September 2017 Notes

The Kaulins Family China spent the early part of September 2017, recovering from our trip to Canada:

• Tony told me that he would miss Canada and his uncle Ron.
• Tony also missed his Canadian grandfather. One of the strangest and saddest things for me to witness was Tony sitting in the living room of Casa K in early September, crying because he realized his grandfather was dead. Tony had been shown photos of his grandfather wearing military uniforms and was very impressed. When he cried over Grandpa, he was with Jenny and somehow he must have dawned on him then that Grandpa was gone and never coming back. [Moral to others: The earlier in life you have children the better it is for them because they can spend more time with their grandparents. It also gives you one less thing to regret later in life.]
• Back driving on the roads of Wuxi, I immediately experienced spasms of road rage. Three weeks of being in a driving environment, I could understand, wiped away what little tolerance I had for the Chinese way of doing things. I was back to honking horns and giving fingers.
• Jenny complained of not being able to sleep well. It must be jet lag, she said.
• I returned to find the menu of the Expat restaurant, I had been eating at as a treat for myself, to be boring and unattractive.

* * * * *

It seems, as September is in its early stages, that driving Tony, who is in grade four this term, to school and picking him up will be more annoying than it had been when he was in grade three. Xishan School has two campuses for the primary school grades. The newer campus, that was built in time for the previous school year, is for grades one to three; the older became the location for just grades four to six. So Tony's being in grade four means having to pick him up at the old campus where there are less places about to park and stop. Indeed, the first day of the school year at pick-up time, cars were double parked up and down the street. Because Jenny was with me, I had her go to the school to pick up Tony while I stayed in our vehicle which was in a double-parked position. The school location we drove to last year, while not being a picnic as for parking, did have a long enough road leading to it so that one could park without having to worry about being blocked by a double parker. Last year, one also could easily turn around to drive away from the school. This year, the road by the school has a fence barrier in the middle and so, unless one tries to make a u-turn at a gap in the barrier, one has to endure a slow slog as there are a lot of cars on the road as the students are let out.

* * * * *

I had been buying German beers – what I supposed were German beers – in cans from local supermarkets. Some have been quite delicious, but some result in my having a horrible hangover the next day. And this is after having drunk only one beer the night before. Why should I get these painful hangovers? Is the beer way past its best-for date? Is the beer counterfeit? Are German beers that strong?

* * * * *

As I told someone, Trump is a two is a sea of one, zeroes, and I add now, minuses. All the things said about him being a boor and a nincompoop and a vulgarian and an ignoramus are no doubt true; and yet the people who loath him are so unhinged in their criticism of him that one feels one has to say "Viva Trump!"

So here it goes:

VIVA TRUMP!

If this causes you to froth at the mouth in rage, so what. You are the one who's nuts.

And there is some good to be said about Trump. 1) He is an American. Unlike, Obama who seemed ashamed of the country that gave him the chance to lead it, Trump is an American. If it is okay for the Chinese to be ruled by a Chinese person, Japan to be ruled by a Japanese person, and for Africans to be ruled by Africans, why can't America be lead by an American who likes his country and feels no need to please European snobs? 2) He is not the wife of Bill Clinton. 3) He is sui generis. That is, he is one of a kind. Unlike Obama, who was a dime-a-dozen liberal who was very much banal, moral-preening and full of himself (but I will credit Barry for maybe having some political skills), Trump is an original who is, hopefully, breaking the mold of what a politician can be like. Trump fights and never says he's sorry. He doesn't pretend to take the high road. He thinks aloud and doesn't choose his words carefully. He seems more concerned with doing things than putting on a show of saying the right things. 4) He is driving Leftists our of their minds. He is bringing out the true traits of Leftists, and showing how bigoted, rude, ignorant, petty and lacking in proportion they really are. And he is doing this despite being as unideological as Bill Clinton was. The Leftists are criticizing Trump for what he isn't, which is a Racist and a Nazi. They are criticizing him for fueling something which he hasn't, which is the white supremacist movement which is fringe movement incapable of filling a junior "c" hockey rink in Canada. By being this way, leftists have shown themselves to be more boorish than Trump. 5) Trump is great for comedians. There was a fear to lambast Obama, but I conjecture that he had he not been put on such a pedestal and treated like every other president, Obama would have quickly been a bore to mock. As I said before, he was a dime-a-dozen liberal and you can only make so many jokes about someone's boringness. Eastwood's depiction of Obama as an empty chair was very accurate. If a world without PC, the chair would have been the prop used for Obama on an SNL skit.

And if what I have said doesn't convince you, which I expect it won't, consider this: The people who hate that Trump is president of the United States really brought it on themselves. Popular culture has coarsened in my life time so that even people who should know better are engaging in the coarsening. Be that as it may, this coarsening is a leftist project. In rejecting the constraints of a bourgeois society, they created the culture where a Trump could thrive and become elected President. Trump became a celebrity in that constrain-free, undignified culture. He gave money to leftist politicians who didn't mind and probably found him to be one of them until he didn't go along with their program. The bitterness of the Left against Trump is akin in irrationality to the bitterness launched at Trotsky by Stalin, and at Lin Biao by Maoists.

[*Two days after I typed this, I heard complaints on conservative right-wing podcasts, that I regularly listen to that Trump was going Left. Does my "Viva Trump!" still stand? As long as the Left keeps vilifying Trump in an unreasonable manner, it will. He is the best there is under the circumstances. One of those circumstances is the existence of the Left. If the Left wasn't as stupid as it was and if it didn't contribute so strongly to the culture we are currently stuck with, Trump would not have been elected.*]

* * * * *

Why is it that I am most influenced by writers and thinkers that are Catholic? They are more thoughtful and more capable of penetrating observations than the people who espouse ignoring religion and thinking for one's self.

* * * * *

"In 1915," said Tony, "Australia and Turkey went to war." Amazing the things he learns surfing Youtube.

I never knew anything about this till I saw the movie, that starred Mel Gibson, called Gallipoli. And I was in my thirties when I did so.

* * * * *

Some leftover bloggings from my trip in to Canada in August:

• I had coffee with the former King of Wuxi. His son, he told, was in the cadets in Winnipeg. This is something I would like my son Tony to do.
• I saw this very earnest old man in Vancouver. While we were riding the Skytrain, the man came up to Tony and offered him some candy. The candy was old, and to be honest, Tony was creeped out by the old man; but I told him to accept it and not to read anything into it. I then saw the man offer assistance to this old woman who had also been on the train. The elderly woman was hunched over as the aged often were and was pushing a shopping cart. She was a sad sight because someone should have been looking after her and she shouldn't be fending for herself on a subway. The man, full of zeal made pathetic by his elderliness, was clearly jumping at the opportunity to help this woman.
• I asked Tony what was the best store we went to Canada. He told the big toy store in BC. I thought he was talking about a store in Van, but when he told me it wasn't, I had to rack my brain to recall that we had gone to the Toys R Us at the Willowbrook Mall in Langley. That was a mall I spent a lot of time making deliveries at when I was working as a relief courier driver.
• At Winnipeg Polo Park, there was a Lego store where they had a display, full of lego blocks of human bodies, arms, heads and hair with which one could built a Lego figure on one's own. It was actually three for twelve dollars. They wouldn't let Tony build just one so I had to swallow the expense because it was sort of Tony's birthday.
• At the St Vital Food Court, I had an interesting interaction when I was queueing to be served at a KFC counter. Being in China for as many years as I have, I can testify to how the Chinese don't know how to queue and how confusing it can be in China when you come to a counter with a bunch of Chinese people already there because you don't know where the front or the end of the queue is. Sometimes, the Chinese don't know when to move. Sometimes, the Chinese are standing in the midst of the queue, but really they are looking, having not made up their minds about what to order, and are in fact standing in the wrong spot. Stand back and try to decide what is going on and another Chinese person will come from behind and cut in front of you! Anyway, perhaps this is why I was confused at St. Vital. There was a woman standing about five feet from the counter. I couldn't decide if she was still thinking or was waiting to place an order. Unsure, I stood beside her. When the serving of the person in front of us had taken place, the woman did an amazing thing. She asked me what was happening. I told her that I was unsure as to whether she was ready to order or was still thinking of ordering. She responded that she was ready to order and she went to make her order; I going next. I really couldn't ascertain the woman's attitude towards me, but I did appreciate that she cleared the air of confusion. In China, doing what she did would probably have amounted to a loss of face.
• Tony's 10^th birthday was a bit of a dud. It was the day on which there was that typhoon that screwed up our travel plans.

* * * * *

I received a newsletter email from the New Republic asking if the readers were missing Obama yet. I couldn't imagine there being any reader of the New Republic who didn't miss Obama as soon as Trump was inaugurated. So I wondered what the New Republic was on about, but not enough to actually open the email.

Perhaps they were mocking the "Are you missing me yet?" billboards featuring W that were posted sometime during Obama's term.

* * * * *

I have been so long in Wuxi that I don't think of it as an outpost. When I see a foreigner, my attitude is "who are the fuck are you!"

* * * * *

We had a stint of assessing the English levels of workers at Johnson Controls in Wuxi.

Here are some things I observed:

• I saw what looked to be a Communist party manual on a rack in the cafeteria.
• The food in the cafeteria was horrible.
• The tests were done on the fifth floor of a seven floor adminstrative building of what seemed to be a massive factory complex. Could a company like this in West support such a seemingly large administrative staff? I asked a colleague. He answered that he doubted it. Western companies would surely cut such things to the bone.
• Assessing English ability is a hard thing to do in a strict quantitative way. You can tell who has good english, so-so english, bad english and who can't speak the language at all, but for me to explain why I gave a 51/60 to one person and a 48/60 to another is something I can't easily do except to say I was using my gut and the student said something that struck as worthy of a higher sore.
• When I asked some the students to tell me about a famous person, I had a few tell me about Chairman Mao. "Old China was bad and its society was full of problems, New China created by Chairman Mao was good " was basically what they told me. You would think that Chairman Mao would not be the first famous person to pop in these person's minds. From what I have observed, Chairman Mao is not crammed into the people's imaginations anymore. So, why did they bother to tell me about Chairman Mao? Was it something about me being a foreigner, a devil as it were, and they're wanting to show national pride in the only way they have been conditioned to think about it? Was their imagination that stunted? That is, they know their political indoctrination and study nothing but engineering manuals for their work?

* * * * *

Thanks to Radio Derb, I read this magnificent travel book, by George Gissing, entitled By the Ionian Sea: Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy. What is so great about this work is that the writer travels to these out-of-the-way places, not to check off an item on a bucket list but because of an actual spiritual yearning brought on by a reading of classic Latin and Greek texts. To experience these yearnings, he goes though a great deal of discomfort that no modern day tourist would be capable of enduring.

And along the way he sees some magnificent things and observes novel behaviors that would put 1960s counterculturists to shame. One such observation was the habit of a town in Southern Italy where locals would anonymously pay the hotel and restaurant bills of travelers to whom they never introduced themselves. Actions as far away from virtue-signaling as you can get.

I should perform those acts myself and not blog about them.

* * * * *

I have a nephew who is coming to China. He will be doing QC in Xiamen for the Canadian company that employs him.

Good for him and I hope his mother is proud.

* * * * *

On the 7th of September, in the morning, I drove Tony to school. While still at home, I worried that we were a little slow in getting out of the house, and I was bracing myself for an annoying experience by telling myself to not be, but I got very annoyed and displayed rage anyway.

On the drive to Tony's school in the morning there are three congestion points we have to go through. The first point is an intersection between Hui Shan Da Dao (a major road) and a road I am on, coming from Casa Kaulins. If we can get on this road early enough in the morning, we can breeze through the intersection; if we don't, we can be in a long lineup that takes five changes of lights to get through. This morning, the lineup was long and it was all in the right lane where people were trying to either go straight through or get into the right turn lane. What is most annoying about this long lineup are the cars that drive in the unoccupied left lane and try to cut into the right lane. You curse at these drivers and wonder why they don't just get into the back of queue like you had just done. Nobody wants to let these drivers in, so some pretty harrowing games of chicken are played every time traffic jolts forward because no one will yield to these queue-jumpers. The second point of congestion is at the next light that is about a block after the first one. If traffic is heavy, you have to play the same game of chicken with people trying to cut in from the left lane. But if you get there early enough, it is not much of a problem. At this second set of lights, I make a right turn on the road on which I am to drop off Tony and where there is a third point of congestion caused by an entrance to an apartment community. There is a resulting T-junction intersection where anarchy prevails because there are cars trying to making left turns onto the road from the apartment complex, cars coming from the opposite direction trying to make left turns into the apartment complex, all sorts of cars passing by the entrance and through the intersection as they drop off their children, no traffic lights or traffic monitors, and no rules as to who has precedence. It makes this congestion point the worse aspect of the drive to school. This particular morning, the 7th, I came to the intersection and a White VW coming from the opposite direction, trying to enter the apartment complex, started to make a left turn in front of me. It blocked my path and I had no choice but to let that car turn. At the same time, there was a small car exiting the apartment entrance on my right-hand side that was trying to make a left turn onto the road and it blocked the VW and me as well. These two cars had a stand-off which was resolved with the VW making room for the small car exiting the complex. But then an impatient idiot driver of a black sedan who was behind the VW decided he was going to do a passing left turn on the VW that he was behind. (This maneuver, that I have only seen in China, involves one turning car passing another turning car) This "brilliant" maneuver resulted in a jam that could only be ended by someone reversing; and this standoff only ended when the female driver of the small car got out of her car and got the driver of the black sedan to move. So, the small car made its turn, the VW made it turn, and I proceeded through the intersection by blocking the black sedan and preventing it from turning. I established eye contact with the driver of the black sedan and gave him a middle finger. I was knocking on the glass of my window as I did so; doing it so hard that Tony told me to knock break the window.

I then dropped off Tony, at a crosswalk where a uniformed person stood without doing anything useful like direct traffic at the T-junction. Continuing down the road by Tony's school is annoying as well because e-bikes and cars are all doing their own thing, getting in the way of others without there being sense of order or courtesy. From the road by Tony's school, I make a right turn on another long road where there is another congestion point that is annoying, if only in an afterthought sort of way. The road intersects with Hui Shan Da Dao, that major road I mentioned above. At the intersection, there are two lanes for turning left, one lane for going straight or making right turns, and a right-hand lane used for parking or bicycles. When there is a long lineup of cars by the intersection, some impatient drivers will try to get around the lineup by driving in the right-hand bicycle lane, and then if they are blocked by parked cars or bicycles, try will budge their way back in the proper lanes for cars trying to go straight or make right turns. The impatient drivers making this maneuver are squeezing themselves tightly against the cars in the proper lane. If they beside me, I won't let them in but again it is another game of chicken with these drivers.

What is it with Mainland Chinese drivers? Has the Chinese Communist Party so ruined civil society here that no one can drive like civilized human beings? The stupidest animal in the world is the Mainland Chinese driver.

* * * * *

Every time I go to Canada and drive, I find myself making a thank-you gesture, in the form of a military salute to another driver who has done me a nice turn in traffic.

Not once, I have done this driving in China. Not once. And I have encountered thousands and thousands of Chinese drivers., there being more of them than in Canada.

* * * * *

I happened to talk to a Wuxi Expat who was hanging it up, as the expression goes. Ten years in Wuxi and he was going back to his Anglosphere country. I take he had many reasons for leaving, like homesickness, but I could tell that he was also leaving Mainland China because he was sick of the bad manners of its residents and how dirty its environment was.

As I said in last month's entry, I would like to go back to a third country that doesn't exist. So I stay here as a result of a certain stasis. As well, I am not sure if my wife would want to move to Canada. She sometimes exhibits patriotism to her homeland.

* * * * *

By 9/11, we were back in the boring Wuxi routine where I went to work and did my intellectual hobbies, and Jenny did her business and tiger-mothered Tony with his homework every night and seemingly free moment of the week.

* * * * *

A new part-time teacher, who had some experience teaching English in China, expressed his frustration at how the Chinese students were just so dull and lacking in spontaneity, and how it was like pulling teeth to get them to talk.. He asked me (alluding to how I had been in China so long while doing so) what insights I had into dealing with it. I had nothing to tell him other than I did try some drills with them (tell me about some topic off the top of your head) and to appreciate the precious few who were not in the typical Chinese mold.

He did agree with my contention that the Chinese Communist Party was responsible for the deadening of thought.

* * * * *

This September, I don't have primary classes to do (or should I say to teach?) and so I have lots of free time which I am devoting to language study and reading. I am spending a little time studying French, Spanish, and German every day using the Duolingo app on my Iphone. I do a little more study of French via a podcast I listen to everyday where the teacher speaks mostly in French at a pace I can easily handle. However, I spend the majority of my time studying Chinese. I listen to podcasts and recordings, and I practice reading Chinese characters. Thanks to the Pleco App and Google Translate, I have an easy time identifying characters. I practice typing Chinese characters on the computer with the help of a Chinese text application that transforms my pinyin typing into characters.

I should spend my time doing something that makes me money. I had vowed that in September I would do some serious exploration of ways to earn money via the Internet. I haven't got around to it.

Here is a sample of my Chinese typing:

我是Andis。我是加拿大人。我住在无锡惠山区。我有一个中国的妻子Jenny。我们有一个儿子。他的名字是Tony。他是十岁。

我想大陆中国驱动程序是白痴。

我爸爸出生于拉脱维亚。她在2012年在加拿大去世。

中国司机是混蛋！

* * * * *

I did a conversation class with a pair of women about America. They didn't know much about America so I felt like a veritable expert when I talked about it. I also thought about what I really liked about American culture. To the students I mentioned that I loved American music, tv shows and movies. Thinking about it after class, I should also mention that I love following its sports and its politics.

Thinking about what I like about China, I would have to say I find its entire history very interesting as well as some poetry and Kung Fu. Chinese history is particularly interesting because it is like watching a train wreck. The hubris of Imperial China lead to a comeuppance and humiliation. The attempts to rectify these bad times has only resulted in more tragedy and darkness. The emergence of China as an economic power is not really something for which the Chinese can be proud. Their affluence is the product of the crassest materialism. If the Chinese Communist Party can keep its grip on power while maintaining this affluence, it would be a tragedy for the soul of humanity. Man needs freedom to reason and revelation to know his proper place in existence.

* * * * *

Because I had heard of a campaign the local government would conduct in order to warn drivers to have respect for pedestrians or be fined, I asked a female student in a Speakers Corner if Wuxi motorists were in fact stopping for pedestrians. The woman told me that they were; to which I expressed flabbergastment. I told her that I had never seen a driver do such a thing unless the pedestrian happened to be a position where the driver had to stop or was unable to swerve about the pedestrian. But she insisted that this happened a lot. We argued about for fifteen minutes. The woman said I only saw the bad. I told her that that was all I ever saw and that if there was courtesy I would have noticed it and celebrated it. She continued to insist that the drivers were becoming more courteous and if they weren't, it was because there were so many people in China. That was an excuse which I should have responded to by saying that if that was so, you would see Chinese people practice courtesy in times when there weren't so many people, but this was just not so. I further should have cited an example of my witnessing, on many occasions, situations where a Chinese drivers will cut off other drivers even when there are no other cars on the road.

Anyway, I was aghast at the woman's attitude and I couldn't tell if she was lying to me or was so completely unaware of how others see her culture.

* * * * *

A white sedan comes barreling onto the road, making a right turn, without looking, in front of the bus in which I was riding. The bus blared his horn at the car: an action I would I done but the driver of the bus was Chinese. I thought that being cut off by cars blindly turning right was water off a duck's back to the Chinese; but the bus driver was clearly annoyed at the driver of the sedan. So how is it that blindly turning right is so common in China when it does inconvenience other drivers so much that they will use their horns to indicate disapproval?

The depths of the Chinese mind is unfathomable to me.

[Or have the drivers been told to follow the rules of civilized driving?]

* * * * *

At this stage of my time in China (I am my 13^th year) to complain about the local driving is to risk sounding like a broken violin. As one about-to-be-former Wuxi expat said, when I got on the local driving and complained about a recent outrage I had experienced, he had seen it all and there was no point in me continuing....

But the local drivers always find a new way to get me lathering in pure road rage.

One Sunday, I drove into a gas station lot to put more fuel in the K family Citroen C3XR. I noticed, after I turned into the lot and was approaching the pumps, that a car was trying to pass me on my right-hand side. He then managed to cut in front of me to get served at the one pump that was available for filling. I was livid. I was tempted to punch the driver. I instead blared my horn at him, opened the door of car so I could stand and give him the middle finger while repeating the one English swear word the bumpkin (for that was what he looked like) would understand. The driver's reaction was one of typical Chinese inscrutability. He looked at me and then looked straight ahead and drove very quickly off the lot. Coward.

* * * * *

The students, when I ask them, tell me they have no enemies. (I then tell the students they have no enemies because as as soon as a person becomes their enemy, the person is eliminated.) This answer, which is always the same, is very telling and a further proof of a lack of imagination on the part of the students.

Jesus Christ, a son of God, walked the face of the Earth and had enemies. He never told his followers to not have enemies, but to love them. The students, not being raised on Christianity, brainwashed by the Chinese Communist education system and modern saccharine be-niceism that they are allowed to be exposed to, would think it a loss of face to admit they had enemies. Meanwhile, I could think of many that I had, like Leftists, Atheists, the North Korean leader and local drivers; and I would not think of myself as a bad human being for declaring that I did. I would only be bad if I didn't hope that these people could change their ways.

* * * * *

The Democrats (I am talking US politics now) should be called out for their KKKism which is real unlike the KKKism they say that every Republican has. Besides being anti-black and anti-legal-immigrant, the KKK in its heyday was extremely anti-Catholic. Who is the anti-Catholic party today? The Democrats. That questioning of a Catholic judge nominee by that senator Barbara Boxer must surely have been out of the KKK playbook.

* * * * *

I went to Tesco on a Monday morning. I took a photo of a shelf of Bear Beer which I published in my Wordpress photo blog. I then experienced surreal lineup behavior while waiting to pay for my purchases. First, I witnessed was the woman in front of me evidently deciding that she had forgotten to pick up something, so she left her basket on the ground and walked to some shelf. Meanwhile another women got in lineup behind me and stood so close that she kept brushing against my elbow and making me feel like she was breathing down my neck. I had to tell myself that Chinese people sense of personal space radius is smaller than ours. Meanwhile, a family in front of me decided to turn around their shopping cart, which was beside the register , and leave the checkout aisle. It was like watching someone make a u-turn with a car on a very narrow road, say the width of one car with not many inches to spare. It would have made more sense to pull the cart out backwards. Meanwhile another group that was in front of the family with its u-turning shopping cart had a member come from the store with a bottle of cooking oil that they must have forgotten to pick up earlier. It was disconcerting for me to have people cut in front of me in the lineup. I even had a feeling that the woman behind me was with that group in front of me but I wasn't sure and I wasn't in the mood to have yet another person move ahead of me. In fact, it seemed that she wanted me to get out of her way but I didn't budge from my position right by the cashier who was close enough to serve me.

Queueing up and lining up in Mainland China is – I will use that word again – disconcerting.

* * * * *

One day, I got on the subway to notice I was on the train that had Chinese communist Party plaques and images decorating its interior. I looked at the TV screens to see video of Wuxi Metro workers holding a meeting of its communist party members. All the workers were attentively listening to what the meeting leaders had to tell them and some of them were then shown to be happy at be awarded some awards from the communist party. I got off the train and walked to my place of work and saw those 14 or 15 pair of patriotic characters that can be seen everywhere since President Xi took control of the Chinese communist Party. Rather grim, I thought to myself.

* * * * *

I liked the excerpts of Trump's UN speech that were played on the Andrew Klavan podcast. I particularly liked it when Trump talked about the current failure of Venezuela's socialist state and then added on about how Communism had failed everywhere including places like the Soviet Union and Cuba. It was a nice sentiment but how I wished he could have been really ballsy and talked about how it had failed and been abandoned in the People's Republic of China.

* * * * *

A student told me she had a pet turtle. The turtle was a family pet before she was born, and so this woman could tell me that she had a pet that was older than herself which was a rare thing indeed.

* * * * *

Mango Six, the cafe that moved into a part of my school's location shut down. The business was a complete bust. After a busy opening weekend, word got around that the place was expensive, people rarely came. I know this because I had watched the cafe from our school's new location and it rarely had any customers. Why it stayed open as long as it did was a mystery.

* * * * *

Sure, I read my bible every day. For myself, I put on a show of being sympathetic to Catholicism. But it entitles me to no claim to be a better person, for it has not translated into any virtuous actions. It hasn't even garnered me any criticism. To be thought less of by the people around me for even being sympathetic to Christianity, for rightly seeing me as a Christian who acts selfishly, would be a start for saving my soul.

* * * * *

Tony asking me questions about history was the highlight of September 2017. In particular, he was asking me questions about WW1, WW2 and other wars.

* * * * *

The last Monday of September 2017 was a day of torrential rain. I also was feeling less than tipper because of some bug I had caught or maybe some bad food I had eaten. My symptoms were lethargy, mild diarrhea, profuse sweating and a mild nausea that had my on the verge of vomiting. It was the worst day of the month.

Tony then caught the bug. He vomited at school, then at home and got to not go to school for a day.

I then told Jenny that she was probably going to catch the bug next. [As I type this, I just recently made the prediction. And really, I hope I am wrong. Because even if I am proven to be right, Jenny will blame me for the bug going around and will hate it that I was proven right. [Later: Jenny has succumbed to the bug, as I predicted.]]

[Tony returned to school, only to be sick again. This time, Jenny had to take him to the hospital...]

* * * * *

Did a BMW driver perform a fuck you maneuver towards me?  Or was it just his aggressive style of driving?

Here's what happened:  On the last Tuesday of September 2017, I was making a left turn out of Jia Zhou Yang Fang, the apartment complex which containeth Casa Kaulins, and the BMW driver who was behind me tried to make a passing left turn on me. [A passing turn is a maneuver I have only seen done in China and it involves a turning car passing another turning car.  I find this to be not cricket in the least]  I didn't yield to him.

I continued on my merry way. That is if you can call taking Tony to school in the morning is a merry thing for me to do and for Tony to endure.  The BMW was behind me, making a right turn as I did onto a certain  double-laned road whose name I couldn't tell you.  Approaching some lights with me in the right hand lane, the BMW then raced in front of me, coming so closely to my front end that I, who was in a passive state of mind, reluctantly honked my horn.  

The BMW after doing this then went into the left turn lane.  So the end result of the BMW's driving had me wondering if he was mad at my not yielding to him earlier.  Why swerve around traffic when there was no advantage to be had by doing so, except to show your rage at some other driver?  

The problem with this surmise is that Chinese drivers are often aggressive in a counter productive way.  How often have I seen Chinese drivers never take stock of a situation and just impulsively make an aggressive maneuver that is counter productive or makes a traffic snarl even worse.  And when I didn't yield to the BMW, the driver didn't honk his horn, as even a Chinese driver would do if some other driver annoyed him.

* * * * *

I used to say that NFL football was a game for men. No longer.

The NFL has become Leftist. Sad.

And the NFL isn't a private business, but in fact a quasi crony capitalist racket acting like a institution. By seeking to identify itself with local governments, it has tried to make money by identifying itself with the local communities these governments are supposed to represent: while at the same time holding these communities hostage if they don't shovel them tax dollars to build expensive stadiums that no businessman would in his right mind build with his own money.

The NFL needs to be held to account, and if Trump brings this about... Viva Trump!

* * * * *

Escape the totalitarian impulse.  If only were so easy as to get out of the Peoples Republic of China.  But as David Warren said in a late September blog entry, there has been an irruption of the totalitarian impulse in Anglo Saxonia.  So there may be no escape for me.

* * * * *

I wanted to talk about the NFL kneelers; the student wanted to talk about North Korea.  The student had seen a report stating that Trump wanted to destroy North Korea and that China was concerned.  I went on a rant about the duplicity of the Chicoms in the whole affair.  If there is a nuclear war, it is China that must bear the blame.  It has been aiding and abetting the evil Nork regime all these years. Later, I told the student, who is an NBA fan (hoo-hum!!) to watch how the kneeling controversy affects the NBA which has had a spat of its own with Trump.

* * * * *

I told the students that Chinese eat a lot of rice. One of the students, who had told me earlier in the month that Chinese drivers yield to pedestrians (see above), said that it wasn't so. "You only see the Chinese eating rice and don't see the Chinese who aren't eating rice!" she told me.

This argument didn't happen. But I should have used the example in my argument earlier in the month. It wouldn't have clinched the issue with logic instead of just facts.

* * * * *

The truth is that teaching English to Mainland Chinese students is tedious. It is a rare thing indeed when I find myself not feeling like I am running out the clock. I have been told that in other countries, this is not the case. The students have things to say and things that they want to say.

I can even give an example from when I was studying with a Chinese teacher of how I used my imagination when speaking. I remember once that I wrote a dialogue in Chinese of Xi Jing Ping and I in the bar, and the teacher was amazed by it. While I made many errors, I tried to say things that the Chinese teacher would have never thought of herself.

Disillusioned but persisting.

* * * * *

As September 2017 came to an end, we had the golden week holiday, in the first week of October to look forward to, and so I asked others what their plans were. Some told they were going back to their hometowns, and many told me that to go anywhere in China that was touristy in nature was worth the bother because they would probably be over run with people.

Jenny had thought to go to a place called Chocolate Town in Zhenjiang Province but I vetoed the idea and got Tony to agree with me by telling him that it was going to be way crowded.

We will go to Jenny's hometown for a day but I am not looking forward to the drive to get there and back. Last time, it took us over three hours to go about 97 km on a freeway.

AKIC's Canada Trip Notes: June 2015 in Vancouver, Winnipeg and Brandon

[Some pre-trip thoughts.]
• To think that humans are bad because they go to war is to miss the point entirely about war.  War is a good thing because humans are so bad.
• It seems that we are going to have the indignity of having no one come to meet us at the Winnipeg Airport.
• The family and relatives I had are disintegrating into nothing. The older ones are dying off and I never had much dealings with the younger ones who live out of Winnipeg.
• Great argument against abortion because of rape.  "I'm sorry innocent one but your father is a rapist and so we are going to have to kill you!"
  [The following was typed inVancouver]
• Nightmare at Pudong:  Paperwork problems cost us 16,000 RMB.  So, I fly to Canada by myself. Jenny & Tony take a flight the next day.
• Just before we encountered the problem, we were waiting in line to check in.  Behind us, young twenty-something foreigners who sounded Canadian kept using "like" and "fuck" in their conversation.  No consideration for the people around them.
• Angela, a ex-student, in Wuxi now living in Vancouver, picks me up at the airport. I had to use a payphone to contact her. She lives near the airport in a house that has four bathrooms and a huge yard. We will be staying with her before we fly out to Winnipeg.
• I am going to have to get a Chinese driving license.  Because I don't work in BC anymore, I can't renew my driver's license there. This I was told at an ICBC licensing office in Richmond.  However, I learned that I could drive with a valid Chinese driver's license in Canada and that if I moved back to Canada, I could change it to Canadian.
• But this leaves me with the problem of having a valid photo ID so I could renew my passport.  For that, it looks like I will have to get a proof of Canadian citizenship certificate.  But does it solve the problem of my having a valid photo ID other than my passport? [Perhaps, my Chinese driving license can be my photo ID.]
• Are humans to conform to the system or should the system serve the needs of humans?  Needing pieces of paper just so you can do something that isn't criminal is galling.  I made a mistake and have to suffer more that someone who performs an act with criminal intentions.
• Richmond, a suburb of Van, seems a lot smaller than Wuxi.  The buildings are not as tall, the roads are not as wide and the subway train is only four cars long (compared to the twenty car long Wuxi Metro.)
• Still the sky is so blue!
• I watched the ninth episode of Game of Thrones.  I knew the dragons would save the Queen or as I think of her:  blonde girl with the dragons.  I also foresaw that the Queen mother, or as I call her the mother of Jodfrey, was going to be thrown in the clink by the religious sect.
• Angela and I meet Tony & Jenny at the airport.
• We will try to get a Chinese visa for Tony although it won't be necessary for Tony to get back to China. He was given a exit and entry permit so he could leave China. [We went to the Visa offices but they couldn't give us same day service, it turned out.]
• Damn! I had a great thought but I forgot what it was.
• One way in which China exceeds Canada is that Chinese can buy liquor in their grocery stores while in Canada, you have to go to specially designated beer stores or government liquor stores.
• You can buy pineapple beer in Vancouver though!
• I saw many typical British Columbians in the shopping mall where I tried to renew my BC driver's license.
• How has jet lag affected me? I didn't fall asleep till after 2:00 AM.
• It is only right and proper that we feel guilt about the things we did and may have done wrong.
  [The following was typed while on the plane the plane from Vancouver to Winnipeg]
• The Vancouver Back Door of the Bus Thank You! Riding the bus in Van, I first saw one guy get off the bus at the back door and say “Thank You!” to the driver as he did so. I thought it was strange. Then the next passenger getting off the bus at the back door thanked the driver. I thought it was just two oddballs doing it. I was in BC after all. But then everyone getting off the bus by the back door did it. Woh! I thought so polite. Jenny & Tony noticed this, and when we got off the bus, at the back door, Tony loudly said thank you!
• Bus baby troller procedure: when mothers and strollers get on the bus, special accommodations are made for them and seats are folded away.
• Politeness has me on edge. I feel the need to modify all my thank you's with an intensifying adverb.
• Anxiety about weight of bags. One airline service person from Westjet asked me how much my bags weighed andI said I didn't know but that we had gotten them all the way from China. The limit was 50 pounds (why no metric? Not that I am complaining.) Two of our bags were just under 50 pounds. One came in at 38.
• Security before domestic flight in Vancouver was more intense than when going through security at Shanghai. Jenny has metal in her shoe that caused her to spend extra time with the metal detector people.
• So many laowai in Vancouver. They looked Canadian and spoke with Canadian accents but seemed so foreign to me.
• Rode the skytrain. I have ridden subways in Mexico City, Chicago, Vancouver, Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and Wuxi.
• Tony would rather play Minecraft then look out at the window at the gorgeous scenery. He was even that way on the Skytrain.
• My Macbook Pro is a little big for the plane. It doesn't fit on the fold out tray.
• Tony likes his bacon and hash browns. I have given him all of mine from my meals.
• Weather was gorgeous in Van. Too bad, we were only there for three days.
• Watched a video with Father from 2010. He said he hated mountains because they blocked the view of the sky. [He said he also hated Winnipeg because it was a big city.]
  [The following was typed while I was in Winnipeg]
• Someone – My brother Ron – met us at the airport after all.
• I drove a car for the first time since May and June of 2012. Funny, how nerve wracking it is to get into the driver's seat only to then to have it seem like riding a bicycle.
• The first evening in Winnipeg we went to a cousin's place for dinner.
• We are staying at my brother Ron's house.
• Tony has fallen in love with his uncle Ron's Xbox 360 and the GTA game which I have him playing with the mute button turned on.
• The first full day in Winnipeg, the three of us all got up at 11:15 AM. As soon as we had breakfast and got ready, we went to a Walmart Super-Center on Taylor Avenue. There was so much I wanted that I had to tell myself to want nothing. The food section was mouth watering. I restricted myself to buying a 500 ml tub of cottage cheese. (I asked Jenny to try that and she didn't care for it.)
• Coming back then to my brother Ron's house, I got stuck for the first time in over ten years as a driver in a traffic jam. I wanted to get back on Pembina Highway from Harrow Avenue but I was in behind ten other cars trying to do the same thing. It took a while for me to get to the stop sign and then the traffic kept coming and coming so that I didn't think I would ever be able to make a right turn. What was really annoying was that there was a parking lot just up the road where cars would take advantage of the break in traffic to make their right turns and thus take a chance away from you. One of these cars did let me turn but it was Jenny who noticed this. The road from Harrow to the turnoff near Royce Avenue, where my brother's house was, was filled with bumper to bumper traffic. [This makes me reconsider the Chinese habit of turning right without looking. How I wish this could be done in Canada.]
• I have a few people I want to pay a visit to in Winnipeg. On the Friday night, I was able to get a hold of Ed Chalmers, my reservist buddy who is now a policeman in Winnipeg.
• Cousin Pat, actually husband of my cousin Edie (pronounced E D: that is you pronounce them as letters), is a fiscal reactionary.  He has been retired for over twenty years and doesn't go out much, out of choice.  He says the world is going to shit.  Case in point, he says, America's huge debt.
• And after riding around Winnipeg and spending time at the Polo Park shopping centre, I am very inclined to agree with Pat, although not for fiscal reasons.  At the food court there, I saw so many fat and badly-dressed people.  And the ones who were in shape looked to have spent too much time in the gym, which only showed how decadent the civilization was becoming either due to overeating or being overly concerned with body image.

• Not one really knockout local woman had I seen.
• On Saturday, we went to the Forks and Polo Park where we did too much shopping.
• Saturday, we also drove past the new Winnipeg Blue Bombers stadium and I saw as the reports had indicated that there was no parking. Pat also told me that 30 million dollars was going to be needed to repair the thing after one year of operation.
• I drove past the recently constructed Museum of Human Rights.  Pat had said it was ugly.  Under his influence, I thought it looked like a Wuxi white elephant.
• Saturday for supper, we went to an Italian restaurant on Corydon avenue.  We didn't have a reservation so we had from 5:00 to 630 to eat our meal.  The place seemed undermanned.  Our waitress dealt with us brusquely. Jenny enjoyed her salmon. My lasagna was too much.
• In Polo Park, they had a shop that sold music CDs and movie DVDs. I thought everyone got that stuff off the Internet now.
• There was a shop at Polo Park for white trash culture called Spencer's.
• Tony was very irritable. The whole time in Polo Park. He was always wanting to go to a computer or toy store.
• We went to Assiniboine Park on Sunday. There was a lack of signs, we thought, as we drove around looking for the zoo and the mini railway. And it just so happened that it was complained about by the owner of this mini railway that we wanted to go to for Tony. Just as we walked to its ticket office, the owner said business at his railway was slow because a lot of tourists didn't know of it. I told the owner I only knew of the mini railway because I had ridden in years gone by. And as I mentioned that I was living in China, the owner talked and talked to me and he had me thinking I was becoming a slow talker after all my years in Wuxi.
• At the Assiniboine Park Zoo, a lot of animals were hiding because of the hot weather. Tony did see a polar bear swimming at least.
• Mosquitoes! Worse than Wuxi!
• Two pretty girls – Asian – entered the Tim Hortons as I was having coffee with the ex King of Wuxi.
• No more pennies in Canada.  When paying cash, prices are rounded to the nearest nickel.  Inflation continues.
• Mobile phones are more expensive in Manitoba than Wuxi.  The former King of Wuxi said that in Wuxi, he and his wife both had mobile phones but that in Winnipeg, only his wife had a mobile because of the price and the restrictions of contracts.
  [The following was typed in Brandon]
• It was a two hour drive to get Brandon on Monday. Dull, dull, dull, dull, dull. I was in pain when I arrived with my butt sore and my leg all so stiff.
• Before leaving for Brandon, I had coffee at a Stella's with Trevor Kraft who I knew at DHL-slash-Loomis in British Columbia.
• I wanted to buy a burner phone to use for two weeks in Brandon but it was just too expensive. When it comes to mobile, they do it better in China. You can buy a sim card and phone cheap in China.
• I visited my father's grave side after supper on my first day in Brandon. My first time to see the grave stone in person. I will try to visit it every day while I am here in Brandon.
• Second day in Brandon, we – that being the Kaulins family – went shopping. First the family went to Mark's Work Warehouse where I bought two pants for work and a pair of jeans. Then, we went to a nearby Walmart where Jenny and my Mom bought stuff, and Tony whined about being hungry so I took him to the in-store McDonalds. He had chicken nuggets and I, for the first time in years, had a quarter pounder. The fries that came with it were too much. Later, just Jenny & I went to a Dollarama. Jenny bought some things she thought she needed and I bought four brands of chocolate bars that I couldn't get in China: Smarties, Glosette Raisins, Skor, and Wunderbar (Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!)
• I had to accompany Tony to the bathroom at Walmart because he had to go poo. In the men's room, there were two urinals and a toilet which was occupied. Tony was noisy and impatient, and even looked under the door to see if anyone was in the toilet. When the person came out, it turned out that he was an old man, and he said something to me about his being old and slow to which I could only say that someone had to learn to be patient. Tony then took his time in the toilet and so there were two men waiting. But then the cleaner came in and told us that there were more toilets and urinals in the back of the store. I told him I was just waiting for my son to finish, but he repeated himself. “There are three urinals and two more toilets in the back of the store!”
• Lots and lots of obese and old people at the Walmart.
• Also at Walmart, I made an appointment to see an eye doctor because I wanted to see someone I could talk to in English and so get proper glasses. The only catch was that it could have taken a week or more for me to have had the eyeglasses made and I may have had to get my brother to mail them to me in China. [It turned out that I got my glasses on the day before I was to leave Brandon.]
• I have seen people of all races in Manitoba: Africans, Latinos, Asians and Aboriginals.
• I have brought Ron's X-box to Brandon because Tony likes it so much. He especially likes the GTA game. He also plays Minecraft on it using a disc which I have purchased in Winnipeg. [It was either that or buy him a much more expensive Minecraft Lego set.]
• I got myself eyeglasses at Walmart. They were bloody expensive because I needed progressive lenses. The doctor said that one of my eyes was higher on my face than the other, and so he asked me if I had ever suffered head trauma. I told I'm didn't and thinking about it afterwards, I was sure I told the truth. All this was useful to know because I wouldn't have learned it in China. The last glasses I had made in Wuxi were shite.
• Storm rolling in while we were at the Real Canadian Superstore was cool to see. What a contrast between the black cloud of the incoming storm and the bright, blue, clean sky.
• Soccer in Brandon: at a field near my Mom's, a game was played by Africans and Middle Easterners. Maybe one fellow was white.
• Almost bought a pair of Duracell ear buds, but changed my mind at the last minute. I have to resist and resist...
• Went to a second hand store that was near the Superstore. It depressed me.
• Tony called the Superstore the Stupid Store
• Went to see Mad Max Fury Road at a nearby multiplex cinema which had an arcade but no human ticket sellers. I bought a large popcorn and two large drinks; and Jenny was impressed by the pail like size of the drink containers.
• As soon as I got to my seats in the cinema, I had a let down feeling. The experience was too expensive. The popcorn wasn't fresh. The atmosphere was impersonal. I vowed to never see a movie in a Canadian cinema ever again.
• The movie itself approached Fast and Furious levels of implausibility. The movie makers wanted as much chase in the desert as possible.
• Tony went to the bathroom three times during the movie.
• I watched the Chicago Black Hawks defeat the Tampa Bay team to win the Stanley Cup. It was during the Stanley Cup Final in 2012 that father died.
• We went for one afternoon to Minnedosa, a small town about 45 km North of Brandon. The drive there through green flat fields was pleasant enough except for a ten minute stop caused by construction.
• Summer means road construction in Manitoba. The winters and the wide range of temperatures destroys them.
• The drive to Minnedosa was also ruined by an unexpected school zone speed warning on a provincial highway. The radar sign indicated the car's speed and made me wonder if we had gotten a ticket.
• Minnedosa was a nice little town.
• We would stop at three places there.
• We first went to a park downtown, climbed on an old train car and caboose, and posed for photos by an old Sherman tank.
• I saw a bald headed man with tattoos and sunglasses strutting on the Minnedosa Main Street as I was trying to get to Minnedosa Lake.
• We finally found the lake and I saw the bald headed man walking nearby it. Near a beach, there was a playground to which Tony happily ran to to be among a bunch of what I learned were pre-schoolers who were celebrating the end of the school year. I talked to an older women there who had first talked to Jenny. She told me that she was there with a two year old niece of hers. She also told me of twin boys in her family who were graduating from high school that day and who were six foot three. One of them had suffered a stroke when he was 14 months old. I gave the woman a yuan coin to give to someone.
• From the playground we went to another playground where we picnicked. I saw some high school students nearby who were dressed in suits and gowns for their graduation photos. A little later, there was a motor boat towing a water skier in the lake.
• I then saw two sights as well that sickened and annoyed me. First, there was this greasy long haired man with tattoos and no shirt riding his mountain bike. Then, there was a group of five young men who hung out at beach and boat launch and seemed up to no good. I was happy when they pulled away. Manitobans can be friendly and yet there is that white trashy element to them. When I drove Jenny and Tony to our third stop, a nearby dam, I saw a beer can that must have been tossed from the vehicle of the five rowdies.
• We saw the bald man walking again as we pulled into a park by a dam. We walked on the dam which made for some nice photos, past some babbling brooks and then into marsh land.
• We returned to Brandon and weren't stopped by construction. As I drove, Jenny took some great video of the sky. That damn school zone where there were no kids caught me speeding again .
• Trying to make a left turn in Minnedosa was annoying because these big pickup trucks would pull beside me to make a right turn and obscure my vision, thus preventing me from making a left turn.
• Back in Brandon, we went to a Value Village. I was tempted to buy books by Sarah Palin and Rex Murphy. [Value Village is a thrift store chain. We had gone to one in Winnipeg as well.]
• After dinner, we went to father's grave to place some new flower pots. Mom said that ones she had laid previously had been stolen.
• Then we went to Canadian Tire: an hardware chain that is as much an institution in Canada as Tim Horton's. It is in fact older than Tim Horton's. No Canadian tire caps for sale alas....
• Three types of garbage cans provided by the city at my mom's house. I wonder how types of garbage cans, they have in the swankier parts of Brandon. Five? Seven?
• As a reactionary, it is my duty to mock these things and remain ignorant of what the different colored lidded cans are for.
• The world has become less humane. Humans have to adapt to the system, not the system to people is the governing ethos these days.
• I watched some television news and was appalled by the left-wing orientation. Listening to the results of the SCOTUScare decision, all that was said was that the decision was about whether millions of Americans would be able to afford health insurance.
• I had coffee with Raymond Pero who I have known since 1982. How to describe Ray? First off, Raymond is a nice guy, of low status, with a ghoulish laugh. I couldn't help every time I met him to make off-color jokes to get him to giggle.
• Surprisingly to me anyway, Raymond is a father. He got some native girl pregnant and now his twenty year old son is working at a McDonald's in Winnipeg. Ray and the girl are separated.
• Ray's parents have both passed away and they are both buried in the same cemetery as my father.
• Ray is still a reservist private after all these years. I gave up the ghost as far as a military career when I realized I could never be an officer and would never get beyond corporal in the ranks.
• Ray gave me some updates from people I remember from my days in the reserves. Some have died like then Lieutenant Thompson who later became the CO of my regiment. Another young lieutenant from my time is now retired and is a curator at the Shilo museum. A third, this sinister fellow who was only good to share a complaint with was now in a mental home.
• Opened up a Smarties box and thought it strange that it had three compartments inside.
• I hate driving and I hate flying, I can tell you on account of this trip.
• Saturday morning in Brandon, I took Jenny to some garage sales where she bought a few things to take back to China. I saw a set of books about the Simpsons that I would have liked to have purchased but didn't because of worries of weight restrictions for our return flight to China. At one of the sales, we saw a family of Chinese who were from the Northeast as I suspected and as Jenny confirmed when I asked her. Another home had about 50,000 hockey and other sports cards for sale. They were from the 1990s and the time of the great sports cards memorabilia bubble.
• Brother Ron came from Winnipeg for our Brandon weekend and told me that we (that being Jenny, Tony & I) didn't like doing interesting things. Tony only liked playing computer games, I only liked reading and Jenny only liked shopping. True enough and yet what we going to do? Go Fishing? Biking? Driving? That one trip to Minnedosa I did take tired me out.
• I regret that I won't be able to see all my cherished acquaintances in Winnipeg. We came at the wrong time. Weekdays, everyone has to work and weekends, everyone already has plans. The logistics of meeting them wearies me as well.
• I didn't visit my sister in BC this trip. I learned from my Mom that Benita is not too pleased but someone was going to have to be disappointed this trip.
• I have told my mother that she should sell the house in Brandon. I can't see myself coming back here except to visit my father's grave site. It may well be that I may never see it again after this trip...
• My memories of Brandon are ultimately bitter. I have some good memories of my last year of high school, which was my first year in Brandon, but even then I can recall there were bouts of loneliness and not feeling that I belonged that would haunt the rest of my days in Brandon and in Winnipeg and still to this day in China. I wandered the halls of Brandon University, for four years, lonely and lost. I went to the University of Winnipeg to try to correct those times instead of giving up on the educational establishment as I should have... My times in the Militia with all the assholes and the drinking unsheltered me from any youthful idealism I had.
• My telling my Mom to sell the house in Brandon seems selfish in a way because it ultimately repudiates my father who was obstinately happy to live the rest of his days in Brandon.
• Ron, Tony & I went to Shilo's Royal Canadian Artillery museum. Shilo, which is about 15 km from Brandon and where I lived on two separate occasions, was not as I remembered it. It seemed smaller and some new roads, which disoriented me, had been built.
• After the museum, we drove to Quebec Crescent where the PMQ we had lived in 1976-77 was no longer standing. The area behind the PMQ where we would wander didn't look the same at all. In my memory, it was more open.
• I ran in Bruce Tripp, an unforgettable figure from my reservist days, at a Beer Store. Go figure.
• Our third drive out of Brandon was to Souris which was 47 km south, more or less from Brandon. [Our first small town, Minnedosa, was about 45 km north.]
• Souris is famous, to those who know of it, for its swinging bridge. I, if I recall correctly, went to the Bridge on a school trip in 1979 or 1980. I have a distinct memory of the kids getting rowdy and swinging the bridge very violently.
• In Souris, we stopped first at a little rail museum in front of which was a old rail service car where Tony posed for some photos There was also a Moose statue nearby for us to pose by as well. [It dawned on me that were old rail cars and engines on display everywhere in Manitoba.]
• We then drove to Souris's Victoria Park. The website I had visited earlier in the day said it was a place to go. The park had a bit of a hill to climb, on top of which was a lookout tower made of wood that was wobbly enough to make me a little nervous to climb its stairs. From the lookout, I could see the actual swinging bridge which we couldn't find right away. [It turned out we had passed by it earlier.] Tony got upset because there was a pool that he wanted to swim in but he hadn't brought any swim clothes.
• We then crossed the swinging bridge and posed for photos thereon, of course. While on the bridge, a Christian couple gave Jenny some pamphlets. They were an older couple who I had seen earlier in Victoria Park. They stood out then because they were dressed in the Mennonite fashion and they walked rather vigorously with beatific smiles on their faces. Jenny was happy to get the pamphlets and didn't know what they were about till later. I was nonetheless glad to see Christians.
• When a man's mother and a man's wife fight, what is the man to do? What he should want is for his wife and his mother to stop fighting. How he can bring about this goal is another question altogether. The only thing I can think to do is pray for strength.
• The problem is that I am weak.
• Amid this squabble, I had beers with Ed Chalmers, an old friend from my 26 Field days and that Ray Pero character. Ed is working in the child sex crime unit of the City of Winnipeg. One story was enough to further sicken me about the world.
• Tomb desecration of my father's grave? Not quite, but the flower pot that my mother had placed at my father's grave, and that you can see in photos at AKIC wordpress, was missing three days after we had placed it. [It turned out that the workers removed it. Fucking regulations.]
• For me, the clouds in Brandon are what are worth seeing here. White Cumulo Nimbus clouds soaring against a clean blue sky are quite breathtaking if you have spent as many years in a smoggy Chinese city as I have.
• The Brandon Shopper's Mall was a strange place in June 2015. Imagine a shopping mall with no anchor stores. The big retail spaces for a grocery store and a big retail department store were empty. The Safeway and the Target having moved out in the year previous. I went there anyway and was impressed with the food court which had a Tim Horton's and A&W. I took Tony to a shop called EB Games that sells games for video game consoles like X-Box and so on. While there, I saw a father bring his boy, who was younger than Tony, into the store. The man had a big gut and was wearing a Kiss rock band t-shirt. Disgusting I thought. Men use to wear suits at one time. [I admit that I dress as badly as that father but I am readily ashamed of myself.]
• I went to the Manitoba Liquor Commission store. I would have loved to have told those guys to find real jobs. The government liquor monopoly is nonsense! It is another thing for politicians and bureaucrats to screw up. And of course you have to drive to get to it.
• Brandon's population is about 45,000. I had told my students that it was around 30,000. So in my lifetime, Brandon has grown by a sizable percentage. When it had less people though, it had its own television station, its own local newspaper published in the city and it probably had train service. Now, you need a car to get about and the city might as well be a obscure suburb in Winnipeg, what with all its parking lots and strip malls.

[The following was typed in Wuxi.]

• I took Tony to a public outdoor swimming pool in Brandon. He waded for an hour and told me he wanted to go home. His timing was impeccable because as soon as he was dressed, it began to rain.
• On Thursday, a rain storm was heavy enough to cause my Mom's basement to flood. This hadn't happened in the years that I and my brother Ron had lived in the house, but a great flood in Brandon in about 2009 started the problem which has resulted in insurance companies suspending the sale of flood insurance in Brandon.
• Friday about lunchtime, we left Brandon. I said good bye to Mom and then good bye to Father (Dad's gravestone was our last stop in Brandon). Tony had to ruin the moment by insisting on playing the IPad instead of paying proper attention to his grandmother and grandfather.
• From Brandon, it was a two hour drive on the Number One Highway to Winnipeg. The drive was marred slightly by my being boxed in by other cars. At least five times, I found myself the situation where I was doing 110 kmh with cruise control approaching a car ahead of me doing 108 kmh while in my rear a car doing 111 kmh was overtaking me. The car passing me wasn't going fast enough and so I found myself closing in on the car ahead of me and thus having to get out of cruise control.
• It was also annoying to listen to the radio as I drove to Winnipeg. On a country station where I kind of hoped they knew better, they praised the gay marriage court decision in the U.S. “Love is love!” said one of the radio talkers. What the hell does that mean? I thought to myself.
• Switching the station, I heard an interview with an artiste who was talking about conversation circles. Apparently, a group of people sit in a circle and talk, one at a time, as a way of expressing their feelings. The artiste was hoping to get a grant to continue on with her art work. [Driving to Brandon on the #1 Highway, I listened to the CBC and heard an activist advocate the banning of tobacco sales altogether in Canada.]
• In Winnipeg, it was a rush against the clock for me to see as many old friends as I could. I would succeed in seeing two and not seeing one.
• Friday night, I meet Arielle (formerly Eric) at a Stella's restaurant in Winnipeg's Osborne Village. It was an experience in many ways. I first had to find a free parking spot and was frustrated by signs that were full of rules and regulations. A parking lot that said parking was a six dollar flat rate during off business hours was empty. I found I had to find Arielle first to show me where to park. Arielle was the midst of a radical change in identity which I didn't know how to deal with, being torn as I was between being of a reactionary mind and being in practice a nice softie afraid of confrontation. Arielle was a troubled soul is about all I can say. First hearing her voice on the phone was startling because it had gone down two octaves. It wasn't before I had a conversation with her on the phone that I could detect traces of Eric's voice.
• Arielle's appearance was more feminine than I was expecting.
• Saturday breakfast at the Pancake house with Jenny, Tony & Ron.
• Saturday afternoon, I went to see another friend from my U of W days: Nicole Firlotte. I told her about Arielle. She told me she had dated Eric back in the day. Now, she was married to a gentleman named Cain (or Kane or Cane or Caine) who had done some interesting things with their house in the Wolseley area of Winnipeg. He had built a pond in front of the house with gold fish in it and a deck that went all around the house.
• Jenny bought a lot of stuff in China to give to her friends. So I spent my last evening in Canada worrying about luggage weight. I weighed the luggage using my brother Ron's bathroom scale. The procedure involved weighing myself and then weighing myself holding one of our three pieces of luggage. We had to distribute the luggage evenly and then have a lot of carry on bags. We in fact brought five onto the plane.
• My last meal in Canada was a Mozza Burger at the A&W at the YVR.
• I buy two big bottles of Crown Royal at the Duty Free.
• I didn't buy any shoes or books on this trip.
• How was the trip in three words? Emotional, harrowing and unleisurely. I didn't do everything I hoped I could have done.