A beautiful day

Today was such an amazing day. I had class from 8-10. Didn't go particularly well, but not particularly poorly either. Can't complain. And my students are always so sweet...

I went to see my Monday afternoon class because some of them work for Air China and I'm looking for a deal on my flight back to Vancouver for the winter holidays. And I succeeded in getting the photocopier to work (I've never used it before) in the teacher's office place, so I was able to do some personal photocopying (I figured I've been using my printer long enough for my work to owe me five photocopies).

I received a phone call from my mother, which is always nice, but she had plenty of bad news.

Then it was already lunch and I was wondering what I should do about that when out of the blue Tom calls. Tom's the British dude who teaches English. We went to Jie Jie, a restaurant right outside North Gate, and we ordered too much and ate plenty and talked about our students and writing and stuff.

Then I walked to South Gate where I was to meet two of my students - Yang Yang and Kobe - at 2 PM. We took the subway into the city, stopping by a CD shop that sells lots of foreign music (illegally?). We were going to bus part of the way, but the busses were loaded to the brim so we ended up taking a taxi to this market they wanted to show me.

It was an awesome place. I wish I had taken more pictures! But I'm sure to go back. It was mainly a pet market, with crickets galore (in the winter, Chinese people pass the time by betting on cricket fights), but also mice (as pets and as food for other pets), fish, cats, dogs, chinchillas (both Yang Yang and Kobe have a chinchilla), lizards, frogs, boas, pythons, iguanas, geckos...everything!!! Including a baby crocodile selling for over $1000 Cdn, which I'm holding in my very hands in the picture!

That's Yang Yang, my student, beside me. He's from Mongolia. And behind him is his skater friend (they met at a skateboarding park), Wu Yi (Wesley), who's 26 and a famous Beijing DJ who loves animals - he has 40 at home! He knows everything about animals and he grew up in the area so all the local shop people at the market knew him. He knew the names of so many animals in English too, like "reptiles and amphibians." I was impressed. His younger sister's studying in Vancouver.

It'd be fun to see him DJing.

According to YY, he's been skateboarding for ten years so he's one of the first skateboarders in China. Skateboarding has been around fifty years in the US, thirty years in Japan, and ten in China. YY loves talking about music and skateboarding - the two loves in his life.

Israel came up in our conversation and they didn't know what country I was talking about so I talked about the Jews. But then I had to define that. So I explained Judaism by saying Jews didn't believe in Jesus Christ. "Oh! I know!" says YY "It's old school! England is new school! Israel is old school!" That's right, Yang Yang, Israel is old school. I really do love my students.

We made it back to campus and they (YY & Kobe) took me out to dinner to a hot pot place (huo guo - my pinyin's probably wrong). It was super delicious. We dipped our cooked meat (mutton - YY kept calling it "mountain" and for the longest time I was wondering what he was talking about) into this delicious peanut sauce. I loved it.

Then we went to their new apartment (they moved into this smaller apartment - YY & Kobe sleep in the same double bed, but YY regularly goes to bed four hours after Kobe) where we watched LORDS OF DOGTOWN on Kobe's computer. The DVD was of course pirated, with some mechanical difficulties, but we managed to watch it without too much frustration. It's a based-on-real-life-events story about skateboarding. I liked it!

It made YY want to skateboard so he showed us a few moves as they walked me home. He's pretty good. He broke his left arm really bad last summer and he says it still bothers him.

It's funny to see a skater who's into punk and grunge music (only in English if you please!) hanging out with a "nerd" like Kobe, who goes to bed at 10 or 11 PM every night and listens to music from Hong Kong. They're such wonderful friends, too. I really enjoy hanging out with them.