Wander Life

Owlie keeping the guest room clean

Owlie keeps germs away

Owlie makes the bed

Owlie does some office work

Owlie in the kitchen

Some pictures

I did manage to take a few pictures. One is of this weird fruit that I absolutely have no idea what it is.  I just bought it at the store on a whim.  I thought it might be some tastey new fruit...but no.  It wasn't sweet at all - it was kind of like the texture of a watermelon but with the taste of a radish or something.  Anyway, thought I might e-mail it to some of my ECHO friends and see if any of them could figure it out.  Other than that, I have a picture of my clean apartment. I also have a picture that I'm sending to my friend Greta because I found the movie that her friend made - it's called "Hoodwinked."  (Ty and Sarah know about it).  I haven't watched it, yet, but I thought she'd be interested to know that it made it's way to China.  : )

Anyway, I guess that's enough of a lesson-planning break for me.  Actually, I should probably go eat something first.  Then back to work.  : )

Easter celebration

Hey, hey.  Well, another Easter come and gone, huh?  Some of the pictures from home made me a little jealous but I can't complain - I had a pretty good one.  And, actually, I had two days of festivities, so, hey, that's something. 

I've been crazy busy (as usual) and still a little scattered, but I think I can recall the two days of festivities.

After the Easter festivities on Saturday, we (N, K, M and I) assembled eggs for our school Easter egg hunt.  N's brother is a youth leader in the states, and he got his group to collect plastic eggs and candy to send to us.  In all, we had 1,230 eggs (which took us about 3 hours to stuff). 

Sunday morning, we went out to the campus just after 9am and started hiding eggs.  The hunt was to begin at 11am, but the problem was that other students and people walking around campus would watch us hide the eggs and then just walk right behind us and take them!  We were like, "What are you doing?!  Why do you think we're hiding them?!"  But they just smiled and kept walking behind us, collecting all the eggs.  It's not like they were secretive about it, either - they really just must have thought this was some weird game the foreigners play: I'll put this egg here, and you walk behind me and immediately pick it up.  So, that was a little frustrating...but kinda funny, too.  It was hard to get a time when nobody was watching us so that we could actually hide any, but we tried.  N's graduate students helped hide, too, though, and they just thought it was a blast.  So, we were happy for that, anyway.

Finally, about 10:45am, we decided to just keep some of the eggs, and we figured we could hide them after the hunt actually started.  So, we gathered all our students in kind of a starting-line fashion.  We explained that eggs were hidden everywhere, and they were so excited. We had many false starts (as waiting in line is not really a held-to standard here), but finally, at 11am, we counted down and said, "Go!"  And they were off.   

Then K, N and I got the eggs that we had saved out, and we just started running around, throwing them into bushes.  That was probably the most fun part because it had this whole "pied piper" effect going on - students just flocking after us, sprinting and diving after our thrown eggs.

Anyway...so, that was Easter festivity number 2.  For lunch, the three of us just went to a little local restaurant, and I worked on lesson planning and grading the rest of the day.  Whee!  : )  Oh, except at about 9pm, N got a craving for a late-night fast food run.  We do, indeed, have two Kentucky Fried Chickens in Y---, so we all hopped in a taxi and got some chicken sandwiches to complete our Easter.

Since I'm not really a fast-food person, anyway, having KFC here isn't that big of a treat for me (and I never go unless other people want to - I'd rather eat Chinese food), but it was kind of a fun American thing to do, I guess.  We just hopped in a taxi, ran in to KFC, got it to go, hopped back in a taxi and then watched an episode of Without a Trace (N and K have it on DVD).  Of course, for me, I haven't been here that long to really have those moments when I miss American culture, but I definitely had those days during my year in Changchun.  In Tibet...well, there, it wasn't a question of whether I missed American culture so much as it was a case of missing human interaction.  Going for days without speaking English to anyone certainly could take its toll.  : )

Anyway, so, that's what's going on here.  This week is going pretty well, but, per usual, it's tiring.  I don't know if I'll ever catch up with my lesson-planning - it's hard when you start teaching the day after arriving.  And without a textbook, it's a lot of prep time - I'm constantly having to think of teaching ideas from scratch.  It's like you just have to write a curriculum and syllabus as you go.  Tiring.  But...classes are going well, and I just have the rest of this week and next week and then it's a week off for May holiday.  The funny thing is that, in the usual Chinese holiday fashion, we have to teach on the weekend to make up for the days off.  So, actually, my next two weekends are booked because...

This weekend the Organization is having a women's retreat for Ningxia province, and Y---- is the host city.  And not only is Y---- the host city, but K's apartment is the host place for meetings (people are sleeping in a hotel).  So, this weekend, 25 ladies are going to be here.  And they're going to use my apartment for some activities, too.  Certainly won't be restful but should be fun. 

Then the next weekend, we have to teach. 

Tomorrow night we have our English lecture, which I'm leading, and tomorrow afternoon, we have to do stuff with the English department (we have to test students who are applying to admission on their English level).  My afternoon class is moved to tomorrow morning, so I teach 4 hours in the morning (starting at 8am) and then go straight to the English department, where they will feed us and then we'll test students.  We were told it might go until 5 or 6pm.  Our English lecture starts at 7pm. 

And for Thursday lunch, we're meeting some other English department person.... 

But, hey, who needs sleep, right?  : )

Living the quesy life

Well, I have my last class of the week in about 2 hours.  I'm glad for that because I had kind of a rough day yesterday - had some kind of stomach flu or food poisoning or something.  I woke up nauseated and couldn't keep any food in all day.  I still went to my classes and to the Wednesday night English lecture/talk (which was really good since we discussed the Easter story), but whenever I wasn't in class, I was pretty much just laid up in bed all day.  Ugh.  By the end of the day, I was feeling pretty weak.

But, since this is my every other week, I had no class this morning, so that was nice.  I was able to sleep in and just take it easy this morning.  I think it has pretty much worked itself out, whatever it was, and I was even able to eat some oatmeal this morning.  I think I'll be good as new by the end of today.

So, that's the skinny with me.  Of course, it's always a little frustrating to be sick, especially when you have so much to do, but that's all right.  I'm hoping that I'll be able to get a lot done this afternoon and all day tomorrow (no random banquets in sight, thus far).  : )

I think the times I get the most homesick are when I'm sick - you're lying there, feeling miserable, and you just think, "I just want to be home!"  But, by now, I've kind of come to just accept that I'm going to end up getting sick a time or two - if it only lasts a day, I'm thankful.

But before I got sick, I did have a good time out at dinner with some friends at a street market. Actually, maybe that's what made me sick. It was still a good time.

Sandstorm

Weekend Update

So, I already told you about Friday, so that was...random but good.  I didn't get as much as I'd hoped done, but it was definitely one for the journal.  Then, that night, we had our study, and that was good.  Saturday, I had lunch with another Organization girl from a different team (at a near-by school).  She wanted to hang out, and I wanted to get to know her better, too, so we went to town and looked around.  Then we came back and got ready for N's birthday party.  Several other people from other schools came (it was at N and K's), so there were nine of us total.  We hung out and talked and had burritos and peanut-butter cookies...so a good time was had by all.  That went from 4pm until about 10:30pm.

   

Oh, I did have one interruption on Sunday, though, that was kind of strange and funny, I guess.  These workers have been coming to our apartments everyday to work on this new gas line they're putting in.  Everyday they come just for like 5 or 10 minutes, and they just do one thing - like, "Ok, today, we're drilling the hole."  Then, the next day, "Ok, now we're screwing in this bolt."  Then, "Now, we're connecting this part...."  It's really funny.  So, anyway, today, the guy comes for something and does his thing.  We're just used to them by now, so I just let them in and then go back to whatever I was doing.  So, today, I was working in my office, when he comes and stands in the doorway.  He had some papers in his hand and was something (in Chinese, of course).  I tried to tell him that I didn't understand, but he was persistent - he just kept saying something, over and over and pointing to the paper.  Then he starts writing stuff, so I have to tell him that I can't read.  Usually, at this point, they give up and basically say, "Ok, it doesn't matter," (that would be "mei sir" in Chinese), but this guy just kept at it. 

I thought, "Well, maybe he needs my signature or something."  No.

"Ok, maybe he's trying to tell me that there's a gas leak or something."  Apparently not.  So, I start busting out Chinese words that I do know.  I told him that I was an English teacher, and he grabbed on to the first part of that sentence and kept repeating it: "Wo sir" ("I am").  Then he said the word for English and pointed to the paper.  I was like, "Oh, ok, you want me to write "I am" in English.  Bingo. 

Then he points to the first Chinese character that he had written and pointed to "I am," so I understood that he was trying to break down the sentence character by character.  "Ok, I can do this," I thought.  So, I looked at the next few characters, and he said it in Chinese, and, low and behold, I actually recognized it...by sight, even.  I know the character for "person" because it's in a lot of names - like Tianamen Square (which is something-"People's Square") or the word for Chinese money is "RMB" (or remenbi - which means "People's money") or even the name for China, which is "People's Republic of China."  So...I was like, "Hey, I know that one!" 

So, thus far, we had "I am a something person," but I didn't know what kind of person, he was saying.  At this point, I thought, "Ok, time for the Lonely Planet Mandarin/English Phrasebook."  It's mostly good for when you know what you want to say in English because it'll give you the Chinese word.  But, to go from Chinese to English is pretty hard.  So, I just started guessing at what he could be saying, "Electrician?" "Gas man?" "Engineer?"  No...no...no....  Then, bam!  I got it, "Factory worker!"

I was like, "Oh, you're a factory worker!" 

"Dway," he beamed.  ("Dway" means "right").

Then I was like, "Ok.  So...."  And he pointed to the next sentence (he had three written out).  Of course, this was taking forever, but at least, we were getting somewhere.  I finally found the next two words: goal and technique, and I figured this to mean that his "aim" or "what he needed to do" was some specific thing.  I kept pointing to the word for gas, but he kept saying, "No, that wasn't it." 

At this point, I was pretty stumped (and tired - we had been at this for a half hour...with one and a half sentences to show for it), so when the phone rang, it was quite a relief.  It was K, saying that they were heading out (we had been invited to someone's house to learn some Chinese cooking.  It would have been fun, but I am just so swamped that I had to decline).  Anyway, I explained to her what was going on, and she, bless her, had a brilliant idea: call one of the Foreign Affairs Office guys.  Even though it's their one day off, she said that they'd be happy to help. 

So, I did that and put the guy on the phone with him, and we got it all figured out.  I was close, but in the end, he was trying to say that he was working on this gas line and his job was to test the level of gas.  I guess the word he was looking for was "measure" or "level."  Maybe I would have gotten it after a couple more hours, but, yeah, I was thankful for the help.

I don't know why the guy was so adamant about telling me that - we really don't need to know the specifics.  We know that they're putting this gas line in, and we know they come do stuff on it every day....  What they do each time...I mean, I guess we just figure we're gonna be kinda clueless.  I was ok with that...but, anyway, this guy really wanted to tell me, I guess.  : )