... but my head in the clouds ( Read more... )

Though the official China blog is over, I have one final thing. I've been translating this cookbook, and while it wasn't a really full-time effort I have a hefty handful of recipes built up and catalogued in a Microsoft Notebook document. It's very authentic Chinese food, as my tutor told me as she went through the books I used. Well, mostly. ( Read more... )

I celebrated by listening to my favourite John Phillip Sousa marches, and the US Army's rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner," but unfortunately I didn't get my hands on any explosives in time to mark the day. Instead, we had a pickup game of soccer/football in the courtyard. We won! Enduring glory is ours ( Read more... )

Thursday was my last class with the Tourism kids. They all needed to study for other exams, so I sat in the back and chatted with anyone who wanted- in that particular case, it was Mitch and Jennifer. Mitch has come so far in just a few months! He was telling me about some of the Chinese gay movies he's seen, as well as some of the American ones I ( Read more... )

I can't remember if I posted about the wedding yet or not, and LJ is so slow to load that I don't particularly want to check, so I'll just say it was very interesting and way out in the villages, and there are some pictures on the photobucket, and will be more eventually ( Read more... )

World Cup was awesome. US versus UK, and luckily for inter-compound relations, we got a draw. The British goalie fumbled one catch monumentally, which is the only reason we didn't lose 1-0, but I'm not complaining ( Read more... )

Sorry if the link is absolutely hideous. But the song it connects to has been playing intermittently all week. It's world cup season, and Hassan and Alex have been going mad. Alex, mostly. He's been playing Vindaloo and Three Lions on loop, so far as I can tell. Three Lions is like the 'Cowboy up' song for the England football team- soccer team ( Read more... )

The seniors are graduating tomorrow, as we all found out this morning. Classes are cancelled as a result, two weeks before finals and with one day's notice. Gee golly, I sure wish they'd told us this last week. Well, at least they told us at all. At the school where Dov and Meg were working in Shenzhen, they went to class to find the room empty ( Read more... )

One of the foreign teachers was one month into an African internet scam. Not Nigerian- it was from Cote D'Ivoir, but still. He was about four days from sending them most of his Chinese savings, but somehow me telling him that I'd found the exact details of the story he'd been told on a Nigerian scam-tracking website was enough to knock sense into ( Read more... )

I just had my first phone interview- with a Canadian school offering 6-month contracts to teach in Southern China. I'd be done by January, 2011, with a probable offer to sign on for the next year. The interview, I think, went really well. I was kinda nervous, but they seemed like friendly folks and by the end all was groovy ( Read more... )