Black Van; Politics; “I don't know!”; Famous Chinese People I Can Name; Mailed My Ballot; Tim Hortons in Shanghai

• One Saturday Morning, I was standing at the intersection of Jiankang and Zhongshan Roads near Nanchang Temple. A black van with caged windows pulled up near me. Inside were a bunch of men in green military uniforms. The back door of the van opened and three of the uniformed men jumped out. They were stern-looking, wore helmets and one of them had a side-arm. Scary I thought. I wonder now what was the need for such over the top security.

• To follow politics and the news, or to not to follow politics and the news? That is the question. There is no point for me to blog on it unless I can report how it has impacted me in China. So much of what is political news is soap opera. And it is so anger-inducing that I wonder if I am being manipulated. These progressives can't be that stupid and disingenuous as they are being portrayed? Just to let my few readers where I stand, I will say this: Impeachment is bullshit. I support the HK protesters. Greta is a little horror. I hope Justin Trudeau is defeated. I hope Brexit happens. 

• "Can you tell me a popular thing that you don't like?" After ten seconds of hemming and hawing, and shifting back and forth of his head, the teenage student whom I asked the question to, said "I don't know!" "So you just follow the crowd?" I asked. "Yes, I follow the crowd." Earlier when I asked him who the most popular person was in China, he answered Xi Jing Ping. When I get these answers from students, it is never safe to assume that they mean what they literally said, because you have no idea what they know and or understand of what you have said. The student maybe didn't know the difference between fame and popularity. And later when I asked the student if he liked something because he himself liked it and not because it was popular, he said yes which contradicted what he had told me earlier.

• I can name maybe four or five Chinese people who are famous and active at this time. They are Xi Jing Ping, Yao Ming, Jack Ma, Jackie Chen, and Fan Bing Bing. For the size of China's population, you would think that one could be able to name many, many more famous Chinese people.

• I mailed my Canadian Federal Election ballot on October 5^th. Hopefully, it will arrive in Ottawa before the October 21^st deadline. Who did I cast my vote for? I will tell you now that I didn't vote Liberal, I didn't vote NDP, I didn't vote Green, I didn't vote Marxist-Leninist and I didn't vote Conservative. 

• The Kaulins Family went to Shanghai on October 6^th. We hadn't visited the city, except for going to Pudong Airport, in over four years. Our main purpose in going was to visit the Tim Hortons that had recently opened there. Jenny had really liked the bagels with cream cheese at the Tim's in Canada and Tony had really liked the steeped tea. I was very curious to see what a Chinese Tim's would be like. Would it be completely authentic or Sinofied? I looked forward to be able to write a blog review of it. 

• Which, I will do now: I will first say that Jenny was happy with her coffee and bagels, and that Tony said the steeped tea tasted just like it had tasted in Canada. He also liked his bacon & ham melt sandwich. And so the wife & son were satsified. For my part, I was underwhelmed. The service was slow compared to a Canadian Tim's. Upon making our order, we were given an electronic pager that would tell us when our order was ready. We sat at a table for five minutes before the pager started buzzing. I then discovered when unwrapping the bagels that two of the three we ordered didn't have cream cheese that we requested, and so I had to take them back. The bagels weren't sliced in half like they would have been in Canada. The portioning of the cream cheese then didn't seem as large as it would have been in Canada. And the coffee was not as good as it would have been in Canada. The Shanghai Tim Hortons seemed Sinofied in the worse way.

What to do, Military Parades, Three Great Father-Son Moments, 很多人, Built-up or Neglected, Two Red-Light Running E-Bikers

• What to do in mainland China on the 70^th anniversary of the Chairman Mao's declaration of the establishment of the People's Republic of China? One could celebrate it or honor it, but that would mean honoring evil, tyranny, the killing of innocents and attempts to crush the human spirit. One could do nothing and treat the day like it is a holiday but one for which you don't care what the point of it is. One could oppose it, but the question is to what degree. Not celebrating it is opposing it, but it is minimal and cowardly. I, coward that I am, indirectly opposed the day by noting other things to celebrate on October 1^st, like it was the feast day of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus and the anniversary of Roger Maris hitting his 61^st home run of the 1961 baseball season. I made postings about Saint Therese and Roger Maris on the moments feed of Wechat, the Chinese social app. I was drowned out by my Chinese contacts actually celebrating the 70^th anniversary. I didn't see any of my Wechat foreign contacts posting things to honor the 70^th, except one who even wished China a happy birthday. Geez. It is as dumb as Canadians who think Canada was born on July 1, 1867.

• What countries have put on impressive military parades? The Soviet Union, North Korea, Nazi Germany and The People's Republic of China. I only caught brief glimpses of the broadcast of the big parade held in Beijing. If I watched any more than I did I would have lost my temper. As it was, it was only a short jaunt into local national day traffic to make me despise mainland Chinese and the Chicoms.

• First, Tony was looking at the NFL app on my phone, checking the scores. "How did the Vikings do?" I asked him. "They lost to the Bears!" he told me. It was a wonderful moment, a sublime exchange with my son. Then, Tony & I were following the National League Wildcard game between the Nationals and the Brewers on the MLB app. We didn't have access to a TV broadcast so we had to rely on a feature of the app that allows one to follow the play by play, pitch by pitch results. In the bottom of the 8^th inning, we followed the Nationals staging a dramatic rally to take the lead in the game and save their season, and Tony said it was more exciting than Bobby Thompson's 1951 Home Run. I had to disagree with him but the moment was memorably dramatic all the same. And then, Tony & I played catch. Jenny & I managed to find a place in Wuxi that sold baseball gloves and bought him one, as well as a few baseballs. I already had a glove and so that evening, Tony & I went to a sports field and threw the ball back and forth. We were a curious sight for the locals who were there. Tony enjoyed himself, though I have to report that I am old and stiff, Tony is clumsy and uncoordinated, and that one of the baseballs we bought was of Chinese quality and broke apart very quickly.

• 很多人！henduoren! Too many people! October 2, we went to the Livat Shopping Mall. Too busy. There was a traffic jam to wait through to get to the Mall. We didn't bother walking through the Ikea. (Ikea when it is crowded is hell on earth.) October 3, we went to a Tai Hu lakeside park. It was worth ten minutes of a walk through, but we had to be there for three dull hours. After finally leaving, we got stuck in a traffic jam for an hour. We were on a two lane road with the jam going one way. So many locals, doing the stupid mainland Chinese impatient maneuver, thought that they pass the whole line making it annoying for the people who were waiting properly in line and for the people who decided they were going to turn around. In the evening, we went to Nan Chang Jie Bar street which was so full of people that I had to hold onto Tony so we wouldn't get separated. The moral of the story: stay indoors during National Day Holidays.

• One thing that strikes me as I travel through the Wuxi area is how everything is either built-up or neglected. Part of the contrast is a result of the speed of the development. You will see freeways built next to or running over neglected, weed-infested fields, hotels next to empty lots strewn with garbage. October 3^rd, I drove on a road built through overgrown bush. The road was new, but the high bushes were already drooping over the curb. I have walked past entrances to new apartment complexes where there are water fountains and well-lit entrances, only to walk fifty meters more and see piles of abandoned fixtures, signage and other trash. The contrast is also a result of Communist China never having had civilized property laws. Much of the build-up I have seen was decreed by the Government and whatever was there before was shoved out of the way. There being no property laws, there is no incentive to maintain anything. So everything is shabby and much is neglected unless the government decides to build up something on it which in turn gets shabby in twenty years as no one in China has much incentive to maintain anything.

• In the past week, while driving, I have put the scare into at least two red-light running e-bikers. In both instances, they had to come to an abrupt halt when I honked the horn at them to get out of my green-lit way. I wasn't surprised when these e-bikers didn't show any bit of sheepishness at the fact that it was their ignoring the signals that almost had gotten them killed, and that they instead glared at me like I was in the wrong. Mainland Chinese, as I have complained many times in this blog, are oblivious to other people as they journey through their days. (It shows why no one should trust the Chicoms on trade, and issues of diplomacy and morality.) In response to their idiot glares, I glared back at the e-bikers and pointed to the traffic signals. I hope I gave these people a near heart-attack, for they deserved that. I also hope that they maybe they may come to see the errors of their ways. (If they operate like the Chicoms, unfortunately, there is little chance.)

Going to Suzhou, Are You Lonely? Why I Am Lonely, Lonely in Wuxi, Prayer, Tony Likes Baseball

• Most laoweis will tell you that that the best things to do during a public holiday in China are to either stay at one's Chinese residence or get out of the country. Going anywhere during that time is a pain in the ass because of the crowds. I would be staying at home too this National Day holiday but my wife Jenny, who is Chinese, feels a need to do something. So, we will be driving to Suzhou. I had first rejected this idea out of hand because I didn't much enjoy driving in Suzhou the one time we did drive there. There were too many cars and we weren't familiar with the roads. So seeming to accept my rejection of this Suzhou idea, Jenny then suggested that we go to Shanghai. I said I would go if we went by train. Jenny agreed to this idea and for half a day, I was thinking that that was what we would actually be doing. But for many reasons, this wasn't going to happen and Jenny told me would be driving to Suzhou, to some lake. I don't like the sound of this. Walking around lakes during holidays is a perennial Chinese thing to do and is something which I find to be a total waste of time. There are too many people and if you have walked around one Chinese lake park in Jiangsu, you have walked them all.

• I have read articles saying that a large proportion North Americans are lonely. It is sad and a condemnation of the modern world. But it is also an opportunity. I have to confess that I am one of these lonely people myself and I am happy to hear that I am not lonely when it comes to feeling lonely. If there are lonely people out there, I would like to correspond with them. Here is my email address: andiskaulins@hotmail.com. But here are some things you should know: I want to be Roman Catholic, I don't like the current Pope, I am a reactionary, I don't want to be a victim, I like reading, I like following US politics, I don't despise Trump, I despise Socialism, I despise moral relativists, I despise Progressivism, I like poetry, I like a good joke, I like a good meme, I don't know what racism is anymore, I am a proud subject of her majesty Queen Elizabeth II, I like Sinatra, I like Rock and Roll, I like Country Music, I like sports but not as much as I used to, I like watching movies and TV series, my u blogger is David Warren, and as far as I can tell, I have no marketable skills. If you are opposite to me if every way, however, it doesn't mean we can't be friends or exchange social emails. I will gladly talked to lonely people of good will. That is, people who don't feel the need to exile people who they think are engaged in wrong think. (Then again, maybe, that is why there are so many lonely people. Relationships have become so politicised by cultural marxism that mass loneliness is the result, like mass starvation results when marxists try to control the food supply.)

• Why am I lonely? It may well be my affliction. I have childhood memories of being very shy. I remember when I was in kindergarten that I didn't talk to any of my classmates for the first three months. I got over that and was able to make friends. But then these pangs of loneliness started during my adolescence. In 1976, my family moved from Quebec, where I had lived for five years, to Canadian Forces Base Shilo, Manitoba. I wasn't completely lonely in Shilo. I remember going out and meeting other kids on the base, but the seeds of my loneliness were sprouted there as my adolescence started. I had a cheesy moustache, developed bad acne and became very socially awkward. After a year in Shilo, my family moved to New Brunswick where I attended Junior High and I had no friends what so ever. I didn't hang out with anyone. I was desperately lonely. Anytime, I was in a situation that required partnering up, I was always the odd man out. It didn't help that my family then moved some more and I attended three different high schools. The loneliness lead to thoughts of suicide and minor acts of inflicting physical harm on myself. Attempts at friendship faltered because I had become full of resentment. I eventually sought psychological help and was prescribed medicine for depression. That didn't help. But I did have some things going for me. I avoided a lot of stupid things by being lonely. I didn't get involved in drugs. I didn't become promiscuous. I avoided the company of many fools. I read a lot. I could take an outsider's view of things. I could be "aloof." I could explore things that were not part of the main stream. I realized that my visits to the psychs was just my wanting to be a victim. I realized that most of my loneliness was a really solitude, and that solitude had many benefits. For in my solitary moments, I believe I had a guardian angel with me and comforting me all along. I resigned myself to the fact that I was just always going to be an outsider and that I might as well look at this state as being sort of an adventure. But be that as it may, I am still lonely but am self-aware enough to see it as an affliction that I must deal with best I can. I have to fight resentments and feelings of inferiority because it is hard to bring up how lonely I have been in my life.

• So here I am now in Wuxi, China. I am married and I have a son. I don't have any friends. I can never be friends with Chinese for I find them dull company and my Chinese study has never involved talking to them. I do find this loneliness comfortable however because it is a sort of me being a fly on the wall, watching something I could never be part of, even if I wanted to. It is when I am with my own kind, laoweis, that I really feel that something is out of whack and I become aware of the stark reality of my adolescence loneliness having damaged me. I find I either can't talk to these people or that I talk to them too much like a muttering idiot. I console myself on this score by thinking of myself as being a reactionary stuck with moderns. But I am at least a good enough reactionary to realize that there are things I am doing wrongly or selfishly or out or a stupid self-conceit.

• I pray everyday. I talk to God. I need to talk to people.

• Tony has taken to baseball and told me that he wants to play the sport. When I took him to the major league baseball game in Minneapolis, he complained of the pace of the game and said it bored him. But it didn't stop him from playing a computer version of major league baseball on my phone. That hooked him into the sport. His favourite team is the Houston Astros (who are from the same city as his favourite NBA team).

I and My Country, Interesting History, Creative Inner Tension, Common Scene, National Day Preparations, I Can Vote

• The one student I had for a recent Speaker Corner's class told me that for the 70^th anniversary of the founding of the PRC there was some Chinese patriotic movie playing in the cinemas. I and My Country (我和我的祖国) , the student went on to tell me, had an all-star cast and was going to depict the 70 years of the PRC so far. I immediately asked if the film would mention the many traumatic events of its history like the killings of the landlord classes that took place in the countryside, collectivization, the purging of corrupt officials in 1951, the great famine caused by Mao, the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square incident, to name a few. She answered that the film wouldn't, but that it would celebrate Hong Kong coming back to China and the launching of some satellites in space.

• China currently is a country with an interesting history but a boring people. How I wish it could go through a stretch of having dull history and producing interesting culture.

• What is happening in Hong Kong does show that the Chinese people are capable of fighting among themselves. If this inner conflict could somehow be turned into a creative energy, there could be a flowering of Chinese culture that would astonish the world. Alas, the Chinese Communist Party wants to stamp out this inner tension. All I can do is pray that somehow in China a leader of genius emerges who could harness this tension. Europe flowered and conquered the world because it wasn't an empire but a bunch of smallish states competing with each other. And within each country there were competing seats of power. Holding Europe together was the Christian faith. But the point is that Europe was not one party trying to control everything... If the EU existed five hundred years ago, the Americas would still be undiscovered.

• Walking home from work one evening, I came upon a gas-powered scooter lying on its side.. Its headlight was still on and so it must have been in an accident with a car that was stopped on the other side of the road. People were standing around but I couldn't determine who the drivers were. It is not an uncommon scene for me; an aspect of living in China.

• I was thinking to not report or comment on what I may or may not see as far as things being done for the October 1, 2019 National Day which marks the 70^th anniversary of Mao declaring the People's Republic. But, I have an urge to blog. So. So far, as of September 27^th, I have seen red lanterns being hung from street light poles and five-star flags being put up in apartment complexes. It is galling to see the flags being put up in my complex because there is a basketball hoop there that's been needing a new backboard for a few months.

• I applied online, had a ballot couriered to me and so I will be voting in the upcoming Canadian Federal Election in the Chilliwack riding. I can tell you now that I will be definitely voting against Justin Trudeau. I'd vote for the Bloc Quebecois candidate but I doubt that the BQ is smart to run candidates in Western Canada. As Mordecai Richler imagined many years ago, if the BQ ran candidates in Western Canada, they would have picked up seats. Quebec leaving confederation is probably a more popular in the West than in Quebec.

Chick-Fil-A, The Tragedy of Liberation, Tattos, Sins, Passion for Teaching, WWWC

• I forgot to mention that while we were in the States (that is the USA), we twice went to the restaurant Chick-Fil-A: once in Fargo; once in Grand Forks. It was a political-cultural statement on my part, though the original Chicken sandwich was tasty. The service was very friendly – All-American Friendly. And the big American flag in the front of the restaurants along with quotes of allegiance to Jesus Christ on the walls inside were enough, I'm sure, to make a progressive's head explode.

• I am in the midst of reading The Tragedy of Liberation by Frank Dikötter. It's a history of the Chinese Revultion from 1945 to 1957. It leaves me very disinclined to want to have anything to do with the 70^th anniversary "celebrations" of the establishment of the PRC that will take place October 1^st. "Liberation" involved a lot of killing on the part of the Chicoms to get their revolution going and to keep their power.

• I said I couldn't stand to look at Chinese men. I also have a hard time looking at laowei who have tattoos.

• Jesus Christ died for the sins of all, even those of Chairman Mao and Xi Jing Ping.

• I overheard a girl say that she was leaving China because she had lost her passion for teaching. I wonder if I ever had this passion. And I wonder when it was that this idea of having a passion of an activity entered the language. Was it with Rousseau? And why was that the girl lost her passion? Chinese students? I was initially drawn to teaching students in China because they were quiet. I soon found teaching them to be mostly a bore because they lacked imagination and were painfully dull. I also found teaching them to be an ordeal because they looked upon foreigners as monkeys. Never once, was the advice I gave them to improve their English ever heeded. At a certain point, I started to mail it in and look to run out the clock in my so-called classes.

• The two "What's Wrong with China" books I have read discuss China's that aren't full of Communist fervor. The first WWWC was written in the 1920s and it depicts the Chinese has having a very low-trust society. The second WWWC, written twenty years into the China opening up to the market era, depicts the shadiness of Chinese business practice. Read these two books and spend some time in mainland China, and you will take a dim view of the people of the PRC. It is with these two books fresh in my mind that I read the Tragedy of Liberation book, which depicts the era between the time of the first WWWC book and the second. The Maoists, the Chinese Communists were horrible, causing untold suffering and death of innocents. No organization is responsible for more deaths of innocents than the Chinese Communist Party. But what does the Maoist era reveal about the character of the Chinese people? If a mainland Chinese person, who I suspected was a sympathizer of the current regime, ever asked me what I thought of Xi Jing Ping, I would tell them that his countrymen had the leader they deserved. I would leave it up to them to try and ascertain my meaning, which in fact I am not sure of myself. I either mean that they could do much better than Xi Jing Ping if they weren't such pussies or that their leader is perfectly in keeping with their character. Could it be that the brutalities of the Mao era happened because there is something wrong with Chinese civilization?

Animal Abuse, Poverty, George Grant, Prayer, Not Talking, Chinese Girls, Chinese Men & Boys

I guess it was in the last year or so that I read a story about someone in China driving a car with a dog tied to the bumper. To the credit of other Chinese, witnesses were angry at the driver for his mistreatment of the animal.

Tony & I witnessed a similar mistreatment of a dog as we were walking back to Stately Kaulins Manor. An e-bike driven by an old man approached us. Behind it was a dog making great effort to keep pace. The dog seemed to be very loyal with its effort. But when the e-bike got close enough, we were aghast to see that the dog's neck was being pulled by a rope attached to the rear end of the bike. What had seemed like dogged effort on the part of the animal to keep up, was really it trying desperately not to be choked by the rope. I could only shake my head.

"Make a sentence with poverty." I asked a student.

The student didn't know the word. I decided to ask the student a question using the word.

"Do you want to live in poverty?" I asked.

"Yes. I want to live in poverty." said the student.

As if any Chinese person, even a faux Buddhist monk, would want to live in poverty.

I have been reading some books by George Grant, a Canadian philosopher.

Lament for a Nation is his most famous work. I was able to e-borrow a copy of it from the archive.org site. Grant wrote the book in the 1960s after PM Diefenbaker's failed attempt to stop Canada from possessing American nuclear weapons. For Grant, it was the end of the Canadian nation. What he meant was the end of a Canadian nationalism born of the fact of that it chose to stay loyal to the British Crown. This nationalism was a very conservative sort, not at all in keeping with liberal-progessivism which he saw as being American.

Coming upon this observation in 2019, where Canada is seen as being the harbinger of all things liberal-progressive, I have to lament as well. Canada went off the rails in the 1960s.

I was also struck by Grant's depiction of Diefenbaker. I couldn't help but think that Diefenbaker had a strong resemblance to Donald Trump. Diefenbaker came to power with an astonishing victory, winning support from portions of the populace that had been thought to be closely off from his party. The elites at the time of Diefenbaker's premiership, liked to mock him for his bumpkin ways and his provincial loyalty to his country. Similarly, Trump experiences the same abuse from the establishment. Diefenbaker's attempts to defeat the elites failed, because of his personal flaws and some bad decisions. The Trump story is not finished yet, but there is a last ditch look about it.

Grant's Canadian Nationalism is the sort I would have supported if I had known more about it.

I had been contemptuous of the Canadian Nationalism I had grown up with which was full of quotas, full of Canadian content regulations and seemed to want to produce a Canada that was self-absorbed as America. The Canadian Nationalism I saw had to discard Canadian history before the 1960s. It didn't seem proud of its British roots. It wanted to be more modern than the USA. It couldn't tolerate its quiet stolid provincialism.

Following Mother Angelica's injunction to pray at least an hour a day, I have been praying the rosary and consulting religious apps that I have installed on my Iphone.

It seems that the world will be entering interesting times and I will need to keep up my spirts.

I don't talk to many people these days.

There has been a huge turnover of Chinese colleagues at work and I can't be bothered to get to know the new ones. So many things have happened in the last year that have soured my view of mainland Chinese. I even, I have to admit, can't stand the sight of them.

I stay aloof from the local laowei. From my few attempts to talk with them, I see that I am not at all on the same wavelength with them. While I do share their contempt and bafflement with the ways of the locals, I share no interests or visions with them.

Despite my carping about Wuxi, the local girls are nice to behold. Many of the local girls are slim and pretty, and dress in ways that attract my eye. But other than exchanging smiles or glances with them, there is not much I can do with them. They think like Chinese women.

The unattractive ones are fearsome. These ones control their households and have their husbands under their thumbs.

Chinese men don't strike me as being virile. They have lithe bodies. Their faces are ugly and many give off impression of brain-washed fanaticism. The ones with friendly faces, that is the likeable ones, are nerds and socially awkward. And they rarely dress in style.

Many of the teenage boys I see at our school border on being androgynous. They are slim and not muscular. They spend their time sitting at desks or hunched over on their smart phones. A few of them may get exercise playing sports, but clearly none of them has ever done any physical labour.

Brexit, EU, a China Mistake, No Plastic Bags in MB, Chinese Fire Engines, Wuxi Old Navy

• One of the tragedies of democracy is how local municipal level elections get such low voter turnout rate while higher level elections get more. In a sane world, local elections would matter more than national elections. That is, we would live in a distributionist world. For afterall, it is the people near us who affect our lives. And yet we put place all our hopes in figures who are so far removed from us that they might as well be abstract. Politicians love this. The focus on personalities that these high level elections produce, causes the public to be blind to the effects of the insufficiently discussed policies on their real day-to-day lives. As well, local politicians can get the benefits of being in the government without having to make hard decisions. Get someone at a higher level to make the decisions! Blame it on Trump!1 It explains why the political class in the UK are so against Brexit.

• Why would anyone want to be part of the EU? It is a bureaucratic monstrosity unaccountable to the people it is supposed to serve. The people who support the EU, don't see it as what it really is. For thede people, the EU is fairy dust. To be part of Europe for them is to be against the bad things like racism, and to be for diversity and brother slash sister hood.

• Was coming to China a mistake on my part? I did meet my wife here and Tony was born. On that count, it wasn't a mistake. However, I have come to the conclusion that the world opening up to Communist China on trade was a big mistake and I should be ashamed of myself for having participated in it. China never got better as a civilization and the economic benefits for the west were negligible. Only certain elites running companies where they shafted their countrymen benefitted. And Communist China is becoming a menace not only to the Chinese, but the rest of the world. My only defense is that I haven't really made a difference here. I was merely a fly on the wall, a passive individual.

• I just read that Manitoba (the province I would return to if I went back to Canada) is planning on banning plastic bags. Damn! Damn! Damn!

• Chinese Fire Engines are like Chinese grandmothers. They are loud but they don't go very fast.

• The Wuxi Old Navy store has only been stocking pants with 32 legs. Either that, or all the pants with 34 legs have been quickly purchased. It was only two years at the Wuxi Old Navy, that I bought a pair of jeans for the first time in China. They had jeans with 34 waist and 34 leg. Alas, that didn' last.

Dark Thoughts

• I am not very busy at work. I have gone to my school for work shifts and have had no students to teach. If I wasn't getting paid, this would be a very bad thing. As it is, it is simply an annoying thing because there is only one thing worse than not being busy and that is expecting not to be busy and then having some classes to teach. I like having lots of free time so I can study languages, read good thoughts and blog what I am thinking..

• If something can't go on forever, it won't. I will have some announcements to make in this blog, once I have told the relevant people what I am thinking of doing.

• Most days, I start my shifts at school at 13:00. In the morning, I drive Tony to school and then go for a walk in the area around the Casa Kaulins complex. I take photos and videos that I put on the story feature of the Facebook messenger app because I see a lot of things that I don't see in Canada and I want my Facebook contacts to see them. One morning, I walked past a truck being unloaded and all the workers gave me sullen looks. I wondered if under different circumstances, these people would be attacking me.

• One point that anti-immigration people make is that immigration from third world countries usually leaves these countries with less human capital. That is, the people who should be helping their third-world countries are being allowed to go to first-world countries. Immigrant proponents don't have an answer for this. They probably would say that it was imperialistic to tell third-world countries how to run their affairs. And yet, they would tell the US how to run their affairs. [Many of these proponents are not American, and they use Trump's position on immigration as proof of his supposed racism.]

• A sight that made me say YES!!! A car was in the bicycle lane trying to make a right turn. The car was blocked by bicycles and e-bikes. The car honked for them to get out of the way. The cyclists didn't move. The car honked some more. Still the cyclists didn't move. The car then honked very emphatically. Again, no movement from the cyclists.

• How do I feel about teaching? When it turns into an activity of running out the clock, I hate it.

2019 Trip to North America

My son Tony & I were in North America for the last three weeks of August. (My wife Jenny didn't come which was first a blessing, but then there were repercussions as soon as we returned.) If I could use only one word to describe the trip, I would say it was overwhelming; if could I could use only one word to describe how it wasn't, I would say it wasn't relaxing.

What follows is a random collection of incident reports and observations from our grand trip:

• My one stated goal of the trip was for my son Tony to get away from the screens of computers, phones and televisions, and do some outdoorsy activities. Alas, I didn't come close to accomplishing this goal. Tony was content to spend his time playing games on my brother Ron's PS4 or my Iphone, or watching YouTube on my laptop or on my Ipad. On a two day trip to a campground, Tony quickly retreated from the warmth of a campfire to the comfort of my friend's camper van where he could watch sports news on a big screen television and play games on my Iphone.

• Tony has taken a big interest in sports and so it was my pleasure to take him to some live sporting events. First we went to a Canadian Football League between the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and the British Columbia Lions. Tony, who is normally a quiet sort, joined in with the cheering and hollering of the crowd. We then went to Minneapolis for a National Football League exhibition game between the Minnesota Vikings and the Seattle Seahawks, and then the next night, a Major League Baseball game between the Minnesota Twins and the Chicago White Sox. Tony and I were most certainly impressed by the stadiums of the Vikings and Twins. The Viking stadium was awe-inspiring, I thought. Not only was it huge, it was attractive to behold. The Twins stadium was nice too but lacked the hugeness of the Vikings facility. In the Vikings stadium, Tony told me he was scared by how high up our seats were. At the Twins game, Tony, not being familiar with baseball, expressed boredom at the pace of the game. I got bored myself, but found the game memorable for two situations: first, the White Sox perfectly executed a suicide squeeze which scored the eventual game winning run in a game that ended with a 6-4 score; second, the game ending with a Twins slugger being struck out with two men on base.

• We spent most of our time on this trip in Brandon, Manitoba so Tony & I could be with my mother. Every day we were in Brandon, I made a point of visiting my father's gravestone which is in the local cemetery there. Tony came with me on most of these occasions and was appreciative of the solemnity of what we were doing. He was also interested in looking at the other gravestones. On one evening visit, he walked far from my Dad's gravestone and endlessly inspected as many other gravestones as he could in the cemetery. The dates seemed to be what fascinated him most.

• My mother is 81 and living in a big house all by herself. When asked by others how she was doing, I said she was alive and still kicking. She took her time to answer my questions and make decisions, and she did seem to worry a lot which, I am ashamed to say, tested my patience. All of my siblings are lucky that she has a neighbor, on one side, who looks after her. Bruce is his name and he's a good Catholic. Her neighbors on the other side however have been an annoyance. The house on the other side is a rental. Two years ago, the renters were Latin Americans who did not how to maintain their yard and were excessively loud at odd times. The current renters give off the impression of being up to no good.

• Driving to Lac du Bonnet, Manitoba where we would have a camping trip, of sorts, was a bit of an adventure. I drove to my friend Eddy's camping site on a Friday night. I had originally planned to go there a Saturday morning but the weather forecast said that would be rain on Sunday. With the window of opportunity being what it was, I made a quick decision to go on Friday. Lac du Bonnet is 75 minutes northeast of Winnipeg. I was in Brandon, which is two hours west of Winnipeg, when I made the decision to go and so I had a three hour drive to do. By the time I was near Lac Du Bonnet, it was dark. Ed provided me with instructions to get there since it would have been long distance to have used the GPS on my phone. The instructions worked to a tee till I got near to the destination. I had successfully crossed a one lane bridge that was controlled by traffic signals. Eddy's instructions said to then look for a Wendigo Road. When I crossed the bridge, I saw a big sign for another road and figured it would be a cinch to find this Wendigo road. But the road signs then became small, that is the size of street signs you would see in a city. These signs aren't so easy to read in the dark of night when you passing them by at 100 km/h. (That was the speed limit on the road I was driving and there were cars behind me.) After five minutes of driving looking for the road, and re-looking at Eddy's instructions, I saw that I had overlooked a detail about the road being two km past the bridge and so it dawned on me that I had passed it. I turned around and found the road, even almost driving past it when I did spot its sign. I found Eddy's campsite and was told that I had performed a great feat in being able to get to it at night.

• I also almost hit deer twice as I was driving to Eddy's. The first one was on the middle of the road and I am damned to know how it was that I didn't hit it.

• The area around Eddy's campsite, which included the towns of Pinawa and Lac Du Bonnet, was full of deer. I saw deer in fields and on a golf course. I can talk of a third close encounter I had with a deer occurring after visiting my cousin Jon in Pinawa which is basically a suburb surrounded by bush. What happened was that I found myself driving down a street beside a deer that was running on front lawns. The deer was so close that I momentarily felt like I was beside a galloping horse. The animal's bulk seem to almost be touching me. The deer then stopped to graze on someone's front lawn.

• Everyone who expressed an opinion in Canada, told me they hated Trump but at the same time they told me they hated the Chinese for what they were trying to pull with the Huawei woman. Me: So you hate Trump for his approach to China? They: Well, other than that, he is a real big idiot!

• I hate flying. My recent flights have always been full of annoyances that bring out my lizard brain. The previous trip to Canada was impacted by a typhoon in Hong Kong that left Jenny, Tony & I stranded for three days in Vancouver. How much I wanted to punch the Hong Kong Airlines service person who said that there was nothing they could do for us because we had booked through a travel agent. This trip, our flight from Shanghai to Vancouver faced the specter of delay because of a typhoon having come to Shanghai and canceling all the flights the day before. At the Shanghai Pudong Airport, Tony & I did get through our check-in and security check no problem and everything seemed to be smooth sailing. But we then went to our boarding gate. The gate where we were to board the plane was not the boarding gate we were expecting. Instead of looking like an airline boarding gate at the level of the plane's fuselage, we had to take an escalator down to what looked like a Chinese bus station at the level of the tarmac. The gate area was very crowded and the waiting passengers were confused about what was happening. Many passengers standing about were compelled to ask others if they were waiting to board a plane going to Vancouver. What in fact happened was that Pudong airport had to force many planes to board their passengers on the tarmac because of all the cancellations of the day before. At least I hope that is why this was done. (Someone told me that some airlines will try and save money by boarding their passengers on the tarmac instead of at a usual airline gate.) So we were delayed getting out of Shanghai which left me with another specter of a further delay being caused by missing the connecting flight to Winnipeg. But that flight was in fact delayed and we were lucky not to miss it.

• I hate flying. I will say that again so that I can make use another bullet point to tell you what annoyed on our flight back to China. Early on a Saturday morning, we went to the Winnipeg Airport to start our journey back to China. Right off the bat, the annoyance began as the check-in area was as crowded as the Chinese bus station boarding gate we saw at Pudong Airport. As it was at Pudong, it was confusing as to where we should line up and where the end of the line up was. Passengers were asking others what they were standing in line for. At one point, I pushed our luggage ahead because it appeared that there was a Chinese individual standing – as I have seen so many Chinese people do over the last 15 years – in the wrong place while being totally oblivious to the confusion and inconvenience they were causing others. Check-in at least went smoothly and I had a nice chat with the check-in person about where I was born, where I was currently residing, and how I lived everywhere in Canada because my father was in the military. Then we went to the security. Security at Canadian airports, if you can believe it, can be more strict than at communist China airports. This time, I was chosen to go to an extra strict security line where I was asked to take the cover off my laptop. I told the person that I hadn't taken it off in four years and I didn't know how to remove it. I was told that I could then return to the agent and tell them this. So I took the cover off the laptop while the security person was telling me how he had seen others do it. The security doing this was tantamount to telling me that the all thing was a charade but I had no choice to do it. I then commented on this to another person who was in the line just ahead of me, saying it wasn't this strict in the PRC, and he said the Americans were to blame. I shrugged my shoulders. But we boarded the plane no problem and our flight arrived in Vancouver on schedule. Because we were on a connecting flight, we didn't have to go through security. We boarded the plane to Shanghai no problem and the plane began to taxi for take-off, when the pilot told us of volcanoes (in Alaska it turned out) forcing them to delay take-off till they could change the flight plan. A twenty minute delay they told us. Then the pilot told us that the new flight plan meant they would have to put more fuel in the plane. So the plane had to return to the gate. Another twenty minute delay they told us. Then the pilot told us that because of the previous delays, the flight shift length require them to get another pilot. Another twenty minute delay till the pilot boarded!! Finally, we took off. We arrived in Pudong late after the usual uncomfortable flight. Just as the plane was approaching Pudong, the pilot mentioned that foreigners arriving at Pudong would have to have their fingerprints taken. Arriving at Pudong has become depressing for me because it is so drab. That and the bureaucracy makes one well aware that one has arrived in the People's Republic of China. Getting off the plane, going through customs, picking up one's luggage and then having to have your luggage run through an x-ray machine before you can get through the departures gate does nothing to make one feel all is right with the world.

• On the flight back to Shanghai, a young Chinese man sat next to Tony & I. He started a conversation and I learned that he was studying at the University of Washington in Seattle. He told me that Seattle was a very liberal place and how one local told him that President Trump did not represent Americans. My first response to that was to say that there were a lot of Americans who liked Trump. Reflecting on this story, I can only imagine how liberal this American was. He sounded totally Obama with a dash of NPR thrown in.

• Walking into a store in Canada or America if you have been away for a stretch of time can be overwhelming. What you see is so much of what you can't get in China and what you miss about Canada. Maybe because I was getting older and had anxiety about spending too much money, I forced myself to not look.

• Tony got a lot of sports stuff. He got a Houston Rockets cap, a Winnipeg Blue Bombers cap, a Toronto Raptors championship cap and a San Jose Sharks cap. I bought him a magazine commemorating the Raptors NBA championship. I bought him a Minnesota Timberwolves jersey in fluorescent green bearing the number 22 and the name Wiggins who is apparently a Canadian player. He also discovered the joy of sports cards. I bought him a lot of basket ball cards as well as some hockey and baseball cards.

• Tony has been to at least four countries. He has been to China, Canada, Thailand and the USA. He has also been to Hong Kong and Taiwan which are not fully part of the PRC and yet have a non-country status. So, let's say he has been to six.

• The Mall of America was not so overwhelming. It was big, but not that much bigger than the many malls I have wandered about in China. It had an amusement park but I have been to Hong Kong Disneyland so my feeling was "Meh!". It did seem to exhibit the phenomenon of the decline of the shopping mall in America that I have been reading about. There was a lot of vacant space that, like in China, was covered up by attractive and clean signage. There was also the strange thing of particular chain stores having more than one location in the store. One store called Champs had locations on all three levels. I was asking my brother if we hadn't already been to this store.

• Tony's favorite store in MOA was Brick Headquarters which sold Lego-style soldier figurines and to-be-assembled military toys. But it was very expensive. A single figurine WW2 German figurine cost 18 dollars. That was more than my indulgence of Tony on this trip could bear.

• We stayed at a Comfort Inn in Bloomington. My brother booked it online and unfortunately, we got a smoking room. The smell of cigarettes was a like a slap on the face whenever we entered the room, but quickly went away.

• We took a train to get to the Twins and Vikings games. Now, I can say I have taken trains in Chicago, Mexico City, Vancouver, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Nanjing, Wuxi, Suzhou and Hangzhou.

• Beer Communism in Manitoba. Only places I could buy liquor was at a beer store or the government liquor store. A good thing about China is that I can buy beer at a Mom and Pop shop, of which there are many within walking distance of Casa Kaulins.

• I heard a lot of Spanish being spoken in the USA. In Canada, I heard a lot of English spoken with East-Indian accents.

• I saw Dancing Gabe at the Bomber game. When I lived in Winnipeg, I would see him dancing at Winnipeg Jet games. That is, Winnipeg Jet 1.0 games over twenty years ago. That he was still around was a surprise.

• Mom, Tony & I went to Boston Pizza (a restaurant that I had worked at in Chilliwack). The food was not as good as I hoped. As well, they were advertising five dollar Coronas. In China, I could get them for 10 RMB: a buck and a half in in Canada!

• Something that I meant to do but didn't: get a set of rosary beads. I did see a set, strangely enough, at the Brandon Cemetery. Across a road, it was from my father's gravesite, on a gravestone of the same shape as my father's. I discovered the beads when I was with Ray Pero as he tried to locate his father's grave, which he found. I told him about the rosary beads and how I wish I could have a set. "You have to be Catholic!" said Ray. Yes. I have got two out of three down: God, Christ, but not Church.