Veggie meals and supermarket fishing

Vegetarian eats are very rare in China, since even vegetable dishes are cooked in animal grease and everything's cooked in the same place (I gave up after the first week of not being able to eat anything and decided for sake of sanity to eat meat). But there are a couple (expensive) restaurants I've been to that are delicious, and we recently found a new cute place with great food and better prices.  Take a look.

And not vegetarian, but entertaining.  Just a man fishing for dinner at the supermarket.

Pets

My grade 3 textbook unit on pets.  Just a funny breach of anticipation logic.

A kitten, a puppy, and a.... carrot?

Close but no cigar.

Cute drawing from one of my students.  At least they can be creative when they don't remember the real word :-P

Egg?

Why Chinese is kicking my a**

Found this funny link on facebook.  Enjoy.

Surprise, Monsoon! video

A video from about a month ago during what I like to call "flash monsoon season", when intense rains would come and go as quickly as you please.  As a Coloradan, I was a bit taken aback and had some trouble guessing when these anomalies would strike.  Here, I am again thwarted during an attempt to dry laundry.

Fire drills in China are AWESOME.

American school kids have found memories of fire drills because we got to line up and file out in the middle of class, to stand somewhere far away from the school and wait to be let back in.  Mostly, we were happy that we missed five or ten minutes of class every month.
Fire drills in China are apparently a little bit different.
This morning I'm working in my office when all of a sudden a loud alarm starts going off.  I am less alarmed than one might imagine because the alarm is less of a shock than the air-raid sirens that went off last month (I think that was an earthquake drill?), and more just in the mood of oh-boy-what-now.
I walk outside and into a cloud of billowing orange smoke. Yup.  And children sprinting by towards the field.  At fire drills here they literally set off smoke bombs to make a more realistic effect, and the students are encouraged to get to the field as fast as possible.  It was so much more exciting than back home.
On the field, they even did a fire demo where they repeatedly lit a can of wood on fire and let the administration try to put it out with fire extinguishers.
The timing for every student to get there little butts on the field was 24 seconds.  24 seconds for a school of about 800-1,000 students (still not sure on the count) to empty out.  I was extremely impressed, but apparently that was a whole 7 seconds slower than they had done last term, so the kids got criticized haha.
So, in summary, fire drills here are awesome.

Also, thank you mom for my camera phone, without which I wouldn't have been able to capture this surprise.

Sprinting through one of the smoke bombs

Hurrying down the stairs

Fire demo on the field

TYNKWD -- Foreign women. All of them.

This edition of Thing You Never Knew Were Dangerous:

The warning signs at the metro crack me up every time I see them, because 1. they are very melodramatic 2.  I don't know what have of them are actually warning against, and 3. the most dangerous thing in the metro seems to be foreign women.

Our favorite hysteric blonde mother

I think the warning is about watching your head, but frankly as a foreign woman I think this creepy guy is the dangerous item.  

I don't even know what's happening here.  Is it the the creepy guy in the back?  The kid with the balloons that seems to be having an asthma attack, the women chatting at the top of the escalator, or simply the naughty blonde herself?

That's right.  In a country that is 95% Han Chinese, and maybe .5% foreigners, at least half of the warning signs in the metro feature foreign women.  We just be trouble makers, I guess.

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!

The Crab Saga

Well, as predicted, the crabs showed up on my doorstep this afternoon.  And in true China fashion, as I should have predicted, they turned out to be ten very alive, very fast crabs in a cardboard box.  Ha!  I gave them to my neighbors and they invited me over for dinner.  It was quite the adventure, we lost two crabs and had to chase them around their apartment.  In the end, a delicious feast complete with hairy crabs and French wine.  The highlight?  When the student foreign teacher from no-ocean Colorado caught on to the joke "Which is faster, green crabs or red crabs?"

Typhoon Day

Recall the glorious days of childhood schooling called "snow days"?  Well I have one today, SE Asia style.  I am currently in my apartment enjoying a "typhoon day".  Apparently it rained really hard all last night and hasn't stopped this morning, so  now there is no class today.  Which is marvelous because it was going to be a very long day for me.
I still have laundry and packing to do for my holiday -- October 1st is National Day, so I'm leaving on Saturday to go on a week trip to Xi'an with some other foreign teachers.  On a train, for 24 hours, in hard seats because all of the sleepers were sold out, because that's how you travel if you want to travel on National Day, because you are inherently traveling with a billion of your closest peeps. It will be a long travel, but hopefully a lot of fun and cool things to see.
In other news, I managed to snag cheap airline tickets for next June to travel around after the school year is up but my visa has yet to expire.  I'm going with a friend of mine here and the itinerary includes Malaysia, the Philippines, India, and Thailand.  So yeah, be jealous.
And in yet other news, I have an interesting but very Chinese predicament.  For the holiday, my school has gifted the teachers with... ready for this?... ten hairy crabs.  I told them that it was ok, I wouldn't know what to do with them (having never cooked a crab in my life and not entirely inclined to try) and that since I leave in a day I would have no time to eat ten.  But, in typical Chinese fashion, they will not take no for an answer.  So they have my ten crabs in the school fridge waiting for me and all of the teachers have been sending me recipes.  I would generally just ignore it and not go attend to the crabs, but I know China well enough to know that they will not just go away.  In fact, I think I heard them scheming to try and get some of my friends to come and "enjoy hairy crabs" with me.  I think I will give them to my neighbor family if they don't already have too many, I know the little girl likes them.

Ok, time to enjoy typhoon day.  It celebration, here's a link to make you smile (and don't think it's a solitary case, I saw two teachers with elastic sealed plastic bags around their shoes and feet this morning).
http://accidentalchinesehipsters.tumblr.com/post/9365898685/its-going-to-rain-a-lot-you-shouldnt-be

<3 Jenn

For your entertainment

A couple pictures to keep you happy until I have time to write another post --

 Chinese clowns at the acrobat show

Pants as flower pot holders?  Why not.