2004-06-09
So on Saturday night I ended up having a really great time. I sucessfully took a cab downtown by myself and found the McDonald's where I was going to meet Scott and his friend. I had intentionally gotten there a little while early so that I would have the oppertunity to walk around the downtown area and get a feel for it. The center of Changzhou has a large park/common area with a mall underneath. This is where the McDonalds is. There are two major roads that intersect at one of the corners. I chose to take a walk down both of those roads in one direction each. This area of Changzhou was much more developed and commercial than the area nearby my school. The shops all have full length window displays and are more western in character and in merchandise. In addition to this, there were a large number of street vendors and other people begging for money. The vendors either sold small merchandise like cell phone cases or food. One thing that I had never seen sold that a number of food vendors had was cantelope on a stick. Big pieces too. A couple of those begging for money really upset me. A saw a man with no arms just sitting there with a bowl in front him. Honestly, what can this man do but sit and beg. Later I saw a man sitting on a small cart who had no legs and deformed arms. If these man are on the streets, whatever communist/socialist systems china has are failing. I also saw three men with monkeys. No, not like the gay porn michael and I got a pop-up ad for years ago, but just guys chillin, with monkey's on leashes. I thought it cute at first, but then as I stopped a second to look at them, they started jerking the leashes and pushing the monkeys to do tricks. After I watched one just start backflipping non-stop I started to feel a little sick. Suddenly, although I had been looking at just one guy with his monkey, two more guys with monkeys came closer and closer to me and were yelling at their monkeys and pushing their bowls in front of me. Although I had given a little money to the first man, the other two men were now aggressively hounding me with their bowls. I quickly realized that I was reinforcing their behavior and just turned away and left. One of the men continued to follow me for 10-15 feet shouting at me to give him money, but I didn't look back and just walked away. Intense.
So after my little walk, I went to McDonalds a few minutes before 7:30 (our meeting time) and bought myself a 6 piece McNugget meal. McDonalds are the same anywhere. It's the same food, just cheaper. 17.3 Yuan for a meal (~$2.25) So after sitting there for a few minutes eating my meal, feeling a little conspicuous as a few people there were staring at me, Scott and Yusu (sp?) showed up. Scott is 22, from Atlanta, about 6 foot tall and has been here only a couple days more than. Yusu is french, of average built, spoke excellent english and has been in Changzhou since February. They both work at a school that is close to downtown. They have dorm style accomodations and there are like four or five other English teachers there. Two are three of which are older (40+ years). Because there are more english teachers in their program, there is always other english teachers who can help new tecahers adjust. This minimizes the burden on the school staff, who apparently are not very helpful at all.
This party that we are going to is a little ways (4-5KM away) and so we will be taking two different buses to get there. I was a little worried because I had not yet taken the bus, but with their guidance, I knew things would be fine. This party is apparently at a house with five girls, one or two of which Yusu knows because they have been here for a while. So we finish are food and go to walk to the bus. While walking, Bill calls to check up on me, to make sure I was able to get into the city alright, which was nice of him. He is a little nervous (as am I) about me getting back to the school, but I assure him that things will work out. I figure that the worst thing that could happen is that I end up staying at the house of these girls or with Scott/Yusu if I can't get myself back to my apartment.
There seem to be a large number of buses (that's what you get in a city of more than a million people where less than 1% have cars), Yusu says we are waiting for the 16 and we will then connect to the 29. Um, yeah, and stuff. So buses are 1 Yuan (wicked cheap) or 2 yuan for the air conditioned bus. Yep, they run two seperate versions of many of the bus lines. I'm not sure about how I feel about this. Having buses be cheaper and thus more financially accessible to the general population is good, but having two seperate buses to me seems like a clear class deliniation. This bus is nicer and cooler...and by the way there are no poor people on it. So after waiting for a while and not taking an air conditioned 16, we take the 16 bus like four or five stops and get off. We then walk a little ways to make our connection. Apparently there is a different number bus that doesn't run as often that we could have taken and not had to walk, but we're able bodied 20-somethings, we need not be lazy. Or at least not too lazy. So we then took the 29 for probably two or so miles, but I'm not really sure. It seemed like a long time. And then we got off. Again, I didn't actually know where we were as the buses turned a few times as they went along their routes.
We walked into a small shop that was open across the street and Scott and I bought ourselves some beer. 2/3 Liter (660ml) bottles for 2 Yuan. Wicked cheap. So we continued to walk down the street for another block or two and then arrived at this really posh neighborhood. In china it seems, any remotely nice neighborhood or building is gated. This is for exactly what you might imagine: keeping poor people out. That's it, no fooling. So we walked through the gate and into the complex. I'm not sure if they would have stopped us at the gate if were chinese. Two tall white guys and someone who is clearly a foreigner are not the sort of people that the gate/wall were built to keep out. So we walked over to their house and went in the front door.
When we walked in, about half the group there were foreigners. There were a few chinese people who spoke varying levels of english, all reasonably profficient. The people there seemed to come from all places, there was a girl (Erin) from Worchester, MA and tall guy (?) from Cameroon, a girl (Annah) from Iowa, a girl (Natalie) from New Zealand and another girl (?) who was originally from India, but grew up in the states. As the night progressed more and more people showed up. There was a guy (Toby) from the Boston area, a few other folks from the U.S. as well as some people the U.K. Also, Natalie's father was there visiting for a few weeks. Everyone seemed really nice and as the evening progressed I met a wide variety of folks from all over the globe. And by all over I just mean western countries.
So all of the folks at this house and a number of the other people had all come over here through a program called C.I.E. I had vaguely heard about it while I was searching for oppertunities here, but the idea of paying $900 + airfare for the program didn't really appeal to me. Apparently all of the C.I.E. folks arrived in Shanghai about the same time and did a little orientation there. Sounds cool, but $900 isn't pocket change. Apparently these folks have parties about once a month, so I imagine that any sort of anxiety that may come from not having people to speak english to will be squelched, knowing that at least once in a while I will have an oppertunity to just relax and speak english freely.
Although many of the people came through C.I.E. there were some others who had come independantly and were teaching at the same location as C.I.E. teachers. There were about 10 teachers who were all living in this complex and teaching at the nearby International School. Some of the people there though, had travelled much further. A few had come from a little ways 10-40km outside the city by bus and a few had come from Nanjing (~2hrs by bus). Pretty intense. I don't think I would've been ready to travel that kind of distance to see other english speakers at this point in the game, but hey, who knows. Someone else who was there was a 28year old chinese guy who apparently owned like seven factories. He had also brought a couple of his managers and their girlfriends along as well. Initially it is suprising to me that such a complex wide-reaching network exists, especially as some of these people have not been here for more than a week or so. But, foreigners stick together...esepcially in a land where no matter whether I can speak the chinese just as well as those who are native born, I will always be identified as a foreigner and never truly accepted, because of the color of my skin.
After a long night of chatting with all sorts of people about all sorts of things (including this English guy Phil who used to work at Computer Associates...we geeked out for a while, it felt good), I decided that 4am was an appropriate time to go home. After exchanging phone numbers with another one of the girls who lived there (Elizabeth) so that I would be kept in the loop for future activities I left to go hunt for a cab. Very quickly one came along and I tried to tell him to take me to Bejao Middle School (using the chinese words for middle school). After going back and forth for a long time...I was ready to give up and try again with another cab driver, he called up someone on the phone and then handed me the phone. The guy on the other line spoke english. And after some discussion back and forth he finally understood what I was saying. After some initial back and forth he was like "Bejao high school?" and I was like "no, bejao middle school" and he was like "bejao high school." So then he looked some more and went, "Oh, Bejao middle school." And so I handed the phone back to the driver. He then discussed things furiously with the guy on the phone and I believe got directions and he took me home. I am convinced that it was not my terrible attempts at speaking chinese that caused me trouble with the cab driver (certainly didn't help), but that he honestly didn't know where I was asking to be taken. Of course I will never know. Once I arrived at my school, the front gate was closed and the guard/attendant wasn't in the little booth. After looking around for a minute, I just hopped the gate and walked over to my house. As I got in my apartment and opened one of the windows facing the school the guard was walking past and I waved at him and he nodded at me. My guess is that we just doing rounds and had closed the gate while doing that. It still doesn't make me feel
that safe about the whole thing though, because it means that it probably would not be very difficult for someone to get at my house late at night. Whatever though, I got home safely and met up with some folks that I probably would have never known existed for months if not the entire time I was here.
Now that it's been three years since I was teaching there, I'm posting a couple photos from my time at Lakeside Charter School in Elon, NC. (I withheld my photos that showed the faces of children for privacy reasons). Lakeside was a public charter school at which I was the "Computer Teacher" in 2004. They closed closed in early fall 2005, it seems to have reopened as a private prep school under the name The Elon School this past August with a new mission of offering "high academics".
After taking about half a roll, I put the tripod (no legs extended) on the hood of my car, took a shot and then stepped away for a moment. Then the camera took a fall to the ground. When it fell, it snapped open the back exposing the half rolll of Velvia 100 I'd taken ($8 down the drain, not to mention the pictures lost) It dented the top of the camera and meant I had almost no pictures of Arizona except the grand canyon. Lame. This made me reconsider the whole film decision, if only for the reduced likelyhood of damage-related loss of pictures.
When I went to Germany in 2002, I saw all sorts of SMS-centric business models. Whether it was horoscopes, ringtones or erotic-text chat I always thought the SMS charity donation model was pretty cool. Here's a campagin in New Zealand for landmines...you tear the foot/corner off and the blood/ketchup squirts out. Genious. I think more charities in the states should use it, I would donate if it was that easy.
When I was in high school, we used to spend the winter months in gym class playing a game called Pickle Ball. It's quite fun, I always thought of it as ping pong, but bigger. For the uninitiated, the game is played with a flat wooden paddle and you hit a wiffle ball back and forth over a net. You can only score on serve. But anyways, 
I've seen the iTrip interface on the iPod, it's pretty straightforward...in fact, I always thought it a little inelegant and kludgy. You tune your stereo to a blank spot and then the iPod just lets you select from any FM station to broadcast the iTrip on. But not having the device I wondered...how's it do that? I always assumed that it did it through the dock connector and through some private arrangement with apple they got to get some software to run. Wow, someone (either 
For real people: It plays an MP3 and based on the sound in that MP3 it changes stations. So simple. Why didn't i think of it. No complicated software...just a couple of MP3 files linked to from the root menu of the ipod. So when this guy decided to 
A few slices of the Xacto knife (and a few pieces of electrical tape) later, and I have a semi-functional phone (which I stole from the kitchen of my flat...hopefully the other 7 people haven't missed it). 
Frank Perdue of Perdue chicken died at 84.
The 
A couple seasons back there was 
Ocean's 12 did some filming in Amsterdam, apparently "Partying on the set in Amsterdam apparently got pretty stoney due to stars' easy access to legal pot. According to insiders, Warner Bros got word that the toking was causing production delays, translating into increased costs to get the film made." Brad Pitt and George Clooney, smoking pot? Suprise suprise.
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"I think the original iPods were black, and then were later changed to white, just like they did to Jesus."
The 
Funny ad on tv for 
