Christmas season

It has been an interesting couple of months. I have been very busy. After my father passed my school insisted that I take 2 weeks off and that I would not have to make up the classes. Shortly after me taking 2 weeks off, someone above the person who made the initial motion of kindness reneged on that and I have been forced to make up two weeks worth of classes in spare odd moments of my life. I have been at school (or in transit to school) for 16 hours a day, 5 days a week for almost a full month now. I am exhausted. I got ill last week and began coughing up blood. It was strange- one day I was fine; The next day I had a runny nose; The following day I was coughing up blood; without medical attention I had stopped coughing but had a really sore throat the next day. I went to the doctor despite the lack of a cough of course and I just had strep (I think that is what the doctor was trying to tell me, my friend I took as a translator said "your throat is sick but your lungs are very healthy"). I am much better now though.
I had to work the morning of Christmas eve but I insisted on having the night and Christmas day off. We therefore threw a party. I invited a lot of people and had 8 or 9 definite yes's...until Christmas eve of course. I ended up with 3 guests total but it was maybe better that way. We did a white elephant gift exchange and had some good conversation. We then headed out to what we thought would be a good Christmas party in downtown Hangzhou. It was held at a big international business center and we were under the impression that it would be a nice indoor party. It was, in fact, an outdoor party in 40 degree weather where we were more likely to be pickpocketed than have a good time. We were expecting more foreigners (locals are fine, but I have more in common with a middle aged German woman with the locals most of the time so it makes conversation hard) but there were 3 or 4 foreigners and 500 or so locals crammed into a small plaza outside. We left and went to a bar, had a really bad, really expensive bottle of wine and called it a night.
I worked my part time job last night (the day after Christmas) and to my surprise, I recieved a dozen presents from my students. I really enjoy that class. I have another job opportunity which I would recieve double my present pay but it would cut out my ability to teach this Saturday class. I am considering it, but my pay is sufficient to live off of currently and I don't feel like I need more money to live here, it is just that I need much more money to create a nest egg to take back home with me.
I am tired, but I only have 2 more 16 hour days and then I go back to my regular teaching 3 10 hour das a week and 4 days off. That is an acceptable work schedule!

Elegy Written on a Cramped Airplane

When I was growing up my father told me that when he was a kid, he was petrified of Papa, his dad. Papa was a very traditional sort of man. He was not shy to whoop his kids until they couldn’t sit down. As an added bonus, Papa was the school principal. If Dad did something at school, he got it twice as bad as the other kids at school, but Papa was a man who separated work from home, so don’t you think that that extra hard whoopin’ staved off any of Papa’s wrath by the time they got home for the traditional you got punished at school, now you’re getting punished at home. One of the things Dad feared most from Grandma were the words, “Just wait until your father gets home”.

Dad told me that he hoped to instill this fear in me. Let me tell you, if this was his goal as a father, my dad failed miserably. “Just wait until your dad gets home” for my mother meant him slapping the bed with a belt and us yelling, even when he did whoop us, he was gentler than mother was, she was perfectly willing to not have us sit down. Dad, on the other hand, had a completely different style of punishment that was much more effective than the fear of pain.

You have to understand the complete and utter respect Dad instilled in us kids. He is so kind and gentle. He is intelligent, hardworking, and just generally a great man. We understood that there really isn’t a better choice we could have had for a father. The only major flaw in parenting he had was to raise kids who understand and enjoy his humor. I personally expect this to be a major drawback in my life as I crack the wrong joke at an interview or some other such nonsense.

This complete respect breeds a side effect that is impossible to beat. Fear keeps you well behaved because you want self preservation. Respect keeps you well behaved because you don’t want to risk disappointment. Fear makes you do what is right even though you don’t want to. Respect makes you want to do what is right. My father failed to instill fear in us, he just took away all desire to do anything wrong. Respect-If I could define my father as a man, that is how I would define him.

Pictures!

The view from my window.

60th anniversary propaganda.

Taken on a boat ride across the lake.

Flowers for the 60th anniversary.

A mountain temple wall.

Sunset by the West Lake...

Oh, what a terrible place to live, a quick bus ride to a trashy dump like this!

Happy Communist Takeover Day

The past two weeks have been crazy. The last week of September was hell. I got sick and was barely able to do anything, then it is the week before the CCP takeover of the government's anniversary (October first) and we get 5 days off in celebration of that, but wait it also falls on the Mid Autumn Day festival which is done by the lunar calendar and so it changes every year. The effect of this is that my school made me make up a day of class on the Sunday before the last week of September, making me work 4 12 hour days in a row! A sick person should not be forced to do that.
N. Korea celebrates the Mid Autumn Day as well so my friend Adrienne who lives in Korea came to visit. She is hating working in Korea and really wanted to leave the country for a bit. We hung out for a few days, but her break was shorter than mine and she went home yesterday. I showed her around town and we went to the lake several times. Hangzhou is the biggest tourist city in China. It was crazy at the lake. That is why we went several times. I took her in the morning and it was crazy so we left. I took her in the afternoon and it was crazy so...you get the idea. I also found a chain of restaurants that I love. I don't know what they are called, but they have the word Halal written in Arabic on their sign and pictures. Pictures are awesome and Halal food means no pork, and a little beef is a great change every once in a while. It is also around 5-10 quai for a meal-that is between .$80 and about $1.50-but the food is great. Food in China is CHEAP (as long as you go to local restaurants and markets, the supermarket or a western style restaurant or any chinese cafeteria is pretty pricey).
I need to post some pictures soon, don't I?
I have a part time job I need to go to in a few minutes so I will post pictures, and more of my life story later.

Life in China

A heck of a lot has occurred in the past month. I got to Beijing to realize that my plane ticket from Beijing to Hangzhou (the town I work in) was canceled from the time that I printed it to the time I landed in Beijing. I was therefore stuck in Beijing for about half a day not realizing what exactly was going to happen to me. Fortunately a girl at the airport was super helpful and went well out of her way to assist me. I was on a flight to Hangzhou late that night and I got there to crawl into my surprisingly spacious apartment. It is on the tenth floor of a gated community with 24/7 security guards and it is only about a 20 minute bus ride from the tourist district of Hangzhou. There is a beautiful wetland park, the Xixi Wetlands, walking distance from my apartment and there are foothills mountains literally one block away forming the end to this section of the city!

My first weekend I took a part time job at a school for kids in a nearby town. It was about a four hour bus ride there because of traffic and that was a horrible weekend. I got food poisoning, I had problems with my ATM card, and I got home at 3 AM and had to be at the bus stop to catch the bus to work at my real job at 6:30 the next (or same technically) day. After a very short repose I went into work only to learn that I would be spending 12 hours at work every day I went in. Fortunately the school was giving me 4 day weekends which makes up for it in a way.

The next couple of weeks nothing big has happened except for a cool night at a Mexican restaurant, Ponchos, to celebrate the fifteenth of September (the sixteenth is Mexican Independence Day but the Mexicans get drunk the fifteenth and sleep through the sixteenth) I have toured the city a bit and I now know my area pretty well. Last night I found an amazing Muslim restaurant. The heavy, grimy flavor of corn oil that every Chinese restaurant uses to prepare their food was absent and instead there was the strange taste of...real butter! On top of that, beef was an awesome change from the typical pork pork pork pork pork. I have had pork hooves, pork ears, pork brain, and almost any other body part which comes to mind.

I just purchased a VPN connection so I will be able to access everything as if it were in...Virginia because that is where my server is located. I have been trying free proxies but as I have not posted you can see how well that has worked (they allow partial access to sites but they tend to time out and become unusable very quickly). I now have a VPN connection which is legal in China. You are legally allowed to bypass the Great Firewall the government just makes it difficult for locals to bypass. The cost of a VPN package is about a month's salary for an average Chinese citizen. It isn't pocket change for me but it makes life a hell of a lot easier and it won't kill me. Expect updates at regular intervals now!

Minor Irritations and Major Reliefs

I sold my Jeep on Wednesday and my passport with a visa came in today. My passport is a one time entry work visa valid for three months. I need to get a residency permit once I am in China and my school should handle the re-issuance of my visa.

The irritation is that I ordered glasses which the factory ruined. The store is willing to give me a free crappy pair of glasses which will work if they don't have the glasses in by tomorrow (they are closed Sunday) but it creates the problem of I may need to have my mother ship a pair to me in China.

Overall though, I have everything major lined upand ready to go for Monday. I shouldn't have any problems leaving the country, you can rest easliy knowing that you won't have to put up with me anymore!

Things Falling Into Place

I have a couple of serious buyers for my Jeep. Nothing great, but better than I expected if I took it to Carmax or something. My to do list which at one point consisted of about 20-30 things is down to about five, two of which (cancel cell phone and cancel car insurance) I cannot do until after I sell my car. The other three are tasks which just need to get done for my mother. My visa paperwork is sitting in Houston about to be delivered at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning. I should have my paperwork back well before I need to leave Monday morning 4am. I am meeting 3 potential buyers for my Jeep tomorrow and I think I'll easily have it sold off. Almost done, almost done.

Visa and Jury Summons

I finally recieved my visa paperwork in the mail today. I will have it in the mail first thing tomorrow and I should have the visa back by Thursday.

The real fun part is that I have been summoned for jury duty three weeks into September. Something makes me think that I will have difficulty attending. I have no official government paperwork (in English) stating that I will be in China and they want official government paperwork to prove that I will not be in the US. I hope that some photocopies of Chinese script will be effective in convincing the government to exempt me!

Other than that everything is well. I am just counting the days.

The Countdown-8

My first blog post and 8 days until plane to China. I am having slight issues getting my visa (the paperwork should have already been here by now and it is not) but other than that everything appears to be going smoothly. I have everything I can forsee needing for the first two weeks (with the exception of a clothes iron and some food).

I am doing some final rennovations and cleanup around my parents' house. I was hoing to finish the structural part of my mother's pond but my mom was going to home depot for plants and I asked her to get cement. My mom bought me concrete when I told her to get cement...big difference.

Oh, well, I need to go and work on other things!