Some friends: a sampler

A short intro to some Chengdu friends, right to left.
Reshalati: my Uighur friend, from Xinjiang (west China), Muslim, studying anthropolgy at the Minority University (fitting, since she's a minority...) Speaks Uighur, Mandarin, Kazak, Turkish, Kirgyz, you name it.
Reed: from L.A. Plays hand drums and improvises pretty ridiculous songs on guitar. Majored in Mandarin in college, so I covet his language skeelz.
Brien: of "Brien and Natalie" married coworkers of mine from Buffalo, NY. Plays in a band with Douglas and Reed. Makes me Buffalo tofu wings with his special sauce.
Me: keeping it real. Trying, anyway.
Douglas: Speaks fluent Chinese, although Chinese people occasionally mistake him for Japanese, because they can't fathom that one of their own would have such weird hair and wear a skirt. I covet both his Chinese skeelz and his musical skills, which are... impressive.

Class time

Guess what! I'm writing a post about class time when I should be lesson-planning! I do it because I care, friends.
I teach high school. I also give a university class 3 times a week, and once a week, I have three periods of little 2nd graders. But most every day finds me at my "normal job", working at high schools named #7 and #11. #7 is a private school with a focus on English, so a lot of their kids are pretty decent speakers, and they're all pretty well-behaved. #11 is a different story. It's near the city center and not well-funded. A few of the classrooms I teach in have no chalkboard erasers. So I wipe stuff off with my hand. By contrast, #7 private school has televisions in every class. The kids at #11 public are streamed into "good classes" and "bad classes", which means I have some classes full of studious but shy girls and some classes full of delinquent and rebellious girls and boys. The latter fully understand my position, which is: I speak a very limited amount of Chinese, they speak almost no English and I'm in no position to give them grades which will directly affect their next year's placement. This equals pretty much no respect for the foreign teacher. They fight in class. They play soccer with crushed coke cans. They throw all kinds of things. They yell. They run out of class. They come back in through the windows. And yet, I don't hate my life. #11 days are draining, and sometimes I dread going from my peaceful apartment to the bastions of ignorance, but it's a challenge, and as these pictures from #11 show, the kids are pretty fun when you're not making them work.

A stolen bike, just like I like

My bicycle was stolen two days ago. But as the kids say, "It's all good". A short story for you crazy readers: I normally rode my bike to the bus stop. One day, I was trying frantically to lock my bike to a post so I could hop on the bus that had just arrived and make it to work on time, but found the post was just a little too thick, my lock a little too short. There was no use, I had to miss the bus and be late for work, or... leave my bike lying unlocked on the sidewalk. So I did! And 4 hours later, I came back on the bus and, yup, picked up my bike and rode it home, all like, "Ain't no thang".

So really, that incident made me feel so good that who cares if a few months later it got stolen? Not me, that's for sure. People in general are so nice that the one joker who took the bike is welcome to it, and may he or she ride it with gusto (and fix that squeaky axle). As for me: it's bike shopping time and I'm excited to get some new wheels.

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P.S. Look at those cute girls! How could you care about a bike when those two are just all holding hands and being cute? It'd be nonsense.

Shui Mo (hike with Maria and Nathaniel)

When my Alaskan friends were here, we decided on the Saturday to go out to a small town to see some rural China. Maria (roommate) and Reed (friend) came too. We went to a bus station and picked a town at random, pretty much: Shui Mo, a village about two hours northwest. The ticket woman couldn't figure out why we would want to go there, but obliged. Once we got there we strolled the small streets and walked by some small farms, before Forrest and Reed took an early bus back to the city, leaving Nathaniel, Maria and I to walk out of town and follow a path up into the hills. As we hit forks, we kept on choosing the smaller trail, until eventually we left the path altogether and followed a stream up into the bush, stopping finally at a little fall where the brush got too thick and the valley walls too steep for us to carry on. When we came down from the hills, school had let out, and all the village kids came to see what was up. After I got the rowdy boys to chase me through the streets while N and M hung back with the rest, there are a couple of pictures of me trying to play a little capoeira with them. With the child-mob over it was getting dark and there was no bus coming through that day (we hadn't thought the return trip through...) so we set out hitch-hiking on the highway. It only took us 3 rides to get back to our front door in Chengdu that night! 1 free, and two others nice and cheap.
The pictures are very me-heavy because Nathaniel and Maria took them all. And yes, that's a Ho Chi Minh shirt I picked up in Vietnam.

Frisbee innovation: the waiter

I invented a new frisbee throw today.
Maybe invented is a strong word. I figured out a throw that I've never seen or heard of before, leading me to think there's a chance I may have invented something. But then, back in 1998, I thought I had invented this shoe that had a grind plate in the middle of the sole, so people like me who weren't skateboarders by culture could do railslides in our shoes. I drew up a diagram and e-mailed it to about 15 of my friends before I was told by a skater friend, that, uh: those already existed. Ouch.

Nevertheless, the new frisbee throw: you rest the frisbee upside down on your fingertips, like a waiter carrying a tray. Then you need to push it forward and flip it over at the same time as you spin it with whatever friction you can get from your fingertips. So the frisbee, resting on, not in, your hand, gets flipped over and spun out, and actually, it works pretty well. Until I think of a better name, I'm calling it "the waiter".