Hanging out with Tiger

The oldish apartment block I live in is owned by China Petrol (中国石油). These are some of the guards that work at the front gate. The guy on the left is "Tiger", who's my best friend of the bunch. His name is Wei Dong Hu, and the Hu means tiger, hence the English name. All the guys pictured actually live in the apartment block too, so I see them when they're off work, too. Anytime I come home after midnight I have to pound on the gate and wake up whoever's on duty to let me in. I know these are just bullet points in paragraph form, but I haven't been posting much, so I'm trying to be more pragmatic and less artistic about informing you all of this kind of stuff (those of you who care, needless to say). About a six weeks ago Tiger and his girlfriend (pictured) took me out on his day off to visit some Christian churches in Chengdu. They're atheist, but Tiger had asked me about my religion and suggested that we go look at these places, just for an activity to do together. We visited the Catholic Diocese and a Protestant church, as well as the YMCA on ChunXi road, where Tiger asked the guy if Christians were vegetetarian. He knows I am and it kind of baffles him, so he asked, and the guy told him no, they aren't. I begged to differ. It's difficult to get across the notion of differences in beliefs under the same religious umbrella. Wow, this post was easily under my 300-word limit. Here are some pictures. As always, go to Flickr for the others. Next post will be another home movie. Love love love,
Matthew

My Kitchen, Part 1: Dinner Party Prep

For those of you who want to know what my kitchen setup is like, this is the preparatory process for a dinner party I had in October, at my apartment, in Chengdu. There will be subsequent kitchen-related posts, but don't think for a minute that this is turning into a food blog (my pictures aren't nice and up-close and shallow-focused enough for that).

Yes I Can! (song)

Another in my series of original kids' songs, written mostly out of necessity for a job I have teaching kids ESL on Saturday mornings. But also because I like kids' songs.

Though this video was recorded at about 3:30 am after I had been struggling to finish a translation contract under deadline, it still, you'll notice, is my first ever kids' song video to feature a cut. That CEGEP film training is starting to pay off! Yes!