AKIC's July 2015 Back in Wuxi Notes

• Our flight from Vancouver arrived in Shanghai Pudong where the airport was dingy and the sky was gray.
• We took a bus from the airport to the Wuxi bus station.
• At the bus station, the taxi stand was closed so we had to hire a private driver to take us home. It was our good fortune that it wasn't raining because we had to walk a considerable distance, toting three heavy bags of luggage outside, to get to his vehicle.
• The first thing I noticed on my return to Wuxi was all the wetness. The Yanqiao Metro station, as I went back to work, was particularly damp.
• They say that of all the students in the world who speak English as a second language, the Chinese are among the worst. Why? I have what are only guesses since Chinese ESL students, not ESL students from other countries, are the only ones I encounter. I first guess that the Chinese are exceedingly shy about using English. I have seen that they will only speak English with a foreigner and often the foreigner has to force them to speak. Many of my students only want to answer questions with a yes, no, or okay. Despite my telling them to speak English among themselves, none of the students ever heed my advice. They will quickly break into Chinese in conversation among themselves in an English class. Do ESL students from other parts of the world have these bad habits?
• I also blame the Chinese education system for notoriously requiring too much rote learning. I have had many Chinese ESL students learn sentences by rote for my classes. [The same has been said about Japanese students of English as well.] When I ask my students to make a second sentence on the fly using their wits and imagination, they go mute. [Rote learning has its uses but turning history into an exercise of remembering exact dates, like the Chinese do, stops students from taking an interest in it. It must be deliberate.]
• Is this poor Chinese performance also due to a fear of losing face when making an English speaking mistake?
• Is it also because the Chinese are arrogant about their place in the world?
• First day back in Wuxi, I had an evening company class. Maybe, I have mentioned it before but this company is located near the Civic Center Metro Stop (Line #1) and the Coastal City Shopping Mall. To get to the company from the metro stop, I have to walk down a long pedestrian tunnel. This first day back from my trip to Canada, the tunnel floor was damp and my shoes were squeaking as I walked. I thought that there had to have been a flood, but what I learned from the students was that there hadn't been a flood, but that the dampness was the result of the large amount of rain that had fallen in Wuxi during my absence. Ultimately, it was a design flaw by the engineers that was to blame.
• Second day back at work was Dominion Day, a.k.a. Canada Day, but I didn't care. Stupidly, Canadian politicians changed the name of the July 1^st holiday to Canada Day from Dominion Day and so, many Canadians, who are ignorant of Canada's history, think Canada was somehow born on that date in 1867. Canada has existed for 400 years since it was so named by the French who first settled there. What happened in 1867 was that the various Canadian colonies decided to establish a federal government, become the Dominion of Canada as it were. Now, I am proud to be Canadian but not proud of its federal government. Canada would be better off if its federal government was weakened and so I can't celebrate Canada Day because it is really a celebration of the Canadian federal government formation.
• The second night after my return from Canada, I couldn't get to sleep. Jet Lag. The next day, I was awake till about 8:00 PM when I had to fight to stay awake for my final evening class. Then on the train ride home, I kept nodding off.
• I will have a class where, if all the students show up, the majority of them will be twins. That is, I will have a three person class with twins. So, 66.7 percent of the students in that class will be twins. Now if the class consisted of five students with two sets of twins, 80 percent of the students would be twins. This adding of a set of twins would mean a 13.3 percent increase in the size of the proportion of twins in the class expressed as a percentage. This increase seems small for what is in fact a 100 percent in the absolute number of twins. Now going from 66.7 to 80 could also be said to be a twenty percent increase if 13.3 is expressed as part of the 66.7. If the 13.3 is expressed as part of the 80, the increase could be said to be 16.7 percent. What does this tell you? Don't trust the numbers you hear from politicians or their spokesman or their enemies in the media. Look at the absolute numbers.
• A backfire or discharge of gas from a passing bus caused a loud exploding sound that startled the boys and girl in the office. The girls screamed and then some of the boys told stories of bomb explosion that they were near in South Africa and England. There was also talk of Xinjiang people. No one was hurt. The driver of the bus walked around the bus to inspect and eventually went on his way.
• Trying to cross Zhongshan Road at a pedestrian path, I had to stop otherwise I would have been run over by a bus. The driver was trying to maneuver his vehicle through a traffic jam.
• The decision to publish my monthly blog entries is fraught with indecision for me. Every time, I go through the notes, I notice something has been overlooked. Often, I am talking about a subject without first introducing it to my readers. I am always forgetting that any readers I may have are not in my mind and know nothing about me. I really need an editor.
• There are butchers in the butcher shop. So said a student when I asked her to make a sentence with the word butcher. In response to her sentence, I asked if butcher shops sell butchers. [That is another reason why the Chinese are such terrible English speakers.]
• I was doing a Speaker's Corner and two potential customers, that is possible paying students, fled. They didn't like it when I tried to say something to them. Some students don't want to be forced to overcome their shyness.
• Summer is humid in Wuxi but I do like the sight of women's legs and peasant wide brimmed straw hats.
• Tom, our most articulate student, is not in favor of “gay” marriage. “Why would they do that?” he asked me. They being the powers that be in the West. I could only tell him that like China, the West had a cultural revolution in the 1960s for which we are paying dearly now.
• How can I talk to a student about Game of Thrones which she hasn't seen all the episodes yet? I don't think I can but the student wants to...
• A teenage student told me that she had just learned to ride a bicycle without training wheels. She hadn't learned to ride a bicycle when she was younger because her mother thought it wasn't safe.
• Tony, at eight years of age, still rides his bicycle with training wheels. I can blame this on my working four evenings a week, my laziness when I do have time for Tony and Tony's addiction to computer games.
• On the first Saturday evening back in Wuxi, we found ourselves at Wuxi's Nanchang Jie bar street. Jenny & Tony went to someone's birthday party and I tagged along. Looking for food for myself, I discovered the hard way that the Burger King had shut down. I had to walk the long bar street about three times to make sure I hadn't passed its former location by mistake. The birthday party was at a restaurant and bar called Honeymoon. It had several floors and a nice view of the nearby canal to recommend it.
• After the party, the three of us had to fight through big crowds to get out of Nanchang Jie.
• On a Sunday, we bought a new E-Bike that was small-sized for Jenny. The old e-bike is big and hard for Jenny to push around, and will now be for my exclusive use.
• The Greek crisis caught my attention and for a few days I followed events there closely. These are my thoughts about it: I want to see the EU crumble because I feel large multinational super bureaucracies are evil. Greece, though certainly a wonderful country is socialist, and deserves its fate for being so. So the EU versus Greece, for me, is like the Iran – Iraq war where no one knows who to cheer for. For the sake of humanity, I hope that the battle is short and that from the wreckage, a more distributionist world order can emerge.
• I don't let Tony forget his shameful behavior to Grandma and Grandpa when we left Brandon. Sad to say, he was more interested in playing Minecraft on the Ipad.
• Nothing like a “Thank you!” from Jenny to make my day.
• 30,000 Japanese die a year of Kodokushi. That is, they die old, alone, and neglected so that they may lay undiscovered for weeks. In the USA, 11,000 are killed every year because of guns. (40,000 or so are killed in automobile accidents). Much ado is made of gun deaths in the US and yet we don't dwell so much on the atrocious care of old people in Western style cultures.
• It's the suits that have screwed up Greece. With their nice hair cuts and their fancy suits, they are truly effeminate, lacking in courage. They couldn't adult up in all the years that people knew the Greek debacle was coming.
• Rocky, a student, tells me that when he eats spicy food his voice changes.
• I hadn't been giving much thought to the Chinese stock market collapse till I read an article on the telegraph.uk site saying that what was happening in China was more impactful than what was happening in Greece. So I found myself looking at the stock market app on my Iphone for the first time and I began questioning some students who told me that they had lost money. One told me that the Chinese were now going to put all their money in real estate.
• That something like this collapse should happen to China is not a surprise to me. In this blog, I have reported how much unnecessary construction of retail space and apartments I have been seeing in the last few years.
• In the near middle of July as I was thinking about the market crash, I looked at the streets and life seemed to go on. Nobody was jumping out of buildings.
• I asked a student if she had made a difference during her day before the class. Once she understood what I meant by make a difference, she said she hadn't. Most students would probably tell me that. Selfish twerbs.
• Imagine, I said to a student, if you knocked on a stranger's door and told them that you wanted to help them, make a difference.
• How to be taller? Stand by a short person. How to be faster? Stand by a man with no legs.
• In a business salon class, the students and I were reviewing a dialogue where the following was said: “Do you want me to call Amsterdam?” One of the students, whose English is not weak, told me that he did know that Amsterdam was a city in the Netherlands. He had actually thought that Amsterdam was a person. Just have to be careful with proper nouns if you are a teacher and a student, but especially if you are a teacher.
• I had to ask the local Hui Shan businessman I know about the the stock market collapse. He told me of a few theories he'd heard. In one theory, it was the Americans that were to be blamed. That theory posits that they came to China and did some short selling and left the Chinese holding the bag. Another theory said that the Jiang Zemin faction destroyed the stock market to spite Xi Jing Ping.
• He also told me of the enormous shadow banking sector that exists everywhere in China to escape the controls, particularly the foreign exchange controls, imposed by the government, which require lots of paperwork to do foreign transactions and which impose daily limits on amounts of foreign currency that can be used. Need a lot of American currency? Go to the shadow bank.
• Tony told me he was angry with me. This was his response to my criticizing his desire to do nothing but play games on the Ipad and PC and his not wanting to walk to stores in the area of our apartment. And to the latter point about not walking, he told me that walking was not good for him.
• In spite the silliness of our arguments, Tony is talking more and showing a great fluency in English, using words that I would have thought that he didn't know how to use.
• I went to the local Decathalon to buy another pair of the same type of shoes that I had worn on my trip to Canada. While I can now buy shoes my size here, thanks to Decathalon, I don't want to take any chances and see my size of shoes no longer in stock.
• Some English Names the students have given themselves recently: Murphy Portman, Skywalker, Momo, Oliver, Ennis, Kell, Kingsley (a girl gave herself this name), Joyce (a boy), Circle, General, Rocky, Holly, Garfield, Sky, Snow, Nail, Maco (who is studying chemistry because he is a fan of the Breaking Bad TV series), Xavier, Thea, Aviva, Shella, and Effie.
• For the Summer, Tony is attending something called the HyLite School of Art and Sinology which is the same complex as my school. I can get to Tony's school from mine through a series of stairs and hallways without going outside. Picking him up the first day, Tony said he liked the school, but he couldn't me why.
• One morning, I got on the Metro at Tai Hu Square and went in the direction of Changguanxi, the southern terminus of Metro Line #1. I only wanted to ride the train to waste time so as to not to get to work too early. I had time on my hand because I took Tony to his school for an 8:30 kickoff. I didn't have to start at my school until 13:00.
• At the Changuanxi platform, I got off the train to see there was another train parked on the other side, but its doors were closed and looking at the board, I saw a sign saying it wasn't going to depart for forty minutes. I wondered what was going on till I looked back across the platform and saw that the train I had gotten off at was on the side of the platform with signs indicating it was going in the direction of Yanqiao which was the direction I was intending to go. So, I got back on the train. When I arrived at Nanchang station, I was interested to see that it only cost me 1.90 rmb to ride the subway as far as I did. [It should have cost 4.]
• This company I am teaching (Lan Gui Feng or Lan Kwai Fong is how you spell it) gave me this sheet written in English to edit about Taihu New City and Lan Kwai Fong Wuxi. Taihu New City is what the Wuxi Government wants to be the new Wuxi downtown. It was hoped or estimated or projected said this sheet that one million workers would move to this new CBD!!! I couldn't hold my laugher.
• Two students, Sky and Betty, or as I call them Skybetty because they are a inseparable pair, told me they went to Vietnam. I asked them if they went to Saigon, Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City. They told me they went to an island that had a water park; and I told them that they had gone all the way to a tourist trap. That is not at all why I would have gone to Vietnam. I suppose their attitude to Vietnam is like a Canadian going to Florida. No one goes to these places for the culture or history.
• Thursday, which is the Wednesday of my work week, I woke up feeling dead tired. Tony's going to school downtown requires me to leave the house at 7:30 every morning on days when I won't return till 9:45 at night. I admit that my days are not so busy. I am no where near as busy as I was during my time at Loomis and DHL, but I am up a long time all the same.
• Live not by lies! I don't have the courage to live this way. I am scared to say anything when lies are spoken in my presence. I don't deserve freedom. Why should cattle have the gifts of freedom?
• To live in China as long as I have: ten years, is to tolerate lies.
• On a Friday, the forecast was for rain which meant that I wasn't going to chance using the e-bike to get to the Metro station. I still had to make a trip to the e-bike's parking spot to umplug it because I still had it recharging. And it was just as I was walking back to the apartment from the e-bike that I felt drops of rain and felt I had made the right decision to not take the e-bike. But there was a lull in the rain, and Tony doubted my decision. But as the shuttle bus pulled up near the Metro station and we got off, it was raining buckets.
• And then as we left the Nanchang station so I could go to work and Tony could go to his summer school, we saw that Zhongshan Road was dry and that not a speck of rain had fallen there. Hui Shan District, where I live, is far from Zhongshan Road.
• President Obama's answer to the question about the four American hostages not being released by the Iranians despite his deal with them was very telling. Obama was staggered by the question and his eventual response, after the stagger of silence, was to be insulted by the question.
• Long Dung II. In one of the two HyLite men's room stalls behind the squatter's hole, another big load of shit, that was nauseating to behold, had been deposited. Did someone bring their horse to the bathroom? I felt sorry for the janitor (a.k.a. I.E.) who had to clean it.
• I have chosen to be boring, not because I have decided to become conventional but because I lack courage.
• Tony and his friend Steven had a sleepover at our apartment. They played Minecraft on my Ipad and my Iphone.
• I wonder if some of the guys in my office still do sleepovers. It wouldn't surprise me.
• I'll say it again. I dislike Wuxi's summer humidity.
• Why do middle-aged and older Wuxi women seem to dress in a manner that makes them look like warthogs? Is it that they want their appearance to revolt and frighten others?
• Friendship. What is that? Is it something one should seek?
• Teppanyaki is alright. What is teppanyaki? A Japanese style of cooking when patrons sit around a grill and have a cook prepare their dishes right in front of them. And there is now such a restaurant at the Wanda near Casa K.
• What to make of the Iran -- USA nuclear deal? I don't know enough about the Middle East to have an opinion. But my instinct is to distrust it because Obama is notoriously anti-American in his foreign policy. He seems to prefer America's enemies at the expense of its friends.
• I finished reading two travel books written my an Englishwoman ME Durham who was able to tour the Balkan area in the early 20th century before the start of the Great War. She was able travel to places that seemed hundreds of years out of the 20th century. It was the kind of travel I would like to do. Instead, I am stuck witnessing the Chinese acquire cars and build shopping malls. The furthest I can go back in time is when I see some of the migrant workers in Wuxi. They seem to have come of the 1950s. [Lloyd Lofthouse, a Chicom apologist whose blog entries I subscribe to, said that some poverty has been in China for hundreds of years and it is not fair to blame the Chicoms for it. So, maybe these migrant workers I see are hundreds of years from the 21^st century.]
• Maybe I should get back to telling the one or two readers I have about Nicolás Gómez Dávila  quotes that seem quite apt. Here is #2390 from my collection: The people with whom we speak every day and our favorite authors cannot belong to the same zoological species. My favorite writers include David Warren, Anthony Esolen, Father Schall, and of course Dávila. I know no one who likes these authors. And so there seems no point in talking to anyone in Wuxi about anything.
• One night as I was taking the subway home from work, I got annoyed at a mother and child. The pair sat beside me and the child couldn't stop saying “laowai!” I was trying to read and I had been full of dark thoughts on account of a recent spat with Jenny and recent classes with annoying students; so I frowned at the woman and told her to shut up “her fucking kid!” When the child persisted, I did it again. Feeling sheepish on account of what I know now and even knew then was imprudent behavior, I tried to concentrate on the book I was reading which ironically enough was written by Joseph Ratzinger. I looked up from my book a few instances to see if I was being stared at by the onlookers but I couldn't tell.
• Since Jenny bought her e-bike, I have been using the old e-bike to go to the metro station. My one fear is that it will rain heavily while the bike is parked outside.
• At the Nanchang station, I saw a pair of hipster foreigners trying to buy subway tickets. How did I know they were hipsters? The male had one of those long Grizzly Adams beards that I have noticed many professional athletes sporting recently. The female, I assumed was hip, but really she looked non-descript and unexotic in comparison to Asian girls.
• I had a student tell me that he had been shocked to see foreign couples on the Wuxi Metro engaging in public displays of affection. He asked me why this was. I told him basically that there had been a change in culture in the West and that young foreign lovers now were no longer capable of controlling their passions and also no longer capable to committing themselves to each other beyond the most recent act of groping or fornication.
• I read reactionary and conservative blogging every day; and lately, I have been wondering what is the point of me doing so since I am in China and living an isolated life where there is no opportunities for me to discuss the issues with anyone anyhow.
• I had to explode at a listless student who was going, in a week, to board a plane to Canada where she was going to go to high school. I had to ask her if she even wanted to go given her ignorance of Canada which seemed to reveal a lack of interest. She said it was her parents idea to go.
• In a salon class, I asked the students what education was supposed to do, and they told me it was supposed to do all these wonderful things to make people so wonderful and thoughtful and able to live a productive life I then asked if the Chinese education system provided these things, and the students say it provided none of them. [Not to say that the Western system is doing that much better. Our system is pumping out infantilized adults who glorify in their craziness and lack of morals]
• As the 637 shuttle bus was approaching our stop one morning (I didn't take the e-bike on account of it raining), I saw an impatient and stupid Chinese driver who was following the bus decide to pass it on its passenger side. I didn't let this happen because I walked onto the road to board the bus. The driver seeing this and not wanting to wait, rapidly steered his wheels so he could pass the bus on the other side
• Is the Western way of driving any better? In some ways, I can say it isn't because you can feel confined in traffic when you follow the rules, and if it wasn't for courtesy from other drivers, you can be stuck a long time trying to make a turn. In China, you can expect drivers to give you some courtesy, but unfortunately the courtesy of a driver to another driver does not redound to drivers giving pedestrians courtesy and so you have drivers thinking it is okay to pass a bus on its passenger side when it is trying to pick up passengers, and drivers thinking it is okay as well to cut off pedestrians so they can make right or left turns.
• Because Tony was hogging my Ipad on the train, I was able to read, on my Ipod, Nicolás Gómez Dávila aphorism # 2453: A prolonged childhood—permitted by industrial society’s current prosperity—redounds merely in a growing number of infantilized adults. I am sure I have commented on this aphorism before. And I hope I said that I agreed with it, that I mentioned I had seen the evidence of it with my own eyes, and that I was certainly one of these infantilized adults myself. And I probably can't take any solace for myself from the fact that I do feel some shame on account of this being so.
• I had the runs in July. Every morning, I sit on the toilet in order to rid myself of the liquidy workings of my stomach.
• The last Sunday of July, I went with Tony to Shanghai to visit with the reigning two-time Shanghai Expat of the year Paul Rudkin. The three of us went to the Shanghai Railway Museum, then Mister Pancake, then the Shanghai Maglev Museum and finally Paul's pad near the Longyang Road Subway Station. That's what we did more or less. For the next bunch of bullets, I will relate the interesting points of the day.
• It was hot and humid for us in Shanghai. I asked Paul how he liked summer there and he told he hated it. It was his first summer in Shanghai after having spent many in Korea. Tony was complaining a lot when we were walking around in the outside. I had sweat sting my eyes although it was Tony's whining that was more annoying. The humidity made us all lazy and so the trip had to social and not so much of a sightseeing tour.
• The two museums were okay, though I wouldn't recommend them if you weren't a train fan. It was our second visit to the Shanghai Train Museum and our first to the Maglev Museum. The Shanghai Train Museum didn't contain many English signs. The Maglev Museum did and for its price – free – it was worth a look.
• The sights very much worth seeing in Shanghai in summer were the girls. Lots and lots of lovely legs did Paul and I see. Talking about these sights, I learned from Paul that Shanghai men have a prejudice against girls who are not from Shanghai. Paul told me about a time that he was with a Shanghai colleague when a girl who was a real looker came into their presence. Paul pointed out the girl to the colleague but when the girl spoke, the colleague was really turned off by her Anhui accent. The Shanghairen wouldn't contemplate going out with a girl who wasn't from Shanghai, no matter how good looking she was.
• I learned from Paul that the 16^th line of the Shanghai Subway had a problem. The planners underestimated the number of riders and built train consists that were only about three cars long. They can't add cars for at least 22 months because the cars built were of a special gauge and size and the manufacturers couldn't fit the orders till then.
• I have been told that only three lines in the Shanghai Subway system make money.
• Compared to Shanghai, Wuxi's metro seems nicer. Wuxi's system is less crowded and less dingy; it's cars and turnstiles are more modern.
• I was able to use my Wuxi subway pass in Shanghai.
• Paul told me that he was very frustrated with his attempts to get around the Great Chinese Firewall. The powers that be, he says, are making it harder.
• From an article by Theodore Dalrymple in Taki's Magazine: If I had my way (which, fortunately for the world, is rather unlikely), I should make it a criminal offense to take a child to a MacDonald’s restaurant. If someone were to tell me that children love those restaurants, I should reply, “But that is precisely why it should be a criminal offense.” Theodore Dalrymple is one of my favorite writers on the Internet and I take Tony to MacDonald's a lot. So that passage is a slap in my face. But I deserve and I should at least try to make Tony learn to eat Vegetables.
• One Monday, I stood in nude in my humid apartment and my body glistened with sweat from my forehead to my stomach. I tried to point this out to Jenny. “Look at me!” I said, but she said I was fat. “But look at how I glisten!” I said. “Well, that's because you're fat!”
• A day of sweating in Shanghai put the end to my runs and my shits became more solid.
• I had a big scare at the Shanghai Railway Station when Tony accompanied me to the WC. He disappeared on me in a split instant. I saw him, looked another way, and turned back to not see him. And for a minute I couldn't see him, and I looked around, frantically calling his name. I was never so relieved as to hear him respond.
• Another writer I admire, though I only agree with him 90 percent of the time, John Derbyshire said he was supporting Donald Trump. His reasoning was that Trump wasn't a professional politician. Fair enough, I thought, and I tried to be more sympathetic to the Donald. But revelations have shown that the Donald had really hadn't been much of a conservative and had donated money to professional politicians on the Democratic side of the aisle. And I have thought of another reason to not support the Donald: he is from another class that rightly needs to be despised as much as the professional politician class: the celebrity class. The Donald is famous in the manner of Hilary Clinton: he has made a name for himself without accomplishing anything impressive enough to qualify him to be president.
• Hilary Clinton is a member of two despised classes: the professional politician and the celebrity class.
• I watch a lot of movies but I spare rare readers my reviews of them, for the most part. I recently watched a movie from 1972, Pocket Money, starring Paul Newman and Lee Marvin, which I enjoyed it a lot. Newman looked cool and I thought that he and Marvin had great chemistry. But the reviewers, I learned from the Internet, panned it. Shows what I or the critics know.
• A typical day in July 2015. I wake up at 6:00 AM. I take Tony, via e-bike or bus and Wuxi Metro to his downtown summer school at 7:30 AM. We get there about 8:30 AM. If my work starts at 1:00 PM, I head back home where I have 90 minutes to do some things before returning downtown. I finish work usually at 9:00 PM. I take the train and then e-bike it or walk home around 10:00 PM. I go to bed before midnight.
• More about that teenage female student who is going to Canada and whose flight to Toronto was to leave in two days. I asked her if she was excited. She said she wasn't in a ho-hum manner. I asked her if she would miss her friends. She said she was going to see them next summer so she wasn't sad at all. Asking her what she knew about Canada, she couldn't tell me who the Prime Minister of Canada was even though I had told her three or four times before.
• This is what I found out about the details of her living arrangements in Canada. She will be accompanied by parents and a grandmother. Her meals will be cooked for her. So I figure she will not assimilate. Not that that is a bad thing, for Canada is a silly place these days, lacking in morals or common sense. But her lack of interest in Canada is coming from a materialist Chinese culture created by the excesses of Communism and Crony Capitalism. All she wants to do is play computer games and chat on WeChat or QQ. Confucian? She wouldn't know who that was.
• Tony thought my e-bike had been stolen. I had parked it in a bike lane in the morning when I took him to school and so he was expecting to see it there at suppertime when Mom was taking him home. But what I had done while he was going to school was take the e-bike home and then park it in a different place. But his thoughts and concern were interesting.
• Lacklustre company class. What to do? What to do? [Could it be that the Chinese speak such bad English because all the teachers they have, be they Chinese or native speaker, are awful?]
• My mother told me that in a certain municipality in Canada, house owners, with driveways and without cars, are renting their driveways to those who have cars, and so the government is getting in on this but insisting that these transactions be taxed. When will they start insisting that garage sales be taxed as well? This is what government in Canada is now. Sad.
• I like the days when I am able to use the e-bike to get to the Metro Station and back. It is much faster than walking home (though not as good exercise) and taking the shuttle bus. Charging the e-bike is a chore however because I do have to park the bike on the other end of the apartment complex, far from Casa K; and because I have to hope there is a empty spot where I can charge and park the e-bike. Despite the many cars in Wuxi, there are still a lot of e-bikes taking up parking space. This is especially noticeable at the Wuxi Metro Station where I often have to ride through a narrow gauntlet of parked e-bikes to find a parking spot. When driving the e-bike, I have figured out that the best time to make a turn is on the green left signal. When a car is tailing me in the apartment complex laneway, I hold my ground and make the vehicle slow down.
• I find I lack focus these days. I cannot concentrate on what I am doing at the moment and I find I am looking ahead to doing other things; and when I am doing these other things that I had been looking ahead to doing, I find I am further looking ahead to doing yet more other things.
• Working for wages and welfare dependency are both forms of slavery. While I am fortunate to have never been on welfare, I have been a wage slave all my life: a nigger by choice.
• A student tells me that someone's wife owns KTVs and thus runs a prostitution ring. Jenny has confirmed that this is the case.
• A rude action on the Wuxi Metro I would say is to lay oneself down on the seats and take a nap. I have seen this done at least three times including the second last evening of July. I thought to take a photo of the gentleman doing this and publish on my WordPress blog.
• Tony really hates walking. On the last Friday of July when I took him to the Yanqiao Metro Station, he insisted that I park the e-bike close to the station entrance. It had been my habit to park on the other end of the parking area far from the entrance.
• At the end of July, it seems like the trip to Canada happened longer than just a month previous. Do I want to move back there? It seems that I more I hem and haw about it, and the older I get, the less sense it makes to go back. I don't have the resources and the energy and the dumb optimism like I had when I moved to Wuxi from Canada, and previously to British Columbia from Winnipeg, or before that, when I moved to Winnipeg from Brandon.
• July was a month of students telling me they had lots of summer homework to do.
• No news about Greece as the month ended.