THE HORROR, THE HORROR!!!!

Run for your lives! Save yourself!

Oh, dear GOD! What is that?!

That’s a tough question really, but if you use your imagination, I’m sure you can think of something creative. My idea was that they were all foreign teachers that just found out they were living and working illegally in China. In all the confusion and mass hysteria of trying to leave the country, they were rounded up by the Chinese Alien Control Cowboy and were being thrown one by one into a pot of boiling water to be made into Laowai Tea. Hmm, sounds tasty, huh? Laowai is Chinese for foreigner or outsider, by the way, if you didn’t know.

Well, on a more serious note, that crazy poster I am posing next to was one of the posters that the former Shenyang WECL English School had hanging in the hallway. Former you say? Yep. Former. When we left to go to Beijing to get our health exam, Shenyang WECL was alive and kicking and trying desperately to find us some students to teach. A week later we returned to find every piece of paper, sign, and poster(including the poster up top) that was related to the school stripped off the wall and thrown into the storage room to collect dust. Apparently, in our absence, they decided that Shenyang WECL English School wasn’t doing so hot and that they should pursue other interests until they could get their act together. What did they decide to do? Well, they thought turning the 8th floor of the high rise we were teaching on into a floor of cozy apartments. No joke. The plans for how they would look were lined up on the wall by the front door. And to make things more interesting, when I went into the room where our office had been, all of the desks, including all the other furniture they had brought in were missing.

“Umm,” I said to Chris, our friend and assistant, “Where did our stuff go?”

“Oh, they moved it into the other room. Your desk is mine now.”

And sure enough it was, along with the computers they had let us use.

“When did they decide to scrap WECL and build apartments Chris?”

“About two days after you left.”

Wow. I knew things in China were changing quickly, but that’s unbelievable! They didn’t even wait until we moved out to switch shop. Another crazy thing was the all of the staff for the school was still there. They just were no longer concerned with who we were and what we were doing there. Apparently, they were now working with whomever decided to reconstruct the 8th floor into apartments. When their job title changed, so did their responsibility. Thankfully, Chris was there to help us get everything situated for our move to Xiamen. He was a great guy, and I’m sad that we weren’t able to stay in Shenyang and get to know him more. I miss him.

I thought I would post this just to make some of you laugh.

I know that in America we have brands that are made to look like other ones, but this completely caught me off guard. Everything on the box looks exactly as it does on the original, but the only real difference is its name. Instead of Colgate, my preferred brand of toothpaste, it’s Colqore. The same goes for the Crene. It’s supposed to be Crest. The brand in the middle is a knock off of brand as well, but I am unsure of it’s true name. I’ve seen it a few times here in China. It may be Black Man International or something to that effect. And where did we find these, you ask? Well, just right down the street from Er Wai in Beijing, at the new Chinese “thrift store” universally known as the 2 Kuai Store. And no, I didn’t buy any. It may work just as well as my Colgate Whitening, but I treasure my teeth a little more than to risk it. The printing on the box was really poor too. I have no idea where they had it printed up. Anyway, I just thought it was funny.

This picture may have been taken a long time ago(back during the days of Fuyang), but I think it shows exactly how I feel after all the crap that has happened in trying to get to Shenyang.Phil calls it “Power Gabe”.

I call it “I’m going to eat your soul.”

Either way, I now think you have a full understanding of my frustration.

All I’ve got to say is that my students better be extra nice to me or else I’m going to turn into that teacher from Fairly Odd Parents and start handing out F’s in pure pleasure. I wish I could find a better picture of Mr. Crocker, but I think this demonstrates his insanity and what could be mine.

As much as China can stress me out sometimes, it also makes me laugh really hard. I have two prime examples. One is a little funny and the other just plain freaky.

After a long day of teaching, I went to Phil’s school to wait until English Corner began. English Corner is a time when the serious students can come and talk to us and practice their English. It is a great concept and all, but it just doesn’t work too well. There are a hundred good reasons why it doesn’t, but I’ll get into that another day. After EC was over, Phil and I went outside to talk to Holy about the trip we are going to try to take with him during the Spring festival. Because we won’t be staying in Fuyang for our second semester(long story and I promise I will post about it soon)it is now becoming more difficult to organize our trip. It’s frustrating, but because we promised him, we are going to do everything we can to make it happen. As we were talking this is what happened that made me laugh so hard. Let me preface this by saying that Holy is 17 years old and speaks English very well. The fact that we can talk, understand, and joke with one another in the same language even though he is Chinese and we American shows how good he actually is.

Looking out over the wonderful and very polluted Fuchun River I asked Holy,”Is there anything on the other side of the bridge?” It is the one place we keep saying we are going to go but never make it.

“What do you mean? Something interesting? Something to see?”

“Yeah.”

Holy paused for just a second, and then said. “Maybe in 20 years.”

Now after typing this I can see how you may not be laughing very hard, but at the time, and even after hearing it, I still find it funny. It was probably one of the first jokes that I have heard a Chinese person say that I both understood and found funny at the same time. It totally made my day. I needed a good laugh after dealing with little devils all day.

Now for the freaky creepy moment of the day.

I won’t talk too much about this. I’m a little tired tonight and talking about it still freaks me out. On the way home from Chinese Class, Phil and I ran into a guy that I think lives in the apartment building adjacent to us. Every time he sees me or Phil, he yells ni hao(hello in Chinese) and runs over to us. In the past he has asked me to eat with him and wanted to know who I was waiting on. He’s always come off as a nice young guy, but doesn’t speak any English. I’m sure that I misinterpret a lot of what he says and that is the only reason I haven’t told the head of the school about him yet. Keep reading and you’ll understand why. Phil and I think that he was he either A) asking to pay 100 yuan to sleep with me, 100 yuan to sleep with Phil, or 100 yuan to sleep with us both. We concluded this because he showed us his wallet, did the sleeping motion with his hands, pointed to me, pointed to Phil, and even tapped Phil on the bottom. We were all really confused. We also picked up on something about tomorrow which we could only think meant that the 100 yuan would pay for services rendered until tomorrow. I’ll be avoiding that guy for some time now – at least until I can have some figure out what in the world he was saying and asking us to do.

Ah, you gotta love China. Gotta love the beast.

I occasionally check the news back home to see what is going on. For the most part it’s normal. Car accident, shooting, stabbing, blah, blah and blah. But then there are days when I get to see headlines like these . . . I think these are all self explanatory. I at first thought they were all from South Carolina and thought “go figure” – but instead it is retarded news from all over the country. The last one in bold did happen in Columbia, South Carolina. It doesn’t surprise me at all.

• Body Found in McDonald’s Bathroom Died of Brain Hemmorhage
• Trooper Hit on the Job
• Man Attacked By Gator After Smoking Crack
• 7 Day Forecast Discussion
• Fairview Road Accident Kills Two
• Spurrier Accepts Contract Extension, Raise
• Dog Saves Family, Then Gets Put Up for Adoption
• Orangeburg Crash Leaves One Dead
• Grandma Sold Pot to Feed Bingo Addiction
• Deputies: Man Wanted for Intent to Sell $250,000 of Cocaine at Waffle House

If you think that is bad, I heard that some drunk rednecks bet $20 on the Carolina Clemson game. When the one that won didn’t get his money, he walked out to his truck(cause all rednecks have trucks) grabbed his gun and shot his best friend to death. Only in South Carolina, I say. Only in South Carolina.

Ever since this cold front moved in and took up permanent residence in Fuyang, my brain just hasn’t come up with anything good to write about. In truth it isn’t that cold. It isn’t any colder than a winter back home, but I need to blame my lack of creativity on something, don’t I? I keep looking through my pictures and I can’t seem to find one that I think is worthy, strange, or important enough to put on here. I do have the pictures of our trip to the zoo and a food festival laying around my computer some where. Every time I look at them my thoughts and words freeze and fall out of my mouth like a giant iceberg. I feel all dried up. I need some inspiration. Got any ideas, or want to hear about anything in particular? If you ask; I’ll tell.

So what do I do when I am not trying to get a blog up and running? I do what every other bored soul does when they have nothing else better to do. I surf the Webby.

And when I surf, I come across things that make me smile and laugh like the kitty cartoon up top. I sure do miss my little kitty back home though. It is so hard to convince a cat here to come any where near me. Most of the time they just jump in a bush and hiss at me. I don’t know why they are so timid. China eats dogs in the winter, but I haven’t heard anything about cat dishes yet. Speaking of dog though, I’ve started to see pictures of dogs in the windows of restaurants. Last night, I saw a poor dog chopped to bits in the kitchen of the restaurant we went to eat at when I looked to see what they had in the back. I pray that none of that ended up on my plate.

But onto brighter and happier things. When I went searching the Webby for some inspirational pictures to put on this particular blog, I came across a funny little cartoon site. If you get bored, want a good laugh, and foul language doesn’t bother you – you need to go here.

And for now that is all I have. I guess I will go back to surfing the Webby because I don’t have anything else better to do than stare at my computer screen.

New, interesting material promised soon.

When Phil and I get our lovely 3 week PAID vacation for the Chinese New Year in late January and early February, Xi’an will probably be one of our destinations of choice. We are trying to organize a trip that takes us in a slow, northen direction until we reach the artic cold of Harbin to see the annual Ice festival. We haven’t mapped out everything yet, and can’t until we know where we will be next semester. I will post about that problem soon, but I first want to show you something funny that made the news not too long ago.

For those of you who don’t know, Xi’an is a very popular tourist destination because of the Terra Cotta Warriors you can find there. Apparently, each warrior is an individual(so far as I have heard) and none of their faces are repeated. For the longest time, I thought the Terra-Cotta Warrior were the size of She-Ra action figures or maybe as tall as a Barbie doll. I don’t think I ever thought they were life size. Maybe I thought this because every picture I have ever seen has been an aerial view of the pit they all stand in or a super up close one like the picture above. So, I was quiet surprised to come across this article a few weeks ago. When I started reading it, I thought maybe it was a joke. I kept thinking, “How in the world could someone not see this guy? He could step on one for crying out loud!” Slowly I understood it, and felt really, really dumb. I can’t help that I am slow! But at least now I won’t show up in Xi’an looking for Terra Cotta Warriors who’s heads might have come up to my ankle. I can imagine what my face would have looked like when I actually got there and saw 5 feet tall creatures. Pablo(Ma Lin) must have been authentic looking as hell to blend in the way he did. I’m quiet surprised he got off only with a stern talking to and didn’t get carted off to a Chinese prison.

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Place cursor over slide show to see the titles of the pictures. I believe that slide shows are going to be the way of the future for my blog. It seems to be much easier and less time consuming than adding only five pictures at a time to Blogger. This in turn will make me very happy, for I have about a billion pictures that I have taken, but not yet posted because Blogger is slower than dirt in China. These pictures, as the previous post would suggest, are from our trip to the largest cave in Asia, the FuChun TaoYuan. It wasn’t as big as Carlsbad Caverns, in Carlsbad, New Mexico, USA, but there weren’t any bats or their guano, so it’s a winner in my book. 🙂 Like most of China, pictures don’t do this place justice. For those of you with over active imaginations, I suggest that you use them here.

I really enjoyed this trip. It was nice to get out into the country side of China and away from the constant construction of Fuyang. Unlike some people who come to China, Phil and I decided to go here by ourselves. Chinese people are always asking who we are taking with us and are usually surprised when we say no one. Because we are American and don’t really know Chinese, I think they assume that we are going to get lost or ripped off and sometimes that happens, but we get to experience more or the “real” China this way.

For instance, the only thing we knew when we left on Thursday was that we wanted to go to the cave, but we had no idea how to get there. We knew there was a bus that could take us close to it, but then we didn’t know where to get on it. So, we hopped in a taxi and told them we wanted to go to the bus station where we could find the bus we needed. Either he didn’t know or he wanted to make some money because he immediately told us for 110 RMB he would take us there. I really didn’t feel like trying to find the bus, so 110 RMB didn’t seem that much to me. Off we went. The country side of China all sorta looks the same. You see the same run down home over and over again. The same poor woman hanging her clothes out to dry. The same little garden. It’s a bit dismal to see that much poverty in a 30 minute taxi ride.

It really makes me appreciate what we have.We’ve got a better apartment than most of the people who are native to Fuyang. When we do have guest come over, they are always commenting on how comfortable it is or how big it is. We actually have hot water and windows that close and aren’t just holes in the walls. Our floors are hard wood and not a slab of grey concrete. When we wash clothes, we just throw them in a washing machine and hang them up to dry. In the apartment right next to us – everyone washes their clothes in the same water troff. The same troff that they use to bathe in as well. But for some reason they have cars. I will never understand how the poorest people can live in the crappiest house, but then have one of the nicest cars. Someone needs to do a study on that for me.

But, I digress. We got to the cave just as the cab man promised, although he did make us climb up a hill to the top of the mountain that he said we take us up to the entrance. For a small second, I thought that he had dropped us off in the middle of no where. Up the hill we did find the entrance, thank God. We thought we were the only ones there because it looked deserted, but I liked it better that way. Big crowds turn me off. We ended up having our own private tour with a woman who spoke about 30 words of English – which is better than nothing I guess. She was very nice, and walked us all around the cave trying to think of English words to describe the formations. We humored her and tried to make it look like we understood.

Eventually, we came across a large tour group, and somehow joined them. If we hadn’t have met up with them, I’m not sure we would have seen the rest of the park. After the tour of the cave, we hopped on a little train that took us through another cave. Before I got on though, the Chinese man I was going to sit next to pointed to the seat trying to tell me that it was dirty. I pulled out one of the tissues I carry around with me and tired to clean it. The seat wasn’t dirty. It was just stained. The conductor of the ride didn’t realize I hadn’t made it on yet and started off without me. I had never heard some many people cry out at once that I wasn’t on yet and for him to wait. Of course, whatever they said was all in Chinese, and I don’t really know what they said – but I bet it was something a lot like that. Thankfully, the ride stopped and I was able to get on. I really felt like I was on the cart ride form Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom. If you have seen the movie, you should understand a little of how that ride worked. On the plus side, there was no one chasing us through the tunnel. Heh.

On the other side was a bunch of stairs waiting for us to walk down them. I’m glad it was down and not up because I was in no mood to walk up anymore stairs. China is littered with stairs. It’s amazing. No wonder all of the Chinese are so thin and fit. So we climbed down the stairs and played a little on a playground we came across. It was pretty big and reminded me of a playground I used to play on as I kid. Like Phil said in his post – the adults were playing on it, too and enjoying themselves. I heard lots of the women squealing like little girls and the men were laughing at them. It was a site to see. After that we went down to the lake which looked nothing like the picture on our ticket, but, eh, the view was nice even though it was completely overcast and hazy. We tried to leave at this point, but got chased down by one of the leaders of the tour group. She asked for our tickets and made us follow her down to the boats. I’m glad she found us because we got to enjoy a bamboo boat ride around the lake – which was bigger than I thought. The only down side was all the dead fish we saw floating in the water. Poor fish. After the boat ride it was time to go home, but there was no taxi that we could pay 100 RMB to take us there. We stood at a bus stop for a while, and after two or three went passed without stopping we started to worry.

At this point in time it was about 4:15 in the afternoon and it was getting dark pretty fast. There was a Chinese man standing at the bus stop too, so we tried to find out which bus we needed. After a lot of “bu dongs” we finally understood that the next bus wouldn’t be around until 5:30. That was all fine and dandy except that it was getting cold and the rain was bound start falling eventually. We decided to walk. This is when we realized how far out in the middle of no where we were. I probably should have panicked a little more than I did, but I didn’t. Everyone stared at us as we walked by their houses. We were probably the only white people ever to walk down that road. Finally, I saw an older woman looking at us with a lot of interest and seemed like she wanted to talk. I told her that we wanted to go to Fuyang and Phil asked where the bus was. She said some words that we didn’t quiet understand and before we knew it, she had waved down a white van and we were on it, hopefully going toward home. Not long after we got on the bus it started to rain just like I had feared, but we were in a nice warm van, so I didn’t care. We were afraid for awhile that we were going anywhere but the place we wanted, but about 30 or so minutes later – the van/bus stopped for us and the driver said it was our stop. We made it home AND we knew where we were. It was a flipping miracle. So, I close this post with this . . . Cost of a Taxi to the largest cave is Asia – 110 RMB($13) Two tickets to get into the largest cave in Asia – 196 RMB($29) Two pictures beside some pretty formations – 20 RMB ($3) Getting on a van that you don’t really know where it is taking you – PRICELESS

This information comes from a frequent visitor of mine named Erick. Because China hates me, I couldn’t go to his blog, even through a proxy for a good while, but now that I am not being blocked anymore I can easily visit his blog as well. So take THAT you big, mean evil Golden Shield YOU! So, thank you Erick for giving me a good laugh. A laugh a day keeps the Commies away! Heh. Heh. Sorry, I had to do it. Those wondering about the good laugh can either go here to read it or just let your eyes follow down the page.

Beginning this month, I will start choosing what I think is the best keyword(s) used in search engines like Google and Yahoo to find my blog site. In September, I posted about someone finding my blog by looking up the phrase “Chinese teacher throws student out of window“. It was the funniest and that is why I’ve chosen it as September’s “winner”. It is a little bit delayed, but the idea just hit me.

The winner doesn’t get a prize or anything, but they do get featured in a post of mine. And that should be better than any prize I could give you. This does not mean that you should start thinking of the weirdest keywords to get to my blog. I just thought it would be a fun little activity to do on the side. Maybe you will enjoy it. I hope you do.

For October, there were 20 keyword searches between Google and Yahoo. It was a painstaking task picking the best one, but I think that the right decision was made. Heh.

The Runner Up for October is: “lucky hairy mole”. I can’t think of a reason why someone would be looking for information on a lucky hairy mole, but I sure know that half of China has one. At least one person on each bus that I ride has a hairy mole some where on their body and it is usually on the their face right beside their lip. Talk about yummy. So for the person that searched “lucky hairy mole” – congratulations. I hope you found what you were looking for somewhere on the world wide web, even if you didn’t find it here.

The Winner for October is: “cat bite heel superstition”. I have never heard of a superstition that dealt with a cat bite. So if there is one, I’m most certainly in trouble. My evil kitty has bitten me everywhere – even my head! She likes to do that when I sleep for some strange reason. Maybe she is just trying to tell me to wake the hell up.

My original evil kitty picture disappeared from Flicker, so I am replacing it with this equally as evil looking kitty.

I tried to look up this particular superstition, but the only real cool thing I found was this. As much as I don’t like to admit it, I think it might be true.

Dogs only bite your body, but cats will nibble away at your soul.

So, for the person who googled “cat bite heel superstition” – thanks for giving me something to write about.