An interlude...

The view from a pedestrian bridge at night.

Taking a minute to add a picture of daily life in Shenzhen.

TYNKWD -- Escalators

This week's addition to Things You Never Knew Were Dangerous can be summed up by this warning poster I saw at the metro station.

 

Please note the hysterical white lady screaming "quick, someone help my child!".  Like, that child's leg is literally being torn off and eaten by this escalator.  Are you skeptical this could happen?  Me too, but after all, this is China.

TYNKWD - Touching Lamp Posts

I would like to take this opportunity to introduce a new series of posts.  Living here, I have become increasingly aware of the imminent danger we live in.  However, more and more I am finding that this danger comes from not only the obvious sources -- for example, the exposed and violently sparking electric line on a metro a couple weeks ago -- but also from things you never knew were dangerous (hereafter: TYNKWD).  

I will start this series with a special gem I found in the newspaper:

Touching lamp posts.  

The following is a snippet from the Shenzhen Daily.

"A teenager was eletrocuted on his way home in a lane in Huangbeiling Village in Luhou on Saturday.  he accidentally touched a lamp post and was electrocuted.  He was pronounced dead by doctors at the scene."

No, I assure I am not cut and pasting this to sound the way it does.  That is the information given.  A teenager "accidentally touched a lamp post" and died immediately.  Why? From what? No clue.  Seriously, no more info was given than that, and the ambiguously haunting article is now causing myself and those I've shared it with to live in fear of accidentally touching the wrong lamp post.  

Happy Birthday Dad!

Since I miserably failed at being home and celebrating dad's birthday, I recruited some of my screaming mimis to help.  This is my lower interesting group.

Happy birthday, dad!  Sorry I can't be there, and even sorrier I can't be there with good beer and real chocolate cake, with chocolate chips inside, and chocolate icing, and some chocolate ice cream on the side!  :)

Love you all back home and miss you bunches.

Drills and jingle bells

Every (single) morning, I wake up to... wait for it... jingle bells.  Yeah, not joking.  The christmas song.  It is played throughout the day, varying with non-recognizable kinds tunes. For you see, Chinese schools are run differently than American ones.  Bells do not exist.  Songs, including jingle bells, usher in every thinkable event at the school.  Arriving, period starting, period ending, flag ceremony beginning, flag ceremony ending, break time, protect eye exercise time, broadcasting time, practice handwriting time, lunch starting, nap time starting, nap time ending, lunch ending, etc etc etc.  While this used to drive me crazy, it's become a part of the day and every now and then I can actually recognize which song is playing for what event.
To add to this gem of hilarity (I asked, they don't know they're playing christmas music), the kids are also constantly drilled to exercise and prepare for military training -- which every person goes through even though there's not mandatory service.  This means that the highlight of my week days is at 9am, when the entire primary school marches outside (yes, to music) to practice marching and drills.  Why is this the highlight?  Because they're 7-11 years old, and therefore adorable.  I finally snuck a picture this week to share my enjoyment with you.

This is the view from my office.  Frankly, I have no idea what they're doing half the time but I love it anyways.  Just try and picture 500 primary students trying to march in neat little rows for the flag ceremony.  Haha!

Hong Kong weekend

Because I have apparently forsaken sleep, I rejoined the Xi'an friends and went to Hong Kong for the weekend. It was a short trip so I'll have to go back a few times, but there was more than enough time to stuff ourselves with Western food (the first American food I've had since July), including TGI Fridays, eggs benedict and bottomless coffee, cheese and crackers, and pizza.  We also took the tram up Victoria Peak, the highest point on the island, to see the view.

HK is insane, it doesn't feel like the China I know at all.  It is a really Western city, complete with other foreigners and people who speak English!  The streets are narrow and the lanes are backwards, the language is Cantonese (of which I speak not a word), the buses are narrow double deckers, the metro stops sound like a pirate ride at disney world (admiralty, fortress hill, etc), and the color of choice is neon.  I was very overwhelmed.  It was so expensive too!  Surprisingly, I'm feeling more comfortable back on the mainland!
Again, fun times.  That said, I'm ready to take it easy for a few days!  Whew.

The view of the island from Kowloon
(the biggest building is the one batman jumped from in the last movie)

Xi'an -- Good Company

Ok, sorry for the short hiatus.  I got thwarted by the great firewall for a time and haven't been able to get on this site, much less post.  China always keeps you on your toes.

Now, for the long awaited photos and stories from my National Day trip to Xi'an.

I went with three friends for the week we get off, you already heard about the god forsaken train ride, but the actual time there was great.  No lesson planning, no screaming 9 year olds (don't get me wrong, I love them, but, you know...)...  We still had to wake up bright and early but it was to see cool things, and we were all in the same place which is one of the more obnoxious parts of Shenzhen (it takes me 45 min to 1.5 hour to get to my friends).

I'm having trouble getting the photos to stay in the right order and I don't want to push my luck too far, so I present in no particular order documentation of the trip:

Xi'an noodles.  A single wide 3.8m long noodle with dipping soup.
Possibly the most difficult thing to eat with chopsticks so far.

Big Goose Pagoda and practicing Asian photo poses

The terra-cotta warriors of Qin in their massive airplane hanger type museum

Thomas and me in front of the Drum Tower.
We look pretty good considering this is right after the first train leg

Possibly the highlight of the trip for me, possibly because I sorely miss biking.
Biking on the city wall, 13km long encircling the inner city.

A display of terra-cotta figurines in the various hats of the era, of which there are many.

"The most beautiful beauty"
(description by our hired driver/guide)

Well, there you go. As far as description goes, it was very, very crowded.  We had to continuously change our plans to accommodate how very crowded it was, but we still managed to see a lot of things, most of which I had missed on my first trip.  Xi'an was the capital of China for like 2,000 years, so there is a lot of old things buried around that you can go see.  Also, a lot of museums with old pottery.  So much pottery.  We feasted on delicious things, like fancy dumplings, that long noodle I showed you, and various Muslim BBQ from the popular Muslim Quarter.  And we found bumper cars, which are the most terrifying thing in China because there are no regulations and they go super fast.

Good trip, good friends, good vacation.  Yay.

And I'll leave you with this gem:

 

The highlight of the train ride, and I mean only highlight of the train ride, was the guy coming through selling shamwows with a megaphone.

Xi'an -- Bad seats

As I mentioned, October 1st was National Day (which is Chinese 4th of July) so we had the week off of work.  To celebrate, I went with some friends to Xi'an.  Xi'an is the ancient city that was the capital of China for almost 2,000 years (I think) and home of the famous terra-cotta warriors of Qin and other terra-cotta figurines, or as I like to call them, the clay dudes.  I had been once before but only for a day and a half so I hadn't seen anything but the Qin warriors and briefly around the inner city.
As you may have guessed, I am now returned.  However, the traveling was extremely brutal.  In fact the worst traveling I have had to do in a very long time, if ever.  I will continue blogging about the amazing trip as the week progresses but I am currently so exhausted that all I will show now is exactly how bad of a travel it was.
Let me draw a picture.  Trains in China are not like trains in the US or Europe.  They are somewhere in between Europe and India, leaning far towards the India side.  It is almost impossible to get the tickets you want on a holiday because of all the other travelers, so we could only get tickets for hard seats.  Which was actually very lucky.  Because it's a 30 hour train ride.  And they selling standing room tickets.  That's right, they crowd the train to twice capacity with most of the people only having STANDING TICKETS FOR 30 HOURS.
So, you get to the train station, stand in a huge like, rush to the front like a maniac, with people actually getting into fights to get there, try to find your seat which someone is inevitably already in, kick them out and settle down.  Because you will not be moving -- and I mean it, not even standing -- for at least 10 hours.  The train is so packed with "standing tickets" that you cannot stretch, stand up, store your luggage, go to the ::extremely nasty:: bathroom, anything.  Eventually around hour 10 they started to deboard and around hour 20 we were able to steal some sleepers and crowd into there for the remaining 10 hours.  Which was nice, because on the way out some asshole decided to bring a 22" flatscreen with him and store it in our leg room in the hard seats.  So not only could we not stand up, we could not, literally could not, move our legs.

Yep, Jenn was pretty grumpy.

How do you fit this many people in one train car?  Just you wait.

This is not a dramatization, this is literally the first 10 hours of the train ride.

The trip back was essentially the same, only no TV box THANK GOD and friendly English speaking neighbors, but no sleepers either.  We almost didn't make it back because the train was so late that we barely made the last connecting speed train from Guanzhou to Shenzhen, had to battle violently pushy Chinese to get the tickets and then runnnnn to board the departing train.  It was as close as it possibly could be.  We didn't get back home until after midnight, and then up again the next day at 6:30am to teach because in China they have this hellish idea that it's ok to work and have school on the weekends if you just had a holiday.  Nooooo.  I do not remember what I taught that day, and I'm still exhausted!
Ok, that's my ranting about the god awful train travel to Xi'an.  I promise, it's the last of my complaints about the trip because the resting of it was AWESOME.  I was lucky to go with some great people, which almost cancelled out the hellish seats.  Almost.