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.