40,000 – 50,000 words per year

Mar5

According to Malcolm Gladwell’s disclosure statement, a contract with the NY Times can mean writing 40,000 to 50,000 words per year. That’s like … 100 personal statements? 10 Humanities papers? A thesis or two? Ok, I better get going.

“Shock and Awe”, a Kickstarter project

Mar5

“Shock and Awe” is the title of a compilation journal of photography,
text,and found objects assembled by my college friend Ethan Rafal over the last 10 years. I am his friend because we had a conversation about our experiences of Sudanese refugees in Africa, and I was grateful for someone who could relate to my experience (even I could not return the favor since his experiences went so darkly far beyond my own).

I’m telling you about “Shock and Awe”, his project on Kickstarter, because it’s important and because there is still time to help him raise needed financial support (even beyond the original Kickstarter goal) before the deadline (March 13).

“Shock and Awe” on Kickstarter

February is somehow almost over (10 things since last month)

Feb28

If not for the merciful leap year, I might be in worse danger of missing an entire month without posting.

One side effect of posting so much less is that by the time I get around to writing something, I’m in a little better position to synthesize and summarize. However, this comes partly at the cost of sometimes losing the fresh impression that I had the first time I was surprised by something.

Anyway, this post is to say ‘oh my gosh where is the time going’ as well as give you a quick rundown of what’s going on these days.

0. I started my Spring Break – the term I’m using for the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) vacation.

1. I went to Shanghai for a few days to meet some friends before going to

2. Japan! To meet family and wander about with Kraytul

3. Back to China (on the ferry, through the fog, bringing Kraytul with)

4. School starts again!

5. I decide not to continue my contract at this school
and start looking for another job … somewhere. I really like this school and would recommend it as a place to teach. I just feel like maybe my life should be moving on again. I’m especially considering things in policy, writing/editing, software/data analysis, and education; those of you who know me are probably not surprised at the breadth there… Actually, it feels a little strange to be open to working potentially … anywhere. After having my sights set on China for so long, this is a strange new buoyant feeling.

6. Kraytul is also applying for jobs,
and he gets accepted for interviews/evaluations at a company in the States, so he’s making last-minute travel plans to go about Asia and wind up in the States again for interviews and then go to Europe and … all over before deciding if he wants to settle down for a job or school or what. I found out this morning that he’s leaving tomorrow!

7. I’m considering whether I can be ready for the HSK 4
(Chinese proficiency test, mid-intermediate level) by the time testing season comes around in May.

8. The Lushan Institute that I attended last summer is accepting students for this summer. Check out: Lushan Institute. One of the many things I hope to do in the near future is add a page to this blog for Lushan-related things.

9. Woah, look a calendar! Japan was my big travel plan, so I can stop wondering about money and logistics for that. I now have until summer to go see cities and try to meet friends!

I am working on dealing with the fact that I have tried for so long to get to China and now I AM IN CHINA but only for another few months. SAD! But, also compelling. It’s like how I think fall is my favorite season because the awareness of winter’s onset makes the last warm days so much more imploringly lovely.

Speaking of seasons, I guess it is supposed to be spring here, which is why everyone is complaining that it is too cold and winter is taking so long. I haven’t noticed much change from December except that the days are getting longer again, thank goodness.

Ok, gonna have to do some more posting in the near future. My brother is beating me to it…(Stepping Stones)

Imminent Traveling (Shanghai, Japan!)

Jan13

Egad. Tomorrow morning I’m leaving for Shanghai, meeting some friends who are fortuitously there at the same time, and then getting on a boat (A BOAT! I’m gonna be on a boat!) and going to Japan. We’ll see if I have my act together enough to tell you anything about Japan before I go back to China. Are you gonna be in Japan? Let me know!

What am I going to do in Japan? … after the first almost-week, I have no clue. Suggestions welcome! My coworkers have already helpfully suggested I avoid the recent Earthquake areas…

天啊！（our lady gaga)

Jan12

A common expression I hear around the office is “天啊…!” (Tian1 aaaaahhh..!), usually spoken like a long sigh to indicate the suffering that the speaker is feeling as a result of their busy workweek, and presumably should be pitied, at least, that’s my interpretation ;). Most people here speak at least a few words or basic-functioning sentences of English, so sometimes they switch to, “My God…”, except that it sounds more like, My Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaddddd……

But today is the first day I heard that change from
Oh My Gaaaaaaaaaad…! to Oh My Lady Ga Gaaaaaaaaaa…..!

I burst out laughing, which amused most 🙂

***
Mar 01 2012 edit
I think the proper expression may actually be “天那~” Tian Naaaaaa 🙂

English Reading Library (feedback opportunity!)

Jan11

What books do you remember being especially great from your childhood?

I got these awesome English/Chinese Dr. Seuss books from taobao.com recently (Taobao seems to be like Amazon), well, these plus the ones the kidlets have already borrowed.

6 of 10 books. I've only had them a few days, and the kids are starting to borrow them ravenously.

王老师 saw my Dr. Seuss books and told me that she will be putting in a request for books to build an English Library for the kids here. In the future, the school will have grades 1 through 6, so they want books to suit all the reading levels. I recently got some Dr. Seuss books here – some of the kids can pick up One Fish Two Fish and read their way through the first few pages. They’re probably all approaching Kindergarten in their reading level, but I think some of them will be pretty darn good in a few years.

Anyway, here’s the list I have so far,
feel free to add to it! Please comment with books you liked! I will update this page as I think of things or get comments from you.

Beginning Readers:

Dr. Seuss (Hop on Pop, Green Eggs and Ham, …etc)
Bill Martin Jr / Eric Carle (Brown Bear Brown Bear),
Eric Carle (The Very Hungry Caterpillar, The Very Quiet Cricket, etc)
Norman Bridwell (Clifford the Big Red Dog)
Robert Munsch (I’ll Love you Forever)
Richard Scarry (Busytown book series)

Getting Better:

Margaret Wise Brown – Goodnight Moon
P.D. Eastman (Are you my Mother?, Sam and the Firefly, …etc)
Stan and Jan Berenstain (Berenstain Bears)
Jeannette Winter – Follow the Drinking Gourd

Even Better:

Bill Peet (The Wump World and others)

Chris Van Allsburg?
Graeme Base?

… and … I don’t really know right now what books are considered to be what grade level…so

Classic Books

Owl Moon
Stellaluna
Rainbow Fish
Make Way for Ducklings

I’ll be building a list to hand over, so please let me know what you think should be in an English book Library for Elementary school students!

No classes since December! (and other surprises about the school schedule)

Jan11

Yesterday, I discovered that I don’t have any classes this week!

And, that I haven’t since December! This is, I hope, the last surprise in my semester-long venture in figuring out my own schedule.

A long time ago, I got a calendar for my first-semester work schedule. I asked for it early on so that I could see which days I would have work (like, when the semester starts and when it ends) and which days I have off. I got a single page with September, October, November, December, and the beginning of January stacked on top of each other. Some of the days were color-coded for being time off, … or they tried to be. When I got a printed copy in black and white, it was hard to tell. At the bottom of the calendar was a list of the 4 important dates: the beginning of school, the beginning of Spring Festival break, the beginning of 2nd semester, and a note on the exact date of the lunar new year. This left a lot to be figured out or asked about.

Here are some things I have learned or confirmed about the Chinese school schedule:

1) Tests come before the end of the semester (and before break)

When I think about being in school, I remembered having Christmas/New Years break, then coming back to school and having semester finals after not having done anything for a while. These kids have their big break around the Spring Festival towards the end of January. We started the semester on September 1st and ‘finals week’ seemed to be the last week of December – the week after Christmas. It seems that we are back to the usual schedule of classes this week, except I don’t have any. I’m not sure if this is some special feature of the end of semester, or if my contract says I don’t teach after December or something… I haven’t checked. Not even Ms. Xu was clear about it. We both had to ask 王老师 if I was supposed to be teaching anything this week.

At first, I had thought that the kids would just be done with school after ‘finals week’ at the end of December. Then, I came back after New Years to find there were still kids coming to school! Oh well, it’s not the first time I’ve been surprised to see kids going about their normal school day. I knew I had to be at work, but I thought we’d all just be … planning and strategizing for the next semester or something. The week after New Years was a short week, and I was told that the kids had some other special tests and activities, thus no regular English class. I busied myself trying to package up my materials for the year. Then this week arrived and … lo and behold, still more kids! 王老师 told me that the kids had a regular school week, but that the new semester had not yet started. Apparently I did not have a regular school week as I discovered that I had no Kindergarten classes, no after-school classes, no classes at all!

2) Sometimes, weekends are rescheduled.

This is actually kind of nice since it is an easy way of putting vacation time in larger chunks. I first encountered this after ‘Golden Week‘, the National Holiday in celebration of the founding of the PRC in the beginning of October. Beginning on Saturday (which was Oct 1st), everyone got 7 whole days of pure vacation. These seven days expire, of course, after Friday, and then people go back to work. “But, after Friday comes Saturday,” you point out, “so they wouldn’t go back to work yet.” Oh, yes they do! I had been told I should come back to the office on Saturday and Sunday, and I understood this was meant to ‘make up’ for the vacation. However, I sort of expected that it would be like a teacher in-service day. Maybe do some lesson-planning in anticipation of the coming week.

Nope! I was in for a surprise when I walked over to the office and saw the kids streaming in as usual! Not just the teachers, but every child knows that every child in China must go to school on Saturday and Sunday after Golden Week – it sounded kind of like their nationalistic duty as children of China when I overheard a teacher saying it. I forget our daily schedule, but I think that Saturday and Sunday were actually ‘Wednesday’ and ‘Thursday’ for class purposes. However, in the Kindergarten, I think they had chosen different days of the week to make up for. I don’t remember exactly what, but the Elementary School and the Kindergarten never make up the same days at the same time!

I was a bit lost for a few days regarding what ‘day’ of the week it was.

This happened again for New Years (Jan 1st). In this case, I thought it was a relatively convenient way to make sure that people had the option of sleeping in on January 2nd as well. Jan 1st fell on a Sunday, so we had Monday and Tuesday off. We paid for our Tuesday by working on the Saturday (Dec 31st) before January 1st.

3) New Years and Christmas are both celebrated, but only New Years gets time off

When I say ‘New Years’ here, I mean the January 1st New Years (元旦 yuan2dan4), not the Chinese lunar new year (Spring Festival – 春节 chun1jie2), and when I say ‘celebrated’, I mean in the sense that people see it as a day to do something.

Religion of any sort is pretty out-of-the-question since everyone has been told from birth that there is no god. People are to some extent aware of the ‘Christmas story,’ as 王老师 told me that she had included a brief description of it when teaching ‘Christmas’ in one of her English lessons. However, Christmas in China is a mostly celebration for stores and for young people. Christmas is a good time here for stores to have promotional events and decorations. ‘Young people’ seem to be co-opting Christmas as a holiday in China, perhaps similarly to how ‘Cinco de Mayo’ is increasingly being ‘celebrated’ in the States. Christmas Eve is a popular evening to go to dinner with friends or family – as was demonstrated by the traffic when, on the way to Guanqian Jie to meet her parents for dinner – 王老师 bemoaned being stuck in the busiest area of town on the busiest day of the year. Christmas this year was on a weekend anyway, but I don’t think it would have gotten time off if it wasn’t – though I guess I’m not sure.

I already mentioned that time off of work is granted surrounding New Years. New Year’s eve is a popular day for celebrations of some sort, including events like the one I went to at Hanshan temple. I’m not sure if drinking is as large of a part of New Years in China as it is in the States, but I was assured that drunk driving early in the morning of the new year is absolutely not a problem here because the drunk driving laws are so strict. I don’t know exactly what these laws are.

Halloween and Thanksgiving seem to be similar excuses for decorations and sales. Here at school, Thanksgiving was celebrated with KFC-style chicken sandwiches for dinner. I missed it though because Kraytul and I went out for dinner!

Holidays that actually get time off are: Mid-Autumn Festival, National Day / Golden Week, New Years, Spring Festival. The kind of family-gathering that people do in the States for Christmas is comparable to the gathering that people in China do for the Spring Festival and for the Mid-Autumn Festival.

4) Teachers will be back before the end of Spring Break vacation

Although the schedule-calendar I got puts the day of the new semester on Feb 6th, the teachers will be back before then. I think some have intermittent ‘on duty’ days on campus, but all will come back a few days before the new semester to get started on planning. I’m not sure if there is an actual pre-determined day for this, or if they just don’t know what it is yet. I have been told that it is fine for me to return from break on the first day of the new semester, but then again, I am just the 外教 (wai4jiao4 – foreign teacher)

I don’t know the schedule for next semester yet 🙂

Cold China Hand (my introduction to 冻疮)

Jan10

(warning: blog post contains images and descriptions of my sometimes-uncomfortable hands. May not be suitable for worried mothers.)

Blog posts aren’t the only thing I’m behind on.

I’m also behind on reading. Reading what? Oh, the many pieces of legit genuine-article Chinese-content items around me! You know, … receipts, packaging, flyers, … all things I’m always convinced I’ll have time to sit down and practice translating this weekend. I’ve got empty boxes from toothpaste, lightbulbs, mooncakes … but there’s one box I was ‘going to get around to soon’ that wasn’t empty.

tube of 冻疮 ointment and the box it came in

This is the box that 王老师 brought me after examining my hands. She also brought me two pairs of children-size gloves. She had come over to my desk the previous day to talk about something and stopped mid sentence with “Let me see your hands.”

Actually, just that morning I had been contemplating my hands and wondering what I touched in the last week that I might be allergic to. I had touched several new things – the sleeves (袖套 xiutao) that I sent to my family, the sleeves I had kept for myself and had been wearing recently, some silk I had been handling, the electric hot water bottle 王老师 had given me earlier that I’d been holding a lot, maybe the soap Kraytul gave me that I finally got around to using?…etc. I hadn’t really eaten any new foods, at least, not recently enough to explain the tiny little welt-things that had been starting to rise on my hands.

the red spots: allergies? But, I don't have those.

I had been noticing a few tiny bumps and wondering if I’d somehow gotten several tiny invisible slivers, or maybe being allergic to something, because the tiny bumps sometimes itched. Maybe I had somehow become host to tiny insects? Maybe I had caught something strange from the mouse I’d seen run across the office floor earlier? Then I started imagining images from El Norte and decided that was getting a little ridiculous.

王老师 inspected my hands and briefly queried my symptoms: this had never happened to my hands before, it started happening recently, and it made my hands itch a little bit when they warmed up, such as being put into pockets while I walked around. Oh you poor thing, she said, and diagnosed me with 冻疮 (dong4chuang2?), which neither of us knew how to translate (my translator widget says ‘Frostbite’, but I sort of thought symptoms of frostbite included pale and somewhat pliable skin, so I don’t think that’s quite right). She instructed me to not let my hands get suddenly hot or suddenly cold, not to use soap on them, and to wash them in warm water and wear gloves. “This used to happen every year to me before I had my son,” she said, then implying that it doesn’t happen now because she wears gloves and keeps her hands warm. The next day, there were two pairs of gloves and a box of 冻疮 ointment on my desk. 王老师 said she hoped it would help and suggested I read the directions.

冻疮 ointment with helpful instructions

That was what took a while. My translating time went on backorder just like everything else. I took at least a week, maybe two, to get around to looking at the tube. In the meantime, I was similarly diagnosed by other teachers, including the headmaster of the entire school ‘district’, Mr. Xu, who had stopped by to thank me for the ‘Portland’ pin I’d given him for the joint occasion of Christmas and the official opening of the Wujiang campus. He asked if I was getting used to China, and I replied positively, citing my 本地手 (‘local hands’). 王老师, acting as our interpreter, burst out laughing after a beat, interrupting her half-translation, half-explanation. Mr. Xu laughed as well. I was glad that this was funny rather than somehow offensive!

Then, Mr. Xu suggested that I wash my hands in warm water and then rub slices of ginger on them. I would try this, but I don’t have any ginger right now. Maybe next time I’m at the store.

I have no clue what most of this says 😦 ... even the non-Chinese part.

Over the week, my hands had been seeming to get slowly better. But, this last weekend I had gotten careless and washed some dishes using dishsoap, after which they seemed to be ‘flaring up’. My fingers felt puffy, especially around the joints, and didn’t want to bend all the way. My skin felt like “pins-n-needles”, except if the pins felt itchy instead of just pokey (and the poking was not as dense). Even my armbones were feeling kind of achey, but maybe that was just from sitting around all weekend propped up on my computer trying to play travel-agent for Japan plans.

The little red speckles seem like capillary-ends

Soooo I got around to trying to read the directions. I managed to parse out which area was the ‘how to use this product’ section and part read, part inferred that I should wash my hands in warm water, dry them gently, and apply the ointment… once? a few times? a day? Well, at any rate, it seems to be working!

************
edit (Feb 28th): the 冻疮 was going away and then vanished entirely while I was in Japan. I’m back in China now, and it’s starting to come back in a few mean little patches, but not very serious so far.

I am so far behind: apologies + christmascard style update

Jan8

So, just how far behind am I on this blog?

Well, let’s see. I got here in August. In September, I was already feeling pretty behind with various delays acquiring a blog. There was tons of stuff I already hadn’t written about and I could just feel the increasing lack of recency making me forget things that I would have liked to record and share.

In fact, I haven’t even posted anything that really explains how I got here or what I’m doing. I have been conscious of this for months, especially ever since my dear old grandmother sent me this lovely card. In it, she thanked me for some gifts I’d sent from Lushan and asked me to blog about the school, specifically, the “who, what, why, when, and where.”

i still haven't replied...

She sent it in mid-September.

I have been carrying the card around with me so I could take a picture of it as soon as I got around to making that post and answering her question. This means I have been carrying it around for months. I am only today posting the picture, even though I still haven’t answered her questions…

Besides not yet explaining basics of the school, I have hundreds of unorganized pictures, entire topics that I’ve been meaning to write about and haven’t, whole cities I have visited that I make no mention of, explanations of how I got here and what paperwork I had to wade through, and various realizations and observations and getting-used-tos that I have been, um, .. getting used to…

For now, besides apologizing profusely and vowing to make massive updates although I don’t know when, I will post the ‘letter’ I sent out on email and in cards … my Christmas card ‘spam’. So, before I head off to bed again, here you go. And… I really do intend to record more and link to pictures and stuff…

********************************************************
from CHRISTMAS SPAM LETTER

So.. more about this school .. This school is new as of this fall, so there aren’t swarms and swarms of kids here because the school is new and people need more time both to sign their kids up and to move into the expensive-looking apartments nearby, which seem to be all named after European cities. China is kind of obsessed with other countries, especially those in Europe. Its kind of sad, like the interesting kid in middle school who realizes he has to be like all the other cool kids in order to have them notice him. I think the foreign policies for other ‘Western’ countries over the 1900s are much to blame… It is interesting for me to consider that even though this area has thousands of years of history and is one of the oldest known civilizations around, in some ways, China is younger than the United States, since so much was ‘reset’ during the cultural revolution that made the PRC what it is now.

Anyway, I got this job after a fortunate meeting with the headmaster at a Portland-Suzhou Sister City Association event, followed by lots and lots of paperwork. This school has a kindergarten and an elementary campus, divided from each other by a road between them and gates/walls/fences around the respective campuses. The kindergarten seems to have 4 different groups of students: 大班 (da4ban1: big class), 中班 (zhong1ban1: middle class), 小班 (xiao3ban1: small class), and the toddler-sorts. The big class is the oldest and seems to be more of what we would consider a kindergarten. The middle and small classes are younger preschoolers, with the small class seeming younger. I teach one class to each group once a week (there are two groups of the 小班). Each group has 10-15 students. I do not work with the pre-preschoolers. As their teacher, and my English-connection to the kindergarten explained: they mostly cry for their mommy all day, but since it is later in the year now, they probably do less of that. These classes are relatively short, to accommodate the very simple material and the kids’ attention-spans. 15 minutes for the 小班 up to a half-hour for the 大班. We learn things like names of foods and saying ‘Thank you’, and the 中班 is REALLY enthusiastic about saying “I like…” and “I don’t like…”

The Elementary campus currently has 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade. The teachers all work out of cubicle-desks in the same office, and I share a cubicle with one of the other English teachers. Both the other English teachers are Chinese women, I am the only foreigner so far, but I think the school intends to have at least 4 more in the future, and to house them all on the 5th floor of the dorm where I currently live, which has been recently decorated with framed photos of famous European and Russian landmarks. Anyway, my fellow teachers are all very nice even if I can’t speak much with most of them. There are almost 40 1st graders, 5 2nd graders, and I think 13 3rd graders, so for the most part, I’ve got things pretty easy as far as dealing with classes. In addition to doing an English class with each grade once a week (twice a week for the 1st grade), I have ‘Brilliant English Class’, one for a subset of the 1st graders and one for a mix of 2nd and 3rd graders. The kids parents have to specially sign them up for these classes, and I am responsible for the content. For the older kids, we have another curriculum that we are working through, and for the younger kids, I’m trying to supplement the stuff they’re learning in regular English class and also teach some songs. The kids are pretty great. They are all friendly and enjoy yelling ‘Hello, Miss Mehoke!’ at me in the hallways, although several of the kids have found me outside of school as well 🙂 The school is a boarding school: some of the students go home at 4:30pm, some go home at 7:30pm, and some stay during the week and are picked up on the weekend. Parents are very serious about their students’ education. I met one father who told me that even though he lives in the nice apartments a few minutes away, his son stays at school all week because they think it’s better for him to do so.

This area (Wujiang) is an economic development zone, so it would probably be a good investment if I wanted to buy an apartment and try to sell it once the subway line has been put in. This place is going to change sooo much in the next few years. Right now, it is a mix of older farming villages, a relatively unexciting small city, and the shiny new developments. Everything here is built to a huge scale, I guess to be ready for when everyone moves here, but right now, it’s kind of like Wujiang is wearing all its clothes a few sizes too big. There is a patch of village-y houses at the base (wall) of the school, and I recently realized that they had planted something that looks kind of like spinach all the way up to right against the side of the school walls. They are constantly causing more plots of plants to exist even though it is December. I suspect there is a road on the map that hasn’t been built yet that will go right through (or very near) that village when it is in place.

(in other topics) I haen’t been practicing Chinese nearly as much as I want, but I am getting better at knowing when the other teachers in the office are talking about A) the mouse(rat) that comes through the office at night and eats peoples’ snacks, B) when ther eis a sale or other neat things on taobao.com (taboo seems to be a sort of amazon.com equivalent) or C) ordering a delivery of bubble tea. I really like bubble tea. Here it is “milk tea” which you can order with “pearls.” After some observation, failed trial-and-error, and some questioning, I can now order Jasmine-flavored milk tea with half the usual sugar, added “pearls” (giant black tapioca beads), and either hot or cold. Success! Except its probably not very good for me.

Oh, one more thing I’m getting better at: giving taxi directions to this school, and delivery directions to the main campus where the mail goes. I’m thinking of this because someone /just/ called me about a delivery. They ALWAYS call because “Duanwen” Rd, where mail gets sent, can apparently be one of two very different roads. And this school in Wujiang is new as of this fall, so none of the taxi drivers know where it is. …In general, I’ve noticed that taxi drivers often seem to not know where things are – perhaps this is because of rapid development. It’s sometimes hard to tell on maps which roads have been built already and which have just been planned enough to get on the map, but don’t exist.

Bubble tea facts!:
1) A teacher here, Ms. Xu, likes bubble tea so much that her husband opened a shop selling it at a college campus in Suzhou! I haven’t been there yet, but I want to go!

2) “Coco” (都可) is a chain store that sells milk tea. It is INSANELY popular and successful. I think the business is based in Taiwan.

Christmas actually seems like kind of a thing here, but purely for commercial and party reasons. I’m not sure if everyone’s recent excitement about buying clothes online means they’re getting Xmas gifts or preparing for New Year – both Jan 1st and the lunar new year – this year Jan 23rd. I recently went to a supermarket where the checkout people were all wearing both traditional red spring festival (lunar new year) vests, AND santa hats. A little strange. One of my visiting Chinese friends remarked upon it, too!

Some major differences here are the hypermarkets, sleeves, and toilets. The hypermarkets are malls with multiple floors and escalators that are more like inclined treadmills… because of course you might want to take your shopping cart form one level to another…
The ‘sleeves’ are external forearm sleeves that people wear over their clothing, so they don’t get the end/cuffs of their real sleeves dirty while working. Such a good idea! I’m going to get some.
Of course, the toilets are different. They are also white and smooth, just like Western toilets, but they are more of a shallow basin on/in the ground with a pipe leading out and a flushing mechanism. Not difficult to get used to, kind of like camping, but without pine needles or packing-out. I notice that I prefer the American-designed Western-style toilets and the Chinese-designed Chinese toilets (but not other combinations). There are a prevalence of Western-style toilets, even in malls and such, which makes me wonder if some people prefer them, or if the malls are preparing for some influx of Westerners.

I am going to miss the Spring Festival in China this year, because I’m going to see my brother in Japan – his birthday is the same day as the lunar new year. Japan doesn’t do the Spring Festival thing. That’ll probably be ok. I hear China during the Spring Festival is like the US during Christmas. Not much because everyone is shopping or traveling or at home with their families. Also, everyone in China is trying to relocate to go home, so traffic, trains, buses, planes… are crowded with anxious people. One of my friends described it as “Think thesis parade, except with thousands and thousands of lost-looking migrants trying to haul their bulky luggage onto overpacked trains. Minus the glitter, and a lot more sweat.” … I imagine people are more anxious and less happy, too. … I should finish getting my tickets soon…

-Tracy

元旦快乐！ Happy new year from 寒山寺 Hanshan temple!

Jan1

It’s a new year at Hanshan temple and the first thing we do is try to make our way back through the crowd to the buses. To the right, fireworks. To the left, lanterns rising into the night. To the far right, the famous bell tower that strikes a few notes as we leave. Hopefully will write more about this event later, but for now, Happy New Year!

The Tracy Update Blog

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