Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Go China!

So our 7 day work week turned out AWESOME!
1 day off for the typhoon, 2 days off for sports day (yeah i know), a party at the 4 largest port in the world, and a teachers party.

Our first party was the "Crane Party." Here our host Richard drives our school around a humongous shipping yard. Surprisingly this got boring.




Then it was time for buffet and games!
Eric (our very weird and silly contact teacher) was the MC along with Yantian Shipping Liason, "Orange."
Here is our big head teacher welcoming us all to this bizarre event.
The president of the entire company "was so delighted that were were here" and wanted us to come back anytime. I don't know why, all we did is get presents and food from them. For a while my brain kept trying to figure out how a group of teachers and a gigantic shipping yard could be beneficial towards one another, but those thoughts were drowned out with french fries, egg rolls and cake.
The teachers were all split into teams and each time had to come up with a name, logo and slogan.
They kept rejecting my ideas until i said the word spider and they all immediately latched on. But just the name team spider was not enough. "We need more, how about team Spider Winner!" -"Yes, or Go Go spider!" "Go Go Spider Winner!" Me: "That is an incredibly chinese name, and what about our slogan?" "Go go spider! We're the winner!"

Jody, kitty and I all got to do "fun teaching" at the party which surprisingly was not as fun as it may sound.
Kitty destroyed me at alphabet ping pong. All the rest of the Chinese just cheated, and focused only on their awesome Ping Pong skills.



At the end we were then treated to some amazing Karaoke (or KTV as they call it) and enchanting dance numbers.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Yangshuo!

Hey dudes we are on vacation in Yangshuo for National day!
This is a place where they have those weird specific chinese mountains called "carsks"(I spelled that wrong).

So we will be back next week with all kinds of fun pictures!
Also we will provide some annotation for the weird other posts about the crane party and other party that we didn't finish!

Sports Day!

So we did have a 7 day work week planned, but typhoon day and 2 days of sports day nicely knocked that down to only 4. Our job was simply to decipher their bizarre sports chants they came up with to scream over the PA all day long.





They had real starting pistols and cool events like shotput and hackey-sack
Here is an example of the kinds of things they expected me to put into english before they shouted it over the PA.

My favorite line to translate was one that went like, "Cindy! Did you know that you are crying? You are crying! But you must not cry, because you need to win! It is okay to cry."

Saturday, September 27, 2008

China Preparation

Here is a quick clip i found from our San Francisco trip when we were preparing for china. Mica is here to tackle whether or not he can eat "G-Fresh" without hands.

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Pictulars

I bought a guitar! It's about the cheapest one I've ever seen, both in price and quality, but it sure is mine! I bought this one at a luggage/watch/camera equipment/cheap crap you sell to foreigners store. It was my first really successful bargaining purchase as well - I got the guy down to 180 yuan from 250. You can't tell too well here, but I'm rocking your socks off in this picture.
Here's a way sweeter guitar that we found in an actual music shop. These guitars were more like 1000 yuan, and probably well worth it. I hope you can see how awesome the dragons inlaid into this guitar are. The guys at this shop were sitting around playing guitar, and they were really good. I was intimidated by them and their persistent efforts to speak to us in fast Chinese, so I just bought a guitar strap and ran.
Here's a good view of a Chinese back alley in the evening. You can buy pretty much anything you want here, including coconut snow fun. We went out to dinner in this area after our Friday afternoon Chinese class. In typical Chinese banquet style (we think), all the couples sat across from each other. We actually know how to order some food now, although menus are still mostly a mystery. Still, being able to go to restaurants that don't have pictures on the wall is a big step.And again for our green-thumbed mothers, a really cool nursery that had HUGE cacti. Maybe pictures will be forthcoming.Here are some neat bull sculptures that had creepy anatomy. Other bull rears were a bit too large and "flaring" to really post here.
Now it's time for us to batten down the hatches - there's apparently a minor typhoon on the way. Hopefully class will be cancelled! We have a 7-day work week this week since we get a vacation next week (brilliant understanding of the concept "vacation," China!), so we could really use a day off. Here's hoping!

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

We live at a location!



The location:

Room402
#1011 Haijing 2nd Street
Shatoujiao Yantian district
Shenzhen, Guangdong,China
Postcode:518081


On another note:
I (andy) had fallen deeply in love with China's State Banquet Beverage, Coconut Palm.

However deep my love, though, I was struck by the fact that Coconut Palm costs almost 3 Yuan! (Nearly 40 cents!). In order to keep frugal, and to prove to myself that my love was just not a result of amazing advertising (i mean how can you resist the state banquet beverage?!) i purchased each type of "coconut juice" that the local stores had to offer, and had Kitty administer a blind taste test to me.
There were 3 main candidates: Cocounut Palm at 2.7 Yuan, Some drink with a coconut and exclamation point at 2.5 Yuan, and some drink with just a picture of a coconut 1.2 yuan. The below picture was not actually tested, it is just a picture to illustrate that, yes, there are other types of coconut beverage.
The Test!
I had to keep my eyes closed, so sometimes i would have to search for the opening with my tongue.

Some coco-beverages were not good.Some were VERY bad.

The Results:

The absolute loser: drink with a picture of a coconut- This drink was sooo bad i was forced, against my will, to throw away a coconut beverage. Its taste was of corn starch, water, and gasoline mixed in a rubber balloon, and served by a guy telling you that you suck. Luckily after i poured out its disgusting contents, i noticed a little warning label on the side that states that it contains no coconut meat, only vegetable albumin, which made me quite happy that i had not thrown away an actual coconut beverage.

Runner up: Exclamation point coconut drink - tolerable, less like gasoline than the loser, and would be able to be drank if dying.
Winner: Coconut Palm! The official state banquet beverage! Worth every yuan!

Monday, September 22, 2008

Welcome to Here


China is weird. Someone in our group told us that the main thing you have to know about china is that they "Always almost get it."



The kids all have to do weird "Eye exercises" between a lot of their classes. This consists of them rubbing their eyes in a certain prescribed manner.I got the coconut rice snow fun and it was awesome!
You should zoom into the full menu. It was pretty awesome. The Pear Sass and Fritllary and the hand grinding sesame intrigued me the most.

Dragonfruit is actually just awesome. Super crazy fruit that doesn't really taste that good but is just very compelling.


Sometimes walls, sidewalks, and buildings that you knew yesterday will be all half-blown-up lookin the next.