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.