A year and 2 days ago I landed in Shanghai, China. Time flies by so fast. It feels just like yesterday I was teaching in Fuyang, China threatening to kill all my students. This year has most definitely been an experience that I will never forget and I am very glad that I kept some form of journal, my blog, so that I can go back and remind myself just in case I start to forget what exactly I have been through in these last 12 months. Even now I occasionally go back and read and am amazed.

I am still working on the super long post about why I made the decision to go home. I may have to wait until I get home to finish it. It’s already over 2,000 words and I still haven’t gotten to the most interesting part of the story yet. I’ll see what I can do before tomorrow morning when I head out. We’ve just been so busy going to the last few places that we’ve wanted to see and spending time with the people we will probably miss the most – Patty, Eddie, and Elisa, some fellow Americans we met here in Xiamen. Also, we’ve been packing and cleaning for days now and we still aren’t quite done yet. We still have our bedroom to dust, mop and we have to move the extra bed out of there, too. I will post the story eventually, it just might take me awhile. It’s a long, evolved story, and you will understand that once you get a chance to read it.

Well, in case I don’t post again until I get home – Zaijin, China.

The news that I have been holding off telling is that I am going home. I’m leaving China, and I am not coming back – at least not for a good long while. I am currently working on a post that goes into the details on why I made this choice, and I will be done with that soon. Like most of my experiences in China, the story that made me make this decision is slightly complicated, long, a bit difficult, and even at times humorous, but I’ll let you be the judge when you read it.

We will be leaving Xiamen at 7:15 AM on August 28th and flying to the city I love to loathe, Beijing, for our connector flight back to the States. My last impression of China will come in Beijing’s international airport as I wait eight and a half hours for my plane to show up and take me home. I’m still not sure how I feel about the whole thing right now. A part of me is jumping for joy that I’m going; I’ve missed home, my family and my friends. The other part of me is in a quandary. I’ve had a difficult time seeing the good for all the bad lately. Not that I haven’t enjoyed my time, I have . . . It’s too complicated to explain right now. It will take time for me to shift through my emotions and figure out how I really feel about the whole ordeal. Perhaps you will understand better than I once you have read my side of the story. I’ll finish that soon – before I leave.

A lot of crap has been going down lately, and I haven’t really said much about it. Every time I try to compose a blog about it my thoughts get all jumbled and catch things on fire because the whole ordeal just makes me so unbelievably mad. I’ll try to explain to you the frustration that these last few weeks have mad me feel in a single sentence. I’ll go into all the gory details later – when my thoughts don’t burn through walls.

Richard, my boss, is the devil, and all of his WECL schools are little subdivisions of hell.

Ok, and now onto other things.

Today I was sitting in the office reading a recent copy of China Daily while trying to figure out what is going to happen to Phil and I in the next two weeks or so when I came across the horoscope section. Usually, I don’t read them because they are silly and absurd, but for some reason or another I found myself reading Phil’s horoscope. I had already read mine and it wasn’t the least bit interesting so I won’t bore you with what it said. Phil’s on the other hand was quite amusing, especially considering our present circumstances. I nearly fell out of my chair laughing. It was as though someone had written it specifically for Phil.

Phil’s Horoscope: Libra

If you have to deal with someone who is rather unreasonable and absurd, you can defang this individual by treating him or her with the same absurdity.

There is another typhoon coming, yep yep, but this time it ain’t no ordinary typhoon. No, this time it’s a Super Typhoon – Super Typhoon Sepat to be exact. Sounds dangerous, huh? Well, it should. This is Butterfly’s(Wutip’s) big brother and he is coming to beat me up for making fun of his little sister. Sepat ain’t no joke either. This sucker is a whopping typhoon and he means business. He’s as big as they get too – weighing in as a category 5. Currently his maximum winds are clocking in at 160 MPH and the gusts are at 195 MPH.

I feel really bad that Taiwan is going to get the brunt of this storm, but I am also rather relieved that Super Typhoon Sepat and all its glory will most likely die down as it crosses over the mountains of Taiwan before crossing the straight and doing a bee-line for Xiamen. If we are lucky, it will be a category 1 or 2 before it starts to pelt us with its winds and rain.

I’m much too young to die.

Something I found interesting is that no one freaking knows that it is coming. I talked to 5 Chinese people today and not one of them had heard of it. One of them even laughed and told me it would be a piece of cake. Yes, a piece of cake. I hope for his sake that he is right. Sepat might just make him into a piece of cake. A Chinese cake. They don’t really prepare for these things either. No one is boarding up windows or what not even though all of the tracking modules say, “Hello, my name is Sepat, and I coming to your city for a visit because I heard it is nice this time of year.”

Eh, hopefully it won’t be that bad. We are going to buy some water and what not so that if it is, we will be prepared. I just hope who ever built our apartment didn’t slack off when he put our place together.

Well, Typhoon Paduk didn’t even make a leaf fall. The only thing we got were its clouds, a nice breeze, and three drops of rain. It traveled too far west for it to effect us at all. It was nice not getting the main brunt of it because the clouds and the wind have made the weather much more enjoyable and pleasant. With humidity and the heat index, temperatures have been hitting the 101 mark recently. I thought that was hot until I heard that temperatures back home have been maxing out at nearly 120. Apparently, there is a crazy heat wave affecting many areas of America right now.

And apparently, there is another typhoon coming this way. This one’s name is Wutip, at least that is what we Westerners are calling it. It is something a little different in Chinese, but my students told me that it’s name translates into Butterfly. Yes, Butterfly. Who in the world would name a typhoon butterfly?? Typhoons aren’t pretty and graceful! They’re horrible, non-forgiving forces of nature that destroy things!! I guess that would make an interesting horror movie . . . Killer Butterflies. This one actually looks like it may come closer to us, but it is not as strong as Paduk was. Although, I guess anything can happen. There is that little stretch of water that could feed the typhoon and make it stronger before it hits land again. You can see where they think it might go by looking at the graphic below.

Time to batten down the hatches and board up all the windows because Typhoon Pabuk is heading this way! Technically it is just a tropical storm, but hey, who knows what may happen in the next 24 hours or so. Heh. And besides, Typhoon Pabuk sounds much cooler than tropical storm Pabuk.

Currently it is located between Taiwan(if that gives you an idea where I am) and Xiamen. Xiamen is a little north of where the 9 PM circle is – at least I think. Take a gander at the graphic. It has all the info on it.

Hopefully, it won’t be too bad. Living in Columbia, South Carolina, I only get what is left of tropical storms and hurricanes. I’ve never lived close enough to the coast to worry or care all that much.

I guess if it decides to get really crazy, I’ll at least be happy and safe in the confines of a Japanese restaurant feasting on sushi while the winds try blowing me away.

Oh, and in other news, I think my days in China are numbered. I’ll get into that more later.

Well, I didn’t take first, but I did manage to get the next best thing – second place(technically 3rd – read on for more information)with a total of 149 votes in the personal blog category. I was really surprised by the amounts of votes that I received. I didn’t think that many people knew that my little blog existed. Makes me feel sorta special, really. : ) Perhaps now even more people know about my blog. That was the main purpose of Chinalyst holding the China Blog Awards. They wanted to drive traffic to the China blogosphere and promote link-love between the China blogs. I know that it worked for me because I found a lot of interesting blogs that I hadn’t heard of before in these past few weeks. I’ll have to add their links to the side of my page so that you can read through them too. There are a lot of great writers and photographers out there.

So, who beat me?

I was bested by Beijing Boyce who received a total of 198 votes. He sorta came out of no where toward the end, going from 26th to 1st, but I give him my congratulations nonetheless. Ryan’s blog, The Humanaught, who is the rightful owner of second place, came in with a total of 155 votes. Ryan has decided not to accept his second place win and out of the kindness of his heart has passed it down to me. I was followed closely by Ben’s blog, Midwesterner in the Middle Kingdom, who came in third with a total of 126 votes. My congratulations go out to him too, as well as all the others who participated. If you want to see the winners in the other categories, go here.