It happened last night.  I dreamed in Chinese again.

For some reason, it sounds like something that I would say to a shrink.  And no, for the record, I do not have one.  Although, I am sure there are countless people out there who think I need one.    I’ll leave that discussion for another day.

The dream itself is rather fuzzy, but the little I can remember may amuse you.  I always ponder who all the yous are.  The stat counter Phil built says 50 some odd people come every day, some longer than others, but other than the few that leave comments on any sort of regular basis, I have no idea who they are, and if they care a wink about me.  I guess I never really will.  Oh, well.

So, yeah, I dreamed again in Chinese.  In this particular dream, I was at a big celebratory venue.  I am not sure if it was the New Year or if I was reliving a piece of the Olympics that I never witnessed in person, but it was big.  And there were lots and lots of fireworks.

The only reason I can remember that I was in this stadium like place was because it was also the start of new school year, and I was in charge of the freshman class.  I had to speak to them once the celebration came to a close – about what to expect and all that jazz.  This made me nervous in my dream just like it would have in real life.  I hate speaking in front of people.  How I managed to teach 30 some students nearly every day for a year is beyond me.  I guess I just got used to bull shitting on a regular basis.    (Yes, Mom, I just used the BS word!!)

As soon as the event was over, everyone started heading for the exits, all except for me.  Something distracted me and kept me back.  Well, before I knew it, everyone had left and I didn’t know which door to take.  I called up the stair wells, but no one could hear me.  I was too afraid of getting lost that I stayed there hoping I would figure out where to go, but my dream said I had to stay. Slowly, I noticed that my surrounding were changing.  It was getting darker, and the walls were turning into stone.  Lights on the walls turned into torches, and bars with electricity came down by the doors, keeping me from trying to run away.

I looked around and started noticing that there were some Americans chained up along the passage ways.  I ran over to them and begged them to tell me how to get out, but they wouldn’t unless I would unchain them.  One even handed me a key, but I told him I didn’t want to get in trouble.  I have no idea why a prisoner with a key would still be chained, but he was.  What can I say?  My dreams are weird.

At about that point, I heard some noise behind me.  The prisoner told me that I should hide, but I didn’t listen.  I ran to see who it was in hopes that they could help me.  The noise ended up being a line of freakish monsters.  The one in front looked like Skeletor from He-Man.  Behind him were some wickedly evil creatures that only my mind could create.  Insert you own creepy guys and you’ll know what I mean.

He looked almost exactly like this!

Well, since my dream was in China, the creepy guys had to speak Chinese.  This made everything super frustrating.  It is times like this I wish I had studied my Chinese a little more because I have no idea what they said to me.  It was all comptlete gibberish to me.  I’m sure they were saying something like, “How did you find our secret dungeon?” And, “We must kill you now.”  I just kept saying over in over in Chinese, “I am American.  I am a teacher.”  I added some “help me” in English, but they didn’t seem to care that much about my presence.

I was feeling pretty helpless, but for some reason I did not run.  I just kept standing there pleading with them hoping we’d finally be able to understand each other.

And then Phil’s snoring woke me up.

Part of me was greatful that I didn’t have to deal with Skeletor anymore, but I was mad that I wasn’t going to be able to find out what was going on.  I quickly closed my eyes and hoped that I’d be able to go back to the same dream like I am sometimes able to.

Fortunately, I was, but the interesting part of my dream was gone.  The little man operating my dream center hit the fast forward button.   I entered the dream looking over a lot of paperwork – all of the stuff I had missed while being stuck in a secret Chinese prison.   Hey, at least I didn’t have to speak to the freshman class.

I was going through the pictures on my computer and decided to post a few that have never made it on this little blog of mine before.  As you can tell by the dates on the pictures, they are all rather old.  I need to go through all of my China pictures and see if there are any interesting ones I forgot to post.  I’m sure there has to be a few.  Phil and I took something like 5,000 pictures.  And if there aren’t any more photos, I’m sure there are still a few blog worthy videos.  I’ll try to find some this weekend.

I’m anxious for spring to roll around again.

I love taking pictures of flowers for some strange reason.

I am pretty sure that this was taken at Swan Lake in Sumter.

Maybe I will go again this year – get their when more flowers are in bloom.

RIP Dopple

Dopple was my favorite orange cat ever.  He totally could have been a real life Garfield.

RIP Morgan Rose Ireland Yvette DeWitter

She was the best kitty ever!

RIP Thames

Thames talked with every step he took.  He was one strange kitty, but I still loved him.

I found this grasshopper behind One Eared Cow Glass several years ago.

He stayed on that stick just long enough for me to snap a picture of him.

I don’t even know what this is, but it’s scary!!

Anyone have any idea what this critter is called?

I don’t know if other people do it, but I sometimes dream in Chinese.

It started sometime after I arrived in China.  I thought it was pretty cool, even though I didn’t understand all that was being said.  When people would talk to me, I would respond to them like I would in real life – a few key phrases or words to try and explain what I needed or wanted them to know. My vocabulary has always been rather limited.

I always wondered why my mind didn’t pretend that I knew Chinese.  I guess it didn’t know how to fake the language.

Even after coming back to America, I still sometimes dream in Chinese.  It amazes me that in my sleep I can recall vocabulary words that I haven’t used in ages.  My most recent dream was rather entertaining, and I thought you would enjoy hearing about it – although I doubt you’ll find it as funny as I did.  I think it is hard to appreciate other people’s dreams because you lose so much in the explanation.  It’s like trying to turn a book into movie or vice versa.

In my dream, me, Phil, and Holy(our Chinese friend) were running away from some Chinese bad guys. We had been running for a long time, but the bad guys were still hot on our trail.  At some point we decide to hop on a train.  The train was headed to Hong Kong.  Well, once we boarded the train and left the station – my dream decided to go completely nuts.  The train, in its attempt to flee the bad guys, jumped the tracks and started traveling at very high speeds over mountains, valleys and streams.  It reminded me of a cartoon.  Somehow we managed to put some ground in between us and the bad guys and were able to rest for a while in our seats that I don’t remember paying for.

As the train started to pull into the Hong Kong station, we started gathering all of our stuff.  In real life, I probably would have been running from the bad guys with only the clothes on my back, but obviously, the same does not hold true for my dream life.  I had apparently crammed every single one of my possessions in numerous suitcases, pockets, and bags and had waited until the last moment to gather them back up.  This is not what I found funny though.  If anything, this part of my dream cause me panic and loads of stress.  What made me smile in my dream would have sent me into side splitting laughter in real life.

As the train pulled closer to a stop, I noticed that there were thousands and thousands of Chinese people waiting to board the train.  There were so many of them, that they had built stadium like seats in the station.  All of them were standing.  And of them were chanting.  Can you guess what they were chanting?  If you have ever been to China for any extended amount of time, you should probably be able to guess.

For some strange reason, every single last one of them was chanting “Jia you! Jia you! Jia you!”

For those of you who don’t know have any idea what “Jia you” means – there happens to be a YouTube video that will teach you all you need to know.  If my dream doesn’t make you giggle, the video should.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7uJ_ExULDw[/youtube]

I have no idea what happened once the train stopped because I woke up.  I can only imagine what would have happened had I stayed asleep and the dream continued.  All I know, is that it was the strangest dream I have had in Chinese yet.

Okay, we all know that I am a bumbling idiot, so what is new you ask?  Well, nothing much really, except I need to much a correction.  A few days ago I posted a little story about how Holy, a friend who we had met in Fuyang, China, had come to visit us during his fall break. In that post I said that his name was pronounced like Holly.  While he was here though, and after I had made that post, I found out it, after nearly two years of knowing Holy, that is name is indeed pronounced Holy – as in holy shit, your kidding me!

You can imagine how stupid I felt.  I then tried to figure out how the confusion started.  Some point when he Holy met Phil, he told him his name and showed Phil how to spell it.  I am pretty sure Phil double checked and made sure it was what he meant, but I guess our English minds wanted to hear Holly, and so that is what we called him.  I asked Holy why he never corrected us and he said he didn’t know.   Perhaps it is was the same reason I never made the scores of Chinese people say my name correctly.  I knew calling me Gabrielle would be difficult, so I opted for Gabe.  To most people in China that year, I was known as Gabe-a.  I should have simplified it even more and gone by G.

I told Holy how hard it was going to be to retrain myself to actually say his name correctly.  The last few days he was here, I had to catch myself mid-name so many times.  Hopefully, it won’t take too long to learn.

I’ve heard a lot of strange names in my life, but I think this story tops them all.

At work the other day, I had to call and see if an applicant would be interested in applying to a position similar to one she had applied to before.  The name was normal enough – Tiffany.  I called the number and let it ring a few times.  A moment later, a man with a rather deep voice answered the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hi, may I speak to Tiffany?”

“This is he.”

I nearly fell out of my chair.  Never in all my life have I met a male Tiffany.  I’m still trying to figure out if it his parent’s hated him, or if he changed his name as he got older.  Either way, it’s weird.  Very weird.

Another thing that I never imagined happening occurred this week.  Holy(pronounced Holly), who attened the high school that Phil taught at in Fuyang, China, decided to take his fall break and visit us for the week.  He is attending Troy University in Alabama this semester.  Well, instead of taking the bus to get to us, like we would have in China, he actually drove.   Holy bought himself a car and passed the Alabama driver’s license test.  I must say, it was very strange to be driven around my city, by a guy I met in China and who has only lived in the States for 9 months.  I guess it would be like me moving to China, buying a car, and driving Holy around where he grew up.  I dunno, I guess i just find it weird – and a bit funny.

One of the afternoons we were in Yangshuo, a quick storm rolled through.  We could see the bands of rain coming through the mountains before it actually got to us.  It was ever so beautiful, and afterward a big rainbow appeared.  We were lucky not to have a lot of rain the week we were there.  This particular storm only lasted about 15 minutes, and then all was back to normal – hot and humid.

In the video, we are standing on the balcony of our hostel.  Yes, that was our view every day for a week.  It was so awesome waking up to that every day.  If you ever manage to go to Yangshuo, you should stay where we did – Riverside Retreat.  You can click here for more details about the hostel/hotel.  It truly was a wonderful place, and the staff was simply amazing.  They were very helpful.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy-YyJalIMg[/youtube]

I can’t believe I have never told the story of when Phil and I stayed in the super fancy, 5 star hotel right next to our apartment in Fuyang. You can click to see the picture of the hotel here.  The outside doesn’t look that great, but the inside looked really nice.  I can’t remember if I took pictures of the room, but I know I have a brochure of the hotel somewhere.  I’ll try to find it.

Phil and I couldn’t decide what to get each other for Christmas, so we decided to treat ourselves to our first ever 5 star hotel – South China Hotel Fuyang.  We walked past it nearly everyday and got sick and tired of dreaming what it would be like to stay there.  So, about a week before Christmas, we walked into the lobby to find out how much money we would have to burn through to enjoy ourselves.  Apparently, several weeks prior to this, we had been at the same bar with the lady behind the desk.  She remembered us, and decided to drop our room charge in half.  We couldn’t decided if we wanted the regular room or the suite for a few more dollars until she let us see what latter looked like.  We had seen the other one several weeks earlier, when Tim’s(another teacher) parents came and stayed there.

As soon as we walked through the door we were wowed.  It was huge. It had two bathrooms. The one with the bath tub was almost as big as the bedroom – the room not the tub.    The bed was equally as huge and super soft.  In addition to that there was another large room with a couch and a table – the kind you eat at.  It was sorta like a living room, and I think there may have been a TV(there was another TV in our bedroom.)   I guess it was your typical suite layout, but since I had never seen one before, it looked super awesome.

The room ended up costing us 870 RMB – at the time that was about $108 – not bad for a night in a five star hotel suite.  Without the discount it would have cost us 1500 RMB – more than I would have paid to sleep in a bed anywhere, even if I could take a bath for 24 hours.  And that leads me into what this story is all about.

A week later we showed back up at the hotel and were given our respective keys.  The first thing either one of us wanted to do was take advantage of the huge garden tub.  Our apartment didn’t have a tub, just a shower, so it had been nearly 3 months since we had had a nice American bath.  When you don’t have access to a tub, you really start to miss them.  Our shower was pretty kick ass though.  It was a sauna/shower, and had it worked 100% like it was supposed to, we would have had jets of water coming out of the walls to clean us.  We never could figure out how to get them to work though. 

Well, anyway, Phil and I were standing in the bathroom, taking in everything it had to offer us.  There were all sorts of bath related items that you could use for a price, of course, big lush towels, heat lamps, and a button.

We both looked at it, curious as to what it did.  There was no sign or anything.  It was just a button, sitting pretty as it pleased in the wall, next to the bath tub.

“Should I push it?” Phil asked.

“I dunno.  We don’t know what it does.” I replied.  I saw Phil’s eyes grow wide with wonder and excitement.

Phil has a history with buttons.  In a DnD game that I dragged him to a long time ago, he decided in his inebriated state of mind, that it would be a good idea to push the button that read 13, when we all clearly knew that pushing a button would make a monster appear.  Number one had made some stupid kobold appear and we killed it in all but two seconds flat.  Anyone should have been able to understand that pushing a higher number would make an even larger monster appear, but Phil didn’t care.  He wanted excitement.  So, he pushed it, and the biggest, meanest, ugliest, most difficult creature to kill appeared.  We ran for our lives, and barely survived.

Phil doesn’t play with us anymore.

So, yeah, Phil was standing in the bathroom, staring at the button.  For a brief second he was five years old again. I could tell by the way his eyes were glowing and twitching – like he had found the mother load of mischief .  Oh, he was going to push that button.

And that is exactly what he did.  With his index finger he stabbed the button.

There was silence for a moment and then I started to think that maybe it is like our light switch in the hallway back in our apartment.  Maybe it doesn’t do it’s job anymore.  And then there is a voice.  An English voice.  Talking to us in our five star hotel bathroom. In China.  In Fuyang.  Where 9 times out of 10, people can’t understand what the hell I’m saying. And vice versa.  But I understand this.

“Gentleman, are you in trouble?” (I can’t remember exactly what he said.  I just remember it sounding awkward.)

I looked at Phil and Phil looked at me.

“Oh, we are fine,” Phil said

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, we are fine. Just accidentally pushed the button.”  (Accidentally my ass.)

“Ok. Have a good evening.”

“Thanks, you too.”

As soon as the voice was gone, Phil and I bust out laughing.

Apparently, Phil had pushed the emergency button.  It made total since afterwards, but you still would think that an emergency button would have emergency written somewhere on or near it.  Hey, at least they didn’t come barging into our bathroom.  I can only imagine what kind of comedy would have ensued if they had.

When Phil and I lived in Fuyang, we really wanted some syrup to go with the pancakes we were trying to make.  Our attempts at making the syrup ourselves never produced Butterworth results.  So, we did the next best thing – we asked my mom to send us a bottle of maple extract to help give our concoction some maple flare.  We didn’t ask for a bottle of syrup because it would have made the box weigh too much and a heavy box sent to China isn’t cheap.  Sending just the syrup probably wouldn’t have cost that much, but our wish list always seemed to grow when we found out someone was going to be sending us some western goodies. 

The extract did help with the taste of the syrup, but we could never get the consistency we wanted.  Eventually, we gave up and decided we would just have to wait until we returned back home to get the good stuf.  When it came time to move to Shenyang, we packed it up with all of our other stuff.  We weren’t about to scarifice any of our western goods.

A week after we got to Shenyang, we were told we would be moving again.  Phil and I weren’t particularly pleased that we would be uprooting ourselves again, but we repacked all of our goods up anyway, including our maple extract, and headed to the beautiful city of Xiamen.

In Xiamen, we unpacked everything and refused to pack again unless we were traveling or moving back home.  And for the next three months our maple extract sat quietly on our shelf, unused.  When it came time for us to go back to the States, we offered up all of our western goods to our dear friends, Patty, Eddie, and their daughter Elisa.  We knew they could get some good use out it. Elisa swore it was Christmas when we brought all of our stuff over to them. 

Well, up until a few days ago, I would have thought that our maple extract had finally run out of gas and found a permanent home in a landfill in China or some other needy westerner’s cabinet.  Interestingly enough though, neither happened.

Instead, our maple extract jumped on a plane back to the States stashed away in a suitcase – destination Miami – when Patty and her family decided to leave China.  After a short stay there, it decided that it wanted to do some more traveling, and hopped on the next flight to Colombia – the country, not the city where I live.  For the next four weeks our maple extract took in the sights and then decided it wanted to settle down for a spell – somewhere else.  So, off it trotted to the airport and booked passage to Argentina, where for  at this moment in time, it still resides.  At least until Phil and I travel to Argentina next November, pick it up, and bring it back to the States with us. 

I don’t know how many miles our little maple extract has traveled, I just know it’s a lot.  Perhaps, there is a section in the Guinness World Records that it would qualify for.

I remember faintly, while standing in the cold, dark corridor of Beijing WECL, Mandy, one of Yuli Guo’s(Richard Guo) lackeys, telling us how WECL had forged one of our coworker’s resume.  She said that it didn’t look very professional.   I thought at the time that maybe they had just added teaching experience or something like that and that it was rather hilarious that our school was lying to the Chinese government.  It made me wonder what they had done to my resume.

Well, a few days ago, I got a message from a guy who had contacted me about teaching at WECL.  He thought he would share some amusing information with me.

“Hey, I thought you would find this amusing.  I actually turned down the WECL job the other day but someone at the Qingdao office keeps bugging me for visa stuff.  Well they decided to “embellish” my resume and added an entire job as a behavorial therapist in Glendale, California back in 2007 while I was in college in Washington, DC.  I can’t believe they would just flat out lie to the Chinese government!  Talk about such a sketchy job!”

And now I know what probably ended up on my coworker’s resume.  Very interesting.

During our May Week vacation in Xiamen, China, Phil and I went to the Taiwanese Folk Village. If you missed the original post about it – you can go here . There are several pictures of the place, but much like the video I am about to show you, many of them have that wretched cloud in the center. Somehow moisture got into my camera. I did everything to dry it out, but Xiamen’s humidity won.

We really had no idea what the show was about, but since the admission to see it was included in our ticket price, we decided to watch it even though we probably wouldn’t understand anything they said. Phil told me that we shouldn’t sit on the front row because we’d be easy targets and probably get asked to participate in something. I wanted a good view, so we sat on the front row anyway.

A few minutes into the show, a man came over to Phil and asked him to participate – in Chinese of course. They tried to get me to go too, but I wanted to stay behind so that I could record it. I laughed so hard that I had I tears streaming down my face.

I really have no idea what important story they were acting out , or why they had Phil drink three shots of liquor.  Phil later said that it reminded him of Everclear. I just thought it was funny, and that you might enjoy watching it. You gotta love China. They think of the craziest ways to amuse people. They really do.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTMauhqVaZ0[/youtube]