These are a wee bit old, but I figured that I should post them anyway. I have a lot of pictures like these. Sometimes I bring my camera with me when I walk around Fuyang and take random pictures until my batteries die. Often I don’t find them blog worthy, but I thought since these were part of my daily life that they needed to be here. On occasion, we venture out to restaurants with the other foreign English teachers. They usually give you a snack food before your main meal. On this particular day it was peanuts. They had some kind of oil dribbled on them. They were pretty good.

From Left to right we have a cut off Tim(American), Mayia(Aussie), Jaya(lives in Australia, but is from South Africa I think), and then Vanessa(also Aussie). There are a nice bunch of people and we enjoy experiencing China with them. It is quiet a sight when we all get together and go out to eat. Ordering food is a mad house. The wait staff hardly understands us(we are getting better at that now) but in the beginning, 9 times out of ten we wouldn’t get what we thought we ordered. But that just meant new experiences. 🙂

Fried noodles. I know that it doesn’t look all that appetizing, but I swear it is quiet tasty. Sometimes I get some that is a little spicy, but other than that I rather enjoy it. In America, you may not be able to live on Beer or Bread alone, but in China you can and many do live on noodles. Noodle shops are every where. Many of the shops are little wholes in the walls, but the food still tastes the same. It can be difficult eating in some of the shops because of how shady they look, but sometimes they serve the cheapest and best food. Isn’t that how it always works?

Fried dumplings. We survived on these for the first couple of days. They are super cheap, hot, and filling if you order enough. 10 of them costs between 3.5 and 6.5 RMB. That is not even a whole dollar for 10 dumplings. They are filled with pork, veggies, and other random things. To me they all taste the same, but the others can tell the difference. This shop is right down the street from where we live and we go there when we have a strong hankerin for dumplings. They are open really late too, so that is a bonus as well.

Just a random picture of Phil and our wet clothes. This is where we hang them after we give them a nice washing. The process is a real pain in the butt, but at least we don’t have to wash our clothes by hand. That would just suck. It gives me a real appreciation of what I have back home and I am not just saying that. Even here I feel that we have a lot. I look out our window and see people washing themselves in the same water bin that they wash their clothes. We have hard wood floors. They just have cold, grey slab of concrete. It makes me sorta sad.

I’ll post more later. But for now – it’s off to Hangzhou. McDonald’s, Dairy Queen, Papa John’s, TCBY, and Pizza Hut – here I come!! Heh

If I could read this sign, I’d have no problem at all getting around Fuyang on a beggar’s income. It only costs 1 yuan to ride the bus here. That is about 12 cents if you are trying to do the math. Since I don’t understand a lick of written Chinese, I have to jump on a bus and hope that the woman who takes my money can understand enough of my broken Chinese to let me know when I’ve reached my stop. If she doesn’t understand me and no one else happens to be getting on or off when I need to, the bus will just keep on going. I then have to get on another bus to take me back the way I’d come. And that is the very reason I’ve become comfortable riding only 3 of the 9 bus routes in Fuyang. (Huge city, I know . . . hehe.) Every morning I take the number one bus to the other side of town and then get on the number 8 bus that drops me off right in front of school. The bus isn’t very clean and it can be cramped, but it beats paying 7-10 Yuan for a taxi twice a day.

Here is a picture of me trying to teach my students the beautiful sport of baseball. It didn’t go over too well like most of what I teach them. The only thing I think they understood was bat, ball, and run and even those three words vanished from their memory banks once they walked out of my room.  Everything else went in one ear and out the other. So, it made it really difficult to play baseball with them the following week. The one thing they did like was me singing “Take Me Out To The Ball Game.” I never thought I’d sing in front of more than just my shower curtain, but I think it may be the only real way to reach them. Guess I better start voice lessons. Doe a dear . . .

Every fall, the schools in Fuyang have a Sport’s Meeting. That means that the students get a few days off to compete in something that resembles the Olympics on a much smaller scale. Some of the students take it quiet seriously. And some of them are pretty darn good. Ask Phil and he’ll tell you all about it. Heh. But anyways, if you enlarge the picture to the left you’ll find some interesting errors. The first being that Atlanta is the capital of George and that it’s also known as “The City of Tress.” They tried to describe Izzy, the Olympic mascot, but messed up in that department as well. Take a look and you might laugh as hard as I did. Sometimes I worry about the students and who in the world is teaching them English. Their Chinese teacher’s only know so much and some of what they do know is wrong. And so the cycle keeps repeating itself. Foreign teachers are the only real cure. And look who they sent – me. God help them. God help them all.

My school had an English Competition on my birthday and they asked me to be one of the judges. There were about 25 students in it from grades 2 and 3. If they were in middle school back home they would probably be in 7th and 8th grade. A few days before the competition, I had some students read their speeches out to me. They wanted help and advice and I gave them what I could without rewriting their entire speech. There were more errors than there are thorns on a rose bush. And I’m not kidding. The sad part is that a lot of the errors were advice that the their Chinese English teachers gave them. That is the evil cycle I am talking about.

I took a picture of this girl as she preformed her speech. I don’t know who she is. She may be one of my students, but I can’t keep track of them. If you had 700 students, you wouldn’t be able to either! I think I can pick out maybe 4 or 5 students that I know are mine if I see them walking around. The cool thing is that every single one of the students memorized their speech. They didn’t have a single card with them. And some of their speeches were pretty long. A couple had some problems, but for the most part they all did pretty well. One of my students, Grey, got first place, but so did about 5 others. Guess they tied or something. I marked all the students a lot lower than the Chinese teachers did, but that’s because I actually knew what the mistakes were. Alright, gotta go. Have to see what kind of trouble I can get myself into. Fuyang and all of it’s glory awaits!

Sorry for the delay. I know that I suck as a Blogger, but I’ve been sorta busy and tired. Teaching does that to you. I technically work less than four hours a day, but I sit in my office staring at my Dell computer screen when I’m not standing in front of 30 devils and screaming at them. I only have 4 classes a day, but I still have to be at school from about 8 to 5 because of the way my schedule is set up. Next term I am going to ask for later classes so that I don’t have to wait around all day for my next class to start. The following pictures are of things my students have done over the last few weeks. Some are cute, others strange, one is just mean, and well, the last one is just plain nasty. Enjoy.

The first picture is of a gift from one of my best students. Her English name is Tiffany, and I wish that all of my students could be just like her. I was teaching about Halloween and threw in the fact that November 2nd was my birthday. As soon as she heard those words come out of my mouth, she ripped out a piece of paper from her notebook and started to make me a card in class. This of course kept her from writing down any of the new vocabulary words that I was teaching, but that’s okay. I can forgive a Teacher’s Pet any day of the week. Hehe. : ) I think if she had known about my birthday earlier she would have bought me one, but I think I like this one better. It’s much more creative than one she could have purchased in a store. The little stickers are so cute. I might just have to have it framed. It is one of the nicest things a student has done for me.

When I was rearranging my desks for what seemed like the 1,000th time(the student’s love to wreck my room and they don’t ever fix it), I saw this phrase on one of them. The first thing that I thought of was Conan the Barbarian and then pictured him playing really great tennis, but then I knew that couldn’t possibly be the case. Turns out, my student was just insanely bored and was doodling about two cartoon character’s named Detective Conan and another who happens to be the Prince of Tennis. I found this out only after Phil had over 3 of his students for dinner. That’s another story all together.

I don’t play many games with my student’s, mainly because I don’t think they deserve them and also because they can never stay quiet enough, but occasionally I will try to make them happy and play a game of Hangman. This is how I try to teach them new words. Well, I had been playing Hangman for a few weeks and then stopped because I figured it was just not working the way I wanted. Boys just want to hang the man and the girls can never guess the word before the boys have hung the man. So when I stopped, there was one class that made it very obvious that they still wanted to play. They gave me the piece of paper during class one day. It says:  Y O U with the hanged man to the right of it and then AGAIN. It means You Play Hangman Again. I humored them on that day, but not since. I’m such a rotten teacher. Hehe.

This one actually made me mad – for two reasons . . . 1) they think I’m boring(only because I don’t play games and music all day) and 2) they can’t even spell their insults right.

What my students don’t know is that when I get angry it only makes their lives more of a living hell. They should really learn to keep their evil thoughts to themselves.

Soon my students will understand the definition of god by the word Gabe. Mu ah ha ha!!

This is the kicker, the icing on the cake, if you will. For those of you who don’t believe me when I say that my room is a freaking pigsty, I now provide you with the proof! I think that I am really in charge of 700 rotten little pigs. I don’t know where this trash comes from. I never see them eating, but without fail there is litter all over the classroom floor at the end of each day. It doesn’t matter if I sweep it, the trash just reappears. Oh, and this is just one corner of my room. There is another pile just like it on the other side.

I will post pictures of our trip to the Zoo soon. And I still have many other pictures I need to post as well. I’ll try to be a better blogger. Promise.

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.

I did a search for a Halloween cat in Yahoo and this is one of the pictures that turned up. I thought it was pretty cute. It’s great when people manipulate animals and make them do outrageous things like this.(Horray Photoshop) For some reason, it totally brightens my day.

Well, if you didn’t know, Halloween doesn’t exist here in China. Sad face. I am slowly trying to bring it over though. This week I am teaching my little devils about Halloween and the whole art of Trick or Treating. Like normal, some think that it is cool, and the rest of the 700 brats think it is boring, stupid and as uninteresting as me. I actually had a student tell me to my face that he didn’t think I was interesting. How wonderful is it to hear that?

For the good students, I bought some Milk Candy. It’s pretty cheap and good if I must say so myself. I find myself sticking my hand in the bag to nick a piece a bit to often. It’s all going to my hips. I can feel it.

The fun part about teaching Halloween is that I get to scare the living heebie jeebies out of my students and feel justified doing it. When I tell them about haunted houses, I tell them that they are scary and then pick a random bored student who looks like he or she is sleeping and then scream SCARY in the ear while slamming my hands on their desk. Even the boys look like they are about to faint sometimes. The girls look like they might cry. And that really, really, makes my day a good day. I’m evil. I know. But you’d be evil too if you had to put up with their crap.

I do have a few good students, but not enough. I actually had a few of them call me Miss Cook last week and today one called me by my Chinese name – Zi Wei. I rarely hear Gabe. Mostly it is just Teacher! Teacher! I should start screaming Student! Student! and see how they like it.

But anyway, Happy Halloween. Hope some of you got my share of candy because I will be waiting patiently to get it when I finally come home in about 8 or so months – if China will let me leave that is . . .

Oh, and will someone eat a piece of Pumpkin Pie for me. I have been thinking about it all week. Nangua is Chinese for pumpkin, by-the-way. Some of Phil students gave him one. He needs to carve it soon before it starts to rot and we have to throw it out. Anyone have a funny suggestion on what to carve into it?

Post you ideas in the comment section, and if Phil likes your suggestion – I will post a picture of it after he is done.

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.

FREEZE!! REMOVE YOUR HANDS FROM YOUR MOUSE!!

Alright, hopefully my big font caught your attention and you haven’t left my little blog quite yet.

If you are still here. Thanks. For those of you who left after the word stop, I have one word for you. Grr.

Now that you are here and settling in on the nice big blue couch I bought a couple of days ago, I have a question for you. A few questions actually. And if you could answer them for me, I would be very happy.

I always wonder who is coming to my blog and how they found it. I have trackers, but that only gives me an IP address(sometimes), a country, and some other random information that doesn’t really matter. What I want to know is who you really are, how you came across my blog, and what other information you want divulge to me and the rest of the blogging universe.

Drop the information in the comment box, please. I would appreciate it very much. It is nice to know who in the world actually reads the words I write.

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.