Olympics

Congratulations to Canada and the rest of the countries that participated in the 2006 Torino Games.

I really enjoy having 4-day week-ends. I have the time to party hard on Friday, sleep all day Saturday (recovering!), see friends and family on Sunday, and do everything that I have to do on Monday...and feel good about it too!

I went to Tsinghua university and Beijing Languages & Culture University, both in North-Western Beijing. I walked around too much and hurt my feet (I'm still wearing-in the boots I bought in Vancouver). Nobody could give me more information than was on the internet. It wasn't very useful. However, I was able to get a "feel" for the campus. They're much, much bigger than the campus I'm working at now. I get the impression I won't be leaving the campus much since I can buy everything I need on campus - a bit like at UBC but not as modern. :)

I'm tired. Didn't get enough sleep last night. I'll probably nap after class finishes at 4 PM.

It snowed last night. There's been a cold snap recently. It was warmer-ish when I got back from vacation in mid-February, and then it got cold last week, and now it's snowing. The ground is slippery.

People still hoark and spit in the streets; I avoid walking on the gobs of white spit that remain on the ground.

I've discovered real-flowers chrysanthemum tea. My cousin made it for me Sunday night and I bought some for myself and I love drinking it. Pierre's mother used to make me delicious chrysanthemum tea, but I never made the effort to buy it for myself. It's good. And it's fun seeing flowers float in the water. And it hydrates my body seeing as there's no caffeine or milk or sugar or anything in it.

I've got class now. Only two hours left...

Pet splurge

Why am I not surprised??? Some people have too much money to splurge on their pets...

Photogenic Vancouver

I love my hometown of Vancouver. Here are some photos from when I was there in January. It rained a lot of the time. But thankfully Vancouver doesn't look bad in the rain. I went for a walk first with my brother and mother and then on my own along the beach and took dozens of pictures. I understand how my sister in Paris was inspired by the beach for a whole set of paintings she once did, even if that beach wasn't Vancouver's.

Vancouver's skyline coming out of the mist...
Solitary walk.
People do use umbrellas in Vancouver. I love those tanker boats.
Sand and logs and boulders...what a great combination!
It was a Sunday afternoon so there were quite a few people, despite the rain.
The beautiful Rachel and our pal, Nik.
My buddies from History at UBC: Angela and Lucas TdS. We just came back from watching Lucas play at the Cottage on Main Street. I loved it!!! Thanks Lucas!
Angela and Lucas outside Lucas' house. Lucas has a beard in order to look more "mature" in front of his students - and it works!

Sorry

I really haven't been keeping my blog up to date, have I? Well, it's been kind of strange returning to the hum-drum of life in Beijing.

I talked to my mother about this: in September it was the excitement of starting something new and different. Now I'm simply coming back to what I already know, what I'm already used to.

However, this term does look exciting. I'm only working 16 hours/week. I was thrilled to hear that I was working only 14 hours at first, and only going to teach my HND students (nine first- and second-year classes, where students will pass an exam to try and finish their studies in England), but then my department added another two-hour class of "trainees" - adults who work in companies who send them to Beijing for four months to improve their English skills. So this is an extra class I'll have to prepare for but usually adult classes go a lot smoother than my younger, larger HND classes.

There are lots of reasons I take an interest in my classes this term, but I won't bore you with the details because it's really not all that important.

What's important is that you realise that I only work on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays!!! I have a four-day week-end!!!

And Gaetan's off with his girlfriend from France for three weeks so we won't start Chinese class until he comes back. I hope this means I can do some short trips on week-ends. Unfortunately, Loic has class Friday evenings and Monday mornings which isn't cool. Katia and Gaetan are only taking two freaking classes this term, and they're both on Wednesday, so they have six-day week-ends!!! We'll see what happens...

I was extremely sick last Friday. I don't know why. I woke up and puked and decided to shower and get dressed anyway. I had to go to work to pick up my schedule and I went to buy water at the campus grocery store. I didn't make it back home without puking on the side of the road...but nobody who saw me seemed to mind or care. I spent the rest of the day in bed, sleeping and throwing up. It was horrible.

But Saturday morning I was fine. And Saturday evening I had dinner and watched a movie with my cousin, whom I haven't seen in a few months. And then I went out to party with my French buddies in Beijing's foreign bar district. Gaetan and Loic came over afterwards and didn't leave until 5:30-ish in the morning...it was quite the long night. Gossip central: Katia wasn't there because she's trying it out with Guillaume - at least we're all hoping they get together.

Katia, Loic and Gaetan came back from their trip around the western and southern parts of China a week before I came back from Hainan. They had a great time, it seems, with many adventures. They randomly ran into a few people from Erwai (our university in Beijing), crazily enough. Gaetan showed me his pix, Katia showed me hers, they're wonderful. Guillaume was traveling with his parents before coming back to Beijing to move; he's now living in north-west Beijing (opposite corner from us) and doing an internship at some company.

This afternoon I'm going to finally buy a new cell phone with Yang Yang and Xiao Sheng. I'm excited. I love the feeling of being connected that a cell phone gives me. I haven't had one in two months!!!

My mother is getting me to seriously think about my future. I'd like to do different things. I'm going to visit Tsinghua university (north-east Beijing) on Monday to ask them what kinds of programs and courses they offer foreigners. I just might stay here another year!

sites

What the world would look like if Canada ruled it. It's a photoshop site with a very cool idea. Thanks to James for the link.

And also thanks to him for this very cool site where you get to pick some words to describe me. I'd like to know how you'd describe my personality!

I made it to 11 PM without napping! This is truly extraordinary! Tomorrow I get to sleep in - yay! Vacation's not over!

Back in Beijing - yet again!

Hello again!

Happy belated Valentine's Day! Celebrate by going to visit Lucas' special Valentine's comic.

Came back from my trip to the south of China this morning.

Monday, February 6th, my student, Yang Yang, came over in the afternoon and we went for hot pot with Andrew (American teacher) for dinner.

Tuesday, February 7th, Yang Yang's mother came to pick Nicole and I up from BISU's North Gate. She (Yang Yang was with her of course) was around 20 minutes late. She didn't know where she was going. Our plane was set to leave at 8:45 AM and we arrived at the airport around 8:15. Needless to say, we made it. We weren't even the last ones on the plane.

We arrived in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, in the early afternoon. It was sunny and hot and tropical plants and palm trees greeted us! What a marvelous change from the sub-zero freezing cold winter Beijing weather!

Buildings in Guangzhou are tall and slim and sit a few centimetres from each other - apparently it's well-known for how close together the buildings are placed. There are two-tier American-style freeways that cross the city, with the typical local food and clothing markets spreading into the side streets underneath. It all makes for an interesting-looking city.

My other student, Xiao Sheng, picked us up at the airport. He was there with his cousin who's going to be a father in May.

The one attraction we went to in Guangzhou was a big park with funky-looking statues of dragons and elephants and all sorts of different beasts, Gods & Goddesses, and people from Chinese folklore made of various materials: CDs, China (like, actual plates and tea cups and bowls and stuff), silk, glass bottles of different sizes and tints. And at night it's all lit up. It's pretty spectacular. Worth noting was a fountain displaying a realistically-painted ceramic cherub-like blond boy holding his dick in his hand and moving from side to side, sometimes squirting water as if he were peeing - much to the delight and "oohs" & "aaahs" of the huge Chinese crowds gawking in awe.

One evening we went to a massage parlour that neither Xiao Sheng nor his cousin had been to before (or so they say...). We went late and Nicole and I finished around midnight and waited for the guys to come out in a lounge area. We quickly realised this was a "men-only" type of joint....

Didn't see all that much of Yang Yang because he's part-manager of a skateboarding company that has its HQ in Guangzhou and he mostly smoked pot and hung out with his skater buddies. He'd fit right in in Vancouver.

The four of us - Nicole, Xiao Sheng, Yang Yang and I - stayed in an empty apartment in a building that's part of the residential complex of the aunt and uncle we were "staying with." It was nice to have our "own" place to hang out. There wasn't much furniture. Yang Yang and Xiao Sheng slept on the floor.

After a couple nights in Guangzhou we went to Zhan Jiang - Xiao Sheng's hometown. We stayed with XS' parents - really sweet people. The city has a rather small-town feel to it and is really spread out. XS' parents live in a building built by the father's gas company for its employees. Behind the building are farms and garbage-filled wasteland...quite a strange area to have a residential building.

A special day in Zhan Jiang included dim sum at a fancy hotel in the morning, a chauffered drive to the beach (the father's company chauffer, no less) where I rode a camel, Yang Yang galloped in the surf on a horse, we had a short drive in beach jeeps, and chose sea-shells from the many sea-shell sellers (the chauffeur bought a sea-shell necklace each for Nicole and I), then strawberry-picking in a field by the road on our way home, and a much-needed nap back at home, before eating amazing seafood for dinner, and ending the day with a delightful two-hour foot-and-body massage. Foot massages are always given by men, and the two guys who got us were so funny! My guy kept laughing at his co-worker who had to massage Nicole's feet, which are bigg-ish for a Western woman, but HUMUNGOUS in southern-Chinese terms (the people from the South are shorter and smaller than those from the North). Apparently Nicole's massager was in a sweat massaging her feet and lower legs, which are the longest part of her body. My guy would burst into fits of laughter, making Nicole's guy laugh, making both of us laugh even harder - we laughed really hard for the whole hour. I've never laughed so hard for so long in my life. Truthfully. It was really great. Nicole's massager was a real man with a mission - in the end he got the job done and he did it well. For my part, my massager sometimes tickled me or really hurt me, so I pulled my foot away twice, quite to his chagrin...I'm sorry! It was quite the experience.

Then we had our hour-long body massage. We both got tiny Chinese women walking on our backs. My massager knew exactly where to place her feet and how much pressure to put where - it was quite extraordinary. I loved it.

Then it was just the four of us young-uns taking the bus (and Chinese-style ferry) to Hainan, a tropical island off the sourthern Chinese coast. We went to the beach resort town of Sanya. We found a hotel in my Lonely Planet for 70 yuan a night for a double room - that's $5 Cdn a night for each of us. And it was a three-minute walk away from the beach!

Sanya was mostly sun, sand and swimming.

On the 15th we took the bus and ferry back to Zhan Jiang. We left around 8 o'clock in the morning and arrived around 7 o'clock in the evening - a whole eleven hours. Nicole discovered what it's like to travel in China and didn't much care for the stress it caused her to feel.

On the 16th I woke up at 5:30 AM in order to catch a 7 AM flight to Shenzhen - just north of Hong Kong - where I caught another flight to Beijing; I arrived around 11 AM.

The cab driver back to the university made his meter go faster (I know because Nicole and I paid around 60 or 65 yuan, while this guy's meter said 85) and then charged me 108 yuan (quickly turning off the meter so I couldn't see) plus 15 yuan for the airport and highway fees (it really is 15 yuan). I told him I'd pay him 100 - the 85 on the meter and the 15 for the fees and he didn't make a fuss. He had already ripped me off on the ride over...sheesh!

But I didn't think much of it. It's so good to be home. It's such common practice here to rip off the foreigners. I really don't much care anymore.

I can't believe I made it to ten o'clock without a nap.

This evening I had dinner with Andrew, the American teacher living across the hall from me.

I also cleaned the sheets that Nicole and I used in my students' apartment while she was in town. I think Yang Yang will come back to Beijing tomorrow (the 17th).

I start work again next Monday (the 20th). Tomorrow I'll start preparing lesson plans and all that. I just need to rest now.

Hope you all had fabulous early February-s. I don't think I've ever seen the plural of February - would it really be "Februaries"???

back in Beijing

OK! Sorry about such a long wait for an up-date.

I wanted to thank everyone I saw while I was in Vancouver. You guys are the best. I really enjoyed watching my friend Lucas play with his band on Main street. You Vancouverites should go to his site (on the right) and check out when he's playing next because it's really worth checking out.

So I'm back in Beijing. I've been here with my Vancouver friend, Nicole, since Saturday, January 28th. I had told Nicole about how sunny Beijing is, but unfortunately when we arrived, there was a super thick hazy coat of smog covering the capital, making it totally uninviting.

We left all our stuff at my place, but had to go to my students' apartment because Nicole's not allowed to stay past 11 PM in the foreign experts' building - how inconvenient. My students' apartment is about a 5-minute walk away, still on campus, but six floors up, so we got our exercise every morning and evening last week.

We visited most of the big touristy sites - Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City, Summer Palace, Temple of Heaven, Qianmen markets (side streets), Hutongs (small alleyways), Wangfujing (foreign shopping avenue)...I think Nicole got a good sampling of what Beijing has to offer.

It was really cold though. Sometimes we just wanted to stay snuggled up in our warm beds. We figured it would be warmer if we went south and there wasn't much left to do in Beijing, so we decided to spend the week-end visiting our high-school friend, Josh, who's in Nanjing.

We spent most of our Thursday looking for train tickets to Nanjing. We ended up finding tickets around 5 PM for a train leaving at 9:55 PM. We arrived in Nanjing around 9 AM. Josh was there waiting for us and he took us to his place.

I like Nanjing. It's smaller and cozier and looks better than Beijing. By "looks better" I mean it's more modern, more "finished," less buildings half-broken down. The pace of life is much slower, more leisurely. There are many tea houses and KTV (kareeokee) bars and Nanjingers know how to relax and enjoy themselves.

We spent Friday morning looking for train tickets back to Beijing. Easier said than done. We (Josh & I for more than two hours, then just Josh) spent around 5 hours going from hotel to hotel searching for tickets. Hotels have their own phone numbers that they can call to get "secret" tickets. Josh finally found a hotel clerk who found a train that left from somewhere far away and went through both Nanjing and Beijing to end up somehwere far away in the opposite direction (Inner Mongolia - doesn't that sound far away?).

Luckily it was a sleeper, which means both Nicole and I had a bunk to sleep in. At one point we had the option of sharing a seat for fourteen hours - one person would be standing at all times. We saw some of those trains - crammed with people sitting and standing - while cozily bundled on our bunks, glad that we weren't the ones on it.

In Nanjing we walked around a lot - in the cold (it wasn't much warmer in Nanjing). Sunday it actually snowed. We tried to walk across one of the longest bridges in China - 4.5 km long - but didn't get very far. It was snowing heavily. I bought bookmarks with pictures of the bridge on them. It goes over the formidable Yangzi river.

We were also invited to an acquaintance's of Josh, who owns a tea shop. We were taken upstairs to his "tea den" and drank two special teas and learned a lot about tea. It was quite an interesting process - lots of hot water is involved, a lot more than I previously thought. He used a bamboo tray with a hole in a corner where the spilled water drained into a tube into a garbage can. It was all very pleasant and lovely, until our host hoarked (if this is a made-up word, it means getting ready to spit very, very loudly) and spat in the garbage can beside him. It's still a shock when we hear and see Chinese men (sometimes women) do this, wether it's in the street or on the train!

We're spending today at my place - warming up, cleaning and getting ready. Tomorrow our plane leaves for the south of China at 8:45 AM, which means we'll have to get up early. Oh well. We're going to Guangzhou (in Guangdong province), one of my students' hometowns (further south and by the water), and Hainan (a tropical island off the south of China). All those places have an average winter temperature that's higher than 20 degrees. Yay!

Hope it's not too cold where you are. I wish you all the best. This is, after all, the Chinese new year. We didn't see much - we mostly heard the people celebrating by firing fireworks and firecrackers.