Australia

We're still in Australia. It's been a great holiday, we've been catching up with friends for a seemingly endless number of lunches and dinners, spent a week up the Sunshine Coast, where although it rained a bit, was really relaxing. We also had Trace's old dog Mosey with us and took him for walks on the beach.

We head back to China this Sunday, and I'm looking forward to that, although I will miss the convenience of our lives here in Brisbane, not to mention our friends and family and the healthier lifestyle here.

When I get back to China I'll probably update this post with some photos from Australia.

China here we go

It's been quiet here, but as many of you know I'm heading back to Australia for 3 weeks - I leave tomorrow, Saturday night. Don't know if I have much to say now, but see all the Australians soon!

Japanese pranks

Quite possibly the funniest thing I've ever seen... I was crying after watching this...

Doing what I can only

While swimming in a Suzhou pool attempting to avoid people swimming width-ways, those loitering in various places in the pool (like floating obstacles), and those swimming diagonally, yes diagonally, it occurred to me that I need to focus on a great principle that I’ve recently relearned myself while teaching English to Chinese students. Yes, I have become the student from one of my own lessons. Anyway, I realised that I have to stop trying to change China. All I can do, in simple terms is focus on the things that I can change or fix and do that, however small or minor. For the things that I can’t change (like possibly people swimming diagonally in a 25 metre swimming pool), I realised that I have to accept them, not worry about them or get frustrated, and simply move on. Do what you can, but don’t stress about it.

I just signed up for a year's membership at a new pool a few weeks ago. I made sure that they'd have pool markers and that they'd be used. They agreed with my request, but it turned out that there would just be two markers on either end (ie lane 1 and lane 8 etc). Still, better than nothing. One reason why I agreed to sign up with this pool is that it looked a bit more exclusive (less staring while you're getting changed, swimming etc) and they appeared willing to use the pool for it's actual use - swimming laps. Anyway, by my third swim, the pool markers dissappeared, apparently "broke" was the reason.... no doubt some of these uneducated swimmers were probably pulling on them, leaning on them etc.... so they're broke - probably won't return, I bet. When I first saw the pool they didn't have them, and I suspect that in the back of my mind that they were only there because I said I really want them. So without the markers, out goes any semblance of order, and people start swimming any direction, and just kind of clustering around in groups in the middle of a pool... you end up running into other people, you get the picture... So I just try to do my thing without stopping much, then get the hell outa there. If you stop for a breather, you notice everyone trying to get a few good stares in (of me). Ah, whatever. So I was thinking, all I can do is to ask them a couple of times politely to reintroduce the markers, and if or when they don't, I'll just have to accept it...

Tracey left for Australia last Wednesday - so the secret's out. Everyone knows anyway, right? She surprised her mum in Sydney, I heard it was good. I'm still here in China for another two weeks and then I'll leave and we'll meet up in Brisbane where will be for three weeks. I'm really, really, REALLY looking forward to Australia. I want to see some blue skies again!

Bad Chinese fashion statements

First of all, I really want to respond to some of the comments on this blog, but I can't because it is blocked by the Ch!nese Government and has been for sometime. But I did manage to recently set up the function that allows me to get all comments emailed to me. So I am reading them and although I'd like to respond in real-time, I can't.

Anyway, this post is to talk about some bad choices when it comes to Chinese fashion. I'd like to post some photos to go with this sometime, if I can.

1 Young Chinese men wearing crop-top T-shirts. Well, during summer many men walk around with their T-shirts rolled up to just below their armpits... eeeeww...

2 The good old jeans with high heels combo. One for the women, and usually combined with gaudy jewelery and flashy, glitzy 'extras'... But the jeans and high heels combo, looks awkward and way too Imelda Marcos.

3 Oversize button up shirts that men wear. At least 2-3 sizes too big. Now, I'm not advocating muscle shirts for China, and I don't wear them myself (although my hunky muscles are crying out for more exposure), but let's start wearing clothes that actually fit. A few times, staff at work have said that I like wearing 'tight' clothes... Actually, I wear clothes that fit...

4 Split pants... yes, the babies are not missing out here... split pants - pants with a gaping whole exposing your bottom and hooly-dooly (or girlie bits) so you can let rip with a dump anywhere you like... the park, the road, even allegedly inside shops... and why not!

Made in Hong Kong

Made in Hong Kong - Always wanted to say that... Good old Honkers, hey - these are some photos from the six days we spent in Hong Kong during early May. This first one's of a couple of chunky buildings.











This one shows a hazy skyline view from the Star Ferry.











This is in the harbour, a bunch of old house boats.












Hong Kong really is a great break from many of the cultural difficulties we have experienced in mainland China. There is a free-ish press to start with, so it was great to hear of many of the things happening in China that weren't being reported. The Hong Kong papers are quite critical of the Beijing government. Pollution is starting to effect Hong Kong too - evident in the haze that surrounded our visit there. I suspect a lot of this drifts over from neighbouring Shenzhen - a heavily industrialised Chinese city on the border. But Hong Kong was also great for the variety of food options, great shopping, and has more of a multicultural feel than you get back in Suzhou. People didn't stare at us and we were able to go on about our business. It's an exciting place.

This last one has been photoshoped by me. We were snapped in Shanghai, and the background is Hong Kong. I combined the two because there weren't any great photos of the two of us together in Honkers!!

Where are you?

This is an urgent (and serious) request for contact details for Kerryn Vose and Mikey Nicholls. All of the email addresses I have used to contact them have not worked, if you know either of their details could you email me please.

Thanks

Everything in it's right place

Firstly, if you've been reading any of the entries in this blog, I'm sure you'd agree that everything isn't in it's right place... at least in terms of my head... Where you at? I don't know... But I do know that I need a more positive attitude to dealing with this strange land. Humour laced activities, such as putting up signs in elevators are fine, but that's not going to go along way to persuading me that my time here is assisting in bringing about a better, fairer Ch!na.

The theorists' theories about the 6 month cultural shock period that then subsides into a period of acceptance and authentic enjoyment of a new culture, isn't mirrored by my experience. So yeah, here I go again, venting my frustrations on the net. Other than a recently stronger effort at fighting fire with fire - deliberately staring back at those who stare at me, whipping out the finger on occasions or some choice language, what are the options? (I hear my brain ask...)

I just don't feel I've fully adjusted to life in China yet - at least not in a positive way. I'm still quite negative towards the things that p\ss me off - staring, the Govt's control, access to information, limited food choices, pollution, other peculiarities....

So right now, I'm going to rant and rant into my little blog, and then maybe, one day it will all stop... ... ...

2 weeks and counting

Updating the earlier post about the "don't wizz in the elevator" sign, here's the proof. This has been up for 2 weeks now, in both of our elevators. There doesn't appear to be much evidence of anyone removing it, but Nancy stuck it up with quite strong adhesive, so I think it will be there for sometime. Apparently the translation was slightly incorrect, so no doubt most Chinese people will deduce that someone with bad Chinese created it, ie a Westerner. Anyway, we are happy with our work, it brightens up our days when things aren't going so well.

more stuff blocked

Blogger is still down, Flickr is down now too - since last week all Chinese users have been unable to view any pictures on flickr. Rumour has it that it's because of a whole lot of Tiananmen Square incident pictures uploaded recently... I'm sure the blocking of YouTube is only just around the corner, because there's plenty of news coverage of the Tiananmen Square massacre and other things up there...

Two nights ago while watching CNN, a story started, "A man in jail" or "Prisoners in..." and then was 'mysteriously' blacked out for the rest of the story.

This is all just so frustrating, makes me want to go out of my way to be subversive...

Check this and this out...

grow up

Anonymous message to the Ch!nese tossers who block blogger and other useful sites on an almost weekly basis... Grow Up! It seriously p-sses me off that you bunch of brain-washed dweebs are living in the 21st Century and still trying to control what people think. You must be all so scared about people having an opinion in Ch!na - imagine that! "Ooooh, what if people could actually express their own opinions on a site like blogger.... hmmm, what if people could actually listen to other people's opinions on these sites....ooooh - sounds dangerous! Better stop that quick and smart"....

Get your hand off it...

Right now, I'm so totally fed up with many of the things that happen here. I've been reading a probably slightly biased book about M A O - "The Unknown Story". It's about 700 pages long and I'm half way through it. I'm up to 1949 when M A O actually takes control of the country. But already under his guidance the amount of death, suicide, torture and abuses is staggering. Millions of people sacrificed for his causes and I still haven't made it to the notorious famines and socalled "Cultural Revolution". It's not only disgusting to hear of the millions of people that were killed or tortured - but it's hearing about sexual mutilations, disembowlments and being buried alive etc - the way things were carried out that is really scary. This sort of treatment of humans seems to be a well established theme in this country, and if it wasn't M A O who was to do this, I'm sure one of his other cronies would have acted in the same way. So much of their history is completely untold - not just here but largely in the West.

Of course, in balance, the 20th Century was full of bloodshed, torture and genocide in many places in the world. But Ch!na's place in this history is extremely downplayed or unknown due to the culture of rewriting history and fabricating of events - turning atrocities into victories for example. What sort of a country actually uses their own tanks and guns to kill their own citizens for protesting? (talking about the great unknown and rewritten history of the T-Square incident of 1989 where somewhere between 200 and 400 people were killed).

Please provide your comments to help me deal with my frustrations. I know that getting angry is futile and not constructive. Oh - but right now, of course, I can't read the comments section because its blocked...

Suzhou traffic

Here's another short movie I put together. As Radiohead once said, "Everything... in it's right place"...

We got a boy on the way

Baby update. This weekend we found out that the baby to be is a boy. We saw the ultrasound which was good, it really helped make this whole thing a lot more real. We saw pretty much everything - the body, the heart, the spine, the face... and other things that I'm sure you can work out. Although it all looked like some alien type creature I'm sure it won't come out that way. This is also good because now I have to get a bit more serious about names. Ms Wurly's been hassling me to start taking the name-thing serious. Apparently my suggestions of "Fartler" and "Hildario" weren't so good.

Names can be viewed as being important in that they help define the character of the person, and they're words that you're going to say a lot in your life. Alternatively you could consider a name to be an arbitrary, but necessary 'thing' that society requires. My opinion fluctuates between the two thoughts.

Anyway, I know that some of the more left-field names Chinese students have chosen as 'English names' won't be needed. Here's my account of some people I've met (or fellow English teachers have met). Yes, this list is deadly serious:

Shelf
Promotion
King
Winner
Flyer
Superman
Oasis
Ci Ci
Headerson
West
Groger (one of my kids – but think he means George)
Harry Potter (all a first name)
Strawberry
Justice
Kcon (pronounced ‘con’)
Hitler

That last one is not one of my students, but a fellow teacher's friend's former student. But most of the others I can vouch for myself.

my bike ride home

Here it is, the rough and ready video version of my bike ride home from work. Filmed entirely on location in Suzhou, China. This is my first outing in YouTube, so maybe I've compressed the file a bit more than I needed to... Hope you like it.

Suzhou Industrial Park

Here's a little sign I found not far from my work yesterday. A very important message about "the sequent" that's immediately clear to all of us... right?

Yesterday I taught a two hour straight lesson to some of my school kids (only 12 luckily) from 3.10 to 5.10 in the afternoon. Usually it's a 1 hour lesson, and as much as I protested about this, I ended up doing it. The kids are 9 or 10 years old and sitting through a 2 hour lesson with some foreigner speaking English must be extraordinarily painful. I tried my best to fill out the lesson with games and things, but it's a pretty hard thing to do no matter how you approach the lesson. I also don't really think teaching kids is my thing. My personality just isn't really suited to it (You know that, "I can't really be bothered trying to enforce some sort of disciplined class" mentality). When the kids get hysterically excited and yell stuff at the same time, I'm thinking just shut up - give it a break! But then when they are too quiet, bored or just not interested, you think why won't someone talk... Every now and then, perhaps just 5-10 minutes in a lesson, or if you're lucky most of the lesson, you get a lesson where the right balance is struck - a level of interested quietness, but responsive answering of questions or involvement in the activity and you actually see that little light in the kids' eyes when they understand something or work out something for themselves. That's a pretty cool feeling. I like those moments like this when they are listening attentively to your every word, or their trying to talk themselves and concentrating so hard about what to say.

But in my two-hour mammoth lesson yesterday, I didn't get much of that 'good stuff'...

projects

[WARNING: contemplative post]

This is a question for all of you. Do you have a project - something perhaps outside of work that keeps you busy and focussed. Something to do after work or on the weekends? I feel like I need some new kind of project. I have been updating the release information of Ennio Morricone, the Italian film composer on RateYourMusic, but I consider this a pretty meaningless project in the broader view of things... twiddling on the computer isn't that valuable to me in terms of using my time. Having the baby arrive later this year will probably eliminate any need to search for a project, but in the meantime, I'm interested to hear from you...

And related to this, is the idea of 'what makes you happy'. This can be hard to answer. I don't think it needs to be easy or immediately obvious anyway, but if you can identify tangible things, activities or emotions, I'd also like to hear from you... Lately, the bike road home late at night is very satisfying - even more so, if the teaching/learning day has been somewhat succesful.

Hong Kong (from our recent 6 days there)

old shirt

For those of you who know me well, then you may recognise me in that very familiar shirt. This is an old shirt - I mean really old. This picture is from 1997 or 98, so I was wearing it back then, and I'm pretty sure I first acquired it back in 1995/96. The story behind the shirt is that it is actually my Grandfather's - a source of quite a few garments in my wardrobe. So I think the shirt is probably from the 1960s or thereabouts - which means it's a 50+ years old shirt. Not bad, eh? I'm kind of pround that I'm still wearing some family 'airlooms', I think my Grandad is also happy with that.

Anyway, a few days ago I wore the shirt to work, and one of the girls asked me if it was a new shirt. To which, of course, I replied - no... no, it's not a new shirt - it's quite old... I then passed on the story to her. Buying 2nd hand clothes or used clothes is not something familiar to Chinese people - there's no second hand shops here at all. I tried to explain how in Australia and many other countries it is quite common, and in fact fashionable for many people to buy old retro clothing etc. She thought this was a very bizarre concept and word spread around the office. For the rest of the day when someone came to work, the staff made sure they heard the "grandfather shirt" story... probably sounded like some strange story from Communist era Mao days to them? Who knows...

don't do it

Nancy and I have been discussing this issue many times and this week came up with our own solution. I knocked up my own version of the famous stickman "don't do it" - 10 minutes with Illustrator and presto! The message basically says, "Don't urinate in the elevators. Don't let your children or animals urinate in the elevators. This is a disgusting habit." I was so happy with my results that I quickly knocked up a few others in the series: "no farting", "no mullets" and "get your hand off it"... I'll add these in another entry. Anyway, Trace is going to hopefully laminate the image and we'll put it up in our lift tomorrow.

some kind of attachment

I think I'm developing some kind of attachment to China. It's been a slow development, but a couple of recent things have led me to believe that I do find many things about this place special and I know that I will miss it when we eventually move on.

Last night my boss confirmed that she was moving on to start up another company and that a couple of other staff would be running the school from May. This was a little sad to hear as she's been a great employer and has personally looked after me well and been very approachable. She also deserves a change because she has virtually not had a holiday in over 3 years and has been working 7 days a week regularly for this period. She's exhausted and I can see why. Managing people isn't easy. Managing teachers who often have a fly by the seat of their pants attitude, is probably more difficult, especially given the different cultural customs. We've had our disagreements at times, but many of these can be explained by understanding the Chinese culture of working non-stop and doing things at the last minute - or giving little notice.

So my boss (Jennifer) and a few teachers had a drink last night, and I thought to myself - I'm going to miss this person and miss the current work environment. The fact that I'm even having these thoughts made me realise that I'm making attachments to people within this strange place, China. Jennifer will still be around and I'm sure we'll see each other regularly, so on the whole I don't imagine many changes to my work.

This week I've had mid-semester exams for my Chinese. So far a speaking examination and general Chinese (reading, comprehension, writing) examination. Both were okay, but tomorrow I have a listening examination (which should be okay) and then a writing and reading characters examination which I believe will be quite difficult. Next week is the May day/week holiday and we're going to Hong Kong.

Sonic Youth - Incinerate (live in Shanghai!!)

Two nights ago we saw Sonic Youth and it was incredible. They were really energetic and sounded very good (the mix as well as their togetherness). Pavement lovers will spot Mark Ibold on bass guitar. The audience was probably two thirds expats, but it was a great audience - very lively and the band treated us to two encores. They also said that we were "the best audience ever", but I've long since stopped believing these statements. Looking around at the pretty impressive Shanghai Concert Hall with Sonic Youth playing, I thought to myself that Shanghai and China has very quickly become a pretty cool place to live/visit. Sonic Youth and most touring bands have never ever bothered to go to established Asian cities like Singapore, Hong Kong or Seoul but now it seems Beijing and Shanghai are not only becoming sought after destinations, but have leap-frogged those other cities...

Sonic Youth - Silver Rocket (live in Shanghai!!) - from where I was standing!


Sonic Youth (live in Shanghai!!) - it wasn't really that noisy

I wanna be sedated

Young at Heart - check out their version of Sonic Youth's Schizophrenia on You Tube as well...