more exercise

more street exercising in china. this is in beijing, but they have these things everywhere. first, my dad got on to exercise with the guy in the red glasses and speedo man. i guess i should explain why this guy is wearing a speedo out in the middle of public- we were at a very famous park that has a lake in the middle of it and some of the older people were swimming in it. it's pretty cold here right now, so they had to warm up first.


then speedo man got off the exercise equipment to go swim, but the other guy stayed on to teach my dad how to properly use it. unfortunately, my dad wasn't doing too well on it. he showed him to put his left leg out while his right hand was out and vice versa so you could get a good swinging motion going. he kept saying, "one two one two one two" in english.



then i decided to try it because i always see people using these things in dalian and had never tried it before. the guy got off of the equipment and gave us a land demonstration. it was a little harder than i thought it would be.


i finally got it down, and we were in unison for a while. he showed me that we could also move our hands back and forth like we were dancing. i think my dad had fallen off at this point ;)



super cool guy! he was 78 years old, wow.

when in china...

do as the chinese! you should...

dance at night with the chinese people


dance with a terracotta soldier


stretch with the chinese people

play chinese sports


visit the forbidden city (even if you've only had 2 hours of sleep)


buy fruit at the market


go to a chinese primary school (look very closely in the back)

eat a moon cake


show off your woodson pride

i met these two goofballs on the street during my huang shan trip. i was walking around taking pictures around their houses and a few people came out to see what i was doing. i had chosen to go down this street because the houses looked really old, hehe. somehow i ended up stopping and talking to these two ladies. i told them i was taking pictures of their houses because i thought they were beautiful. they seemed to get a kick out of that and stepped aside to let me photograph it. they were really hard to understand though, so i had to cut the visit short, but they were very kind.



as you go farther south, it seems like more of the buildings use wood. this was the farthest south i had ever been, although it really wasn't that far south.

dining with my student's family

i've written a few posts on here on about my student's mom who always cleans my apartment. it was really starting to make me feel uncomfortable- i didn't want her to feel like she HAD to do that every time... so i suggested that we start doing 1 lesson a week at their home. she was amenable to this, so i met them outside my student's school on wednesday.

on the way to their house, the mom asked me if i wanted to eat dinner with them that night. so freakin nice. i didn't have any plans, so i told her that i would. i figured that i would just give the daughter a lesson and then we would all eat, but when i got there i realized that they weren't that interested in having class that day. they just wanted to show me all the things in their house and hang out, haha. their apartment was tinnnny. one bedroom for the girl, one bedroom for the parents, and then a kitchen with a dining room table. the only place to really hang out is the kitchen table because they don't have a living room. it's so hard for me to imagine growing up in such a small space, you can't really move and there is no privacy. they also had a ton of pets- frogs, turtles, fish, ants and a cat.

i gave the girl a short lesson and then we were called in for dinner. the dad made the whole dinner, apparently he is the chef in the house. we had a chicken wing dish, cucumbers, an egg rollish thing, shrimp and rice. it was pretty good. for some reason though, the dad did not sit down to eat with us. i never fully understand what's going on with things like this in china. while i was eating, the mom kept encouraging me to eat more and suggesting what i could eat next, haha.

after we were done eating, the daughter returned to her room to do her homework and the dad sat down. we ate gummy bears and nuts, and drank 2 different kids of tea. they don't speak english, so the entire conversation was in chinese. i didn't understand everything they were saying, but enough to keep up and add my 2 cents, which was always some inane comment haha. they are really chill people though so i felt relaxed the whole time, which is good. earlier, i had been dealing with another parent who didn't really speak english and it was incredibly stressful because she basically was speaking to me like i was a fluent speaker- she seemed to have no ability to slow down her speed of speech (even though i asked her to slow down like 4 times) and she was using ridiculous words (like instead of simply calling her son's english book a book, she was calling it a text book, which is a completely different word in chinese that i didn't know). really, how can you be so dumb? the family i was with later was just the opposite, they could speak slowly to me, and use a variety of words that i might know. but i felt like language barriers aside, we were all on the same page with each other. they're about 30-35 years old.

in total that day, i was trying to listen and speak chinese for like 6 hours. i was pretty dead when i got home, but it was cool trying to use everything i have learned.
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i finally got a picture of my little student, she is the one doing the wink face. she is a genuinely nice child, but her class is like the class from hell. last semester they were my first class in the morning every friday, and i always dreaded it. the day and time have changed this year, but they're still little hell raisers. of course i still have a soft spot for them though- my little private student, the girl next to her in pink who is always smiling and whining at me about something or other chinese, and the boy behind them with glasses whose mom told me on QQ how much her son likes me as a teacher :)

fly away

this little boy is awesome. as you can see, he is a little more outgoing than his classmates, i don't think i could have gotten a better picture of him, haha. he is a 6thg grader to Hu Tan elementary school, which is the smallest school that i have taught at in china. the class sizes range from like 20 to 30 kids, oh my god, it's wonderful. i often talk to this boy on QQ (chinese AIM) and he told me that he wants to be a singer, a pianist, or a scholar. pretty good. the first day of class, his chinese english teacher (who attends all the classes with me, a rarity) made him sing a chinese song for me in front of his class. apparently he had no issue with this, he always sings the songs for the new teachers! his teacher told me that he is a very famous singer in dalian. he will go far..

climbing huang shan day 1

my first post on this sucked, so i re-wrote it

last week i went to huang shan, one of china's most famous mountains. to put things in perspective, about 15 million people visited the mountain in 2007 alone (says wikipedia). i visited the mountain during the national day week when everyone in china has a week-long holiday. many people do not even bother traveling at this time because it's too crazy. while there were definitely a lot of people there, it wasn't as bad as people made it out to be and it was interesting having to share the mountain with so many other people.

although i had planned on climbing huang shan by myself in 1 day, i ended up meeting 2 chinese guys (jayee and gavin) in my hostel and decided to climb it with them in 2 days. this was a really good decision for 2 reasons- 1. because now i have 2 really good new friends that i will always remember climbing huang shan with and 2. i feel like this is not a mountain that you should do in 1 day. it's pretty tall and you would miss the sunrise, which i think is one of the main highlights of the trip. here we are at the beginning of the hike.
we got a super early start on the day the bus left from our hostel to go to the mountain, the sun wasn't even up yet. we packed our way onto the bus and i was sitting there about to fall asleep when i realized that the hostel had not given me my lunch at breakfast (you could buy packaged lunches from the hostel for the next day). i asked jayee and gavin what i should do, and they said i should go back and get it. it seemed like the bus was about to leave but i was like ok whatever and ran off the bus to get it.

when i got back to the hostel, there was a lot of confusion because there was no record of me having ordered a lunch for that day and i was telling them that i had already paid for it. they went ahead and made my sandwich anyhow. it turns out the error was made when i had cancelled the lunch from the previous day (because i had a headache and couldn't go) and moved it to this day, but they didn't realize that until later, so at least they went on the assumption that i was telling the truth about paying.

after my lunch was finally ready, i ran back outside as fast as i could to get back to the bus. as i came around a corner, i saw someone standing there looking down the street. i assumed he was the bus driver. he looked pretty angry and yelled at me to hurry up. while the hostel people were making my sandwich they were calling the buses to tell them not to leave me. this is why i said this hostel was so freakin organized. then i saw jayee standing there holding all of my bags. i was like oh my god, did the bus leave with gavin?...but thankfully it turned out there was a smaller bus still there which we could take. i'm pretty sure everyone hated me when i got on and the bus driver told me to apologize. the bus driver lightened up to me after we got on though, which was good because i was sitting up in the very front seat with him. i was so lucky i got the front seat- i had an awesome view of all the little villages and scenery on the way to the moutanin. i was so tired but i knew i would regret falling asleep and missing it so i just put my ipod on and tried to relax and take it in. so that was an interesting start to the trip!

we climbed so many steps that day. i definitely have never climbed that many steps in my life. i had made a foreign friend at the hostel 2 days earlier and she told me that huang shan was freezing, so i was wearing leggings under my jeans and a long sleeve shirt with a hoodie and a jacket. after we started climbing for like 15 minutes, i was already hot. i realized that we had used different methods to get up this portion of the mountain- while we were doing the 3 hour hike (all staiiiirsss!) she had waited in line to take the cable car. no wonder she was cold! i had no desire to wait in that line (it was like an hour..), and i also wanted to say that i climbed the whole thing myself so i'm happy we didn't do that. i eventually found a bathroom to take my layers off. the hike was pretty hard but there were plenty of rest stops along the way and jayee, gavin and i had time to get to know each other better. most of this portion of the hike looked like this:
it was really beautiful. i hadn't seen that many pictures of huang shan before but i thought alright, if this is what this place looks like, that's great! however, someone coming down the stairs told us that this scenery was just normal, and that it was even more beautiful at the top.

after getting through that first portion of the hike, we finally passed the place where the cable car would have taken us and came to this bridge which had all these locks fastened to it. the locks are put there by couples to ensure their everlasting love, haha. the chinese are so romantic.

then we started coming to some really impressive sights. the sign was right, i started to believe how majestic huang shan really was :)-

here are some of the first views we got from the top of the mountain that day. my crappy camera really couldn't handle these pictures. it was a little foggy that day, but the feeling i get from the pictures is not the same feeling i had when i was there. it felt much brighter and fresh. i felt a little scared when i was up there because it was sooo high, there were a lot of people, and the hand rails seemed very low and unstable. notice me gripping that rail, and the guy on the right side barging in!



afterwards, we checked into our dorm for the night, grabbed a quick bite to eat and set off quickly because dusk was coming and we still had places to go. the route we chose was a deep canyon. at first when we started descending, it felt really good to be going down rather than up, but i realized that we were going to have to climb all of those steps to get back up...ah! i think this was one of the hardest portions of the hike because it was incredibly steep and we were really tired after climbing all day. but it was so beautiful and serene, it didn't matter.




we saw a father carrying his little girl down into a canyon too. i don't know how he did it, and why he didn't have some kind of thing to strap her on his back. it seemed to be a pride thing, but to me it was also very dangerous. i guess one day, she can tell people that that's how she first climbed huang shan.


at last, the sun started to set, and it felt like the world was going to sleep.

it was time to start going back up before it got too dark. along the way, i made a new little friend. with little to no encouragement he took wonderful pictures for me and told me all the english he knew (his ABCs, his numbers, a few colors!). he was only 4 years old, so i think his english will be very good one day :) his mom must have bought him that medal at the top of the mountain.



we returned to the hotel and ate a big dinner to refuel our bodies. afterwards, there wasn't anything to do in the dorm room, i was exhausted, and we were getting up at like 4 to see the sun rise the next morning so i started falling asleep around 7 or 8. the dorm room felt really cramped- there were like 2 other families in there. they were all very kind though. one woman had her little son with her in the same bed, and she kept telling him softly to be quiet because i was sleeping. how nice, haha. finally, the lights went out and i went to la la land. what a great first day of the trip...

music festival contd.

this is probably a better representation of the crowd from the music festival than the conga line :)

















an accordion?


sooo emo

dalian's first music festival

a while back i attended dalian's very first outdoor music festival with a wonderful chinese girl from changchun (Dingding!) who couchsurfed with me for a few days. i wouldn't have known about it if she had not stayed with me, so i was very fortunate. we also met up with 2 of her friends from high school who were super sweet and also took us out to lunch.


the festival was very small- probably no more than 200 people (i could easily walk right up to the front of the stage) and they had something for everyone...rock, metal, electronica, techno, rap, emo, punk, folk...etc...haha. they just wanted to put it all out there. most of it was pretty good. for the first music festival ever in dalian, i'd give it a thumbs up. in the picture below is one of the folk singers. apparently he was the most famous person at the festival, and accordingly, his act was at the end. dingding got his autograph, haha. i'm not really sure how he could see his guitar.


i realized that Dingding was the coolest chinese girl that i will ever meet here when i saw her head banging like crazy when the heavy metal came on. she had told me that she liked metal, but wow. she is super sweet and bohemianish so you wouldn't expect it. i really can't handle metal, it's just too much for me. people also started pushing like crazy when it came on and i thought i was going to die, so i moved to the back and waited for the insanity to end. here is one of the earlier metal acts so people weren't too crazy yet. the sound quality is not very good.


the vibe at the festival was a little different than what it would be in america. at one point when i looked behind me during a techno act, there was a huge conga line going. i was like whoa, haha. whatever floats your boat.

my favorite acts were the techno guy and the 'ghetto' rapper guy who was MCing the festival. the rapper guy had the whole rapper schtick down really well. the techno guy just had a cool mustache. the video is the rapper doing his MC thing while the techno guy was playing.



hopefully i can attend another chinese music festival before i leave :)

traffic jam

front row view on the bus :)

this is a huge traffic jam on the road from hohhot to beijing (yes, my posts are out of order). there were at least 1000 of these trucks on the road filled with coal and they were moving sooo slowly. ugh, seeing that made me feel so sick. i heard the bus driver say that this traffic problem was getting worse and worse. i wonder how often this road looks like this- how can there be that much coal??!? we came to a complete standstill for about 45 minutes and everyone got out to go to the bathroom on the side of the road (i did not participate in this). i was so worried that we were going to be stuck there for for hours...i heard about a traffic accident in china about 2 summers ago that lasted for a few days....well thankfully we eventually took off and were able to pass all of them on the shoulder.



video once we finally got moving

oh my gawd

chinese eye meds

a lot of my students have these little raised black things all over their ears with white pieces of tape covering them. from what i was told, it's some kind of traditional chinese medicine that helps improve eye sight. i don't understand what it is or how it works, but it seems to be pretty popular.

this little girl is a cutie, but she's also a little monkey because she's so small. if i'm not being careful, i'll end up with her somehow hanging off of me. crazy children...

cell phone person

during class one of my students put this on my phone. i kind of saw her out of the corner of my eye doing something but i was trying to teach so i wasn't really paying attention. then i looked over and saw her arranging the little pieces of paper. i was like what is she doing, haha. it's so strange. even though this meant she wasn't paying any attention to me at all, i gave her a sticker, i at least had to award the creativity!

slogans

the stairs at one of my schools has all these english slogans written on them. this one seemed a little strange though..it's the last step on the top floor haha

she xian

the night before i was supposed to go to huang shan, i got a huge migraine in the middle of the night and couldn't even think about getting up at 5 and exerting myself the next morning. i went down to the reception and my hostel was kind enough to move all of my bookings to the following day. it actually worked out well that way because i would have climbed it by myself if i had gone that day, so i think it was meant to be.

i woke up late the following morning and had no plans at all. i felt 100% better though so i decided to rent a bike from the hostel and just ride around all day. i really wanted to ride out into the countryside but i was told that it was too far away. i wanted to give it a try anyhow, but i didn't have a good map so i wasn't sure where i was going. for a while i thought that i had made great progress in leaving the city but then all of a sudden i realized that i had gone in a gigantic circle. ahhhh! at that point i gave up my mission and started riding along the river so i wouldn't get lost. finally, i ran into the long distance bus station at the edge of town. i was pretty bored on my bike, so i decided that i would lock it up there and see if i could take a bus to a neighboring town.

i decided to take a minibus to a little city called she xian because it was only 30-45 minutes away. immediately when i got there, i knew i had made a mistake. i think other people were just as confused as i was about why i was there- a couple people looked like they were about to fall off their motorbikes when they saw me. i couldn't believe how ugly this little place was, mainly because of the amount of construction that was going on. i swear, the entire town was under construction, that might be the only job there. look how dirty the water is in the picture above. i wonder how many little cities are like this in china...

even the kids couldn't find another place to play!

but despite this, i still think there were some beautiful things there, like this old woman's ridiculous garden by the water (how do they do it!?), these ugly houses all crammed together in front of the water, and the oxen just roaming around. the bridge in the background kind of looks like something you'd see in europe :)-