Today during our two hour lunch break, Bo and I went to the shoe repair guy outside of the school’s gate to see if it was possible to fix the bottom of Bo’s shoes.  His soles were looking pretty worn.  When we got there, another woman was getting her boots done, so we had to wait.   I thought it would be a good idea to ask how much it was because there would be no point in waiting if he quoted us some ridiculous price.  When I asked him, he paused for a moment as though he were thinking of a price.  The woman waiting on her boots to be finished perked up and said something to the man.  He looked at her and said a few more things and then she turned back to us and said 2.5 in English.  This sorta surprised me.  I hadn’t expected either one of them to speak English and it was cheaper than I thought it would be.  2.5 yuan is like .37  cents.  Do you have any idea how much it costs to repair soles in the US?  Not .37 cents.   We decided to wait.

It didn’t take the guy long at all to finish the woman’s boots and then it was Bo’s turn.  He sat down on the little stool the guy had provided and took off his shoes.  The guy took them and went straight to work.  In a few short minutes, the guy had resurfaced the worn places on the shoe and handed them back to Bo.  We asked him one more time how much it was just to make sure.  For a second, I thought he meant 2.5 yuan for each shoe, and that would have been fine, but he repeated his earlier statement.  Bo slipped on his shoes and stood up to test them out.  He said that they felt great and that maybe he should bring all his shoes to get fixed in China.  Yep, that is my plan, too.

Here are some pictures that I have taken in Linyi over the last week and some odd days.  I have more, but I ‘ll save them for another day.  I am currently working on a post that talks about my experience at a Chinese organic farm.  I’ll try to get that up soon.  Until then, enjoy!

This is the left view out of our window.  We are on the 6th floor.

Right view.  The city is very flat.

This is a little bedside table that is in our room.  I am almost positive that our building used to be a hotel and that a lot of the furnishings here are from that hotel.  I am very interested in what the Do Not button did.

Phil needed a pillow since they only gave us one.  He went with the Dog-cheap pillow.

Shark head.  Need I say more?

I have now been to every country and city in the entire world.  The world map is actually a fountain, but they don’t let it run in the winter.

Here is a view of the Yi river.  Phil and I walked a portion of it trying to find something interesting to do.

Okay, this entry is going to be short because I need to make sure that I am well rested tomorrow for my first day at work.  Phil starts Monday.    I just wanted to let the world know that I was alive and well and that I will start blogging more regularly now that I have internet . . . although, what we have now is hard to call internet.  There is some weird program that the school requires to be on your computer in order for it to access the internet.  And of course, it blocks everything, even when using Phil’s awesomeness to get around it.  For instance, I can access Facebook, but I can’t comment or anything.  It’s frustrating.  If we just had a normal line, instead of school internet, I don’t think we would be having any problems.

Well, I suppose I should put up at least a few pictures before I hit the hay. Videos will have to wait until I can figure out a way to upload to Youtube.

Ha ha.  Phil fell asleep on the plane from Beijing to Linyi.

This is the place we are living.  We are on the 6th floor.

I am a little less than impressed with our living conditions.  We might be moving  soon, but I am not sure.

Yep.  That is our toilet.

Interesting set up they have here.  Our shower is on the left and our clothes washer is on the right.

I snapped this picture walking around Linyi trying to find things to do.

I’m not sure how many of you care about Chinese Folk art, but I have several videos that I took at the Wind from the Plateau, a performance held at the Koger Center here in Columbia.  Instead of making several posts, I am just going to shove all 12 of the videos I uploaded to YouTube. Enjoy!

I am sure I will have more of things like this to come in the new future.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM9vbFoMnmY[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMZrskavUOM[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5SmK-Qb2us[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SI7QZte-LQQ[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqaIcc4IH10[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXFOoVPC7Dk[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMsSiztIQbk[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Edv2yrujk0A[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmH_0EoZR8Q[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi8vyGUI9ts[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVVVTjNE7Hk[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlZrHBdZtPs[/youtube]

It took awhile, but I finally have an idea of where we are going.  The name of the city is Langfang, and it is located in the Hebei province between Beijing and Tianjin.  Phil and I haven’t signed our contracts quite yet, so anything could change, but that should be happening very soon – just as soon as our contracts get prettied up and finalized.  The name of the school that we will be teaching at is the North China Institute of Aerospace Engineering.  If anything, it should look good on my resume right?  🙂  There isn’t much about the city or the school online.  I have scowered the internet and haven’t turned up any sites where other foreigners have blogged about their experience, save one or two articles that didn’t really tell me anything. I did turn of something interesting, though, and I told Phil I didn’t care how much it cost, we are totally staying in this hotel.

Shou, Fu, and Lu as the Tianzi Garden Hotel

Yep, that is a hotel, alright.  The Tianzi Garden Hotel(translation – Son of Heaven Hotel), to be exact, and it is located in the Son of Heaven Garden (天子庄园), Yanjiao Economic-Technological Development Zone (燕郊经济技术开发区), Langfang.  The god’s depicted are Fu(福 – symbolizing fortune – center), Lu(禄 – symbolizing prosperity – right), and Shou(寿 – symbolizing longevity – left). The peach being held in Shou’s hand(green circle) is actually a suite.  I have no idea how much it costs, but that would be an awesome place to catch some shut-eye.  The blue circle shows some other windows in the hotel.  The entrance to the hotel is through Shou’s “shoe”(red circle).  I wonder how much flack someone would get if they made a Jesus hotel like this one.

I also read that Langfang has one Wal-mart and one McDonald’s.  It is always good to have a western fix nearby.  Although, Beijing is only an hour or so away and it is chalk full western goodies if one were to desire it.

My only beef with the city is going to be the cold.  I don’t do well in cold temperatures.  I guess I should go stock up on long  johns.

Until I learn something new . . .

For some reason, we thought this was one of the scariest elevator doors that we had ever seen and insisted on getting it on video. I will admit that while it just looks like an elevator on video, it was rather terrifying in person. Having no real light in our hallway may have contributed, but it could have just been the rickety sound of the door opening. Who knows. I just know it was frightening getting on and off the elevator every day.

If you can’t tell, I’m having a horrible time coming up with stuff to either post or write about.  I’ll work on posting something more real next time.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-e6leONmJc[/youtube]

We really didn’t stay in Shenyang long enough to get to know the city as well as perhaps we wanted, but we were there just long enough to make our apartment feel a little bit like home.  And that is why it made it even more frustrating to repack everything we had previously shipped as well as all the additional goods we purchased since we arrived.   Some of the stuff we bought seemed like too much trouble to ship, so we left it.  We probably could have found a way if we had more than one day to move down south, but since we were stuck with the fixed schedule, neither me or Phil cared if we lost out on a few 100 yuan.

Our apartment was small, but it was decent.  The bed was soft and the room was bright.  It didn’t have the greatest view in the world – we had a series of train tracks outside to look at – but we  could see the city all around us since we were on the 15th floor – technically 14th.  4 is a bad number in China.  Sounds too much like the word they use for death.  Our bathroom wasn’t too shabby, but when you took a shower you had to make sure you were done by the time the number on the water heater got to 32 or so or else you would be stuck with cold water.  With me having such long hair, 32 always seemed to get there way too quickly.  It was always like a race against a ticking time bomb, and I always seemed to flipping lose!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebjfpWNRjSo[/youtube]

A long time ago, I posted a picture of what a soft sleeper train car looked like in China, but the picture was a little distorted and it was hard to gauge its actually size.  The video Phil took helps, but not by much.  I highly recommend forking up the money for one if you are traveling more than eight hours.  Even though I had a hard time going to sleep, it was nice to have a place to lay my head and be able to stretch out.

I was terrified that somehow the crazy snow storm that attacked Shenyang was going to freeze us on the tracks in the middle of no where and that we would ultimately starve to death because we didn’t have but a few snacks with us.  Thankfully, that never happened, because if it did, well, you wouldn’t be reading this right now.  🙂

If you have plenty of time or you want to save money, trains are the way to go in China.  However, you can’t really plan ahead too much when it comes to buying tickets because they only sell them one or two weeks in advance.  I can’t remember how early you can buy them, but it is something like that.   If you wait too long, depending on the time of year, you may not be able to buy tickets and you’ll have to figure out another way to get where you want to go.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR_E-HZhIxM[/youtube]

I don’t know how I ever forgot to post this particular video.  I mean, it isn’t a ground breaking video or anything, but it did make me laugh when I watched it for the first time in a long time.   As I mentioned in my last post, this was our third attempt trying to get to Shenyang. What was supposed to be an easy hour and a half flight, turned into 14 hours of hell.  It would have been one thing if we had waited in the lobby for 14 hours, but most of our time was spent on the tarmac, cramped in a small plane, filled to the brim with passangers.  I suppose the craziest thing was that we actually took off for Shenyang at one point, got half way there, and when they found out there was no room for the plane to land, we were forced to go back to Beijing.  It was at that point we decided to give up and go home and figure out another way to Shenyang,  but before we could go home, we first had to get our luggage back.  That was another nightmare all together.  Below is the video Phil took as we waited for Richard’s(Yuli Guo) luggage to be found.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EA0-VNpEBs[/youtube]

Flipping through my Chinese videos, I found a few that I had never shared before and decided to upload them for your viewing pleasure.  The first video is of the freak snow storm that hit us when we were in Beijing waiting to go to Shenyang.  You can read all about that special story here, here, and here if you have no idea what I am talking about.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFZg-JinN5Y[/youtube]