can't engage in conversation in Chinese and pronounce the tones properly at the same time. It is why I prefer to spend my time trying to decipher Chinese characters. When I am reading, I am not having to think about the tones and hurting my neck when I try to say them properly.

• I wondered what had happened to the China History Podcast. But Laszlo is back and I have just listened to first of his ten part series on the history of tea.

• Which reminds me that I have a lot of Wuxi Metro video that I need to put together into a video to upload to Youtube.

• As November drew to a close, I had a day where I thought my cold was going away. But then the next day, it got worse. I was more stuffed in the head than ever and so I felt a mild headache and I thought my voice was going.

• I asked a stupid question. I suppose I have asked many stupid questions in my near fifty years on Earth -- many more than I would suppose – and that maybe the best I can hope for is that if I do ask a stupid question, I will quickly realize it instead of having the stupid thought linger in my mind for a long time and never ever realizing my foolishness...

• Anyway. Here is the stupid question that I asked before quickly realizing I was a big dummy to have asked it. I asked it during a class about superstitions. My student, a very intelligent management type who has spent time in Japan, was telling me how superstitious many of his co-managers were. He told me how many of them wanted, as a group, to make an annual visit to the Ling Shan Big Buddha to pray for good fortune for the company; and so it came into my mind to ask how the 88 meter tall Buddha was constructed and I pondered aloud the possibility that the 88 meter Buddha was constructed first and erected as a whole piece, from lying on its back, onto the place it now stands. As soon as my student mentioned that the whole thing had to be assembled on site from the base up, I realized the stupidity of my question.

Things Seen in October 2014

• On October 1^st, I took the shuttle bus to the Subway Station. It was the first leg of my trip to the countryside to see my relatives and to reunite with my wife Jenny & son Tony who had gone there earlier in the week. As the shuttle drove pass the Hui Shan District government complex, I saw a crowd by the entrance. Half of the crowd consisted of civilians, who I presume were protesting. The other half consisted of black-uniformed security guards and blue-shirted policemen. In the center of the crowd, I could see two men engaged in a very animated conversation. One of them, I presume was from the government; the other was a citizen. Another bus load of security guards was just pulling in as my shuttle bus passed out of view.

• The train I then caught took me to the bus station which was of course crowded with holiday travelers. The bus station was so crowded that many sat on the stairs between the bus station's two levels.

• Having to wait, I walked around the bus station to see what I could see, and I did see a young man wearing a denim fabric jacket and matching pants which had a flowery pattern that I would normally see on old Chinese woman's dress. For footwear, he wore black pointy ended dress shoes.

• I saw heavy holiday traffic on the freeway on 10/1.

• The evening of October 1^st, my relatives took us to an outdoor lantern show which covered an area bigger than a few football fields. One of the displays celebrated the war against the Japanese and depicted a scene where a Japanese soldier was pointing a gun at an unarmed Chinese person.

• On October 2nd, I was taken to Taizhou (TZ). I saw that Taizhou had its own version of the Oriental Pearl Tower in its skyline. (I subsequently learned from students, who had been to TZ, that it was a television tower.) Jenny & Tony & I went to the Mei Lan Feng Park. Mei Lan Fang was a famous Chinese opera performer who could perform both male and female roles. In the museum dedicated to his career, there was a display where a wax Sergei Eisenstein was directing a wax Fang in a movie.

• Earlier that day in TZ, I spent some time in the drabbest apartment I had seen in a while. I took in a dreary view of other crumbling apartments and dirty green vegetation.

• On a dusty street in TZ, I saw a women sitting on a stool cleaning vegetables in a basin she had sitting on the pavement.  A cigarette, half ashes, dangled from her mouth.

• In TZ, I see a young man dressed spiffy.  He wore a white shirt, a black dress jacket, a pair of tight white cotton knee-length shorts, and a pair of black dress shoes while not wearing socks.

• I see, at a TZ retail walk street, a tall thin local man, older than me but not by much, proceeding at a slow shuffling place. I wondered if I was looking at the Chinese version of me.

• Near the Wuxi train station, at one corner of an intersection, I saw two man holding the ends of an eight foot long piece of string festooned with tiny one-colored flags. The string was meant to block pedestrians who might want to cross the road to get to another corner while ignoring traffic signals telling them couldn't. The men holding the strings looked to be civilians who had been made to do community service punishment by acting as crossing guards. I have never seen pedestrians heed these Shanghaied crossing guards in all my time in Wuxi so I was curious to see how pedestrians would deal with string, but the taxi I was in pulled away before I could witness the amount of success of the string in accomplishing it purpose.

• October 5^th I was taking the shuttle bus to the subway station and saw on the video screen, footage about the goings on in Hong Kong. There was first a reporter in front of a graphic showing the Chinese and Hong Kong flags. Then, I saw video of some guy in a suit making a statement followed by footage of calm street scenes in Hong Kong.

• My In-laws compound in Beixin is right next to a road, which in Canada would be said to be the main drag of the town. It always concerns me when I am in Beixin or more importantly when Tony is in Beixin, to see the cars and trucks go at a good clip of speed past our compound. For cars are racing at 50 km/h or more, merely ten feet from where my in-laws are sleeping. During the October holiday, I witnessed a semi-truck pulling a tanker trailer come to a quick stop in front of the compound. The semi's tires and brakes jerk rather mightily in front of me.

• On a Friday, I see another crowd of people by the entrance to the Hui Shan District Government Compound. I could see the crowd from the front of my apartment complex entrance which is about half a kilometer from the Government compound. Riding past the scene on the shuttle bus, I saw that it was a crowd of protestors and I took a photo but it didn't show much other than a bunch of people. With my naked eyes, I did get a glance of two men in the center of the crowd having an intense discussion.

• I saw the X-ray machine operators at a Wuxi Metro station actually make some travelers open up their luggage. These people, who were probably going to the train station, had to open up a big suitcase. Beside the suitcase, I was able to see a kitchen knife, still in a package that the security people had spotted. As if these people were going to use the knife.....

• I was standing on the corner of the intersection of Xueqian and Zhongshan Roads when I saw a young gentleman on an e-bike stop right beside me. I couldn't understand why he would be doing this. He was sitting there placidly not moving even though there were green lights in his favor. His placid stare in the direction of where I was standing, while I was waiting for the a green pedestrian signal, was making me nervous. But after about ten seconds, a woman sat behind him on the bike. I then understood what had been taking place. If e-bikes are carrying passengers as they approach the intersection they will be stopped by the traffic cops and security types. I would guess the pair often had to have the passenger get off their e-bike before going through the intersection and then have the passenger get back on afterward This time when I saw them, the woman had boarded the e-bike while still on a corner of the intersection within sight of the traffic officials who were looking the other way for e-bikes approaching.

• On a Friday afternoon, I went to a company located near the Wuxi Airport – yes, Wuxi has an airport. I saw a Chinese military plane, a Chinese AWAC, with pedestal on its top, taking off. I would have taken a photo if I hadn't been busy watching a student giving a presentation.

• I saw two foreigners at that company. I think that they were the first foreigners I had seen this month other then my colleagues at my school.

• Standing at the Shuttle Bus Spot at my apartment complex, I saw an e-bike dash across the road in front of three side-by-side oncoming vehicles.

• I saw a taxi trying to make a right turn through a gap between two moving buses that were going straight, one after another, through an intersection. The taxi had to skid to a stop as it had gotten too close to the driver side front of the second bus. As soon as that bus got past, the taxi quickly skidded as it got moving again.

• On a Friday evening, I saw that one of the businesses that had attempted to open in the Nanchang Subway Station was moving out all its fixtures.

• As I said in the experienced things entry for this month, there were numerous things to be seen in the Hui Shan Wanda Plaza on a particular Saturday night. Tony & I together saw a man with very big bubble wands. The bubble man had placed soap in a bin that was about three feet in diameter. He would place a small child in the center of the bin and then put a three feet wide wand around the child into the bin of soap bubbles. Pulling up the wand, the child would be encased in a very tall and wide bubble. Tony, watching this, was beside himself in excitement.

• I then saw three foreigners, twenty or thirty somethings, standing beside the stage where the bubble man was performing. I wondered why they were there. They did a show themselves, it turned out, and I thought "Good! They weren't moving into the neighborhood."

• At the other end of the mall, there were new cars on display (I mentioned how Tony was jumping in and out of the driver's seats.). As I stood by waiting for Tony to have jumped in all the cars, I saw some female models come out. The first set were two Chinese girls with long hair, short silvery sequined dresses, high heels, and nice long legs. The second set were these foreign girls, Caucasians, who were wearing these ridiculous looking bikinis with angel wings.

• I should have taken a photo of this car that had stopped right on the corner sidewalk at Xueqian and Zhongshan Roads. It was stopped diagonally at the corner of the intersection on a spot that I would have thought was always meant for pedestrians.

• On a Thursday morning from the 637 shuttle bus stop near Casa K, I saw a lineup of hundreds of people, ten wide, bearing signs and long banners, walking or marching from the direction of the Hui Shan District government building. They made a turn at the corner at which the Hui Shan Ramada Plaza stands. I assume that the demonstration was government approved.

• Office space on the first level of a building on Zhongshan Road had been occupied by a bank. The bank had abandoned the office space and and the space was being cleared out by workmen who were using a front end loader which was driven into the space to remove rubble from fixtures and displays.

• I saw the driver of a motorcycle wagon – a motorcycle that had been modified so as to have a wagon attached to it – pushing his vehicle, which was not functioning through an intersection. And just as he would have, had his vehicle been working, he was ignoring the traffic signals and so oncoming cars were swerving to avoid him and his vehicular contraption.

• Walking down Zhongshan Road, I see a turd on a red carpet placed in front of a shop.    

Things I Was Told in October, 2014.

• In Beixin in the Jiangsu countryside, Jenny told me that Tony followed some countryside boys to a field and played with them. He didn't tell any adults that he was doing this and so they got worried and went to search for him. Whatever he did with the boys in the fields was all good boyhood stuff and so I told Jenny to not worry so much about him getting his socks and shoes all dirty.
• Jenny told me that she had heard that a policeman had been hit at the gathering I had seen at the entrance to the Hui Shan District government complex. (See October things seen.)
• Jenny told me that Tony did some work in the countryside. He helped scoop up harvested peanuts which had been lain on the ground to dry.
• Jenny told me that her sister (Jenny has two) had gotten into an evening argument with her husband and got beaten. Earlier that day, her sister had driven us to Taizhou, and had been exceedingly nice to Tony, in fact being very motherly to him. Jenny's sister spent the whole next day lying down. (Chinese men, I have read and I have been told, think nothing of slugging their wives in arguments. Whether this trait has changed in modern times is hard to discern. I read a book about China from over a hundred years written by a visitor that reported this. Foreigners have told me that it still happens a lot in these times.) Jenny also told me that her mother didn't see what the big deal was about the incident. Jenny told me she would visit her sister to see how she was doing.
• Student told me that in Nanjing during the October holiday, the subway station was so crowded that she had to wait three trains before she could board. In Nanjing, the trains come every four minutes. In Wuxi, they come every ten.
• Jenny tells me her sister was staying with her mother.
• In my first class back from the holiday, a student told me that she supported the demonstrators in Hong Kong. She said she wanted democracy in the mainland. The two other students in class told me that they hadn't been paying attention to what was happening in Hong Kong. One of these two students told me that she didn't like Hong Kongers, having been treated rudely by them, she said, when she visited that “small land where the people had small minds.”
• I asked another student about what was happening in Hong Kong. He was an older gentleman in his thirties. He said he hadn't been paying attention. I told him that the world was thinking it was big news. I told him it was the biggest protest in Hong Kong since the 1960s. He misunderstood and thought I was talking about all of China, and told me how students were killed in Beijing in '89.
• On the first Friday following the Golden Week, a student told me that his school was having classes on Saturday but on a Monday schedule. And then the next Monday, following the one day off on Sunday, would be another day with a Monday schedule. So, the student was telling me that he was having a weekend with a Monday and a Sunday, followed a Monday. Two Mondays in three days.
• Someone told me that they saw someone wearing a Mickey Mouse Jacket. Under the Mickey Mouse was written Sewer Rat.
• An acquaintance, a businessman who lives in the Hui Shan District, told me the following:
• HK can't succeed or the Party will have trouble on the mainland with citizens there wanting what HK got.
• The most powerful person in Wuxi city is the Wuxi Party Secretary, not the Wuxi Mayor.
• Thirty years ago, a Chinese delegation to New York City was surprised that American city delegations didn't have party secretaries but only mayors.
• Five star hotels in China have been desperately trying to downgrade themselves to four star after the central government, in its effort to fight corruption, said that party conferences would no longer be held in five star hotels.
• The problem the Chinese economy is that the central government wants to control everything.
• Only three our of the sixteen subway lines in Shanghai make money. The rest have to be subsidized. (I had to teach the word subsidized to my acquaintance.)
• In the 1950s, the Chinese Communist government sent a letter to Hong Kong telling them to not give their citizens so much freedom.
• Hong Kongers have a bias against Mainland Chinese. So, my friend would rather shop in Dubai.
• The local Lexus dealership sales are down which is a sign that the Chinese economy is slowing down.
• Buses in China can be very crowded and sometimes, the driver will tell passengers to pay and then get on the bus through the back door because for whatever reason some room is to be had there. I had a student tell me that one time he did this – that is, he paid at the front – but couldn't get on the bus because the driver closed the door on him. He was part of a group of three or four people who were told to pay at the front and board on the back, and he was the last to try to board. Usually, I find myself a seat on the bus because I take the time to wait for an empty bus. But I remember one time, I boarded a bus where this was not an option, and I boarded the bus at the back and then made a point of rushing to the front when I got off to pay the fare by swiping my card.
• Student told me that his company was getting less orders from Russia.
• A student told me that the workers hadn't got their pay from their company.
• A student told me that he was going to a notary to have a criminal records check done for his Australian Visa application. He will be going to Melbourne to study for a Master's Degree.
• A female student, who is attending FAS school, told me that she was feeling sad because she wasn't able to get a job with Hainan Airlines who had come to her campus to recruit. The thing that really got her was the fact that she didn't even get an interview because she wasn't slim enough.. As it was, her chances were slim (pardon the pun) to get the job. Only nine out of four hundred were selected she told me.
• What's happening in Hong Kong, a student told me, would be dealt with quickly in Mainland China.
• Problems with Italian components are causing delays on an assembly line in Wuxi, said a student working at the company.
• I should instead of calling this the “told things” entry to the “things told and overheard” entry. I overheard that local businessmen are finding the inability to bribe government officials hard to deal with, because the incentive of government officials is to do not anything efficiently for a businessman because they don't want to be suspected of having been bribed.
• I also overheard that local mayors and party secretaries in China are jockeying to become heads of committees investigating corruption because they would be immune from being investigated for corruption.
• I asked a student, with the English name Leo, why he had the English name of Leo. He told me that he had previously had the English name Hunk but felt compelled to change it because somebody already had that name at a company he had just joined. I explained to the all the students in the class with Leo, what a “hunk” was in English. To the young female who was a fan of the NFL, I said that she would think that all the players in the league were hunks because they were all so handsome and strong; but she said she only thought the quarterbacks were hunks. I asked a married male student if his wife thought he was a hunk and he coyly said yes. I then asked a married female student if her husband was a hunk and she said in a flat manner that he wasn't.
• A student named Terry tells me that fitting rooms are places where people can change their clothes.
• A student tells me that the banks are in bad shape in China and that I should take my RMB and convert then to dollars or euros.
• A middle school student told me that his friend broke his leg when trying to dash in front of oncoming traffic as part of a school boy dare; and that after the accident, the boys took the injured boy on a bus to his where they were subjected to severe questioning by the boy's parents. Stupid kids.

Things I Experienced in October 2014

• It took me seven hours to get to Beixin from Wuxi on October 1^st. It would normally take three hours. I first took the bus from Wuxi to Taixing and then caught a public bus to Beixin.
• I felt the weaving and swerving of a coach bus whose driver seemed to be F1ing it on his way to Taixing.
• I stood in a crowd at the Wuxi bus station for a hour because the bus to Taixing was late. Expecting the bus to be on time, I became stuck in the rush toward the bus entrance gate, when the bus's number was posted on the board above the gate, and then I wasn't able to go back when I realized the bus – it being October 1 – was delayed. So, I had to stand in place, a compact place with tens of others, for an hour not knowing when the bus would leave.
• I had to stand for a hour on the bus that I took from the Taixing bus station to Beixin where my in-laws live. I didn't realize that the bus was a city transit bus, not a coach, and didn't bother to join the initial rush to board the bus.
• I felt boredom of the countryside. Nothing to do but stay in a room and hide from the crowds and the noise and the filth.
• I feel utter disgust when walking down the street on which my in-laws compound was located, and so I went back to inside their compound to hide.
• At my local Pizza Hut, I read the menu and couldn't find a listing for pepperoni pizza. I peevishly gave the staff and the manager the what-for. The menu had changed they told me, but they did make a pepperoni pizza for me. To place the order in their computer system, they had to enter it as an order for a deluxe pizza with all the toppings and then hold about ten toppings except the pepperoni
• I walked through the Hui Shan Wanda Mall observing the locals be consumers while I listened to a podcast speculating about what was happening in Hong Kong. Mention was made of the Tienanmen incident and the persecution of the Falun Gong.
• I had a good meal at the Grandma's Restaurant in the Sunning Plaza. The shrimp cooked with garlic as well as the garlic fried potatoes were to die for!
• I took Tony to the grocery store in the basement of Sunning Plaza to show him the toys on display there. As far as I know, the grocery store is the only one that still sells Tomica toy cars and Plarail train sets in Wuxi. I also showed him a Ultraman figurine in a display case that was in a Japanese package. He looked at it and told me that it was an Ultraman Uglu. I then saw that it said so on the package. However, I couldn't tell if Tony could read the package or his knowledge of Ultraman characters and figures was that extensive. I mentioned this to Jenny and she said she was wondering too about how Tony could have known.
• Tony & I are a sight for other passengers when taking the Wuxi Metro. I didn't notice this as much when we were riding the bus, but because the train seats face each other, I notice lots and lots of stares. I can even look down a couple cars from where we are sitting and see people staring at us from that far away.
• In the second bedroom of Casa Kaulins, which had been a study, Jenny & I put in a bed for Tony. (No longer would he sleep with us, was the hope.) The day before we were to do this, we had to do some cleaning and to move some stuff about. I saw that we either had too much stuff or too little space in the second bedroom, and so I decided that some things had to be thrown out. One thing we threw out was a metal stand for our flat screen television (that we bought six years ago). Since the television was on a wall and wasn't ever going to be moved, I convinced Jenny that we should trash the stand. So, I took it out and left it by a nearby trash bin. Ten minutes later, I came back to the bin with more trash from the second bedroom, and I saw that the stand had already been taken by somebody. A little later, I found a CD player which I showed to Jenny and that she told me to trash. The player wasn't working as far as I could remember, and anyway, was rendered obsolete by all our newest electronic gadgets. I took that player out and stuffed it into the trash bin with the bags of normal refuse. Returning again ten minutes later with more trash, I saw that someone had taken the player. As I then told Jenny, some stuff you can't sell, but you can give it away for free.
• In a discussion about Hong Kong goings on, a student asked me how demonstrations and protests in the West were covered in the West. “Did Western governments try to tell the people they were no big deal?” I didn't know how to explain to him that the media in the West wasn't government controlled and that most people heard the government views through private, not government media filters.
• So we put the bed for Tony in our second bedroom. And so for the first time, we tried to get him to sleep in a bed other than ours. He surprised us by actually falling asleep in his new bed. We had expected him to resist. He didn't however stay the whole night there. At about three or four in the morning, he came back into the master bedroom and fell asleep beside Mom. As expected, he wasn't comfortable with sleeping by himself.
• I have had a student, English name of Change, in some of my classes. Way back when, I had a student name Hope, in classes. Yes. Hope and Change.
• Change took the name because his Chinese name is Qian Jie. The Qian which in Chinese means money. Funny, I told him because change is sometimes what we call the money we may have in our wallets or in our pockets.
• Rare readers may remember my mentioning that I took part in the recording of a commercial, for our school, for which the theme was backpacking. Well, the second Thursday in October, I was sitting on the subway train, minding my own business as it were, tapping out pinyin on my Ipod in order to test my knowledge of the Chinese characters that I was looking at on my Ipad, when I looked up at a video screen and saw someone reading a map of China. That map was familiar to me, and then I saw Edith's image and (Edith is the redoubtable one who is a study assistant at my school.) I realized that they were showing the commercial in which she and I had stood together for the recording! My first reaction was to smile, my next was to feel sheepish. The subway was crowded, it being the morning rush hour, and I wondered if the other passengers would look at me and notice that the foreigner on the train was in that commercial. When images of my backpack, that I had used as a prop in the video, appeared, I instinctively turned the backpack about so that no one on the train would recognize it. (The map of China was a map I had had for years folded away on a shelf near my desk at school. I used it as a prop on the commercial)
• When I do order pizza for pick up from my local Pizza Hut, they give me a lot of plastic forks which I take to school and use to eat Xinjiang Noodles.
• Walking on the subway platform, I noticed that the tile flooring was very uneven: so uneven that if I was dragging my feet as I walked, I would have tripped and fallen on my face.
• When I saw the backpacking commercial a second time, I saw more of the video including a shot where I was walking with a backpack on my back into a building. My posture looked atrocious, I thought. I then had a passenger nearby point at me, in a questioning manner, after she noticed that video and then me sitting on the train. I nodded my head up and down to indicate that it was me in the video. It was the first time, in four years, that I have had a stranger indicate that they had seen me in a commercial that was being displayed on a nearby video screen.
• The second night of the Tony new bed era, I slept with Tony on his new bed. The mattress was hard and had a wooden headrest. He slept soundly; I was my usual hard-to-get-to-sleep self.
• A student told me that during the Golden Week holiday, she had gone to a friend's wedding and became very displeased. The reason? The Groom. He's a bad man. A week before the wedding, he had gotten in a car accident in which he was driving a car at speeds over 140 km/h with three girls he had met in a pub. He told his fiancee about the accident and told her to not say a word about it to his parents. On the wedding day where the tradition is for guests to go to the Bride and Groom's home, the Groom was a terrible host: he hadn't cleaned his apartment, he didn't provide food for anyone, he let the guests fend for themselves for chairs to sit in, while he had two computers on so he could play computer games. And he didn't talk to anybody. Of course, I asked the student why her friend was marrying this man, and the student told me that her friend was 26 years and wanted to get married before it was too late.
• In mid-October after Tony got his new bed, I was sleeping in two beds every evening. Tony wanted me beside him when he fell asleep. When he would fall asleep, I would go back to my & Jenny's bed. But in the middle of the night, Tony would come to our bed, and so I would move to his bed to finish out the night.
• I feel rage as a green light comes on and I can't cross because of all these right-turning vehicles not stopping for the red light.
• On the night of Thursday, October 16, history was made as Tony, for the first time, spent the entire night in is bed. (Dad did join Tony in the new bed at 5:30 AM because he was worried about Tony.)
• On Saturday the 18^th, Tony was up at seven AM. I don't know if it was on purpose, but he asked to play with my Ipad Mini. Tony is now obsessed with first person shooter games... One of which I had downloaded the previous night.
• Coming to the subway station at 9:00 PM one evening, I didn't have to have my bag run through the x-ray machine. The workers had gone home. Presumably, they were getting rest for their daytime shifts when passengers do have to have their bags x-rayed.
• I took Tony for a wander around the Hui Shan Wanda Plaza on a Saturday. There were numerous shows being put on in the Mall's two courtyards, including car displays from dealerships hoping to boost sales. (Look to the things seen entry for October to learn what we saw) Tony jumped into the driver seat of as many of the cars as he could while I stood by feeling that we shouldn't be doing this because we weren't planning on buying a car ever. And then while we were looking at the cars, some dancing girls and models came out. I wanted to watch these girls wearing showy silvery dresses but Tony grabbed me by the hand and pulled me away. The little bugger.
• Doing a salon class about tools, I felt compelled to give the student nicknames because the topic seemed a barren one for which to start conversations. The students were mostly urban apartment dwellers who had never picked up a tool in their lives. Eric, I called the Hammer; Justin I called the Axe; and Chris, who loved to eat, I called the Bucket.
• Late October, I got to take part in another school commercial to be shown on the video screens of Wuxi Metro trains and stations. Standing beside the redoubtable Edith, I said a few lines of introduction about the topic of comic books.
• I got the news of the Parliament Hill shootings from the Drudge Report. A little bit later that day, I had a student tell me what a peaceful country Canada was. I mentioned the shootings to him and he said that he had heard about them. So it was news in China.
• The death of the reserve corporal, who was performing honor guard duties when he got murdered, impacts me in a slight way. I was a reserve corporal many years ago in Brandon and Winnipeg, Manitoba. I took part in a few twenty one gun salutes marking the opening of a session of the Manitoba Legislature. I can just imagine the horror for this man's family and friends. He was taking part in the most benign of military activities and got killed.
• After I learned of the shootings, Edith came in and excitedly told me all about what had happened in Canada. She thought that ISIS was responsible and that she wanted all ISIS killed. Apparently, they were a problem in Western China.
• Jenny & I celebrated our 8^th anniversary on October 27^th. I hope that when I die, I am still married to her. I have the Catholic attitude when it comes to marriage. A marriage is forever and  indissolvable . Divorce is a horrible thing though I don't deny that it is sometimes necessary. But most divorces in this day and age are frivolous. On October 27^th, 2006, I made the vow of till death do us part, and I will be damned if I ever break that vow.
• As it got into late October, I found myself spending more time in Tony's bed than my & Jenny's. One evening, Tony didn't go through the preliminaries of falling asleep in his bed and just went to sleep in our bed; leaving me to sleep in his bed all night.
• Washing my hands in the bathroom one morning, I noticed Tony had left some of his Ultraman figurines beside the sink. Tony has no notion of putting things in one place. I constantly have to chide him to put things back or at a proper place, whether it be the remote in the remote pockets we have placed near the television or dirty clothes in the hamper instead of on the floor of the bathroom or living room.
• Buying a coffee at the 85 bakery, near our school, lead to some momentary confusion for me. I took the coffee, in the 85 paper cup, upstairs to my office desk where I added the cream and sugar. I then got up from my desk to look at the bulletin board and noticed a paper cup from 85, similar in size to the one I had just bought, sitting on another desk in the office. I was momentarily startled. What was the cup doing there? I thought. Had I been adding cream and sugar to a coffee that wasn't mine? I picked up the cup on the other desk and saw that it was empty and felt relief. I asked my colleague what that cup was doing there and he told me that it had been sitting there since the day before.
• In order to make another commercial for a school, I was taken to a bookshop with the redoubtable Edith. I hadn't been in a bookshop for a long time and I liked the feel of it again. It brought back some pleasant reminisces. I even liked browsing through all the Chinese volumes. A series of books called Old Photos (老照片) was particularly interesting to flip through. The books featured old black and white photos of ordinary Chinese people from throughout the 20^th century.
• On the Wuxi Metro, I look ed up from my my Ipad Mini to see a video with a foreigner in a yellow shirt shuffling on his feet as he talked into a microphone. The foreigner was me so I quickly look back down at my Ipad Mini.
• On October 30^th, I spend the entire evening sleeping in Tony's bed because Tony was sleeping with Mom and occupying my place on her & my bed. Tony tells Mom that he hates the new bed. So, as of October 31st, Tony has slept only one complete night there.
• I had students liking my explanation for the phrase getting a taste of one's own medicine. “Imagine!”, I said to the students, “that you kidnap your math teacher and take him to a dark room where you make him do math homework and tests. That would be giving him a taste of his own medicine!” The idea of this was extremely popular with the high school aged students.
• For the last two weeks of October, I had an annoying cough that was either the result of a cold or Chinese air pollution.
• At the Nanchang subway station, the trains coming from opposite directions will usually arrive at the same time. One time I got off my train at the same time that Sally, a Chinese co-worker, coming from the opposite direction got off her train. We greeted each other but we didn't talk. I was listening to my Ipod and was very caught up with a particular podcast episode to which I was listening. Later, Sally told me that it seemed to her like I didn't seem keen on talking to her because I scowled when I saw her. I didn't deny what she said, and told her about wanting to listen to a podcast.

October 2014 Thoughts

• A showdown in Hong Kong. Will the Chicoms put down the demonstration '89 style? What would it mean for me?
• I didn't sense any trouble when I was in HK in February.
• Unlike '89, there is no Disneyland nearby.
• What would happen if there was a massacre in HK? It would be a dark day. Would I have to leave China? Would Tony & Jenny flee with me to Canada?
• And I went to that reception marking the 65^th anniversary of the PRC...
• I rationalize living in a country with a Communist Government by thinking the government really isn't Communist anymore and that I am just a spectator anyway. I may no longer be a spectator. I may be dealing with it.
• I told a student that I could never adopt the mentality of the mob here in China. As I was saying this, I thought about how the reason this was so was that the mobs here are not my people.
• Who my people are is another story. I am a loner and a solitary.
• Are all Chinese drivers as bad drivers as Wuxi drivers? China, being a big country, and I only knowing Wuxi drivers well, I should avoid generalizing about China. But there can be no doubt that Wuxi drivers are bad. They are rude, selfish, and inconsiderate. In civilized countries, drivers are made to yield to pedestrians, but not in Wuxi. I think that anytime you meet a driver from Wuxi, China, you should immediately slap him or her in the side of the head, and tell them that is for being a bad driver!
• Insult me but don't insult any of the people I love.
• It is nice to be important but it is important to be nice. I heard this on a Gilbert Gottfred podcast. I think I'll ask the students if is important to be nice but nicer to be important.
• I live in a world where everyone has an irregular life style which deviates far from what would be considered traditionally moral. In this universe, the rules are murky and so being more stridently self-righteous than others is the way to seem moral. And being a man of reactionary views, or more traditionally moral minded, I feel that this world is a wasteland which I couldn't clean up, even if I had the courage to do so. My saying the truth aloud would only make people more stridently self-righteous against me. It would be like firing a 22 gun at an elephant.
• I have an idea for changing the Chinese animal birth years. I would drop the year of the chicken and replace it with the year of the Shark. The year of the sheep would become the year of the Barracuda. The year of the mouse would become the year of Rhino. The year of the pig would become the year of the Gator.
• No one will ask me what my thoughts are on the parliament shootings so I will just put them here. Obviously, it is a bad thing, but not a complete surprise. There was that case a few years ago involving Marc Steyn, Canadian Human Rights Commission and Muslims. Living abroad, it is interesting to see that the story is international and that the Americans are paying attention to Canada.
• Here is a thing you can do next time someone shows you a photo of himself standing beside a clown. You can look at the photo and say that the person standing beside them looks to be a little light in the loafers. When the person gives a what-the-heck-you-talking-about response, you can say, “I'm sorry, I thought you were wearing the clown suit.”
• I imagine this happening: A teacher comes up to me and tells me that he has killed one of his students during a class. When I ask him how, he tells me he pushed the student out the window of the classroom, the student falling to his death three floors below. When he asks me what he should do, I tell him to do nothing. “Let's see if you get away it.” I say, hoping I can do a similar thing myself.
• I had a sore leg for a short time in October and so I was limping around and I have to say that I really enjoyed limping and kind of envy those who limp. The feeling of suffering gives one's ego a certain elevation.

October 27th is Our Anniversary!!!

8 Years!

I love you Honey!!

R.I.P.

Things AKIC Did in September 2014

• I had access to another person's We-Chat account and so I made some goofy postings to the Moments section: here We-Chaters can make postings for all their contacts to see. One I did caused a lot of reaction. Hoping for another Moments coup, I told the person to pose for a photo holding his nipples. I posted the photo and also wrote the following in Moments: What is the Sam Hill is going on with my nipples? They are tender and chaffed this morning. Alas, there was much reaction His girlfriend later deleted the post. She said it wasn't very professional.

• There was a song played at the end of a Radio Free Delingpole podcast episode that was catchy and not familiar to me, and for the life of me, I couldn't find the song's name and artist. But I then used a Siri feature on Ios 8 which I had just downloaded. I re-downloaded the podcast episode onto my Ipod and then played it for Siri on My Ipad. Siri identified the song in about five seconds and I was able to download the song from Baidu.

• I have realized that people take what is said on Social Apps very seriously. And I have a great idea for a movie. The promo goes like this: They didn't take social apps seriously and now they're paying the price....

• I got Tony to do some homework. I then did some arithmetic problems with him. I ask him what twenty plus twenty is, he doesn't understand. I ask him what 二十几二十 is, he understands and says 四十。

• I shot another commercial, that will be shown on the Wuxi Metro video screens, for my school. In it, I tell the pretty co-star that I am getting ready to do some backpacking next week, and then tell her how backpacking is an activity that is physically challenging, for which you should travel light, and wonderful for those on a budget (like me).

• I have been earning extra dough doing video transcribing. I thought that in this day and age, that there was software that could do that for you. As it is, there is a demand for it and I feel like I have over-committed.

• I bought the Happy Meal at McDonald's so I could get the Takara Plarail Train Toys for Tony.

• I bought two of the same toy but didn't give them to Tony directly. I instead left them with his other toys so he could find them. The first toy he was happy to get. But the second toy brought on a strange reaction. He found this toy while I was at work. When I came home, Tony was upset with me. "I don't want this!" he said to me angrily. "I already have one!" I was surprised at his attitude, and chided him for his ingratitude.

• I attended a reception at a Hotel located in the heart of Taihu New City (so said the hotel website) that was really far away from the downtown Wuxi. It was to mark the 65^th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic in China. A bunch of foreigners, including the trainers at my school, attended. Most of the foreigners were businessmen wearing suits and ties. (I at least wore a tie with white shirt and black pants – the rest of my colleagues balked at the idea of dressing formal) I recognized only two of the foreigners but didn't talk to them. I felt intimidated by being with so many business types and couldn't escape this feeling of being frivolous English teaching riff-raff. The mayor of Wuxi made a speech thanking the foreigners for their support. Later, he came up to us and gave us a name card which I will keep as a souvenir.

• After the reception, I returned home and stopped by my local mom and pop shop to buy some drinks. The female proprietor looked at Tony Baba (that be me), and asked why I was wearing a tie. Not knowing what Chinese to say, I showed her the card I got from the Mayor.

Things I was told in September 2014

• A student told me that they had to write an exam on a Sunday evening. A Sunday Evening!!

• A foreigner told me that he was accosted by a local woman on the street who told him he shouldn't be dating Japanese woman while he was with his girlfriend who was a local.

• A student told me their favorite flavor of ice cream was rose. She insisted on this when I questioned the existence of rose flavored ice cream. She then denied that she meant strawberry.

• A student told me that she had gone on an exchange trip to Denmark. I asked her if Danes struck her as being particularly happy, perhaps the happiest people on Earth. She told me that they liked to party till five in the morning and that she hadn't meet an unhappy one.

• My wife told me that a man was arrested for peeing on a Wuxi Metro train.

• Other students told me that parents letting their baby pee on the Wuxi Metro train had made the news.

• We Chat silliness engaged in by me has my colleague being shunned by members of Wuxi's American Football team. Or so my colleague told me.

• A young male student was upset because he learned that his school was going to have a sports day on October 1^st. The day is supposed to be the first of a three day holiday for everyone.

• A student told me her favorite movie was Roman Holiday. I have probably had a hundred students tell that this is their favorite movie.

• The students told me that they had to go to work or attend school on the Sunday before the October holiday.

• Someone keeps telling me and other people that he has broken up with his Chinese girlfriend, only to still be living with her the next day or week.

• On the day that I heard about the riots in Hong Kong, I just so happened to have in class, a student who is going to go to Hong Kong to study. Talking to her more, I learned that she had spent a great deal of time in Hong Kong, even spending summer vacations there because her parents' Hong Kong flat. I asked her if she had heard about the riots. She told me she did and that she was surprised because she thought that the Chinese government was doing a good job of running the place and couldn't understand why the people in Hong Kong were so upset. I told her if I was in their shoes, I would do the same. Hong Kong, I told her, should be running China, not China running Hong Kong. She also told me that when she is in Hong Kong, she prefers to speak Cantonese because Mandarin speakers are looked down upon.

• A student told me she will go to the M & Ms factory in Shanghai.

• A student told me that she would never eat the street-made fried dough sticks, called youtiao by the locals, because she had heard that the vendors use soap when making them in order to enhance their golden brown appearance.

Things Seen In Wuxi, September 2014

Things I have saw in Wuxi in September, 2014:

• A School Master with a loud hailer supervising rows upon rows of uniformed school children doing mass calisthenics on the school playground.

• Hair salon workers standing in file, outside the salon, being spoken to (harangued by?) their manager.

• Street cleaners wearing the hats I normally associate with Vietnamese rice paddy farmers.

• A local man wearing a polo shirt so that was partially rolled up so as to expose his midriff.

• A male holding onto to the forearm of his female companion in a caveman manner. Instead of holding onto her hand, he had grabbed onto her forearm in order, it seemed to me, to pull her about like she was a recalcitrant child.

• A young woman wearing a t-shirt on which was printed the word "pervert."

• Three security guards rolling a traffic cop's pedestal from the center of the intersection of Zhongshan and Xueqian roads at about nine in the morning. Despite the fact that the intersection has traffic control lights, the powers that be still see a need for a policeman to direct traffic during rush hours. Interestingly, the guards, when rolling the pedestal to a corner, weren't paying attention to traffic and vehicles had to swerve to avoid colliding with them.

• Two young men together on a bicycle. They dressed in identical white dress shirts, black pants, and dress shoes. One was standing as he turned the pedals, with a look of exertion on his face, as the other sat on the basket clamp over the rear wheel.

• An old man with a very distinctive scowl on his face getting off a Wuxi Metro train. He moved slowly and was one of the last passengers to get to the platform exit.

• A man with shoulder-length white hair crossing at a pedestrian pathway on Zhongshan Road. He is too far away from me for I to be able to determine his nationality.

• At the shuttle bus station that is by the Wuxi Metro Yanqiao Station, there are long rows of potted flower beds that have been erected seven feet above ground. One day while riding the bus, I saw about ten workers, wearing those Vietnamese style farmer hats, in a row planting flowers in these beds. To see them seven feet in the air, was seemingly to see them at a new and heightened perspective.

• A man standing on a corner with a large turtle hanging from a hook. I assume he was showing it off because he wanted to sell it.

• A very wide sign. It was wide because the title printed on it was very long. The sign was so wide I would have had to stand in the middle of the road to capture all its width with my pocket camera. Piecing the title together from the two photos I had to take to capture all the words: the sign says: National Center of Supervision and Inspection on Preoduct Quality of Overhead Gantry Crane Machinery: Equipment Safety Supervision Inspection Branch of Jiangsu Province. (the spelling mistake was on the sign!)

• Eight people on the entire Wuxi Metro Train at 815 PM on a Monday.

• Waiting for the shuttle bus that takes me to the Subway Station, an old man walked past and was looking at me, studying me closely; and so I stared back, looking him straight in the eye after having given him the once over. I detected the corner of a laughing smile on his face as he had passed by me.

• While waiting for the shuttle bus to take me home from the subway station, I was Daydreaming and so the driver honked the horn at me to get me to board. I would have been her only passenger.

• Taking the shuttle bus one morning, I saw, at an intersection, a driver perform a very quick left turn off a fresh green and thus cut in front of the bus I was on which was attempting to proceed straight through the intersection from the opposite direction. This wasn't worth blogging about. It was the driver behind the first left-turning car doing the same maneuver that was. The second left-turning car wasn't actually stopped at the intersection when the light turned green but was approaching it at full speed. The driver as well wanted to make a left turn and not wait for the bus to go through the intersection. So, making the left turn at a high rate of speed, the car missed hitting the shuttle bus I was on by a foot!

• On the subway, there was a baby without diapers. I didn't pay much attention to the baby and its family, but I couldn't help but notice that when they got off at a station that there was a puddle where they had been sitting. Jenny confirmed my suspicions that the baby had taken a piss.

• Taking the subway home on a Friday evening, I saw there were a lot more passengers than usual and I had people sitting next to me. I was reading, flipping through, you could say, books on my Ipad. I noticed a male sitting on my left, stare at the screen full or curiosity as to what I was looking at. A male on sitting on my seemed to have done the same thing, but then I heard and felt him thump his head against the side wall of the train. Why he was doing this was a mystery to me. I took a glance at him and he didn't appear to be mad.

• On a Saturday morning, I was walking to a bus stop and saw a row of black cars with pink bows tied to the front outside mirrors. Someone in my apartment complex was getting married I thought.

• Next day, I see the same fleet of cars parked on the road outside our apartment. Someone says something and the drivers got in the cars and headed off somewhere. Maybe someone isn't getting married from the apartment I thought.

• I saw myself on Wuxi Metro television. As I walked in the station, I saw the video that had been taken of me and the redoubtable Edith, a study assistant at my school, doing a commercial spot for our school. And I was wearing the same green khaki colored shirt that I wore recording the commercial and so I felt sheepish.

• Walking near a Primary School as the students are about to go home, I see a man walking down the street with no shirt on. I needed to put something in this blog and that is all I saw. Of course, he did stand out, especially to me because I was in the mindset that it was autumn.

• I saw a foreign woman at a Wuxi City Hall reception wearing a nice formal dress. It was long and had a low back. From behind, I was surprised to see she had a huge tattoo. Is that what is cool in the West? I have been away over ten years now so what do I know? The last time I was there and living there, tattoos were the fashion.

• At the same reception, I saw a Japanese man wearing a suit and white shoes.

• I was walking back to Casa Kaulins because I was not willing to stand and wait twenty minutes for a bus. On the way, I saw many outstanding examples of bad parking. Several cars were parked a meter from the curb, some cars were at 45 degree angles to the curb, and one car was was parked perpendicular to the curve. Its driver was going into the space between two cars that weren't parked in the center of the lined spaces.

• But what really got to me about the road I was walking down wasn't the bad parking, but the hideous ugliness of the scene. Cars and pavement and trash and crumbling buildings and gray sky.

• On the last day of September, I was walking down a street towards the McDonalds on the corner of Zhongshan and Xueqian Road. The Number Two People's Hospital was across the street. In quick succession, I suddenly heard the screeching of a car coming to a quick stop, the sound of a collision, and a collective gasp of people seeing what was happening. I turned to my right to the cause of the sounds and the gasps, and saw that a taxi had hit an electric bike. The e-biker was a woman and she was knocked off her e-bike so that she was sitting on the pavement, one leg straight on the ground and the other bent under her buttock. The accident happened at a spot on the road that was combination pedestrian crossing and car turning spot – Zhongshan Road otherwise has barriers dividing the opposing lanes of traffic. I have often tried to cross the road at that point and it is a place with a high probability of accidents because pedestrians and e-bikes and cars come into conflict. They all ignore each other. (And to think, if I hadn't decided to go to McDonalds, I would have been crossing at the spot where the accident happened.)