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!

Trip to Linxia (video)

Here's a video of the trip to Linxia I took during Ramadan. I did a voice-over to help you figure things out. If you're on Facebook, cut that foolishness out. Facebook doesn't import the videos. If you're on my blog for realz, then enjoy.

People in my School (song)

Another original kids' song to use in my Saturday class. Actually, I took some of the words from their textbook, but as you'll see, that's not exactly the greatest literary crime ever perpetrated.
(For the greatest literary crime ever perpetrated, see "The Eyre Affair" by Jasper FForde. Yes, that's a recommendation.

If you're seeing this in Facebook, the video won't appear. So just click on "view original post" or go find it in my Facebook videos (if you have the video application. Geez, the Internet is complicated.)

My Pencil Case (song)

This is another in what can now be considered a string of kids' songs I've been writing to teach to some very young Chinese ESL students. I explain the rest in the video. Rock and roll.

If you're seeing this on Facebook, the video won't appear. Fortunately, you can just go to my Facebook videos and find it there, or click here on the "view original post" link.

The Months of the Year (song)

A new kids' song I wrote just tonight, to be used tomorrow morning. I'm ashamed because I say in the video "In order so that..." I'm sorry, bad English makes me cringe too, but I was in front of the camera and not thinking. Forgive me. Also, I should admit to some plagiarism: most of the words to this song were in fact lifted directly from... the calendar. Just thought I'd get that out in the open before we begin.

A Matthew Original: I Love my Family

This is a song I wrote last night, because I needed a simple family song to teach my class on Saturday. It's a side project to my full-time business English gig - teaching songs to young children at a start up Saturday school every weekend. It's only two hours, and it's a disproportionate amount of work to write a new song every week, but it gets me writing, even if it's not the most moving songcraft you've ever x-perienced. Enjoy, or don't. Also: love your family. I'm kind of getting into filial piety now that I'm living in China (just kidding mom, I still can't come home for Christmas).

My Chengdu Apartment episode 1: Laundry Night

Yes, it's Friday night and given a lack of VIP invites to fancy clubs coupled with a dearth of clean socks, it's laundry night. Pictured is my bathroom /laundry room. Although the laundry system really just consists of those two buckets, so I suppose could do laundry in bed if I felt like it. Luxurious, I know. For those of you wondering, yes, this is one of those bathrooms that has a squat toilet and a shower head all in the same tiled room. I like it like that. It's easy to clean. And I can splash around when I do laundry. I took this picture myself, by the way. I do have some friends here in Chengdu, but none of them are close enough that they'd be washing laundry with me on a Friday night, so I'm being domestic on my own.

Also, did I say the next post would be about Islam? Well, it got pre-empted by laundry night. Islam comes next.