So this past weekend we didn’t have much to do mainly due to that fact that it has been pouring all weekend. But we did decided that we would head out to town and see what was happening. On our way to the rec center to see what was going on there there are a bunch of temporary restaurants that people set up and we saw the above… thing.
Upon closer examination, I noticed that it was three sliced fish head stacked on top of each other. Ew.
Well, I am not going to write much because we have a early morning tomorrow. We have no teaching this next week and we are going to head out of town and catching a 8 am bus in the morning. Our biggest stop is a place called Zhangjiajie where the supposed model for the mountains in Avatar came from. We are very excited for it and of course, there will be lots of pictures that I will upload. I am evening thinking of doing a post just for potential background images.
Anyway, we are off to read our scriptures, watch a movie and call it a night. See you in 4 days!
This is a pretty common sight in China. Makes me wonder how anyone can work as an electrical service person, but it makes me smile every time.
This past weekend we were supposed to go on a BBQ but it didn’t quite go down as planned. After expecting a call from the student that we were going to go with at 12, we didn’t get a call until about 2 p.m. And for a strange reason that we don’t know, she seemed completely confused as to what we were talking about. It was kind of weird. So we decided that evening that we were going to exploring.
Through that exploring I found something that I have come to love. That is, picking your destination and trying to get there by traversing the side paths, shortcuts and alleyways to get there. It is a lot of fun because, well, it is an adventure in and of itself and you get to see sights that you normally wouldn’t get to see. I mean, I felt pretty cool when I realized that I was probably the first western person ever to step on a particular pathway. It was cool. 🙂
The beginning of this week marks six more weeks in China and boy are they going to be fun one. Next week we are going out to see a lot of sights, including the Avatar mountains in Zhangjiajie. I will take lots of pictures, of course, and have some detailed posts to go with them.
As well, the internet has gone on the fritz for us again so that’ll explain why update might appear very intermittent. I apologize for that ahead of time if it does happen. Love ya all!
So above you can see the before and after haircut photos. The first one was taken when we were on our adventure watching the rocks go down the hillside and the other was at KFC when we were in Jishou this past weekend. Even I don’t know why I was making those faces. 😛 But let me tell you about the journey that I had with my haircut.
This past Friday evening we set out to get our haircut. Jordan wanted to try this new place near the public square and so that was where we went. We didn’t find the guys that we were looking for and instead went to the next cleanest place on the street. Jordan got his haircut first and then it was my turn.
The reason that getting a haircut in China is so much of an adventure is that you don’t know what you are going to get just by the simple nature of the fact that the barbers never speak English. 😛 When I sat down I told them that I wanted finger-length all over. I tried to demonstrate this by pointing at my fingers, pointing at my hair and then eventually pointing at Jordan’s hair. The guy that was cutting my hair seemed to have understood it and got to work.
Expecting him to use the clippers (buzzers or whatever you call them), he started with the scissors but the thing was that he was doing it at about two finger-lengths (see pic at right). Since my hair was super long and is pretty fine I figure that he might be doing that so that the clippers might work better but then he started to make sure that every hair was the same length.
A bit concerned, I tried to tell him the length that I wanted a couple times and that didn’t seem to work. I eventually pointed to the clippers and he started using then. And cutting pretty short too. Jordan’s great line summed it up, “there’s no turning back now.” Boy was it true. My hair is a shorter than I was hoping that it would be. I feel victim to the language barrier.
On the upside, he spent a good amount of time making sure that it was all the same length since he did it by sight. Also, it should be a good length for when I go to Beijing and Shanghai at the beginning of July and I will look sexy in my pictures. My advice? Well, I don’t really have much advice, just that if you want a successful haircut in China, well, expect an adventure. 🙂
… Chinese is so hard for me to learn. The word I searched for above was Huayuan, the town that we are living it. I got three possible different word with the same spelling. The difference is in the tones that are used with certain vowel.
Another example: if you want to end a question that is directed towards a person, you end it with “ma.” If you say it with the wrong tone you end up calling them a horse. 😛
So yeah, Chinese is such a struggle for me but I do try to make the best of it. Often is class I will ask the class how to say a certain word in Chinese. Nine times out of ten I will butcher is, which is fun because it makes the kids laugh until I eventually get it right. Sometimes it sounds to me that I am saying the right thing but they will laugh and say “bu hao” which means that it is bad. 🙂
Haha, it is soo much fun to try to speak Chinese. Try it some time.
The that picture above is probably the last picture I will have taken with my hair this long, if all goes to plan. As many who do read this might know, I decided shortly after being here that I would not cut my hair until I got home. Why? Because I could. I had no other justification for it besides that and I was will to endure looking like a slob.
Well, I have been looking at my pictures and I am indeed looking a little trashy with it this long so I have decided to go back on my commitment and get it cut. I figured that when I go to Beijing and Shanghai right before I come home that I don’t want to look like a shaggy dog when I look back on the picture. I want to look cooooooooool. Which means having to get a hair.
And that means another adventure. Jordan got his hair cut at the beginning of April he ended up with a totally traditional Chinese flat-top. So yeah, I don’t know how it will end up being but like I always say in my posts, I love the adventure of it all. 🙂 Pictures to come tomorrow!
One thing I love about China is the funky quirks that people have. One of them is sleeping.
With the Chinese, if you are tired, you find a suitable place near you and conk out. Simple as that. Until recently, we would see people sleeping on the usual places like on the grass or on a bench but occasionally your would find someone sleeping in the hot sun or with their body slopped over in the most uncomfortable of positions.
Well, this past Saturday as we were walking through town towards where we were going to explore and we came across this guy. No, he isn’t dead but at first that did pass my mind. He must not have been drunk since I didn’t smell any alcohol. He has just sleeping there right next to a busy intersection in the middle of tow with lots of people walking past him. He was there when we went exploring and was there when we came back; a span of at least 3 hours. Jordan bought some fruit and after deciding that he didn’t like it gave it as a gift to our man of slumber.
I am sure he was there longer. Not a care in the world. I can dig it.
A shoe we found stuck in the road. Upside down. Your imagination's the limit on this one.
As you might have read in one of my previous blog posts, Huayuan is pretty much in the middle of nowhere. That doesn’t mean that our town is tiny, actually it is far from that, but we are two hours away from a train station and there are no big town near us. While that might be considered a bummer since it makes it more difficult for us to travel to the big site, it has been great because we have been able to explore the countryside more. I quite enjoy it. 🙂
This weekend was one where we didn’t have much to do so we decided to go exploring. Now I must explain how our exploring goes. We stare long and hard at an airiel view of our town and if we find something that looks interesting we go there. This weekend we decided to explore this winedy road and we were class we did. The trip was simple; we walk up this road about half a mile and saw another valley with a river running through it.
The main thing that caught our eye this day was the cement factory and a bunch of dirt. Just up the road from where we had hiked up there was steep hillside where trucks were dumping dirt. We saw that there was some big boulders coming down the hillside and we decided get a closer look. It was awesome to see these big rock cascading down the hillside and smash into a bunch of pieces. Good fun! 🙂
After that we explored the cement factory, explored some abandoned trails and homes, and the hiked up another hillside. On that hillside was a bunch of shale that had been dumped so we had fun throwing those rocks and watching this dissenegrate. Boys will be boys. After about three hours of exploring the area, we decided to head back into town to buy food. We decided that we will go back there another day because there is a cool water fall there and you can get right down by the river. Plus there is more construction to explore. 🙂
It was a simple weekend but in the end, I am glad that we did it. Weekends like these will always be the fondest memories.
Tonight was a really great one. One thing that I had been thinking was a bummer with the school was that the school wasn’t getting us involved in activities outside of the classroom. That was the case until recently when we were invited to a English contest that happened this evening. We even got a fancy invitation with really good English. 🙂
On our campus there are two big groups of buildings. One is where all of the classrooms are and the other group, well, we don’t know what they are used for. It seems that one is used for office space for teachers. The other building in that group is seemingly rarely ever used. It was on the fifth floor of that second building that we had this event and found out that there is something there. The room that it was in was a broadcast room, as you can see in the picture above.
The invitation that we were extended asked us to be one of the judges. In the contest there were two parts. The first part was where a group of ten students gave a speech in English and we, along with four other teachers, had to judge it on a scale from 1 to 10. All of the speeches were very good. What impressed me was that variety of speeches. One gave the story of Snow White, one talked on the importance of learning English and one sang a song in English. 🙂 I gave them all high scores because I saw that they were all trying very hard. It was awesome.
The second part wasn’t a judged event but kind of like a filler contest while the scores from the speeches were tallied. The contestant paired off and there was a quiz game about fruit. The object was that one student would randomly choose a fruit on the board and then relate clues of what the fruit was to their partner. The partner then had to guess what the fruit was. It was pretty funny to hear them try to think of clues to give their friend. 🙂 This activity also explain why there is so much fruit. 🙂
I have been thinking a lot about the kids and their own personal desire to learn English and it was great to see what an earnest desire to learn English can do for the kids. 🙂
