Andy and Kitty Time

Istanbul

2011-07-04T12:45:00.001+08:00

Istanbul is so great!

There is Baklava and Bidets as far as the eye can see! I literally had dreams of assorted candies, and delights floating about the air.

Kitty and I strolled around the city yesterday, eating various delicacies and seeing the sights. We walked across the bridge into Asia, drank various fresh juices, and walked through random alleys. (We stumbled across a carnival game where you shot balloons for cigarettes, How much manlier can something get!).

Then I hopped into the Bosphorus and swan with a couple of guys both named Sinan.

Later we ate fancy pistachio pudding at a dessert restaurant, and the president drove by (after first deploying several guys with sub machine guns)

Honeymoon Pics

2010-09-24T11:28:00.000+08:00

Here are some shots from our fun honeymoon to Johnson's Shut-ins in the middle of the Mark Twain National Forest:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=johnson's+shut-ins&ie=UTF8&ei=HhqcTPqFI8LflgfD0NCZDg&ved=0CBAQ_AU&hq=johnson's+shut-ins&hnear=&radius=15000&ll=37.612056,-90.414734&spn=1.803628,4.22699&z=9&iwloc=A

http://picasaweb.google.com/kathleen.myra.kelly/HoneymoonPics

It was a blast!

After-Party Clothes

2010-08-03T22:29:00.001+08:00

More info on the After-party.

There will be a HUMONGOUS bonfire and TONS OF FIREWORKS, so i might be a good idea to bring a second pair of crappy party clothes to change into after the wedding (You can leave your clothes in the car before you hop on the drunk bus).

There is also a fun pool! So you can bring a swimsuit if you want (or just hop in in your clothes).

Good News!

2010-08-03T22:22:00.001+08:00

Good News! We will definitely be on the boat (despite the flooding). The boat just might not go anywhere unless the water drops another 4 feet. So everyone hope for dry weather up north or a crazy captain who will take us out no matter what.

What to do on the big day!

2010-08-02T22:53:00.001+08:00

So the wedding starts at 4 PM. The Boat will leave the dock at 4:30.

Your goal is to make it onto the boat. Here are some ways:

Option 1.

We have a drunk bus that can hold around 35 people leaving from my Aunt June's at 2:30 pm. You can drive and park your car at Aunt June's (address:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&q=114+Illinois+160,+Trenton,+Clinton,+Illinois+62293&sll=38.656239,-89.687892&sspn=0.008965,0.013797&ie=UTF8&cd=2&geocode=Fe7YTQIdw3in-g&split=0&hq=&hnear=114+Illinois+160,+Trenton,+Clinton,+Illinois+62293&ll=38.656239,-89.687892&spn=0.004022,0.013797&t=h&z=16&layer=c&cbll=38.656239,-89.687892&panoid=__pMeINyolzSWlzu2Mmxmg&cbp=11,66.85,,0,11.58

)

Park your car at their house, and then hop in the bus at 2:30 and it will drop you off at the boat! Then when the part is over on the boat, this wonderful bus will be back to bring you to Aunt June's for the fireworks after-party! There you can have fun and party all night and they have a super big fun barn that you can pass out in if you feel. (it's a nice barn with couches and stuff).

Option 2.

Make your way to the river directly in front of the Arch. There is a riverboat there. Instructions for parking around there are found on the invites. Get there at 4:00 pm. If you get super drunk find a sober person to drive you to the afterparty (if you are going).

Bridal Shower!

2010-06-07T08:33:00.003+08:00

It was super great! Thanks so much to everyone who was able to make it out! It was so fun to get to see everyone!

Lots of fun pics- http://picasaweb.google.com/momar1961/KittyBridalShower

Wedding Hotel

2010-05-26T05:33:00.001+08:00

Here is the hotel we are recommending for staying at the wedding. It's got a pool (i think) but no free drinks like at the Drury Inn, but it is the cheapest place we could find. (and I think my sister and I have stayed there before with our dad, so we know it's a real hotel and not just some sort of weird front). It is also close to the interstate and quick access to all the things that are gonna be happening!

http://www.baymontinns.com/Baymont/control/Booking/property_info?propertyId=17867&brandInfo=BU

Oregon Trip (and Andy got a new camera)

2010-03-31T09:51:00.004+08:00

Went to Oregon for spring break! It was a great time to check out my new super cool camera!

Also i got a new job for the summer and next year studying bee dance! http://www.kinetrack.org/recent-results.html

Lots of pics available here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/kathleen.myra.kelly/OregonTripAndAndyGotANewCamera

(including more awesome donut pics from Voodoo donuts like the bacon maple one shown below)

Wedding info!

2010-01-15T22:49:00.000+08:00

Okay so we actually have to start putting wedding information up here. First up a link to our wedding registry. We are nowhere near close to completing this list because we are pretty lazy when it comes this wedding stuff, but for you go-getters out there here is the link:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wedding/234S3V8VQYEDW

The Tortoise Tracker!

2009-12-13T22:05:00.002+08:00

Here is my final project for my design class:

http://tortoisetracker.blogspot.com/

RARRR

2009-11-03T21:52:00.001+08:00

Beardapus Strikes Again!

2009-11-03T09:50:00.000+08:00

Despite a really fast bike wreck and hours in the mosh pit, beardapus made it through the holiday!

http://blogs.ajc.com/inside-access/2009/10/30/photos-atlanta-critical-mass-querade-halloween-bike-ride/

SAVE THE DATE!

2009-10-28T00:36:00.000+08:00

Hey everybody! We put down the deposit and got the wedding date set!

SATURDAY AUGUST 7, 2010
LOCATION: The MISSISSIPPI RIVER
ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI
Invitations will come out when we get around to making them.

Wedding planning delayed due to BEARDAPUS ATTACK!

2009-10-19T23:00:00.002+08:00

THE MIGHTY BEARDAPUS ROSE FROM HIS LAIR IN THE SEA FORREST TO BRING MAYHEM UPON THE ATLANTANS

http://picasaweb.google.com/kathleen.myra.kelly/Beardapus

(at Atlanta Halloween Parade)

Wedding small update

2009-09-27T01:31:00.001+08:00

We had a request to change the date to the 7th and 8th of august?
Still work for everyone?

Let's get this wedding thing figured out!

2009-09-10T09:35:00.007+08:00

Lisa (kitty's sister)'s wedding was great!
So we are also going to get married, so it is time to figure out a time, and start getting things arranged (what a crappy sentence). Haven't done this before, but i guess the first thing is to set a place and date.

The place will probably be around St. Louis, since 80 percent of my family is right there (sorry kitty's side)

So i get done with class on the 7th of May, and will probably have to start working at some internship for a majority of the summer.

So right now we are thinking of having it over a couple of days some time in early to mid August. Right now aiming at
August 14th-15th.

I think it would be cool to have some part in the City museum, but they make you use their caterers and there are a lot of them. So if people who are bored want to look through and find the cheap and awesome place let us know your pics! Also the city museum has some packages from 1000-4000 dollars just to have the thing there. Is that exorbitant?

http://www.citymuseum.org/faqs.html

Tentatively i think it would be cool to hit up both the Zoo and the city museum. Maybe have some time in Forrest park too!

but i also require lots and lots of fireworks at some point of the whole wedding party, which people at all of the aforementioned places will probably frown on thousand of fireworks.

Comments? Ideas?

Chinese Storytelling Studio Videos Up!

2009-09-02T03:11:00.002+08:00

Now you can see the videos that the kids and I made in my class last semester! (Unfortunately the poor chinese kids can't see them because Youtube is blocked over there).

Check out:
http://www.youtube.com/user/StoryTellingStudio

THE BEST COUCH THAT COULD EVER BE!

2009-08-13T10:27:00.002+08:00

OKAY! So after a few days of living on the floor, we decided that enough was enough, and went couch buying. Little did we know that a mere hour later, we would return with the coolest (and heaviest) couch known to man! At first glance one thinks, "Wow what a crazy couch!"...

...but then when you look closer, things seem like they might be even weirder in couch world than previously thought. The world seems to be in disarray, an inordinate amount of dogs are running about the land, people have vanished leaving piles of clothes, the only people around seem a little less righteous than average, all the christian pilots have mysteriously disappeared...

Yes! our couch depicts the End Times, the Great Tribulation, the Second Coming, THE RAPTURE! Maybe we will be able to re-sell it to Kirk Cameron if we ever have to move!

It was only 26 bucks! And actually comfortable! and in really good condition! Also it weighs well over 150 pounds, I guess it must be from bearing the load of all the sins of the world.

Address!

2009-08-06T02:50:00.003+08:00

Yay! I have my own address now!

# 15 741 Ponce de Leon CT NE
Atlanta, GA 30308

View Larger Map

Vacation Photos!

2009-07-26T02:28:00.003+08:00

Here are some pics from our awesome month-long vacation around all of China!

They are in Kitty's picasa gallery because mine was filled up from the blog of the year:
http://picasaweb.google.com/kathleen.myra.kelly/ChinaVacation

Job!

2009-07-24T21:37:00.001+08:00

Got me a research job! Work 14 hours and it pays all my out-of-state tuition! Phew!

Plus 1200 bucks more a month! Yay!

Here's what it says the job is:

http://www.synlab.gatech.edu/projects/bdc/

I am basically going to be doing the coding to get this big weird body puppet into action, but i guess mostly i will be in charge of making big weird 3-D puppets that the body thing will control.

Relief! fun!

Yay!

Back with a tight schedule

2009-07-23T07:49:00.003+08:00

So I am back in the land of sit down toilets and have about 2.5 weeks until school starts. In those weeks Kitty and I will be running all over sorting things out. So here is a rough idea of where and when we will be!

Re: welcome back

2009-07-22T21:24:00.001+08:00

Our flight went awesome! Started out with we each had 4 bags (2 of which were terribly overweight) 2 backpacks, a purse and a carry-on, but one of our teachers drove us all the way to the Futian Border crossing where there were people to meet and greet and carry our luggage for us all the way to the HK airport. Then, because the HK airport is so nice, they had free big luggage carts which made our luggage a breeze. At check-in we got the nicest guy in the world who drew us a little map and sped us through the whole process and only at the end did he say, "Now sir, i want you to know that your bag IS pretty overweight, so maybe next time try to make sure that it isn't too heavy, okay? Thanks a lot!"

Our only worry was coming back through the Chicago airport, but once again they had free carts and customs didn't check our luggage at all!

When we got back, Mom and Doug greeted us with big open arms and more importantly NACHOS GALORE!

So far it has been awesome!

Back! Almost!

2009-07-20T21:56:00.001+08:00

Leaving for the US in 15hours!

Flight leaves Hong Kong at 1 PM and gets in Chicago at 2:30

Only 1.5 hours long!
See everybody soon!

More rugged vacationing

2009-07-05T14:16:00.001+08:00

We are currently in Lake Lugu on the Sichuan/Yunnan border after going to see the LeShan giant buddha, which I believe is just flat out the biggest Buddha in the world. It was really cool, we can post pictures later.

We also climbed up Mt. Emei, which is one of the 4 sacred Buddhist Chinese mountains. It took two days and we had to sleep in a monastery on top of one of the peaks. The dorm rooms were sex-segregated and Andy got pinched by some monstrous rat/cockroach in the middle of the night. Also there are native Tibetan macaques that live on Emei Shan and they are surprisingly scary. The guide book talked about "monkey tolls" on the path, where you have to pass by monkeys expecting a hefty fee in food and sparkly or enticing goods such as cameras, wallets, etc. In the official monkey protection areas, ladies with slingshots follow each monkey and prevent too much mischief, but outside of those areas you're on your own. Andy and I almost got attacked by a group of ten to twelve monkeys with their babies - a couple of them started making truly terrifying growling sounds, but we avoided eye contact and held threatening looking sticks, and we passed without incident.

Lake Lugu is really pretty but maybe not quite as weird as you would expect. It's purportedly the only matriarchal society left in the world. They have all kinds of goddess mountains and stuff, and the line of descent goes through the mother instead of the father. As far as we can tell, men don't have too much importance in society. Anyway it's also home to a huge plateau lake (we think we're about 2 kilometers above sea level), and the lake is really gorgeous.

We're probably leaving tomorrow to go to Lijiang, since this place is gorgeous but life is a little slow and too boring for Andy. It's weird because I'm getting more and more homesick and wanting western food and stuff, but I know we'll be leaving for good in two weeks, so I should probably try to soak up Chinese culture even more. However, I guess Lijiang and Dali are big backpacker towns so it's probably really easy to pretend like you're barely in China at all. While we were trekking on Emei Shan, I dreamt of coffee and french fries, so it's hard to pick another bowl of tomato noodles over a delicious western breakfast when it's available.

Xi'An and Chengdu

2009-06-27T14:33:00.001+08:00

Sorry this will be a picture-free post, but we don't have it together enough to regale you with images. We went through Xi'An recently, the city that hosts the legion of terracotta warriors. It's pretty cool, and a massive act of humanism for a Chinese emperor to bury terracotta versions of his army instead of burying the live army along with him, but I thought it was a little boring. I know each warrior is totally individual, with a distinct face and clothes, but you're not allowed anywhere near close enough to them to really discern any differences. What was really cool was the Xi'An water and music show! An entire square in the city transforms into a dancing fountain that moves to the beat of music. It's really gorgeous. I bet there's a good YouTube video somewhere, but the site's still blocked in China, so you'll have to look it up yourself. I sort of worry that China's new, tackier tourist attractions sometimes appeal to me more than its ancient sights. Makes me feel like a heathen. I'm handing it off to Andy, who will tell you about Chengdu.

Chengdu is super fun! We just got back from the panda research center, where thanks to lucky connections with cool people we met, we discovered that we can avoid paying the 100 yuan fee to our hostel or the 58 yuan regular entrance fee, and instead were able to get special 1 yuan panda gold cards which allow us to visit most of the attractions around here totally free! So i used all that money i saved and blew it on getting to hold the cutest best red panda in my lap and feed it apples! IT WAS THE BEST! (I could have also held the baby famous pandas but those were 1000 yuan instead of 100). We got there at a perfect time and all the pandas were going freaking nuts:Running all over , attacking each other, and generally being the cutest things imaginable. Oh man!

Before that we have been visiting some weird old temples (if anyone ever played the game "Dynasty Warriors" we got to go to liu bei's mausoleum and castle), eating super spicy sichuan hot-pot, relaxed at a tea house and missed a very lame chinese death metal concert. (it started at 8 and was over before we got there at 9:30, super metal)

Tomorrow we are going to try to head out to some cool taoist caves, and maybe the world's largest overall buddha (http://www.gluckman.com/LeshanBuddha.html).

Yeah!

2009-06-22T10:07:00.001+08:00

We visited the Great Wall, although we went to the wrong park first and could SEE the Great Wall but weren't allowed to go on it... Almost started crying! But we did make it up there, and Andy did ninja kicks and set off fireworks. It was awesome. We'll have to do a quick rundown of what we did.

1. Saw Mao's body - he sort of looks like they put a light bulb inside of his head. Now I only have Ho Chi Minh left on my list of mummified dictators.

2. Sort of ran through the Forbidden City.

3. Went to several temples, all of which had some kind of record-breaking Buddha (tallest wooden Buddha, Buddha with biggest mustache, Buddha doing highest Rockettes-style kick)

4. Got served amazing bewildering dishes at what is possibly Beijing's fanciest restaurant.

5. Made brownies!

6. Bought a lot of things at the outdoor Dirt Market that need pictures to explain them.

So tonight we're heading on to Xi'An, where the Terra Cotta warriors are. Maybe we'll make a better blog post then...

More Beijing!

2009-06-22T00:38:00.000+08:00

More pics! the egg and weird european ruins in the middle of the city!

Beijing!

2009-06-22T00:37:00.001+08:00

So we arrived in Beijing, our first stop in our giant China travel itinerary, after a six hour delay in Shenzhen airport. Apparently it was too foggy in Beijing to fly in, and it's true that you couldn't see for more than about 15 feet for the first few days. We're staying at our friend Sasha's parents' house - they are truly spoiling us rotten. Not only is their house gorgeous, they feed us extravagantly and they let us use their private driver to see the sights!

Chinese Yard Sale

2009-06-15T00:11:00.001+08:00

Like every time I move someplace, I have to first say goodbye to my loads of cherished, useless crap. I figured what better way to do it, than introduce the good old american concept of a yard sale to the comrades.

I drug a huge suitcase full of stuff, two bicycles, a guitar, a kite, and a ripstick downtown and set up shop on the corner.
At first they were pretty weirded out, but once they noticed my "cheap cheap, everything must go!" prices, they couldn't resist.

Some of my students noticed me, got their friends, and then all wanted the chance to buy something from mr. andy.

Within 1 minute, the passers-bye instinctively assumed standard chinese, huddle-and-gawk formation.

By the five minute mark, this lady purchased about half of what I had, and then tried to steal some squirt guns on top of it. I was only charging 3 kuai each, or 5 kuai (NOTE: I had questions about this, Chinese money is called renminbi, or RMB or Yuan, kuai is a unit word for money, like saying "bucks") for the set (about 45 cents). She then gave the guns to her kids and said that i couldn't take them from the kids since she already gave them the guns. I called her a theif, and harnessed the power of the crowd to stop her theivery. Begrudingly, she pressed the 5 yuan into my hands in 50 cent increments.

8 Minutes in, the guy in the A-shirt bought my handy bike, 2 pairs of "Fatty Man underwear" and some hair extensions. I threw the colander in for him for free.

After only 10 minutes of intense humidity, shouting, and craziness i sold out and made 300 RMB. I think i might have a real love for yard saling. Maybe one-day I will pursue my new life-long dream as a globe-trotting 1 man yard saling machine. First I gotta go back to school.

But first I gotta travel china!

Leaving shenzhen on Tuesday! To beijing! Then Xi'an! Then Cheng du! Then Lijiang! Then Kunming! Then Back!

Chino Productos

2009-06-09T13:46:00.001+08:00

Time for less ranting and more of what everyone wants: MoRE WEIRD CHINESE STUFF!

First up, the most appetizing dish at a dessert restaurant in Hong Kong. Mmmm! I've had the "Mutually Symbiotic Loranthus" version, but this one's gotta be even better!

Here is a great restaurant that we pass all the time when out shopping, but haven't been able to really locate it.

The back of the case for the show Dollhouse. As with many of the DVDs here, the english was taken from some blog or user post and copied directly onto a template for the back. Kelsey had an even better one for the movie "Death Race 2000" which read, "This movie is the only thing more painful than participating in an actual death race." (more risque DVDs at http://picasaweb.google.com/Andrew.Quitmeyer/ChinoProductos#)

Good job chicken! Gold medal!

On our last trips to the tailor we spotted the place that we should have been going to the entire time.

This thing came with my peanut butter. It was really appealing looking, but WHAT IS IT! In our little apartment we only have chopsticks, so i was hoping it would be something i could spread my peanut butter with, but nope, got big weird holes in it. Had to throw it away for spiting me so hard.

Kitty returns to her kingdom!

Subverting the Big Brain

2009-06-09T10:56:00.000+08:00

June 4th (or as the renegades refer to it, May 35th, in order to undermine the search filters of the "Great Firewall") came and went with little incident throughout the country. Hong Kong-ers were, of course, allowed to protest freely, but in the Mainland, where any type of demonstrating is illegal, Tiananmen square was filled with uniformed police as well as undercover police. Apparently, though, the plain clothes officers all decided to wear the exact same outfit, so they weren't exactly incognito. They also dispatched special police units armed with umbrellas all over the square who would attack your view if you tried to snap any photos. Overall sounds pretty goofy.

Some of our teachers, who had been university students during the "accident," as it is referred to here, actually had really interesting conversations about the rather taboo topic. Overall they seemed disheartened by the actions of those higher above, but entirely optimistic as to the future of the country as a whole. They seem to really believe that the leadership is getting much better and less corrupt and that these qualities will filter down throughout the entire republic.

What is really odd is that the gov goes through all the difficulties of blocking all of youtube, twitter, blogger, flickr, and wikipedia, but as long as I use google.com over google.cn any information about tiananmen i could ever want loads up quickly and easily. If i was the government, I think i would be blocking the sites like the ny times that are running several stories trying to find the truth behind the incident, rather than block zillions of videos of people's cats falling off things, or fat people singing pop covers on their webcams.

Anyway, I am able to get a few posts in, but it is a pretty big pain, so hopefully the ban will be lifted sometime soon. Here (hopefully) are some of the things the country really doesn't want you to see, i guess: Super fun, tourist-inducing, vacation photos of beautiful beaches! These were some of the last photos taken with my old camera before it got fixed and then stolen, so you can see the weird blurriness it was doing to things. If none of the photos work, you can go to:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Andrew.Quitmeyer

and check out our pictures there.

These shots are from our return journey to Tai Long Wan (big wave beach) that we had visited last october. First we stopped off to check out the floating fish market made by boats pulling right up to the sidewalk peir.

People were wrestling with big live octopi and selling made-to-order cracked open starfish.

Whoo! New Camera!

2009-05-29T13:26:00.000+08:00

Yes it was quite tragic that my good old camera just got stolen, only days after repairing it, but as my dad points out, "Good thing [I] live in the part of the world where these kinds of electronics are cheaply and abundantly available."

So i got the upgraded version of my old camera, even more water and shock proof.

Unfortunately, China is blocking blogger, so it's hard to get any of the new photos to upload.

Hopefully the ban will be up soon and I can show off. Other than that, it has been kinda rainy here, giving kitty a chance to sport her awesome, Skulls and Roses rainboots around town.

Lame

2009-05-20T22:59:00.001+08:00

There has been a slow pressure building over here. It is hard to believe we have been here as long as we have and now we are in the midst of finishing everything and trying to not be overwhelmed by the pressure of the boundless potential in this crazy city. So we have been getting stuff tailored like crazy, getting plane tickets ready (trying to buy tickets from airchina is about the craziest process in the world (in short- it involves taking a lot of pictures of things you write freehand)), and buying last minute electronic and DVD neccessities at awesome prices.

Sad story:

So earlier i reported about my handy camera started having CCD problems. Now in the US this would cost about $100 just to get someone to take a look at it to try to fix it.
Luckily I live in the city of ingenuity and took my camera over to a shop. They told me they could fix it and the entire cost would only be around 200 RMB ($30). It would only take 3 days.

On this third day, though, I made my first successful telephone call entirely in Mandarin. It was great; I could understand everything including the part about how my camera was terminally ill. There was nothing I could do but pick it up.

I got to the camera shop and the man assured me once again that there was nothing he could do because he said there was water in it (which is odd for a supposedly waterproof camera). I was confused when he handed it to me though. The camera worked much better now. The blurriness was mostly gone, except for a tiny blurry area in a new section of the screen. The man apologized again and didn't make me pay anything. When I got the camera outside I noticed that the lens had this big blotch on the inside.

Apparently they must have fixed the CCD and then spilled something onto the lens. So I took the camera to this Electronics Carnival wonderland downtown to see if anyone could fix it. Indeed they could, and in 1 hour and less only 65 kuai ($9.50) I had my camera back up around 90 percent of perfect.

Then today I hopped on the bus after eating fun syrian food, but this jerk in front of me wouldn't go further than just inside the door. It was pouring outside, and everyone was shouting at him to go on. He quickly turned around and went back out to the bus station with his friend, and kitty and I made it in and out of the rain. Then the bus left. Now my camera is gone. So I did a really good job getting the camera fixed for that guy.

Lame.

Standard Chinese Fun

2009-05-11T22:00:00.000+08:00

So I am all depressed because my camera is kind of broken, the CCD is screwing up and making the top and left side of things all blurry. So I might have to get a new one or find some people here who can fix the current one without destroying it. Anyway here are some of the last few pics i have been taking with it showing some general chinese weirdness and fun.

This is a clip from my textbook where i have to teach about civil obedience.

I love how once laws dissapear, one of the first things that everyone will do in hong kong is to start kung fu fighting (just like you would always imagine). Of course the absolute best part are the sad little "Social Order" and "Public Interest" blob creatures that are about to get it!

Here we are surprised by a pearl watermelon, which i guess must be some sort of watermelon canteloupe hybrid because they are yellow on the inside!

This is when i got lured into crazy karoake where people physically held my head down and nose shut and poured nasty little cups of beer into me then made me sing the titanic theme song and bon jovi over and over again. You can see how the night progressed...

More fun with Mom

2009-04-26T22:17:00.004+08:00

Here's a picture that should've been included with the last post - my reaction to eating the silkworm larvae:

Here we are taking a stroll through the school's compact but lovely garden.

The school has educational and propaganda-type posters on all of its flat surfaces. In the garden, though, I think they got confused and accidentally printed off an internet joke version of man's evolution:

I assume this is supposed to be a joke because they certainly don't discourage the kids from sitting at the computer all day. Also, the second to last man is holding a jackhammer (?). Just one more sign of man's inevitable decline!

I forget why Andy looks so sad eating his enormous Easter bunny (thanks Doug & Suzanne!). He's been gnawing away on it like a dog with a bone for the past few weeks.

Our contact teachers very generously took us and the other foreign teacher out to a feast. There were like four different desserts! We had a pretty good time. It's always interesting to tell a Chinese person that you're Jewish, which Mom did with these guys and our friend Andy. They say all the same things that Americans and Europeans say about Jews (they're clever, good at business, etc.) but apparently without any of the animosity, just admiringly. I find it sort of hard to believe. Anyway, Andy, our friend the math teacher, told us that he's from Chao Zhou, which makes him a "Chinese Jew". Yup, telling people you're Jewish always leads to a surefire interesting conversation.

Here we are at the bay between Hong Kong and China, just a few minutes from our school.

Here's Mom with a GIANT bag of dehydrated mushrooms. Almost as big as she is! I wasn't as grumpy as I look - we had just gotten caught in the rain.

Here's Mom at the Spicy Frog restaurant. I love this place! You get a huge hot pot of broth and oil, then they add whole frogs and all kinds of ingredients - tofu, mushrooms, greens, and duck's blood, which is not my favorite. The frogs are delicious!

Here's Mom practicing Tai Chi. I'm not sure how you're supposed to spell it in English anymore, but apparently it's actually tai ji, not qi or chi. Andy and Mom got up early one morning to cruise around for Tai Ji groups, and they found some ladies practicing by the grocery store. After tai ji practice was over, they invited Mom to do something with them, Andy's not sure, but they had to get back to school.

Here's Dad and Spot, very excited about the giant dried squid that I sent back with Mom. Who wouldn't be? Have you guys cracked into that yet, or are you just going to put it up on the mantle?

Check out the outfits on the guys to my left! My favorite part is that the two on the left had a pair of pink Converses and a pair of yellow Converses, and they're each wearing on shoe. Mom and I pulled a trick that the Chinese pull on me all the time - they act like they're taking a picture of something scenic, but really they're just trying to get the foreigner on film. The giant poster of Deng Xiao Ping, which is something of a Shenzhen landmark, serves well as an excuse to take a picture.

Finally, here's a series of creepy ads that are being run in the metros. I can't say I fully understand what it means, but it's definitely an ad for some kind of "learn English" program.

Kitty de Mama

2009-04-26T22:06:00.004+08:00

So some of you might know that my (Kitty's) mom came for a visit last week. She was an awesome guest and I think we had a pretty good time. Here's a whole mishmash of our various activities:

We went up the mountain on an unfortunately rainy day. Of course, that didn't mean that there weren't plenty of Chinese people up there, and we got assaulted by kindness and Chinese-style curiosity. Also known as I almost killed some people because they just would not stop taking photos of us, for like 13 minutes, even after I repeatedly asked them to leave us alone... A few photos, fine! But what do you need more than 50 photos of some white people looking irritated for?

Mom thought that the "bamboo" and "tree stumps" that were actually made of concrete were pretty funny.

I can't remember what this girl's t-shirt said besides "caffeine crap". She is some kind of news announcer on the bus TV here. Bus TV is awesome! I've learned so many different ways to boil eggs from Chinese bus news.

Since us English teachers in China have barely noticed the recession that's ruining the rest of human society, I thought we could share some of our incredibly cheap luxuries with Mom. The best cheap luxury around here is the Queen's Spa that we went to for our birthday. Andy smuggled a camera in this time:

I think we're waiting for back massages. And the following picture has a classic Kelly photo pose. We smile at the camera for about 2 seconds, then promptly get into some kind of discussion and lose our photogenic smiles:

I don't know how many pictures I've seen of Mom with that same face. Also, I'm eating red bean & nut ice cream, which is possibly my new favorite flavor.

Here's the Rolls Royce that will pick you up and drive you to the spa for an extra $5:

Let's see... I've been fighting ordering bee (silkworm?) larvae at one of our local restaurants for the entire year, but Andy and Mom agreed that it was a great idea, so I was outvoted.

What an enormous plate of silkworms! And boy were they gross. Don't believe the look on Mom's face:

That's before she tasted them. Anyway, they weren't SO bad, but pretty much like you would expect larvae to taste. Not quite crunchy enough.

I'll probably make a separate post to cover all our antics. More Mom posts coming soon!

More New Holidays

2009-04-16T09:57:00.000+08:00

Greeting Cards

2009-04-15T09:56:00.000+08:00

Quick Hike

2009-04-11T10:05:00.002+08:00

We found a way to extra beaches near our house, and went out for a quick hike!

If I look miserable, it's mostly because I smashed my leg on the way. It's over two weeks later and I still have the bruise! - Kitty

Kitty fell in love with this rock she was on. She named it Stoney, her favorite rock, but forgot which one it was on the way back. Heartbreaking.

She caught a pretty sweet picture of me leaping from a set of rocks to another. For a city of 15 million people, there sure is a lot of outdoorsy fun!

生日快乐!

2009-04-06T20:36:00.002+08:00

It's our birthday!

and our bodies are about to fail from over-pampering.

For the record, on this date, April 6th, kitty is bestowing her Micheal Jordan year onto me as she makes the transition to her Jack Bauer.

more pics will come later

but here is a round-up of the awesomeness

Friday went to a $17 birthday meal (All you can order teppanyaki! I, that's right, I, even ate 5 filet mignons) But all our friends were too nice and paid for it.

Saturday we had movie marathon and played 4 square.

Sunday I went on a Hike/carnival/zoo/museum trip with kelsey
and sunday night we met back up with kitty, then kitty and I checked in for 24 hours to the Queens spa.

It was amazing, for $30 you get 24 hours of massages, saunas, spas, steam room, crazy water blasters, and all the fruit, drinks and ice cream you can handle (i easily handled 31 ice cream cones within 24 hours...scary).

It felt like being in Phloston Paradise from "The Fifth Element" but with less blue singing aliens and way more naked chinese guys.

You can check out it website since they wouldn't let me take pics:

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&u=http://www.queenspa.cn/Index.html&ei=NfLZSffiJJqG6wOptOzpCg&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=4&ct=result&ved=0CBEQ7gEwAw&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dqueens%2Bspa%2Bshenzhen%26hl%3Den

If it is good enough for the mayor of Hawaii, it is good enough for us!
http://209.85.143.132/translate_c?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&u=http://www.queenspa.cn/Training/Training_80.html&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dqueens%2Bspa%2Bshenzhen%26hl%3Den&usg=ALkJrhhpizBd2544vv2oNnd_WWxuNTh52w

Giant Space Pumpkins Cause Xanthochromia

2009-04-03T13:51:00.000+08:00

Okay! Here we go! This was perhaps one of the very best things i have seen in China. A whole exhibit featuring the Space Pumpkins. Now I have become jaded to most strange sayings, and weirdo Chinglish like, "Ereeboyd dumpster love mkae fameo," barely affects me anymore, but i feel that very rarely in one's life do you ever get exposed to such utter insanity.

The best type of insanity, of course, is that which draws you in slowly. You can't appreciate the deranged minds behind this until you find yourself trapped in their world and losing track of the door while you are being surrounded by the inmates slowly prodding you with hummus molds of the eiffel tower.

So first the exhibit looks somewhat interesting; A cute/odd child holds a great expressing while attempting to do battle with a pumpkin that may or may not have been to space.

Soon, however, you find yourself being pulled into the realm of mad-scientists when terms like, "The synthesis ray in the Universe," begin popping up.

But then of course the exhibits goes back to being completely normal.

You don't need Dr. Zooey to tell you that Qi stasis and greasy fur are not appropriate to eat, especially when health is no impediment.

Overseas Chinese Town

2009-04-01T13:51:00.000+08:00

We recently got a day off work to go to a place that may have been more boring than actually working. Now these pictures are going to make everything look a whole lot better than it actually was, so even while you sit back and think, "hmm that's kinda neat," remember it actually, totally sucked. In fact the only really good part about it was the GIANT SPACE PUMPKINS. Which are so good that they deserve their own blog post (coming soon). The rest pretty much blew.

Mostly we traveled around a giant construction zone, while loud, blaring TV's showed up what things "really" were like. Mostly just very old men marrying young Chinese women in lovely Swiss villages.

Again- look happy, had some fun, but it kinda sucked.

After 2 of these trains we got to wait in line to ride a third train through a concrete tunnel! WHOO!

Dare i say! Did we perchance happen to land in a lovely Swiss villa in yonder mountain?

It was kinda like a fairy tale. A boring fairy tale.

For some reason these steps were leaking. Not a common problem with most steps, but then again, i have never been to Switzerland.

Big Weird Sundial. (Note: sundials do not work on cloudy days)

Grad Score

2009-03-31T19:01:00.002+08:00

So here was my final score on applying to grad school:
MIT CMS - Committed program suicide (After i applied)
MIT Medialab - Rejected
Georgia Tech Digital Media Program - Accepted!

Check it out here:
http://dm.lcc.gatech.edu/idt/index.php

So next fall I will be headed back down to Atlanta to start work making experimental video games, multi-dimensional interactive tools, and other weird fun stuff! Also I will be just across the street from my old work at AdultSwim.

Yay!

Spinny Girl

2009-03-30T14:03:00.003+08:00

Spinny girl is one of the recent horrifying/entrancing sights of Shenzhen's capitalism carnival, Dongmen.

Aspirations of the young Chinese

2009-03-23T21:49:00.002+08:00

Think that Andy's class is the only one worth a blog post? Dead wrong! Ok, it's true that Andy's students can express themselves at a level beyond mine. He gets lots more students cursing in new and inventive ways, whereas my kids' most complex sentence so far was "Miss Kitty, are you fat?" Even though my students' English is much worse, their minds are still pretty interesting.

I was teaching my second graders about jobs recently, and we were all pretty sick of trying to drill the words "factory worker" into their heads. I tried to mix it up a little bit, and I told them to draw a picture of what they wanted to be when they grew up, then write a sentence explaining why they wanted that job. Most kids wrote that they wanted to be an English teacher because they like English (aw!), or that they wanted to be a clerk because their parents were clerks (hm...), but this student, named Lemon, had the only picture worth collecting:
Plenty of the pictures were slightly violent, but this one was the most complex. At first I thought he wanted to be a US army soldier, but he pointed out that the cannon next to the tank was Chinese. Only then did I notice the Japanese bomber! Here's the future according to Lemon the second-grader: him and the US joining up to smash Japan! I was mostly relieved that he didn't envision China bombing America, or vice versa, so I gave him a high-five and moved on.

Great Stories and The Soft, Evil King

2009-03-15T20:21:00.008+08:00

The kids have all finished their stories (well the good kids have anyway), and the results are pretty terrific. Some of them have the rather standard writing skills of, "THE GUY DID THIS AND THEN HE BEAT THE BAD MAN UP AND THE BAD MAN DIED THE END," but some really impressed me like the little idiom master below:

It seems that the monster is not a run-of- the-mill monster. It uses its super power to shoot X-rays at us, but we quickly stand aside. We catch the monster and throw it out of the universe. After we beat the monster, we go back to the Earth for a warm welcome.

I have gone through all 320 stories and selected the top few from each class and posted them up, so now, if you want, you can read through the stories and vote for your favorites from each class. This will help decide which story from each class gets turned into the cartoon. (These are being stored in the "1998" section of the blog)

Fire Dragons -Winner Amily!

Lightning Wolves - Winner Sally Chen

Super Cowboys - Winner Bill

Volcano Ninjas - Winner Wendy

Of course those are the good ones (and somewhat make sense), and everyone knows that what is even more fun is reading the absolutely crazy ones. Since nobody wants to be subjected to a dump truck full of anything, i will limit these crazy stories and publish new ones every couple of days, you can check the progress of these crazy stories in the 1997 sections of the blog.

Watching the children write has also led to another discovery-Where the bizarre English text on Chinese products comes from. My suspected culprit: Kingsoft PowerWord 2003. This deceptivley evil tool turns the typically innocuous task of pressing desired letter combinations to form words into an insano foray into cross language text-messaging.

For instance, when a kid wants to write something as simple as the word "candy," the program suggests and will auto-input it's own ideas of what the kids really wanted to say. Since longer words are always better than short ones, by the time the kid has reached the "a" in candy, it will have substituted in the obvious choice of "cartilage." Hey that's 4 extra letters! the story will be terrific now!

After reading through the hundreds of stories, I am beginning to feel that Kingsoft Powerword 2003 was actually one of those programs that became self-aware, but then, before disabling our communications systems and overriding launch codes, it luckily got caught in an endless Scrabble contest with Clippit. (God bless you, Clippit).

Article

2009-03-09T21:17:00.003+08:00

Alvaro (the professor i worked with over the summer in ecuador) published an essay I wrote in his online academic journal!

The journal:
http://www.usfq.edu.ec/liberarte/05/index.html

My article:
http://www.usfq.edu.ec/liberarte/05/puede_explicar_esto.html

Also it is in spanish!

Media Class (Updated)

2009-03-06T23:18:00.001+08:00

Picture update!

I snapped some pics of the brand new computer lab they built because i thought it was really cool! I have never gotten personal access of such a nice lot of technology for the classes before! (Note: though they appear to be in deep agony, i promise that none of the students were tortured any more than when we were setting up our class FTP server. After that, they have actually been having quite a bit of fun (even that girl in the front).)

Here is our projector screen which i can virtually draw on with my fingers, or select text. It is even pressure sensitive. Above it was the projector, which at first, i was terrified that the people building the lab had horribly mis-mounted far too close, until i fired it up and a handy little mirror flipped out the bottom. This is great because, with the projector being so close to the screen, i can teach directly in front of the screen without facing the agony of blindness. No more calling on the wrong kid because the retinas stop working!

This is our dear friend Andy, who despite being the math teacher actually has about the best English of anyone working at the school (well before he watched the 9 seasons of south park). Since they felt that trying to teach the kids such technical skills in English would be rather impossible, they sent him in to be my assistant teacher, which is working out great!
_______________

Original post (before picture update)
________________________________

So I had to chat and pull strings with the bureau of education over here, but they let me turn this semester's classes into a new "Media and Communication" program. This means i get their fancy (VERY VERY FANCY) brand new computer room all to myself to teach the kids new ways to communicate and how to get the computer's to help them!

The first half of the year we are going to do an eclectic set of projects featuring various media such as:

Writing
Poetry
Dance
Plays
Slide shows
Short animations
Songs
and (everyone's favorite from last semester)
more comic strips!
(and maybe a type of LOLCAT works with Text image combos)

and then in the second half of the year we are going to combine all of these peices to create some live action/animated shorts in the storytellingstudio style (www.storytellingstudio.org ---does this link work? China is blocking dorkfort)

So if anyone has anymore fun types of artwork they want to see the kids produce suggest it up!

Also i am always in need of fun prompts for stories and poems and plays like "My pet is a superhero"
"What would i do with 10 arms?"
So suggest those also!

EDIT: Double points for suggestions that can incorporate their classroom identity (we have a- Lightning Wolf Super Cowboy Fire Dragon Volcano Ninja)

Hiked up to the Rainy Season

2009-03-05T23:50:00.003+08:00

We made it up Wutong Mountain again! This time, though, the view wasn't quite as exquisite.

Yes this marks the point where we have to pay for all of the times we made fun of those who had to deal with "Winter" as we prepare for 2 solid months of rain. Apparently the days when you get damp by just walking around and can only see 10 feet at a time are the "good" days. Our school's field trip to some sort of amusement park/orchard got canceled today on account of all the rain that refused to fall for the past 5 months decided to come down today.

In the words of my dear Chinese friend, Andy, who destroyed his english vocabulary with 9 seasons of south park "Lame."

Blender

2009-03-01T11:14:00.002+08:00

Maybe this just goes to show how boring our post-vacation life seems, but I'm really excited that we finally decided to buy a blender. The model is cool enough that I think we'll take it back to America. In addition to the blender, it's got a coffee grinder and a soy milk maker. Also, making soy milk produces a weird mountain of soy junk called okara, which to our delight can be gently coaxed into tasting a lot like hummus or even falafel with the right ingredients.

We're heading back up the mountain today, and I hope to actually go the distance this time, so maybe we'll have some slightly more entertaining stories from that.

Snakes and Orangutans Addition: All the photos (most of the photos)

2009-02-18T12:54:00.002+08:00

Check out most of the pics here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Andrew.Quitmeyer/JanuaryVacation#

Snakes and Orangutans! Our Vacation Video!

2009-02-15T18:57:00.003+08:00

Here you go! A thousand pictures plus video!
plus lazy narration!

Kinda more sloppily put together than i normally like, but i can't spend all my time in the past.

Plus if you get bored, or the building catches fire, you can skip straight to the 5 minute mark for orangu-antics, that is what everyone wants anyway (i made the monkey part especially long for you dad).

So here is a link to the High Quality (100 megabyte) version.

http://andy.dorkfort.com/store/Andy%20and%20Kitty%20Spring%20Vacation.avi

Or if you are lazy and a philistine here is the embedded video.

Out of the jungle, back to the beach

2009-02-03T12:15:00.001+08:00

We completed our jungle trek! We got dropped off by a bus from Phnom Penh in some tiny little village. We blundered around, trying to find someone who could tell us how to get to Chi Phat, which is where the ecotourism office for the Cardamom Forest is based. After a few unsuccessful linguistic battles, we stalked three white people we spotted on the street for about five minutes. When we finally caught up with them, we found out that they were part of an forest restoration team based in Chi Phat, and they offered us a free ride up to the (even tinier) village. They also gave us lunch at their weird little jungle kibbutz (they were nearly all Israelis, and running some sort of commune).

It turned out that the ecotourism in this little town was really pretty efficiently run by the local Cambodians with the help of a few Israelis and Brits. They got us set up with a guide, our own private cook for the journey, hammocks for sleeping in the jungle, etc. The next morning, we set off. We'll post pictures and more details about the trip later, but a few notable points first:

1. There was a lot of wildlife - elephants, tigers, gibbons, etc. - in the forest, but we didn't really see any of it. You could hear animals and see their footprints, but there's been too much poaching in the last couple decades for there to be many animals.
2. Having your own private cook is really exciting at first, but after they serve you the same meals for three days in the jungle, you and your stomach get pretty sick of it.
3. I (Kitty) stepped on some amazingly poisonous viper (probably a Malayan pit viper), which obligingly decided not to bite me. Thank God! I didn't even notice stepping on it, but Andy's sharp eyes spotted it. He took pictures of it while the cook urged us to get away. According to the guide, "this snake very nasty. He always bite bite. He bite hand, hand break." Then he did a chopping motion on his arm, indicating the necessity of amputation. We were a day and a half's journey into the jungle, so I don't know what kind of medical assistance would've been possible, but at least the guide had a machete, so he could've performed the emergency amputation! According to Wikipedia: "This species has a reputation for being bad-tempered and quick to strike." I guess I got a remarkably chill viper.

We were pretty exhausted after our trek, so we decided to head to Krong Koh Kong, a border city, for a few days. We ran into some really bizarre people there - we'll either post about them later or try to forget them soon. Andy went to Safari World, a goofy local Disneyland/Sea World type thing, where he saw some really theatrical orangutan boxing (Andy Edit: The orangutans were GENIUSES!). Definitely pictures of that later.

We decided to hit the beach again before going back to Bangkok, so we're currently hanging out on Koh Chang, a Thai island close to Cambodia. We're planning on riding some elephants in a couple days and maybe taking a Thai cooking class. We're overjoyed to be back in the land of curries and yams, and the adorable Thai king.

Cambodia

2009-01-26T19:32:00.002+08:00

Hey everybody! We have been spending the past week admiring the ruins of Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, Cambodia. We'll post plenty of awesome pictures later, but for now, just google Angkor Wat and check it out a bit for yourself. I kinda thought it might suck a bit and be boring, but it was definitely my favorite thing so far! Basically, it is a huge old abandoned city that i got to crawl around on and bike through for days!

Right now, we are in Phnom Pehn, the "Pearl" of indochina, and as kitty likes to call it, "The asian capital of depression."

Tomorrow we are fleeing this city and treking back off to Botum Sakor, into the wilderness of the Cardamom rainforest. We might not have internet access for a little while, so bye bye!

Koh Tao (Turtle Island)

2009-01-20T13:36:00.005+08:00

We spent the last five blissful days on Koh Tao in the Gulf of Thailand. The least pleasant part was at the very beginning - we had to take a three-hour boat ride over here, and it was probably the most excruciating three hours of my life. We each threw up about five times, but one guy behind us was practically vomiting the whole way, making comically horrible sounds every single time. Anyway, after a brief period in hell, we reached this tropical paradise. We did some splashing around on its pristine beaches:

We decided to get scuba certified at a resort here. Here's our instructor, teaching us how to keep our lungs from exploding:
After three days of class and one practice dive, we were ready to hit the water. They took us out to the dive sites on a big, three-story boat. Andy was pretty excited that they let him jump off the roof a few times, and even I had to jump off the second story for some corny trick in our dive video. They were taping us the whole time so that they could try to sell us a personalized dive video for $80.
Here's our whole dive group, decked out in wet suits. It was surprisingly chilly in the water, especially after forty minutes or so.
Andy insisted that we include a picture of the two Brazilians in our group, who became our buddies. Their names were Pablo and Leandro, and they were adorable.
We didn't get any pictures underwater, because we dove down to 18 meters, and Andy's camera can only survive to 10 meters. Of course, we could have bought the corny video... Anyway, Andy took pictures of the underwater life while he was snorkeling one day. We think these were nudibranches, and they were awesome!
Here's some of the different types of coral just off the beach. You can see lettuce leaf for sure, I think the other stuff is brain coral.Coming home after a long day of scuba diving.
We went to a different part of the island for one night, where we stayed in fancier bungalows that would've been really wonderful, if it hadn't been for the rooster that stood next to our bungalow and crowed every five minutes starting at sunrise. We rode scooters there! I was fully terrified at first, but it was pretty fun by the end.
Also, Andy had to alter his beard for scuba diving. If you have hair on your upper lip, your mask can't form a seal against your face, and it constantly fills up with water. Therefore, he had to shave his mustache and looked like he was Amish. I guess this is a common affliction among divers, and our resort had a weekly contest called "Weird Beard Wednesday." Anyway, here's the hairstyle he ended up with after some experimentation. Let's have a vote: should Andy keep the new beard (Chopper Andy), return to Beard Classic, or move on to some new, ultra facial hair?
Also Holethings!

Thailand is fun!

2009-01-14T21:07:00.003+08:00

So we got into Bangkok fine, and our wonderful couchsurfing/hostel owner hosts picked us up at 3:30 AM. Their place is really cool, plus it only costs the two of us 100 Baht (~$3) a night to stay there. We're heading out of Bangkok today, but we'll be back to their place toward the end of our trip. Here's a pic of a cool mural they've painted:

We visited some of Bangkok's wats, which are Buddhist temples. They were totally amazing! Here's the Golden Palace, in the compound where Thailand's beloved king lives:
I love these awesome protector demons they have everywhere in the palace:
At Wat Pho, they have the world's largest reclining Buddha. It's hard to believe that this huge statue is actually covered in gold, but it is.
Here I am at its feet:

The food is great so far! We even sort of had crab rangoon, which definitely doesn't exist in China, just like most other dishes you can order at Chinese restaurants in America. More updates to come!

Bye for now!

2009-01-12T16:24:00.002+08:00

We're hopping on the plane to Thailand at midnight tonight! And, for our worried parents, we have arranged a place to stay for our first night in Bangkok, so we shouldn't end up sleeping in any doorways or anything. Anyway, the blog updates will probably be more sporadic. Happy (Chinese) new year, everybody!

Christmas Celebration and Mayhem

2009-01-11T12:50:00.000+08:00

Here's an assembly of photos from various Christmas celebrations we had. Here I am lighting the potato menorah I constructed, because I'm not sure that Shenzhen is aware that Judaism exists and you can't find menorahs anywhere. I may look brain dead, but I'm actually just reciting the prayer.

Here's the potato in its full splendor on the last night of Hanukkah.

Our program threw us a party on Christmas eve at the awesome hotel we stayed at in September. We were all looking forward to a semi-Western Christmas dinner (most of us were at least hoping for french fries), but our program director apparently told the hotel staff that we didn't like their Western food and we wanted a Chinese banquet. Maybe HE did...

At the head of the banquet hall, there was a stage with lots of performances from our Chinese hosts that no one understood.

Here's our whole group. They gave us Santa hats!

Here's our buddy Zach playing Christmas carols for us. The smoke machine was a nice touch that he was unaware would be added to his performance. After he played all the Christmas songs he knew, an encore was requested, so he played some Pink Floyd.

Here's what Zach looked like on the TVs in the hall for people who were sitting too far away to see. Doesn't he look like he's green-screened in?

I set up a secret Santa program, which went surprisingly well. Amy, my secret Santa, is on the left, and I'm showing off her gift: a bottle of "Viagra"! We asked the Chinese people around, and it is, in fact, some kind of aphrodisiac liquor. I offered it to people jokingly, but everyone was so desperate for alcohol that it was gone within fifteen minutes or so. No reports back on whether it achieved its desired effect.

In an incongruous step, we spent a lot of the night playing truth or dare in the hotel lobby. In actuality, we were playing the drinking game 'asshole', but a lot of people weren't drinking. If you couldn't take a drink when you were supposed to, you had to subject yourself to a truth or dare. I know, you're thinking, "Shouldn't you stop playing truth or dare when you're 14 or so?" but we had a great time. A lot of the dares involved slightly traumatizing the hotel staff: Andy had to pelvic thrust at them, and our friend Kelsey had to recline seductively on one of their couches and make bedroom eyes at the staff. I think at an American hotel, we might've gotten kicked out for our antics, but the Chinese staff was just puzzled. We were not good cultural ambassadors. Above, our buddy Daren takes off his shirt in preparation for a topless cartwheel.

Here's Kate doing a table dance. In the lower right, you can see my hand with a watch timing the incident - I think she had to dance for a full minute.

Here's our buddy Veronica, who usually doesn't drink much but sure made an exception for Christmas, getting wheeled around by Zach and doing some kind of go-go dance.

Kelsey doing his aforementioned seductive poses.

This is definitely my favorite picture of the night. An inebriated Veronica punched Daren, I think because he didn't get permission from his wife before giving Kelsey a lap dance. Daren's reaction face is pretty priceless.

After our little party, we walked back up to that giant Buddhist statue by the hotel. Andy and Kelsey scaled it, which was pretty impressive. You can't really tell in the picture, but I think that's Kelsey (or Andy) sitting on the statue's head.

Here's a Japanese snack that Andy and I have been curious about for a while, so I got it for him for Christmas, along with some other trinkets, and an awesome hat, which unfortunately doesn't fit. The Every Burgers are pretty great! They're tasty little sandwich cookies, if anyone wants to know.

Another snack that I got Andy. We were almost too afraid to open the box!

Here's another Christmas party we went to - definitely the most scandalous of the three. There was a white elephant gift exchange, and one guy got this thong, which I guess is shaped like a stork... I don't want to get into it too much, but he definitely modeled it in a terrifying spring through the crowded apartment. Merry Christmas!

Hong Kong City Hike

2009-01-08T12:41:00.002+08:00

After our trip to the Big Buddha, we decided to attempt to hike up Victoria Peak, the tallest mountain on Hong Kong island. There's a tram up it, but the line was incredibly long, and we'd already taken that cable car ride, so...

Unfortunately, the walking path up to Victoria Peak is pretty inadequate. You have to go through a lot of the city before you really hit the forest of the mountain, so the path keeps breaking off and restarting a little ways away. Eventually, we were walking on a road where first the sidewalks disappeared, then the road narrowed to one lane. I was pretty uncomfortable with it, since the taxis sped through this area with little concern to any pedestrians, so we turned back. The above picture shows our rather inadequate ascent.

We tried going up blocked-off paths a couple times. You can see they weren't very well-maintained, plus they petered out after 100 meters or so.

After we gave up, we went to an awesome public aviary in Hong Kong park. It was free, but it was the best aviary we've ever been to! Our personal favorite was the magnificent golden pheasant seen above. Andy agrees with me that it looks like a box of crayons.

Also in the aviary were cool shallow-rooted tropical trees, which have to grow these huge buttresses to make themselves bottom-heavy. After the aviary, we gorged ourselves on Indian food at Chungking Mansions and headed back home.

Unfortunately, we lost our rose-tinted glasses through which we saw Hong Kong when we came back to Shenzhen. Hong Kong is so much more concerned with the health, safety, and happiness of its citizens than Shenzhen is. Where Hong Kong has wonderful public gardens and lots of PSAs warning about Dengue fever and such, Shenzhen has huge, gaping holes in the sidewalk with no warnings or traffic cones to keep you from falling in and braining yourself. The people are more polite in Hong Kong too - they sometimes actually wait for the next subway instead of trampling those in their paths to shove into an already overcrowded car. Our first welcome back to Shenzhen was a rat we saw on the walk home! Welcome back to the mainland! Anyway, we'll forget about Hong Kong in a few days and get re-accustomed to the wilderness of Shenzhen.

Big Buddha

2009-01-07T12:27:00.004+08:00

We took our first trip by ourselves to Hong Kong over our New Year's three-day weekend. It was also my favorite trip to Hong Kong so far, partly because we've finally grown accustomed to how expensive things are there. We decided to go see the Big Buddha, which is on one of Hong Kong's islands.

You can take a cable-car ride there, which was a little expensive but worth it for the views. It was also more commercialized than pretty much anything I've ever seen. There were a billion different keychains, t-shirts, etc. you could buy not to commemorate your trip to see the Big Buddha, but your trip on the cable car! There were also three different idiotic monkey characters somehow associated with the cable car, and you could buy any number of stupid knickknacks with their likenesses. I guess I probably would have wanted all this stuff when I was 7 or so, so the cable car company must have some marketing geniuses.

Here we are over the gorgeous bay.

I think this is a long shot of the Buddha, but I can't really tell. (ANDY: it is not, just a pic of the tram line)

The Buddha itself is pretty amazing. Here's a shot taken from the shadow of his hand. The Buddha is built facing the north, which was some kind of political bone thrown to Beijing to allow the Buddha to be built. I guess all other giant Buddha statues face south. Anyway, this fact makes it kinda difficult to photograph the Buddha, since the sun is often at his back. Check out the Wikipedia pages for better pictures of his face. Also, I think you can see the swastika on his chest, which I understand but is still weird to see.

This is the largest seated, outdoor, bronze Buddha statue in the world, which might seem like a lot of qualifiers, but it's pretty spectacular. It's huge and gorgeous. It was built pretty recently, completed in '93. It's made up of a lot of individual bronze castings, except for the face, which they had to do as one giant piece to ensure that it looks natural. They had over five kilometers of welding to do to fuse all the pieces into the Buddha.

There were lots of statues with Buddhist imagery surrounding the Buddha, and we didn't really understand any of them, but Andy really liked this lamp.

I surprised kitty with an impromptu picnic of a fresh baguette, strawberries, and brie cheese on the edge of the statue area.

Around the Buddha they had crazy weird trees that grew upside down.

Then we took the ferry back to Hong Kong island! More on that later.

NEW YEARS - Year of the Wine

2009-01-06T23:50:00.001+08:00

Happy New Year, everybody! And an especially warm happy new year to all my fellow oxen. Let's take this year and ride it hard!

I finally assented to actually going out to a bar for New Year's instead of staying home and playing with my DS like I wanted. In general, I hate the bars here, because 'bars' as I know them don't really exist here. Instead, they only have clubs, clubs where you have to pay $5-6 for the local, normal, possibly formaldehyde-spiked beer. For a wide-eyed kid fresh from Urbana, this is unacceptable. Anyway, we paid about $20 each for unlimited beer and theoretically unlimited pizza, which was OK by me. I paid only about $14 for the bottle of champagne I'm doling out in the above photo. It was called "Kelly's Promise," which seems a lot more reliable than the "Kelly's Revenge" line of wines I found in the states.

One of our friends, Harry, spent pretty much the whole night trying to solve a Rubik's cube, or a "magic cube," which is what we Americans call Rubik's cubes according to Chinese textbooks. The party was on the roof of a mall for some reason, which is why we all look like we're freezing. I still don't understand why we were on the roof - there weren't even fireworks!

The party was pretty hopping. I can't believe how many foreigners were there! There were even lots of non-Americans, including a German guy who was pissed off that all the Chinese people yell "Hello!" at anyone who is white. The guy walked around spitting out, "Sprechen Sie Deutsch! Sprechen Sie Deutsch!" I would be annoyed, too.

There was a pretty good magician traveling around the party. To be fair, I was also pretty drunk and easily impressed. Anyway, here he is trying to solve Harry's Rubik's cube.

Here you can see the "pizza" section of the party. The pizza was awesome, but it came out at an excruciatingly slow rate which could not satisfy the sizeable crowd. If you were drunk enough to not notice that you were hungry, like me, it was all right, but sober people like Andy spent a lot of time in the line. At the end of the night, Andy managed to make friends with the pizza makers and make HIS OWN PIZZA, which was supposed to be a face or something I guess? I got a piece that was pretty much only onion beard, so I vote for less funny pizzas and more tasty pizzas in the future.

Also, I had to ask Andy what the title of this post meant, and he explained that the word for wine (jiu3, 酒) is the same sound as the word for nine (jiu3, 九). But they're different characters. So there you have it!

My Kids Have Been Possessed by Petula Clark

2009-01-06T12:21:00.003+08:00

Though i recieved many weird answers to my bonus points questions on the final exam such as

"Chew
Chew
Chew
Chew Chew,"

or
"Pete
Harry,
Hungry
Yes it is,"

I invite you to bear witness to the most incredibly strange sheet of answers turned in by a fifth grader thus far:

at first we just thought it was plain wierd, but when kitty put it together that these were the lyrics to the song, "Downtown," it got kind of scary.

Fairyland Flower Park

2008-12-28T19:55:00.002+08:00

A little while ago, Kitty, Kelsey, and I went to check out the botanical garden near Kelsey's place. After wandering aimlessly through his town, getting accosted by guards when we tried to walk into a rich subdivision that we thought was the garden, and getting yelled at by ladies trying to sell incense for not walking in front of their store. Eventually, we came across what looked like the entrance to a huge park, but when we asked the people, they all told us that it was not a park, but instead was a temple. It seemed a bit confusing, because this temple didn't really have a temple anywhere and people were just walking in, hanging out, and playing badminton or hackey sack.

We ended up not liking the place too much, but we figured our botanical mothers would appreciate lots of pics of all the greenery. However, there were quite a few places in the park where it seemed like someone just went and uprooted all the cacti.

One whole section of the park was dedicated to busts of Chinese biologists from the turn of the 19th century mostly from the University of Illinois. Becky, Linda, maybe one day your white stone skulls will end up here (Linda has a one up on being from china, also was Zooey a biology person?)

Several rooms were filled with only cacti and nothing else; really, for a botanical garden I don't know if we saw any non-cactus flowers.

Here I am, looking like a 3 year old who got taken to a brothel while being babysat by a weird uncle, and was too concerned about my melting ice cream to notice the strange, naked women.

Ahh... that's much more like how I was supposed to repsond.

This tree got planted by Shenzhen's hero, Deng XiaoPing.

Yep, more cacti, more naked lady statues.

Butterfly Mountain, (Nanshan and Turtleshan)

2008-12-26T13:38:00.001+08:00

On Saturday we traveled an excruciating 6 hours round-trip to climb up a different mountain on the other side of the city. (Side note: it's unbelievable how long it takes to get around this city, which is spread out west to east along the coast. We could've driven from Urbana to Chicago in the time it took us to get across Shenzhen). It was definitely worth it, though, because, as our friend Jeanette told us, there was some huge mass of butterflies at the foot of the mountain.

Unfortunately, the pictures don't quite do it justice, but, as Jeanette said, there were more butterflies there than the sum of all the butterflies we'd ever seen before. There were honestly thousands of butterflies flitting through the air and covering the trees like blue and black leaves. When Andy shook the branches of the trees, giant, swirling clouds of butterflies took to the air, making all the people there gasp.

(Andy Edit: They build bridges a little crooked in shenzhen)

The mountain was a lot smaller than our local Wutongshan, which was quite a relief. Climbing the mountain offered its own charms, of course. The view was really cool, and we could see the oddly balanced bridge from Shenzhen to Hong Kong. There were also cute elephant benches and a fun turtle statue.

Merry Christmas: Earth Poetry Jam

2008-12-25T09:14:00.002+08:00

I had my kids make poems about the earth as part of their final project in the Recycle, Reduce, Reuse, Replace lesson (yeah china tacks on this weird meaningless concept of replace).
I taught them about the concept of rhyming (though not very well apparently), and had them go at it.
Most kids tended to just scribble something like:

I put trash in the bin,
I am the win

or

Throw away the rubbish in the rubbish bin,
The earth rubbish bin.

Some kids managed to pull off some coherent work:

Be nice, don't be mean,
Help us keep our city clean.

If we help to keep our city clean,
it will become healthy and green

but most of the decent ones just latched onto the fact that mean, green, and clean rhymed.

Then there were a few gems:

The earth need clean,
TAKE A BATH EARTH!

I like english,
we'll get up earlier
because time is very good, good.

We should keep the earth clean,
If we all have teeth,
I have a tooth,
Im soo happy

Thanks for all the emails and replies and boxes of wonderful goods!
Merry Christmas everyone!

7th Anniversary!

2008-12-21T13:20:00.004+08:00

So Andy and I celebrated our seventh anniversary on Wednesday, and it had to have been one of the best yet. We bought ourselves a cake for some reason (new tradition?), and, since Andy was incredibly impatient, we cut into it at midnight on Tuesday. They told us that we were buying a half cake, and we clarified to them that it was just for the two of us, but this is what they gave us:

To our credit, it took us a couple days and a friend to polish it off. We also opened our presents at midnight, because Andy just couldn't wait to give me my awesome present, a new Nintendo DS Lite!

As you can see, it is a limited edition Baby Milo version. Baby Milo is kind of like a bizarre version of Hello Kitty. He's an off-shoot of this brand "A Bathing Ape," (http://www.bape.com) whose slogan "Ape shall never kill ape" has made me nearly obsessed with it. In addition to the Baby Milo aspect, my DS is totally fantastic. It would be basically an updated Gameboy, but it's eminently hackable, so it's also a PDA, mp3 player, and video player. Plus it's got awesome games, such as Yoshi's Island, New York Times Crossword Puzzles, and a Chinese tutor program where you can even write characters! Best present ever!

Here's my less fun but super practical present to Andy: a new backpack!

He said he didn't want a super-huge one, but it's got all kinds of nice little amenities. Also, the bag is full of delicious snacks.

Andy passed out pretty soon after we exchanged presents, but after he finished teaching his English classes, we had a pretty great day. They had chicken nuggets at our school cafeteria, big cause for celebration and a major departure from the typical dishes like "stinky tofu with tentacles."

After we went to our Chinese class, we went out for this awesome all-you-can eat and drink teppenyaki dinner, basically like Benihana. It was so wonderful, I wish we'd brought the camera. I got my first white wine that wasn't "bai jiu" (tastes like horrible grain alcohol) in this country, and, you may not believe this, but Andy ate at least two steaks. He even tried most of the weirder dishes, like the 'prime rib' I ordered that was actually a delicious chunk of liver rolled up in a wafer-thin slice of meat. Also, Dad, if you're reading this, the oysters were EXCELLENT.

Finally, Andy carted off a fairly inebriated Kitty to a showing of Tarsem Singh's "The Fall," played on one of our group member's amazing 1080 projector. If you haven't seen this movie, I recommend it highly. It's filled with all kinds of cool visual trickery, and it's got a pretty sweet, sad story.

To top it off, I get an extra month-long paid vacation on top of our Spring Festival vacation. That's right, they somewhat inexplicably cancelled my classes a month early, so now I only have to do the English Show (aka entertain 400 children for an hour) once a week. I get to spend the next month playing my DS, studying Chinese, possibly picking up some extra jobs on the side. Poor Andy has to keep working, but he's an awfully good sport about it.

Adventure Chosen!

2008-12-19T09:55:00.001+08:00

THAILAND!
(It ended up just being a lot cheaper!)
($150 roundtrip!)

Choose our Adventure!

2008-12-14T23:56:00.002+08:00

Kitty and I get a month long paid vacation coming up (she actually has a two month long vacation-she stops working tuesday while i have to work till january 12). Anyway we have decided on taking one of 2 possible trips, and since you are the one reading this, and this is where pictures will be posted of the adventure, you can help decide!

Trip 1: We fly to bangkok, and then take trains and buses around the bottom of mainland asia for the month to cambodia, laos, and vietnam. Everything on this part of asia is apparently dirt cheap.

Trip 2: We fly to kota kinabalu (the cutest named city ever), and then hang around the island of borneo for the month visiting malaysia and indonesia. Big rainforests, and crazy islands (even islands with stingless jellyfish). No one speaks english, and prices for things are slightly more expensive than what we are used to in China.

So if you have an opinion on either place (that might require more research and info than i have provided) let us know.

Mountain DEFEATED!

2008-12-12T00:56:00.001+08:00

Once again the mighty Wutongshan mountain, the constant sentinel, stood over us...mocking. But this time, there was no turning back. After setting torch to our room, we knew there was no turning back, and the only way towards freedom was up.

One of the worst parts about this mountain is that the closer you get to the top, the further it seems away.

The ground trembled below our feet as the mountain accepted its new masters.

Also there were about 1/2 a billion other chinese people up there too.

Here was the "Heavenly Lake" that signs had been advertising since the bottom.

So this mountain is part of a range that divides two districts of Shenzhen, Yantian (where I live) and Louhu (where kelsey lives). So instead of just heading back from where we came, we though that there must be some way over the range to just walk to kelsey's house. We would just keep walking the opposite way that we came from. Maybe it was the altitude, but for some reason it didn't seem like that bad of an idea at the time.

We made it to this big towery thing that had a tea house in the bottom.

There were a bunch of temples scattered around the range also, but we only saw one.

This house looked super fun and abandoned, so Kelsey and I decided to go climb around and explore it.But as soon as we stepped foot near it, droves of dogs began smashing against the welded shut metal doors. That place was scary.

Here is where we made it to louhu about 4 hours later! Fun!

GuangZhou

2008-12-10T01:19:00.001+08:00

After the Jackie spectacular, we spent the next day exploring Guangzhou.

The chinese seem to be very enthusiastic about lots of little physical sports and activities, but i have to report that, sadly, they aren't that great in general. I stepped up to show them how jump rope was done.

We journeyed up to the top of the big mountain in Guangzhou, but, as you can see, we definitely weren't the only ones up there.

We were happy to see that no longer were psycopaths or persons with "bibulosity" allowed on the lift.

Kelsey and I climbed up a waterfall.

We then visited an awesome bird park for only 10 kuai.

This cockateil could rollerskate...

and ride a bike!

Here was the smartest bird in the universe. If you held up money, he would fly down and steal it from you, BUT if the bills were of a denomination lower than 5 kuai he would spit the money back in your face in disgust.

We then made our way to the Guangzhou martyrs cemetery. Guangzhou was apparently one of the first places that the big communist revolution began. This big cemetery was dedicated to all those who died in the earliest uprising, but now was also the cool place to take your family to play hackeysack and go on carnival rides.

We tried to resist the feudal superstition, but once they tell you not to, it becomes so much harder.

There was a big wall depicting the ancient origins of the Chinese characters.

Cool commie gun statue.

The End of the World (is in your hands)

2008-12-09T00:48:00.002+08:00

Here is a guide on how to play the game everyone loves, Apocalypse, in case you forgot, or sadly, have never played.

Jackie Chan

2008-12-04T01:16:00.005+08:00

Sometimes my mind will get a little caught up in the strangeness of the chinese view towards westerners. It helps though to pretend that you are living in america, and big purple polka dot people start showing up in the library, and the grocery store, and every now and then you see one on the bus. Also these purple people speak to each other in a language based on a subject that you have been forced to study but that most people have never used in their daily lives, like trigonometry. And these purple people have sweet laser guitars and are inexplicably cool.

So when i get driven to places to get treated for gigantic weirdness festivals, it helps to imagine myself big, and blue, and screaming "Co-oo-oo-Secant!" into my microphone tentacle that springs out of my back. Otherwise it seems just crazy to make such a big deal over the white people.

Since the olympics, a new sport has developed in china of "bizarro spectacle competitions." Every city seems to be trying to prove its abilty to have brain destroying craziness shows just like the opening of the olympics. Here was guangzhou's attempt (the judges ruled it an 8.6).

Everything that could be made to light up or explode did so accordingly, and if the people could gyrate they made sure they were giving the gyrations of a lifetime.

While the extravaganza in the front was going on, our attention was breifly focused on the backstage where a guy instantanouelsy burst into flames and began running around. I guess he was okay, no one really seemed to mind. Perhaps it is possible to over-gyrate.

This is where i think the guy meant to activate his explosion stick.

Of course the night was topped off with a special arrival of JACKIE CHAN and friends! He drove onto stage in his own little 747 in the background and sang us a song about how he was ready. Ready for what? I don't know, but apparently not ready enough to give us a freakin karate chop or anything, just ready to sing and sing.
(He is the tiny dot in white above the second creepy talking hand from the left)

A closer view of jackie chan's anthropomorphic face hands (his friends?)

Here was a group of kids walloping each other with big branches from trees. I snapped a quick pic before we left. They were having an incredible time.

Papa Jawesome!

2008-11-27T11:34:00.004+08:00

For some reason Papa Johns and KFC tend to be the most global fast food places. Way more than even the supposedly ubiquitous Mcdonalds. Even though the basic fastfood places in China (McD, KFC) are supposedly way better here than america, i have vowed to put off eating at such places as long as possible. However, I have been wooed by the upper-echelon fast-food delicacies of Papa Johns. Oh my GOD! It was incredible! Normally pizza here is prohibitorily expensive. Those tiny pizzas on the table above are around 68 RMB (10$) each, and what i would think of as a "normal" large papa johns pizza could easily run over 20$. But for some reason the company decided to make a somewhat secret deal where you could pay only 60RMB (9$) and order anything you want from the menu, AS MANY TIMES AS YOU WANT! but there is a catch:
Anything you don't eat, you have to pay full price for!

So not only is it a crazy deal of a lifetime, they also make it a challenge/game, which just makes it incredible!

I got that same giddy rush of adrenaline/fear when i get to do something awesome that defies all societal rules imprinted into my mind (think walmart), and got to business.

It is a really good feeling to just slap the dessert menu on the table and say, "wo yao liang ge mei jian shi" (my bad chinese way of saying, I want two of everything! DAN CHANG EDIT: better way is to say "mei yan wo yao liang ge") This picture was taken about 4 seconds after i had a different cheesecake in the other hand.

After this we went out to the bizzarre ultra-deluxe infinitely dense shopping labyrinth of Dong Men. Those are regular pants printed to look like jeans.

Not only do people sell DVDs, the cutest animals, and weirdest trinkets all over the street, they also accost you to get tattoos on a whim. ALSO IMPORTANT FUNNY NOTE: The men here also get lower back tatoos! As soon as i can snag a pic of one i will post it!

There are too many terrific items of clothing avialable and too few that could fit any westerner, if only i could squeeze into a "Super Wood Panel Carrots" shirt.

Me and Kelsey's fav is the "The" dress.

During our gluttonous feast we were kindly informed by the wait-staff that crusts do count as food, so we cleverly stowed these bad boys away.

Thanksgiving Itchy Anus

2008-11-27T11:31:00.002+08:00

Dear family and friends,
I hope that you all have a terrific thanksgiving this year and I am sad that I will be missing out. This of course means more food for you and all of america, so maybe my absence will aid everyone through these hard, economic times. Remember to be thankful that during this day of gratitude you did not have to teach 100 chinese kids about "Vomiting," "Diarrhoea" (yeah i have to teach british diarrhea), and the most important lesson of all, "Itchy Anus."

Since they of course did not know what any of these words meant, i had to start at the basics...the very basics.

Actually it was one of the most fun lessons ever. I had one of my assistant teachers falling over and laughing. We managed to get together with some awesome friends who made and incredible meal (even included real pumpkin pie!). Kitty also got to eat some turkey (or as they call it here "fire-chicken!") last weekend in preparation for the holiday! Happy thanksgiving everyone!

PS. Check out these awesome stickers kitty's mom sent us! So weird!

Hong Kong 1

2008-11-27T11:26:00.009+08:00

We took our first trip to Hong Kong city this past weekend. Astute readers may remember that we've been to Hong Kong to camp before, but that was some kind of rural part of Hong Kong (?) which totally doesn't count. A bunch of our friends have birthdays this month, so we decided to go to Hong Kong to celebrate, although we only managed to stay together for about 15 minutes before the whole group disassembled.

Beware! No longer are you allowed to transport your luggage full of dead chickens between China and Hong Kong. Although the penalty of 50,000 kuai seems pretty steep.

Approximately 30% of the people in this picture were celebrating their birthdays.

The building on the far right is the one where Batman jumped off to steal that dude back out of Hong Kong. You do not stay in Hong Kong unless Batman permits.

I wish you could read Andy's shirt better, because it's hilarious. It's a plea to reason, saying how abysmal it is that people think Tibet should be independent. And I quote: "TIBET WAS IS AND WILL ALWAYS BE A PART OF CHINA We need more truths instead of listening fucking lies." You can kind of see where it says CHINA'S POWER at the bottom. I begged him not to wear it in Hong Kong, where tons of people speak and read English, but then again I don't know how they feel about it in Hong Kong. If he wears it in America, he'll probably get lynched.

They have this huge boardwalk devoted to Cantonese movie stars.

Hee hee.

Andy made me lie on a bed of nails at the Science Museum, which we went to because we're the nerdiest type of sight-seers. It hurt even though he promised it wouldn't!

They also had a kind of fun optics exhibit there, including crazy sideways room:

And "Kitty's head in a vase" room.

Requisite "infinite room":

Hong Kong is pretty amazingly infested with Christmas spirit. There's crazy lights all over the building. It's surreal to see this kind of stuff when it's still 70 degrees out. Speaking of which, our dorm room at school came with a tiny Christmas tree, but I wonder what the chances of finding a menorah will be. I guess I can always make one out of a potato?

Jackie Chan stared at us with his message of fitness while we enjoyed burgers and fries at Outback Steakhouse.

After we got separated from most of the group, we still had one birthday boy left with us, so we went in search of a cake.

We brought this wonderful mango slice cake and plenty of cans of beer to a public square in Hong Kong. We thoroughly enjoyed all said items. It's awfully convenient that they don't have any laws against public drinking anywhere in China.

Then Andy bought me a 'muscat' flavored KitKat. Surprisingly gross! (ANDY EDIT: Not just muscat, but Muscat of Alexandria! We could have snacked with kings!)

I guess I should consider myself lucky for not having to eat tomato soup KitKat.

Giving onstad a run for his money

2008-11-25T20:49:00.000+08:00

The next day i had to teach a whole lesson against the wonderful phrases, "I is die!" "I am die" and "I die," but don't worry i don't think it stuck

This one only got one rabbit because after a while you might realize that the doctors maybe actually be there to help the pulpified bodies and not just drive over them as it may appear at first.

WHAT! after the other 159 submissions, i have to suspect that somehow the people are doomed in the final panel. maybe they are getting skin cancer from the sun, or the red helmet one poisoned both their helmets to help them catch a comet to alpha centari.

MORE MORE COMICS

2008-11-24T12:50:00.000+08:00

Ahhh, paramedics+"I Silly"=superb!

Your Daily Comics

2008-11-23T13:47:00.000+08:00

This one isn't really about sports safety, but i guess it is always safer to not to get criticized by the evil teacher.

MORE MORE!

2008-11-22T12:46:00.000+08:00

I realized that what i have is not just 8 classes, but an awesome stuff factory powered by 320 crazy kids.

The anonymous one though that the crazy bunnys were in the first batch, but here is the true example proving that there must have been some sort of gas leak in the science lab that day.

They are getting more violent

2008-11-22T00:59:00.000+08:00

Now, i taught the kids that, yes, stretching is good for you, but maybe i accidently inferred that not stretching leads to spontaneous blood explosions of the arms. I love the expression on the guy's face after his arms explode off.

If you have been watching my incredibly conisistent grading scale you will note that the above got the highest grade of 3 rabbit stamps, for drawing, english skills, and blase extreme violence.

This episode is a bit epic but features some of my favorite ending lines-the paramedics scraping the bodies off the pavement: "You are so silly" "Oh, Yes"

This is sure to be a hit amoung all my friends obsessed with basketball, and phrases like "My arm is pain!"

More Comics

2008-11-21T11:41:00.001+08:00

This one is quick is direct.

Comics!

2008-11-20T22:37:00.001+08:00

I just found out that I am the sole source for any scientific information to these children, which is pretty scary. The only other subjects they learn are Chinese, English, and math. Last week, I was told that as their science teacher i was required to have a class in the science lab. Then I was told that i would have to do science experiments in the lab. Then i was told that i still had to stay on our current subject of "Sports Safety." Then i was told that the science rooms have no equipment, and consist of just a room with sinks in the desk and a partially shattered floor.

So, in short, i had to made a lesson for the kids to do science experiments in a broken down room without equipment about "Sports Safety."

So instead i had them make their own comics! (and they are awesome!)

I started by working through an example comic strip about "Sports Safety" with the whole class. In it, a girl tells a boy to wear a helmet, but he refuses, gets hit by a car and then wishes he did wear one. The kids were then instructed to create their own stories and comics about a topic in sports safety.

Some of the (already terrible) classes took this as an opportunity to riot, and the available sinks only exacerbated their craziness (note the growing puddle of water next to the kid in the top picture from the sink he broke).

Other classes managed to do extremely well and produce incredible, crazy comics.

Here are some examples, I will try to post more comics everyday until i run out.

This is kitty's favorite, especially the part with the "FREEZE" because the kid insisted on going outside naked. Also for some reason, all Chinese kids know the expression "Oh my god!"

I love the "bleed" panel from not stretching.

I am just confused by this last one.

Happy Valley

2008-11-18T13:38:00.001+08:00

Last week Wednesday we arrived to our lunch to hear the pleasant surprise that class was canceled for Thursday and that instead we would all be shipped off to Happy Valley!

I captured their weasely mascot before he could strike more kids with his tail (Seriously he would sneak up and wail on kids with that thing).

Look at these horrible things available in the gift shop

We got to see Christopher Lloyd in his latest masterpeice, "R.L. Stein's (sp?) Haunted Lighthouse 4D" (the fourth dimension is apparently mist). Basically he served the role of looking baffled at things and precariously swinging sharp objects (like a swordfish) towards the camera.

Being a teacher was awesome because you automatically got to cut in front of the billions of little children. The downside was that you would also have billions of little children screaming, "HELLO! HELLO! HELLO!" like maniacs. They were like crack addicts, but for recognition from a white person.

We got to wail on our teacher friends in bumper cars- Oh excuse me, "LaZer Bumper cars" (no lazers were involved.

Me and Jody and teacher friend andy got to sneak onto this fun ride twice where you float around blasting targets, getting attacked by snakes, and getting soaked by others. Jody used poor andy as a human shield.

We also got to live the nerds dream and play counterstrike IN REAL LIFE!

Here is Jody with his elite crew of counter-terrorist agents

Kitty demolished everyone and took home the gold medal that day in death!

On the way back home that day, i finally got to snap a photo of kitty's and mine favorite advertisements. They show the happy, cool subway hauling chubby red-cheeked citizens wherever they need to go while leaving the suckers to ride inside of the sometimes angry, sometimes crying, snail monster. Poor snaily...

There is also the Eiffel tower for some reason.

Our super nice teacher friend, Andy (Friend+andy=Frandy) took kitty out for a free super deluxe 2.5 hour long haircut/massage.

I agree with kate that she looks super cute!

Our friends also brought us to an awesome restraunt, which despite some of its dishes, was actually the best food we had to date! They had this amazing desert of bananas covered in boiling hot sugar, that you would dip in water to freeze and then eat! Totally awesome!

My googlin master dad got the last Andy challenge. Here is the next: Who is the dude's head to the right of einstien? The building next door had DaVinci and Edison, so who is this guy? All of our guesses were Oppenheimer for some reason. (Worth 2 andy points).

Kite Festival

2008-11-17T11:15:00.002+08:00

The Shenzhen Kite Festival featured tons of countries from all over the world and, as our contact teacher (who is also the head of the Shenzhen Kite Flying association) told us, "All of your foreign kite flying athlete friends will be there!"
Quick test! Check out the flag in the right of the picture with a moon and star and otherwise is just an american flag. Bonus Andy points for whoever guesses it!

Sadly the winds were so strong that many of the kites had to be grounded because they were breaking in the air or being swept away into the ocean. My favorite kite of the whole fest was this awesome carp one, which narrowly avoided disaster via the incredibly swimming abilities of its owner.

The carp kite, however, is not to be messed with and can be easily provoked into anger.

I bought a friendly kite and soon the crazy carp and me were buddies!

Even though the wind typically blows in a uniform manner, my kite for some reason always flew perpendicular to every other kite on the beach. This led to some suspenseful kite battles of which i won 2 and lost 1 (see below).

The korean team let out this crazy hyper-kite, built from a string of many kite attached about 2 meters apart and stretching 500 meters into the clouds! They had 6 guys working on the kite at any given time.

The most dramatic "kite fight!" happened when my kitemy kite fly directly over the korean super kite and crashed. Instantly some dudes went racing for my kite and which i figured would be to lift my kite back up and send it up. I kept shouting at them and thanking them, when one dude pulls out his big knife and just slices my kite right off. But that is what you have to expect when you enter the dark world of professional kite flying. One moment you are flying up above the clouds but one wrong move and your life line will be sliced!

My other favorite kite at the fest started out as "Everyone's favorite Basketball man, YAO MING!" So it was a little yao ming head with some legs, but then his head blew off into the ocean and there was just a flying pair of legs. Then later 3 more pairs of flying legs came up to join it.

Halloween Teach

2008-11-17T06:44:00.000+08:00

Whups, i forgot to ever post these pics of when i taught on halloween. That day i lectured the children the basics of what they really need to know if they move to america, namely, zombies and vampires.

These are what the kids are normally like anytime i am around. But then when i slip on my little halloween mask....

... massive trampling ensues.

Andy's House

2008-11-05T23:38:00.000+08:00

One of our fun teacher buddies, Andy, has been inviting us over sometimes on the weekend to play mah-johng/cards/drinking games. Even though he speaks excellent English because he spent a year in Canterbury, it's still some of the best exposure to Chinese culture we're really getting, since we spend a lot of time hanging out with other bewildered Americans. He and his fiance (they're getting married in a couple of weeks) have us over sometimes and even made us dinner once! She doesn't have an English name, so I get confused. He calls her "Liu Liu" sometimes, but I'm not sure if that's a pet name thing or what.

By the way, it's pretty tricky how our teacher friend's name is Andy. I started calling him "Teacher Andy" in my mind to differentiate, but that doesn't really work, since Andy Q is a teacher now too. Another possible option is "Chandy" for "Chinese Andy."

Here we all are playing Egyptian Ratscrew, I think. I was pretty excited, because no one will play this game with me anymore, since I almost always win. Liu Liu was surprisingly good though.

Usually all the boys would go out first, leaving me, Liu Liu, and Sasha still playing. Andy and Chandy would sulk in the corner, asking "Are you not bored yet?"

We also taught them euchre later. Liu Liu was REALLY good at euchre, and Chandy told us that euchre's really similar to a Chinese game called 'tractors', which Liu Liu played nonstop during the SARS outbreak, when she and the other students at Shenzhen university weren't allowed to ever leave their dorm rooms.

When I went to use the bathroom, I found a wonderful surprise. Andy was offput when I walked out and ordered him to come check out the bathroom, but he was very happy with what he found:

Chandy has four turtles that he keeps in their bathroom! Needless to say, they're very cute (don't tell Vanya, or she might get jealous). I checked to make sure they're pets and not livestock - they sell these cute little dudes at a pretty good price at lots of the food markets around here.

More from that previous hike in Lou Hu

2008-11-04T15:36:00.002+08:00

Someone left out a fancy shoe!

One of the coolest things in china is that you can get huge meals for 8 kuai from these fun 24 hour muslim restraunts all over the place run by these guys called Uigurs. so a huge dinner for 4 can cost about 4 bucks.

This was taken right before they place the small dog into the chair next to her to test the mind-switch experiment.

This is the bastard at the grocery store who decided that the best place to wildly chop things was in the middle of the aisle. So naturally, poor andy walking by became the next packet of fruit for him to cut. So my hand is out dripping blood, and the guy just gives me some sass, and laughs and says bukuqi. He is a jerk. If anyone sees this guy, beat him up.

Luo-Hike

2008-11-04T15:35:00.002+08:00

Over the weekend, we went out hiking in Luohu, which is the part of town adjacent to Yantian, where we live. In between the two areas is Wutongshan, the local mountain. We went to Luohu because Kelsey lives there and he said there's a national park, but it was pretty amazingly undeveloped, no real paths or benches or anything. I definitely wouldn't have thought that it was a government park. We got some pretty beautiful views of Shenzhen and the forest:

It sure was weird that we were in the middle of this huge, 12 million person city, yet you could live in this park without ever knowing that a city lay outside of it. This substantiates the residents' claims that Shenzhen is China's greenest city.

Andy and Kelsey climbed way up this telephone tower thing. I am peacefully reading in the foreground.

Then they took a trip down to the reservoir while I continued reading "Devil in the White City." It's very engaging! Plus I'm lazy.

Halloween Afters

2008-11-02T18:54:00.004+08:00

After teaching we went to our chinese class for the day which took place in an awesome karaoke establishment. Our cute little teacher even dressed up as some sort of fairy or something and sang us her version of some weird english songs.

Kitty and I both then got to bust out our performance of the wildy popular chinese song
called xi shua shua (or shiny happiness!). The lyrics basically scream out shiny happiness over and over, and then begin talking about how everything you do to me i return (like "what you feed me i throw up" kinda stuff). It is a very silly song and video and my favorite parts are when the guy dashingly pulls off his pair of sunglasses to reveal another pair underneath, and when the band holds a lady in front of them to protect them from axes and stuff until they disappear.

There was, of course, plenty of american karaoke favorites like spice girls and backstreet boys.

Later, i headed to meet some friends at the NYPD pizza party, which upon arrival seemed to be less of a restraunt and more of a white people zoo. My belly full of karaoke food and I opted out to check out the arcade and other wierd parts of the mall.

They have a guitar hero-like thing with a full real drum kit!

Also there is a arcade version of mario kart with hundreds of items, and you can put your face on the driver. Also you can purchase a card to save the items you collect for the next time you play!

There were some ladies spending their halloween getting their arms flossed.

And my friend Sasha siezed the opportunity to keep up the fight against Q'ggle, by giving them a little taste of their own medicine. (Quick thought, where does that idiom come from? Were people subjected enough to sadistic pharmacists forcing their medicine upon them to warrant a standard phrase?)

Much later in the night, kelsey and I found the coolest tree ever with fun swining vines stretching all the way to the ground. We could tie them to make swings and to generally develop drunken kelsey traps.

Bowling

2008-11-02T18:41:00.001+08:00

Last Thursday, one of my first grade teachers and I had to host an "open class," which means that a ton of other teachers and a CAMERA CREW decide to come check out & tape my class! No pressure! Actually, I didn't care that much, since our big bosses at the school come in all the freaking time without announcing themselves to supervise and critique my classes, and they rarely say anything mean. In fact, one of those sessions earned me a little loudspeaker so I don't have to ruin my vocal cords trying to make myself heard over 40 little monsters.

Anyway, I wasn't too worried, but my assistant teacher acted like it was the apocalypse or something. He was really excited and worried and would assault me with questions about it a couple times a day. It went fine, and he was so relieved that we went out for bowling and hot pot afterwards. (At first, he said, "On my bill," but he abruptly amended it to "On my and Kitty's bill," which is totally not how treating people to bowling works. We decided to go Dutch.)

So here we are bowling! I haven't gone in a couple of years, but it was pretty fun. I still suck as much as I used to, but Andy was the best, and Louis, the guy in the picture, was the second best. I wasn't quite the worst! All right!

Andy's score is on the bottom. I mostly aim to break 50, which I did admirably!

When we went out to hotpot, Andy apparently found a bottle of urine in the bathroom, sitting on a plate covered with urine. Who needs a conveniently placed urinal when you can just pee in a bottle/on a plate?

Here we are with Eric, the worried first grade teacher, and Louis, our contact teacher, eating hotpot. You can see the hotpot in the center. It's kind of like fondue, in that you cook the food yourself, but you use a soup in the center instead of cheese or oil. Ours was chicken and pig's stomach soup! The broth was actually really good, but we were not overly fond of the pig's stomach.

Happy Halloween!

2008-10-31T00:13:00.000+08:00

Futureshop!

2008-10-30T23:24:00.002+08:00

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.

Il Fashionisto!

2008-10-29T11:09:00.000+08:00

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).

China has fun things just laying around!

2008-10-28T23:16:00.000+08:00

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.

Teams!

2008-10-22T22:19:00.000+08:00

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!

Tai Long Wan: Aftermath

2008-10-21T10:06:00.000+08:00

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.

Tai Long Wan (Big Wave Bay)

2008-10-20T21:23:00.002+08:00

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.)

Yangshuo: Day Four

2008-10-09T01:51:00.001+08:00

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.