There is no need to adjust your screens, these peanuts really are purple and turquoise, the very color of my room(back home that is.) I ran into these little suckers when I was walking through an open market down the street and couldn’t let them go without getting a picture of them. A few Chinese people stared at me when I did, but I mean, how often do you see purple and turquoise peanuts? My point exactly. I have no idea what they taste like. I haven’t gotten around to popping one in my mouth. And I don’t know if I will. There is something wrong about eating purple and turquoise peanuts.

There are two things about China you should know. The first one is that China is not the safest place in the world. The people are fine, but you have to watch where you walk. If you don’t, you may plummet into a hole. The Chinese don’t cover up holes on the sidewalks here in Fuyang and if they do, they aren’t very effective. The second thing is that China is one of the least sanitary places I have ever seen. A lot of the places are just plain dirty. The bathrooms are probably the worst of the bunch, but pretty much every where you go – you have to wonder what disease is growing there and how it can possibly hurt you. But that is something I have just grown used to. For a visual example, I’ve posted this building.  It’s a trash can, at least that is what it is used for in Fuyang. People come down, throw their rubbish in and walk away. Then all of the rats and flies come in and feast. And the smell. Icky. That is what gets me the most. The smell. It is almost as bad as the rank ammonia smell of urine that comes from some of the bathrooms.

Here is a random picture off of one of Fuyang’s bridges. If this creek was like any one from back home I would run down to it and try to go Crawdad hunting, but I wouldn’t even put my toe in this particular one. And I don’t think that a little Crawdad could live in it. I think that is one of the things I miss from home besides western food. Wildlife. I haven’t even seen a squirrel here. There have only been a handful of pigeons around town. I saw a duck in a cage and few chickens getting their heads cut off, but no real wildlife. I don’t even know where to look to find them. 🙁 Guess I have to go to the Zoo.

Talk about airing your dirty laundry. All the Chinese do. Well, it isn’t dirty anymore. They are just hang it up to dry after a good washing. They hang their laundry every where. They hang them on wires in front of houses like this woman here, outside of windows, over banisters, and even on telephone wires. It reminds me a lot of when I went to Portugal. It all comes down to the fact that the Chinese people just don’t own dryers. I don’t know why they don’t. They aren’t that expensive and I have seen them in stores. Maybe they just don’t want to bother with them. They sure make life easier. And I am sure that they would think the same if they gave it a whirl.

We found this pretty little bench in the gift shop at the end of our tour. After seeing the prices on the books for sale, we had to sit down to catch our breaths. The prices were pretty steep, at least more than I was willing to pay. I was hoping that they would have some smaller items for my cheap blood, but that didn’t happen, and we left the gift shop without anything in tow.

I am not sure exactly what you would call this. I thought it was a fish at first, but then I changed my mind and thought it looked more like a dragon. After looking at it for several minutes, I decided on the phrase – Fish Dragon. It seemed fitting. We had a tour guide, but she didn’t speak a lick of English – go figure, so I never found out what it really was or what it symbolized if anything. The only good thing my guide was good at was pointing and motioning “this way” with her hand.

We climbed up some stairs into a building we shouldn’t have gone into, but our tour guide hadn’t found us yet. While I was up on the second story, I took this picture. The village is pretty even though it is a little run down. There are only a few more buildings than what you see in this picture. Like I said, the village is small. Hence the name – village. Heh.

This looks like a fabulous job. All day she sits and paints this rubber flower stamp with some green paint and then gently presses it on the paper square. This process repeats itself over and over again. I was hoping to come across these little pieces of paper in the gift shop, but I never saw them.

A few weekends ago Phil, Mayia(one of the Australians teaching with us), and I went to an Ancient Paper Making Village located about a 5 minute taxi drive from our front door. The village is pretty small, and if you spend an hour there – you’ve been there long enough to see everything.

I won’t go into too much detail about it. Writing something interesting about paper isn’t easy. I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking.

This first picture is just a random building that I thought was pretty cool looking.

The Process(In My Words – Simplified and Probably Wrong)

To start the process, they have to create paper mush. To do that, they take big slabs of old paper(hurray for recycling) and let that round, heavy stone roll over it a couple hundred times until it is exactly that – mush. Then they take it and throw it into the container in the back right and let it float around a bit in some unidentifiable liquid until it breaks apart some more and turns to pulp. I think it may be a part of a cleaning process as well, but I really have no idea. It’s a complete assumption, as are most of my Chinese experiences since no one ever tells me what is going on.

After all of that, the pulp is then taken into another room and dropped into a vat of water. The pulp floats around in it and a man(or woman) drops this rectangle piece of wood covered tightly with mesh into it. He lets the pulp settle into the mesh and then slowly pulls it out. The mesh now has a thin layer of very wet paper laying on it.

In a very crafty motion, the man(or woman) takes the mesh covered rectangle out and lays the wet, paper side down next to the vat. It sits there for a few seconds and the it is lifted quickly, leaving behind a thin layer of paper on top of the many other layers of paper that have been made prior to that one. They sit there until a certain number have been created. I am not sure why the pieces don’t meld together, but they don’t. Each piece remains separate as they wait until the next step.

The sheets are then carried into yet another room. This particular room is very warm because there is a large wall in the center of it producing heat like one big iron would. A man or woman picks up one of the sheets of wet paper and places it on the wall. All of the water is almost immediately zapped out if it. You can see the steam flowing off of it. To make sure though, they take a brush and glide it over it until every drop of water has been removed. After that, they very easily take the dry piece of paper down and lay it in another pile.

That is the main process of paper making, but not the end. The dry pieces of paper are taken to another room where they are cut, stamped, or written on and then bound to be sold in the expensive Gift Shop.

Please don’t shoot me if I just completely mucked up the process of paper making, but like I said, no one told me what they were doing, I just watched and wondered. The place was pretty neat, and was worth the Y25 to get in. I have more pictures of the place that I will post. Hope you enjoyed your Paper Making tour. Heh.

Phil’s sick.

I’m sick.

Phil’s sick.

I’m sick.

Repeat.

There will be no new posts or pictures until this process stops repeating itself.

And I think blogspot may be blocked again in China – I don’t know. If you know, please do tell.

I saw the strangest thing one day outside of my classroom window as I was day dreaming my day away and had to get a picture of it. If you remember from a previous post of mine, there is a big track outside of my 5th story window and a massive area of grass is in its interior. Well, that is where these four fine ladies are sitting. At least, I think they are women. It is hard to tell from where I took the picture. I had seen them early in the week, but I didn’t know exactly what they were doing until later. It struck me as I stood by the window watching them very slowly transform the field.

These ladies, as it turns out, are Human Lawn Mowers. That is not an exaggeration, at least not really. What they do is this: They sit on these itty bitty stools that you can sorta see in the picture, if you look closey, and they pick the tall pieces of grass and weeds that they can reach. They take these pieces, put them into small baskets until they get full, and then put it in that wheely thing you see and roll it away. Your guess is as good as mine on where they take it from there, but unless it is some special kind of grass, it probably goes straight into a trash can.

These women did little sections of the entire field for a good long week, if not longer, until the field looked nice and trimmed. I’m not kidding. They really did. And the craziest thing is that when they were all done – the field actually looked better than when they started. I have seen exactly one lawn mower since I came to China almost two months ago and it took 3 people to operate it. It was as though they had never used it before. I think that is one of the things I miss – the sound of lawn mowers on a Saturday or Sunday morning. There isn’t a lot of grass here in China, and if you happen to come across any, you are more than likely not allowed to sit or walk on it. You can look at it all you want to – but the instant your foot touches a single blade – you may get a whistle blown at you. I’m sorta lucky, though. I can go to the primary school right beside my school and sit on their little patch of grass all I want to and the only thing bad that will happen to me is a weird stare from some of the staff members.

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. I still have a billion pictures I want to post, but I’ve been too tired and depressed to post or talk about them. Hopefully, I will get in a better mood so that I can tell you about what all Phil and I have done. There are still several pictures from Shanghai and some new pictures that I just took of an Ancient Paper Making Village. My readership has dwindled this week and I don’t know why – maybe it is the lack of posting. Or maybe my blog just sucks. I am hoping for the first one. I would hate to think that this blog sucks. That would make me more depressed.

If you think of any way to make middle school students behave, please feel free to post your insights. They are really starting to drive me insane. For Halloween, I am going to buy all of them Devil Horns. Maybe a pitch fork for the really bad ones.

When Tim’s parents came to visit him about two weeks ago, Phil and I went to see how their hotel accommodations were. They were staying in a four star hotel that was trying to become a 5 star. It is located right at the foot of the hill that leads to our apartment and the school where Phil teaches. We eye it constantly and jokingly say that we are going to stay there one night just to say we did. Who knows, we may actually do it. It would only cost us about $69.00 to do so. How often can you say that you stayed in the lap of luxury for $69.00 . . . not very often would be my guess. It it is a very nice hotel with a staff that is constantly on your heels to see if you have any needs. Even better – some of the staff can speak English. But anyway, I digress.

We went to see what their rooms were like because Phil’s parents are probably going to come visit us as well before we leave and we wanted to make sure it was suitable for them. Before we got on the elevator(one of man’s greatest inventions – thank you Mr. Otis) I asked Tim what floor his parents were staying on. I was thinking to myself that it couldn’t be the 13th – because hotels don’t have . . . and that is where I stopped in my thought process because I suddenly remembered that I was no longer in the States and that the fear of the number 13 was some 7,000 miles away. But I went ahead and asked Tim anyway, expecting any number but the 13th to roll off his tongue.

“They are on the 13th,” he said.
I laughed. “Your joking?”
“Nope.”
“They really put them on the 13th floor?”
“Yeah, why is . . .(lightbulb) oh, yeah, I almost forgot about that.”

I thought it was funny, but of course, stupid things like that always make me giggle. It may have been some cruel joke put on by the hotel staff because they knew they were Americans but it was probably just a random occurrence. I like the cruel joke idea better.

The hotel room ended up being pretty nice with a good view of the city from their window. The beds were actually sorta soft. In China, hard beds are the norm and they suck, but these weren’t half bad. The room itself wasn’t as big as I expected for a 4 star hotel. It was about the same size as a normal cheap room back in the States, but it was nice. The room came equipped with a western toilet(hooray) and a bathtub(double hooray). It was the first bathtub that I have seen since we got to China almost 2 months ago. I so wanted to hop in and take a long hot bath so bad. That would have felt so good. More reasons why we really should go there and stay a night.

In China, and this is the reason for this post, they have similar superstitions to ours. For instance, we fear the number 13 because we think it is bad luck, although I couldn’t tell you why, and I doubt any number of people could either. As far as I know, the Chinese could care less about the number 13. It doesn’t mean jack-diddley to them, but the the numbers 4 and 14 sure do.

The pronunciation of the number 4 and the word “die” sound very, very similar. So much in fact, that the Chinese avoid it as much as humanly possible. Like our 13, they don’t like to stay on the 4th floor of buildings and they really don’t like days, months or years that contain the number either. It’s just plain unlucky. The same goes for the number 14. It sounds a lot like the words “must die” and so they avoid it, too. If an apartment building has a 4th or 14th floor – the apartments on that particular floor are usually cheaper. I wouldn’t mind living on a unlucky floor if it meant I could save some money. But then again, I am a cheap bastard. Heh. I’m already unlucky naturally, so maybe the unluckiness would cancel each other out or something.

I don’t find these particular superstitions odd, but I’m still not quiet used to the idea of a lucky hairy mole, lucky long pinky nail, or a lucky cricket. Hopefully, I will make it through the rest of the day for I do have a lucky cricket to ward off the unlucky 13th day of October.

Heh, I’ll tell you about the two additions to our little family later. Gloria and Edwardo, our new pet crickets, are super annoying, but cute – so they are forgiven any wrong doing.

Have a Happy Friday the 13th.

I promise I have not forgotten about our Shanghai trip, but I wanted to post some pictures that I have been meaning to get on here for sometime now.

For instance, dinner one night at our lovely school. I am sorry that this picture isn’t any better than it is, but you’ll at least get the idea of how awkward it was to have this on my plate. I didn’t eat it. I couldn’t. My soul would have blinked out of existence if any of it had touched my lips.

Chicken Feet and Snails

The food in China is unlike anything I have ever had to eat. And this picture isn’t even the worst of it. The Chinese eat anything and everything that they can get their little hands on. They don’t waste a single inch of anything. I mean, look at this poor chicken here. They are eating his feet for crying out loud! When you order chicken back in the the good ole US of A, you usually get pieces of boneless chicken that don’t even look like it came from something that used to cluck and scratch it’s three toed foot in the ground looking for bits of food. That is not so in China. In fact, it is quiet the opposite. When you order chicken here, that is what you get – chicken . . . an entire chicken. Everything between the head and those three toed feet. The Chinese basically take a chicken, skin it, boil it, lay it down on a cutting board, hack it all to hell with a butcher’s knife, and then lay it on a plate for you to eat. Sometimes, you have an eye staring back at you. I think it’s pretty damn creepy. I don’t order chicken anymore. The whole brain thing really turned me off. Same goes for the duck dish you can order. It just isn’t right.

Something a little more on the normal side. I was walking home from school one day, when I saw this mother and these two kids sitting on her lap. I am going to assume that only one of them is hers because of the one child policy, but then again, she could be a freaking billionaire and be able to afford the heavy fine for having more than just the one child. Who knows really. She didn’t want me to take her picture at first, but I asked again and she relented. The kids as you can tell were not very happy. I’m not sure if they were fussy because I was a strange white woman snapping their picture or if they were just tired and wanted a nap. Either way, I wanted to snap a moment of the life of real Chinese people. So I did.

This is part of the street that I used to walk on Monday through Friday. Now I drive it, or well ride it. I used to walk from the bus stop next to the Xinhua Bookstore(a pretty nice bookstore similar to Barnes and Noble) to Yong Xing Middle School(it’s a good 10-15 minute walk and it sucks) because the woman in charge of me insisted that their wasn’t a bus that could take me anywhere near my home. What a fibber. I found out today there is a bus that stops right in front of the school and that it will take me to the Xinhua Bookstore where I can get on another bus that will take me almost to my doorstep. Goodness, what a mouth full. Hey, at least now I don’t have walk as far anymore. I did enough walking when I worked at Bermex. This picture by the way is right beside the bus station that takes people to and from Hangzhou everyday. All of those cars on the right are various taxi drivers. When I walk past them, they all try to convince me to get in. I’m glad that I don’t have to deal with that anymore.

The Fuchun River. People actually go swimming in it. And that almost scares me more than the whole chicken feet and snails bit. From this picture, it looks peaceful and serene, but it is anything but that. I am surprised that fish live in it. I mean, I guess it could be worse, but I sure as heck wouldn’t go tubbing down it like I would the Congeree or Saluda River back home. Ah, talking about them brings back memories . . . if you are reading this and have any idea what I am talking about – I miss you. The river isn’t all that bad I guess. It is nice to sit by on the grass – some of the only grass here in Fuyang. And the view of it from our balcony is nice, too.

Like America, China flies their flags everywhere, too. I once saw some sort of village that had a China flag on each and every building there. A lot of the apartment complexes here have them flying on the roofs. This flag in this picture is Yong Xing’s flag. And the building in the back is yet another set of apartment buildings being built. The one thing that I have noticed is that China is constantly under construction no matter where you go. The sounds of hammering are never far off. You are lucky if you don’t have to wake up to it every morning. We don’t have any construction going on around here. Just the school bells and the sounds of kids shuffling up to our six floor windows.

I had hoped that a week long vacation would have some how cured my little devils of their rotten behavior. After my first class this morning, I realized that a 10 month vacation couldn’t have helped these children. No matter how much things change, some things always remain the same I guess. My kids are and will always be …

LITTLE DEVILS

To give you a taste of their devil behavior, I will tell you a little story. I met with two teachers today that had previously taught at Yong Xing Middle School. I am still trying to figure out why they came back for a visit. Apparently, they had a good experience which baffles me more than the fact that they came back to say hi to the staff. But anyway, what one of the teachers told me was this – One day while teaching, he thought he smelled some smoke. At first, he didn’t think anything of it, but soon it was more than obvious that the smoke was indeed coming from his classroom. A student had found some random matches in the room and thought it would be fun to light a fire, so he did. The guy said the trouble maker had the biggest smile on his face when he approached him. He picked the kid up and moved him away from the fire and then beat the fire out. I think these kids need a taste of Battle Royal. That should cure them. Or make them worse. I don’t know which.

The kids were so bad today for a fellow teacher of mine that she just walked out when she couldn’t get them to behave, listen, or remain quiet. I am pretty sure that those students are going to get chewed out for their behavior. And because she walked out, I am sure that the Chinese teachers are now starting to see the wretchedness of their students. I had Bella, the teacher in charge of helping us out, asking me which classes were the worst and I had a hard time picking just a few. The truth is that they are all about the same. Each class usually has one or two students that care and maybe one student that is way smarter than his classmates, but the others are just horrible, rotten, little devils. Maybe by the time I leave they will all be wearing halos and white robes. One can only hope. Heh.

I check my stats on my blog every once in a while to see who is coming to it and how they found out it exists.

I had to laugh earlier when I checked out the list of search words peopled used to get to my little blog in the last month. The search words usually have nothing to do with my blog at all. The are just so random that when they type it in my link appears somewhere near the top of the list. Thinking that my blog may be what they are looking for, they click on it only to find that it isn’t what they wanted at all. Hence all the people that come and don’t don’t even stay for a blasted second.

What made me laugh was this: Keyword= Chinese teacher throws student out window

I have joked many times about throwing my students out the window. I have even day dreamed about doing it. Maybe one day I will get so frustrated that I will actually go through with it. But the fact that someone searched for it means that someone somewhere did it. Or word has spread about the punishments I prefer to have in my class. Ah, if only it was so. Heh.

But yeah, I thought I would share it with you. It made me laugh. Maybe it made you laugh, too.

I did some searching and this is what I found. Indeed, someone really did do it. Wow.

Click here to read the gruesome details.

On every floor of my school there is an area where you can find a chalk board. The students love to write messages and draw pictures on them. I never know what they are writing for the obvious fact that it is in Chinese, but I imagine it is like a bulletin of sorts. The things that they write or draw have purpose and order – it isn’t chaotic or anything. They would appear to have themes.

The thing I like to look at most is the art work the students do. The first picture that I have posted is of a cartoon character that we call Naruto back home. He seems to be pretty popular here. The cool thing about their art work is that they don’t just draw the picture – the push the chalk into the board until it forms a raised bump and then a lot of little bumps form a section and the sections become a picture. It is hard to just wipe off. You have to scrape it pretty hard.

To give you an idea of what the pushed chalk looks like, I took a close up of another drawing some of the kids did. I will show the big picture and then the close up version. I can’t figure out what it is. It almost looks like a stop light, but I haven’t ever seen one quite like it. Maybe some of you will know.

Exhibit A – Weird Stop Light Thingy

See what I mean about not knowing exactly what it is. It sorta looks like a traffic light, but I’m not exactly sure.

Exhibit B – Close up of Weird Stop Light Thingy

Sorta looks like ground meat got slapped on the board. Interesting.

Exhibit C – The Writing on The Wall

God only knows what it means.