Snorse

Meet Snorse, the newest member of our family. He is Mr. B's first gift from a student, and is apparently a gift in recognition of international labour day.

Pretty sure labour day is in September.

In any case he is weird and wonderful and will be serving as a paperweight and general space absorber on Mr. B's desk starting tomorrow.

Oh the places you will go......

Today was one of the nicest days we have had in Dalian so far. The weather was decently warm, the sun was shining, and we even spotted some green grass coming up and some flowers budding on the trees outside our apartment. Even though we were tired from a full day of work, we decided to take this opportunity to explore a little bit.

Since we have moved in, we have been staring out our bedroom window at a pile of really cool looking rocks. Unfortunately we are separated from them by a ten foot high stone and brick wall, so so far we have had no chance to explore them. Today that changed!

In behind the knobbly trees are the really sweet rock formations (click on the picture to zoom in!)

As we were walking down towards the beach on a road we hadn’t been on before, we saw that the rocks we have been looking at were just beside us (separated from prying eyes by a metal fence and sharp thorn bushes of course). When we rounded a corner, there before us was a ticket booth and a stone arch way. Through the archway we could see these really awesome rock formations, and seeing as no one was around at the ticket booth, we just walked in. Of course Kristen is a bad ass, so she wasn’t concerned, but Paul is a bit of a shall we say... pansy, so we was looking over his shoulder for the first few minutes.

After a while though, his attention was fully fixed on the amazing natural sculptures. Paul’s a bit of a rock nut, but even Kristen was totally impressed by some of the formations. And to think that this is literally a stone’s throw from our back balcony....

Just inside the entrance.

Kristen contemplating the dinosaur fossils that are surely hidden just inches beneath the surface of these rocks.

China? The Moon? Drumheller? You be the judge.

Paul pointedly ignoring the do not climb signs all over the place.

If you climbed to the top of this rock you could probably see in our bedroom window... good thing they don't encourage climbing..

After we had thoroughly explored the rocks, we kept walking down to the beach to watch the sunset and explore up the coast a bit. It was a wonderful little date, and after the sun had set we decided we really didn’t want the night to end.

Sampans...

Classic Chinese scene.

Don't not pass go, do not collect $200.

We ended up walking back the other way and into Manjitan (the village a few minutes from the school) where we went to  a Chinese owned Japanese restaurant. The lady who works there was so cute, and slowed down her Chinese so that we had a chance to understand her. She repeated all the words we were saying incorrectly and actually went out of her way to understand us when we were pronouncing thing abominably. Today was the first day that Paul was able to get someone to understand “Ta bu yao rou. Zheghe sushi ma?” (“She doesn’t want meat. Is this vegetarian?”- sounds like “tah boo yaow row. Je-guh su-tse mah?”). He was so proud of himself that he pulled out “Fuwuyuan, zheghe hen hao chu!” (Waiter, this is very good food) and “Wo yao maidan” (I want the bill). Kristen was also using her mandarin tonight to say thank you, goodbye and to tell the waitress that she understood that the wasabi in her soy sauce was spicy (“ming bai”- I understand).

All in all it was a great night, and a wonderful unexpected date.

And on your right...................

So we have heard some rumblings lately from some, who shall remain nameless, about wanting to have a tour of our house. So here it is! We have drawn a lovely layout using that oh so versatile program, PAINT!

So you can see we have the family suite. Which is one large bedroom, one small bedroom, and a closet. Many people in our building are housing 4-6 people the same space that we have 2. Ouch!

This is the Master bedroom, with the floor to ceiling window which makes sleeping in a real challenge.

This is our "western" style bathroom. We are lucky to have a tub! Cam has the same suite as we do and has no tub just a shower head on the wall, so that he could sit on the toilet and shower at the same time.

This is our living room! This picture was taken on day 2 in china and you can see how tired and disorientated Kristen is.

This is the kitchen, with the the bonus feature of sliding glass wall so that when you make real Chinese food with a lot of oil and smoke it only fills your Kitchen. Paul also thinks it is funny to block people in the kitchen and laugh sadistically.

Pizza, PETA and a Show

On Friday evenings here in Jinji there is a 2nd weekly run of the "shopping bus", except this one leaves @ 4:45 which gives one just enough time to clear off your desk run home and change then dash out to get a seat. Well this week it was nice and sunny on Friday so Kristen was basking in the sunshine in the living room drinking some tea and NOT getting ready, while Paul was off doing some speech correction work with a student. Needless to say we missed the bus by just a minute, so we ran for it. We did catch it but by the time we got there there were no seats left. Being full of endorphins we walked to the Qingkauy (ching-way) and caught the train into Kai-fa-chu.

We had an extensive shopping list which included a stop at Deli Harbour, which is actually a little piece of Fernwood smack in the middle of China! It has real cheese, salsa and good chocolate! After that we went out for our first real "date night" since arrival and we seriously splurged! We went to a family run Pizza place the Nurmburg since we heard they make good pie. We were greeted VERY warmly and encouraged to use or broken but becoming functional Mandarin to order. Since the place was quite small the entire family was listening to our conversation, this was strange as we are largely ignored when we speak here. SO just to be awesome we switched to French! We had a very long and somewhat stumbly conversation but it was a lot of fun and the family quickly lost interest in us. So for the grand total of 22 Canadian dollars we had 2 appies, 2 gimlets (with REAL ICE) and a large veggie pizza! Not bad!

After dinner we wandered around and got the other food stuffs we needed! We also picked up some posters we had made for our house. We blew up 3 pictures from previous trips which are now up on our walls making our house feel much less like an asylum.

Then we wandered over to the "Robson Street" market, so named because Vancouver is the sister city of Dalian. You can buy pretty much ANY accessory there as well as many t-shirt with sayings like "don't worry Micky is always behind you" and poorly spelled lyrics of Beatles songs. There you can also buy animal in the smallest cages you have ever seen. the bunnies look like little puff balls and they stand on wire cages. We kinda want to buy them all and set them free in a park or something but as UVic students we know how that turns out!

So being fed up with the animal cruelty we walked quickly away from the market only to bump into a dance troop performing in costume with a band. Paul thinks that the story they were performing is a Chinese fairy tale about a pig farmer who wants to marry a princess and she is saved by a traveling monk and his disciple. It was really awesome to just stumble upon it! At one point a man in the group tired to give his fan to Kristen and make her join in but she politely refused and we left soon after that~!

 The costumes were very colourful and they had bejewelled just about everything!

The Band

Many of these performers where Men dresses as women, it seems to be a common thing here!

Here is a little taste of Chinese street theater

Maple Leaf Arts Festival

This last week was an incredibly busy one. Kristen was recovering from being sick, and was trying to write her first ever midterm exams for her Grade Nines. On top of that, she also marked sixty five essays! Needless to say for someone who is not a trained teacher, it was a hell of a week.

Paul bit off a little more then he could chew last week, and spent the weekend struggling to catch up! On top of collecting over 200 chapter review tests, he collected 200 review sheets, 200 crossword puzzles, and filled out 200 participation assessments. He also prepped for this week's lessons, coached the ultimate frisbee team (which is in the process of gearing up for a trip to Tianjin to play in a competitive tournament)  and was an "honourable judge" for three different Maple Leaf English Arts Festival competitions.

He's not the brightest crayon sometimes...

However, the English Arts Festival was pretty sweet! He worked with his grade sevens to write fairy tales for the creative writing contest, and judged the drama contests (with the department head, the Dean of the ESL department and the superintendent of the school). He also helped groom some of the students pronunciation and sentence structure for the speech competition. Oh, and he judged the competition...

Some pictures:

The middle school kids all were out for the arts festival... it may have been mandatory attendance. I am not sure. Either way... full house~!

One of my grade seven students. She was picked to go on to the Maple Leaf Cup (an open speech contest in Dalian, sponsored by the school). She didn't win (there were high school students and students who had studied abroad at the contest and this was only her first time) and was pretty devastated. On Monday, she came up to me to tell me that she was sorry about disappointing me. I had a long chat with her about how proud I was of her and told her what a great job she did... different world over here sometimes!

The ten finalists at the speech contest.

Tiniest child at the school.... plays violin like a forty year old Russian lady who studied for twenty years under an
old-school master from the Moscow symphony. Amazing!

J____ on the left is one of my students. He split a reed halfway through the song and was hilarious about trying to contain his embarrassment. Definitely one of my favourite students.

China's word is.............

So any of you who have read or seen “Eat, Pray Love” will remember that they Very self indulgent main character set about giving locations one word which was felt to describe them best.  Along those lines of thought, we have been thinking for some days about China’s word.  We finally have it: UNCOMFORTABLE.

We have been constructing an extensive list which should be much to your enjoyment, in your comfortable coushie home in the ever wealthy North America......

There is no toilet paper in any bathroom in China. This doesn’t really seem to be a huge deal right, just bring some out with you and you are covered. Except if you say changed your coat or leave your TP in your other backpack or bag, and then you find yourself in Kai-fa-chu needing to pee so badly and having no way of getting anymore.......uncomfortable.

The walls have no drywall or insulation just plaster which comes off when you touch it.

There is no subfloor of any kind so standing for 8 hours a day is really difficult on the feet and back. Some teachers have mats that they stand on, like those that the girls at Safeway get. BUT if you have to move classrooms at all it is not such a great thing.

There is no control over the temperature in your life. The heaters are either off or on and now they are off. The people who stoke the fires are laid-off of the summer and so we are colder now inside our house than we have been since we got here!

Our hot water tank doesn’t make enough hot water each day of us each to have a shower longer than 3.5 minutes. When the tank is drained it take 5-6 hours to refill again which means washing your hands in ice water and no dishes or showers during that time.

Then there is the toilets themselves. Kristen having very strong legs from years of skating is not so upset about them as some of the other girls. But we think that might deserve its own post....stay tuned.

This is nothing compared to how the people in town live. Most families spend as much time as possible outside of their house because it is not a very comfortable place to be. In an apartment our size there would be at least 4 people and as many as 6. Remember that we have a 2 bedroom plus closet.

Despite all this whining we are actually have a great time. We have learnt many things about re-creating your own culture in a far away land. We have learned many things about the local culture and we are still happy to be here and see each other every day. Some days are tough but then we would have tough days at home too!

But take a minute and reflect on all the awesome things that you have and use EVERY DAY that make your life easier, more comfortable or more luxurious, because you are VERY lucky to have your life!

More Shenyang Pics

Gates to the North Tomb

Every part of the walls of the tombs are covered in relief work.

All of the old wooden buildings are covered in paint from the 1600's.

From the caption: "It is said to be a kind of mythical deer often appearing at the peaceful and flourishing age. As an auspicious beast, it shows the kindness and wisdom of the emperor."

The tomb itself. The emperor is buried beneath the mound and an elm tree was planted on top the day after the funeral.