Friday, October 31, 2008

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Futureshop!

Are you starting to wonder about what to get friends and loved ones for the upcoming christmas? Well how about for christmas 2010? Some may argue that we are only 12 hours in the future over here, and others may argue that that is not how time really works, but the cool others argue for my point of view that China exists somewhere in a hazy anachronistic cloud, dropping temporal artifacts from the past, present, future, meta-future, and pizza time! Our recent trip to Luohu's commercial city, once described as "the other big shopping area in luohu, potentially sketchy and full of fake stuff," opened our eyes to the future of commerce and we got to glimpse a few products that actually don't even yet exist.

For example, while you are busy trying to squeeze your little, past-y "Word Documents" onto 2-4 gig thumb drives, we are busy downloading our entire consciousnesses quickly, and conviently onto 1000 gig usb sticks. Some of the temporal sticklers out there may try to point out that the largest such drives that exist are merely 64 gigs (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233072), but we don't have to worry about such trivial concerns as impossibility here in the CHINAFUTURE! (The drives even have secret little programs on them that open up fake little Windows windows that say "1000 gigas!" just to let you know they are real!


Ignore these signs! These are just to stop tourists who have glimpsed too far into the future too quickly from fainting.
You don't need to see when your head, neck, and part of your chest can be batman.

It is sad to say, but yes, mickey mouse died in the future. Of course, death has been scientifically relegated to "no biggie" status in the future, so he is wishing you caveman a jolly good ol day!


Some of us in the future get so sick of our dirty old heaps of garbage, and instead of just littering our bills around the city like deceased servant corpses, we like to stay "green" and recycle those sweaty wads of cash. You are welcome, Mother Earth.

All restraunts in the future will be named in the manner of "[Facial Hair] [Relative]," so expect some "Moustache Momma"s, "Goatee Third Cousin"s, and "Fu Manchu Nephew"s to pop up in the US within the next 12 hours.
This is about a medium sized on of these. There are so many, and so huge, and so expensive.

FutureNews!: Pogs are coming back!



Soon it will be uncouth to ever drink your coffee while not dressed as a spikey haired anime character.



Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Il Fashionisto!



Our first set of visits to the tailor has resulted in two new pairs of pants for kitty, and a three piece suit that was stolen off a 3rd order assassin cleric from the future for me.

It has a cute little vest....
And a matching overcoat. As you can see the suit is depicted in "relaxed mode," but can quickly transform into ultra fashion-laser (Flazer) with the addition of its pants, a tie and matching cuff-links.

I am probably going to head back to the tailors in a week or two with concepts for duck feather lined t-shirts, jump suits, shorts, and maybe a hammock, so i am going to open up this post to be the official "Ideas for things for Andy to wear." So if you have any awesome ideas, let me know and i can try to incorporate them into my designs. Hopefully our powers will combine to start a fashion empire and we will be able to take down my arch nemesis, "Q'ggle" (which is apparently run by heroin addicted 12 year olds).



Tuesday, October 28, 2008

China has fun things just laying around!



Recent immigrants to china may experience a shock when being greeted at abercrombie-like stores by man sized mecha-aliens and godzillas instead of hot, mostly naked guys, but in time you can adjust.

Posted by Picasa

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Teams!

In order to make my kids feel more awesome than the standard sobriquet of class 6-2 or class 5-3 would allow, I gave my classes the opportunity to come up with awesome team names.

I made a list of (what i am going to call, though this is pretty grammatically incorrect for an english teacher) "Action Adjectives" and "Action Nouns". The class then got to collaborate (read: fight, bicker, and punch each other) to decide what their overall class was going to be designated for the rest of the year. All of them wanted to be "Super" something because that was like the first word they knew along with "prawn" which none of them wanted to be. Tornado was another popular title as you will see, and i was quite disheartened that no one wanted explosion!
Some teams i am really quite proud of, like the tornado bots, the Lazerbots, the Supercowboys, and the volcano ninjas, but others disapointed me like the "Fire dragons"-yeah real creative there, class. One class almost had the coolest, rule-bending, name of "Lightning Whale-Wolves" which would have been super sweet, i mean imagine a electric powered werewolf-like creature that was part whale instead of part "were." The kids were super excited but the teach declared that it would just be "too crazy."

As a special prize for them i designed them each sweet logos.









A weird side effect developed from these denominations in that, since i don't know what the names of the assistants i have in each class are, i have begun mentally referring to them by the class name. So if one gives me a hard time, i am like, "man, that 'Ice astronaut' was such a jerk today," or if one is really fun, i am like "That super cowboy is alright with me." The "Fire Dragon" is really weird in that she seems to really enjoy her class and have a good time, but the only words out of her mouth are screaming "SHUT UP!" in various ways: "Shut up! Why don' t you shut uP!" "You are so stupid! Why don't you shut uP!" "Why are you stupid? Becuase you talk? Yes! Shut UP!

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Tai Long Wan: Aftermath

SAND EVERYWHERE!
CLOTHES SOO SMELLY!
MOSQUITO BITES PERSISTING!


Note that even though there is a certain, constant amount of mosquito bite coverage on Andy at all times, he was almost destroyed by trying to sleep on the beach. Everyone else seemed to be fine (albeit most others had tents) but my feet and hands and even lips were demolished with unusually painful mosquito bites. Surprisingly the forehead, which retains a certain amount of mosquito bites anyway, was entirely spared.

Monday, October 20, 2008

Tai Long Wan (Big Wave Bay)



This past weekend marked our first real voyage to Hong Kong. We met up with the rest of the daring souls in our group at the Hong Kong Metro station to embark on a camping trip to a remote beach.

We stopped to eat a a cute little town with big fun fake paper boats. (Note: for some reason the ducks in the background were also fake)
I got attacked by a friendly stink bug. If he only knew how bad i was going to smell at the end of the weekend anyway maybe he would have left me alone.


The journey demanded riding a bus to a train to a bus to another bus (a double decker!), and a 3 hour hike over a mountain just to get to the beach. We visited two beaches separated by a rocky bluff.


A crystal clear lake in the middle of the mountain greeted us, and treated me to hand and leg lacerations when i fell.

While i waited for the others, i went exploring around an old squatter settlement that looks like it may have been forcefully "reccomended for clearance."
There were a few trails to go from one beach to the other, this was not one of them. Jeanette, I, a californian guy and his chinese lady were the only ones willing and stupid enough to take the rocky, sheer cliff route around the bluffs separating the two beaches. The waves would shoot up and shatter against the rocks all around as we spider crawled over gaps in the rocks. It was pretty awesome.
Here was the main beach that we finally made it to, and where we set up camp (well after the jerks next to us on the huge mostly abandoned beach told us to move).


Euchre was played.


Long romantic strolls were had.


Some guys' boat was almost washed away in the night.
The sun rose.



And the spiders were incredibly huge.

(Note: my finger is actually about 3-4 inches closer to the camera than the spider.)


Thursday, October 9, 2008

Yangshuo: Day Four

On day four, we decided to go white-water rafting. We were both pretty excited about this, cause we love kayaking and canoeing, but had never tackled a more adventurous form of water sports. We were a little late getting to the travel agency, and our guide made us follow him while he rode his scooter to the meeting place. That was a pretty brisk walk, but somehow Andy managed to snap a photo of him getting ready to glare at us for not going fast enough.
On the way to the rafts, there were all sorts of exciting, menacing photos of people going over huge waterfalls in their inflatable rafts. I was getting scared, but Andy was really excited about finally doing some real white water rafting. But when we finally got to the rafts...

We discovered the most bogus "white water rafting" imaginable. They made you wear hard hats and life vests, but gave you no oars? That seems like a bad sign. Yeah, basically they just dug this irrigation channel type thing, opened some kind of dam at the top of it, and sent you down this concrete chute. In between the "rapids," you sat in these huge bathtubs full of other suckers who paid for this "rafting." All the Americans looked pretty down in the mouth at the mouth of the "river," but the Chinese folks loved it. What an adventure!
Despite how disappointed we were at first, the ride was really a lot of fun. Given, it was NOTHING like white water rafting, a lot more like a more extreme version of Ragin' Rivers or whatever at Six Flags. As you can see in the following shots, though, I definitely enjoyed myself.
A lot of times when you were stuck in the bathtubs between the "rapids," it could be really hard to get to the next exciting part, since there were a ton of other rafts and lots of bizarre currents that could sweep you to the side. To solve this problem, Andy grabbed a big piece of bamboo and transformed himself into a gondolier. I even got him to sing some "O Sole Mio."
We headed back in to town after the surprisingly fun debacle of "white water rafting," where we found the culprit who was actually painting all of those Hitler and Bin Laden t-shirts.
Then we headed into this public park where you could climb little baby karsts, so that you didn't feel like such a loser for never climbing a karst the whole time you were in Yangshuo. Here's some kind of "glory to the people" statue in the park:
And a shot of us in a little pavilion halfway up the karst:

Of course, Andy and his new adventure buddy, Kelsey, could not be content to climb the baby karst that my new non-adventure buddy, Sasha, and I huffed and puffed all the way up. So they climbed out from the sanctioned path and discovered a new karst peak.
We took the sleeper bus back home to Shenzhen that night. They have two levels of beds, all of which are designed for midgets. Even I couldn't lay flat in them, so imagine how Andy felt. Our friend Kyle, pictured below, declared that it was just like a sleepover and gave us his best "Jonathan Taylor Thomas is so dreamy" grin.

That's it for Yangshuo! Now we're back teaching in Shenzhen. I've had all kinds of boring teaching trouble that I won't bother you with, but when something exciting happens, we'll be sure to post it.