星期六的事

Lesson number one from today:
When you plan a Halloween party for 7pm expect a house full of girls at 3:30.

Lesson number two:
Eat dinner before the girls show up at 3:30 or you will be doomed to hunger pains for the next 6 hours.

Lesson number three:
Expect your house to look like a war zone after said party because the "worm cake" will be irrevocably ground into the floor.

Lesson number four:
Plan enough Halloween costumes for 7 people besides yourself, because they will show up expecting you to create one for them.

For those of you who are wondering, my Grandma had surgery today, and she's doing fine, everything went well, and she'll be in the hospital for a few more days.  I cannot thank you enough for the prayers and encouragement this week.

"Weekends don't count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless."
-Calvin (& Hobbes)

Please pray for me and my family.  My grandma had a heart attack, and is having triple bypass surgery this weekend.  She needs your prayers for safety and we need your prayers for comfort.  I wish I didn't have a heart so that I wouldn't hurt so much.

银行, 吉他, 豆腐

When I start to get over-confident in my ability to perform every day functions in China life takes a sledgehammer to my confidence.  For example, I went to the bank to Western Union some money home so that I can pay those pesky student loans and possibly buy a plane ticket for winter travels.  Last year my first Western Union adventure was one of the biggest headache inducing expeditions I've had, but I was naively expecting it to be a piece of cake this time around.  They wouldn't surprise me with the irrational requirement that I have to have the ID card of a native even though the money has nothing to do with any Chinese citizens.  I was fully prepared, walking past the largest, fanciest branches of the Agricultural Bank of China.  They wouldn't fool me by their size or grandeur.  The western Union was hidden in a smaller, farther branch I knew.  When I got to the location of the bank I gazed upon a pile of rubble and mentally gave myself a few swift kicks in the rear for thinking any building here is safe from the sudden demolitions ravaging Yichang.  Buildings are destroyed and replaced overnight on a regular basis.  So a quick errand once again became an epic battle with the streets of China.

 

To make a long story short, I was victorious in sending all my money to my mom--which incidentally did not bring with it the sense of accomplishment most victories in China do thanks to my now-empty bank account.  Katie-1 China-0.

 

Tonight one of my friends called and asked me if I wanted to come to a guitar class with him, to learn from a "Guitar Master," and since I've had a guitar decorating my living room for the last 8 months I felt it was about time I used it.  At first I had to endure 10 minutes of the kid next to me extolling the brilliance of Avril Lavigne and I was wishing I'd said no to the invitation, but soon I met some kindred spirits.  On my other side a student started playing some Dylan and from there I met some people with good taste in music, and am therefore exceedingly glad I went, not to mention there's a chance I might come out of this with the ability to play a song or two.

 

I'll leave you with a story from lunch:

"Hey Katie," I paused with the noodles halfway to my open mouth and glanced at Utopia from the corner of my eye.  I held my breath in anticipation of his next sentence.  He lifted his eyebrows in excitement and proceeded, "I want to be a business man someday and I will sell tofu in America.  And when I sell tofu in America, I will give you all the tofu you want for free!"

 

It's all my dreams come true.

我得了感冒

For the last three days I've had a head cold that is proving to be more relentless than I first thought, so I canceled all my activities and spent the day in bed.  I was too lazy to even get myself something to eat, but my wonderful roommate bought me a milk tea and fried rice.  I probably would have shriveled into nothing if it weren't for her.  Then she washed all my dirty tea mugs, because I hadn't wanted to get my germs all over them by washing them.  I'm feeling very loved.

"It is not the magnitude of our actions but the amount of love that is put into them that matters."
-Mother Teresa

阳朔的华，山

Story time

Once upon a time, there was a Sammie.
Once upon a time Sammie sent her favourite sister a package from Australia.
That sister was so happy she danced the whole way to her foreign affairs office.
Alas, her foreign affairs officer gave her a measly envelope.
Inside that envelope was a jigsaw puzzle.
A jigsaw puzzle made of Chinese characters.
Her task was to decipher the characters and determine the reason she got an envelope not a box.
She declined the mission and handed the paper back with with a pout.
Her foreign affairs officer translated for her.
He told her that her package had been WITHHELD in Wuhan for an unkown reason, probably due to the Australian contraband inside．
He also said it will be very complicated to get it back．
Even he does not know how.
They will charge her 3yuan per day to hold her box from her...
Until she provides a list of what's inside, and a million other ridiculous things.
A list of what's inside a box she's never seen.
Will the story end happily ever after?
To be continued...

我的英文名字

Hello Kitty.

That's what the teacher said to me when she shook my hand and thanked me for coming to the English speech contest at Yiling High School.  I understand that my name is sometimes hard for Chinese people to pronounce, so I tried not to cringe too obviously until I saw the giant sign marking my place at the judges table.  For the rest of the evening I was introduced as "Kitty" in front of hundreds of high school students.  Yes, my mom really hates me that much.  She named me Kitty, so that people could greet me by saying, "Hello Kitty!"

The sad part is, I'm pretty sure my student thinks that that is my name.  She's the one who asked me to judge the contest.  Last week I got called "Kite" repeatedly by one of my students.  I think the next quiz I'm going to give will have one question:
1.  What is my name?

Pass or fail, muah ha ha.

You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.

阳朔和桂林

I've almost convinced myself to seek help for this problem that I have:  I cannot leave home without at least four books in hand.  My vacation was scheduled for seven days and I nearly brought a book for each day.  During my 24 hours of traveling to get to Guilin I began to pat myself on the back for loading myself down, no matter how cumbersome they were otherwise.  The morning before I left, my good friend ZhangXiaQing came over to tell me that she wasn't going to be able to come along because her mom was afraid she would get swine flu while traveling.  So what had at first looked like a fun all-nighter with a friend began to look more dreadful.  It started with a train ride on a hard seater from 7pm to 2am.  While I dread spending all night on a hard seat, from the very beginning this train had a different feel.  It was subdued, like China took some time off and had a glass of wine instead of it's usual crack.  The guy across from me was polite but not nosy, instantly endearing himself to me by not overwhelming me with questions or cigarette smoke.  It's like everyone had been muffled by the festivities of the National Day celebration in the morning, and had no energy left to be annoying.

Around 2am I arrived in Loudi to wait for my next train.  At first I had decided to ignore the shouting taxi drivers and hawkers who swarmed around me, pretending that I didn't speak either Chinese or English but instead risked the inevitable sales pitch to ask if one of them could take me to the McDonald's in town so that I could get a cup of coffee.  Unfortunately he said they were closed, so I hopped over a conveniently placed shrub outside the train station and settled down against a tree to read for the next 7 hours.  I thanked the shrubs for their ability to hide me from inquisitive eyes.  I think I like China better at night.  At night you can't tell that smog is shrouding the nearest buildings.  At night old people dance in the town square and don't care who's watching.  Fireworks still pop and horns still honk, but they seem somehow softer, as though blanketed by the darkness and unable to travel as far.  I laid there and listened to the tunes played by the combination of taxi horns.  Each one plays a different note and to a different rhythm that forms a living musical.  Loudi's is livelier than Yichang's.

At 6am after finishing 1 1/2 books I decided to try for Mackers again but the next taxi driver told me there wasn't one in Loudi.  I think he was lying but I resisted the urge to try all of the taxis around.  I went inside when my eyes stopped functioning, to wait the next two (I thought) hours before falling blissfully into a bed.  Waiting in the train station after being awake all night wasn't the most miserable I've ever been, but it definitely makes the top ten list.  When the sign above the train entrance repeatedly flashed messages about the newest delay I started to think I was never going to get out of Loudi, and that's when CCR seemed prophetic. 

If I only had a dollar, for every song I've sung.

And every time I've had to play while people sat there drunk.

You know, I'd catch the next train back to where I live.

Oh Lord, I'm stuck in Lodi again.

Oh Lord, I'm stuck in Lodi again.

At almost 11am I finally was allowed to elbow my way to the train where I found my bunk and lost consciousness for the next 6 hours or so.  Upon arriving in Guilin I met two other American teachers and we hopped on a bus to Yangshuo, where we eventually located our hostel...above a night club.  I had fun falling asleep to rock music but was thankful for the ability to sleep in the next morning.  Eventually we got around and headed out to the 漓江 Li River and hired a bamboo boat to float down the river, so that we could see some of the gnarly hills lend their beauty to the country.  It's easy to see why it's such a famous tourist spot.

Yangshuo has some of the best shopping I've yet seen in China, though I haven't been to the famous Silk Street or Pearl Markets in Beijing.  We were a little disgruntled at how much we had to bargain for everything though, including a simple bottle of water.  The city was so foreigner-heavy that the locals assumed we were suckers just like the rest and tried to double the price of water and food, in hopes that we wouldn't know any better.  Once you started speaking Chinese they toned it down a bit though, and through my impressive skills I managed to get lots of cheap things.  We filled our days with a lazy kayaking trip through some of the most unique scenery on earth, a mud bath and hot springs excursion in a very underwhelming cave, and getting lost on what was supposed to be a 13 mile hike to Xingpping.  We stumbled across farmers knee deep in the fields, which in my opinion was more interesting than the highly-populated trail we had been looking for, and were honored to try to chat with the locals who gave us fruit and told us we were thoroughly lost.

I'm afraid I may be losing some of my extensive reader base due to over-exuberant typing, so here is the last highlight of the trip:
We accidentally discovered a little hostel that served coffee and ended up chatting with the owner for over an hour about his life, and how he became a follower of our king.  It was one of the most encouraging conversations I've had.  All in all, it was a great week with great people.  Pictures will follow.

"If you don't get to a beautiful place every couple of years, you get to thinking everything is urban, as though when God made creation he just made some medium-sized buildings, a bowling alley, and a burger place."
-Don Miller