June 2007

Friday: 6-1-07

Editing some student material that the Chinese staff put together, I came across some dirty jokes about vibrators and anal sex. The staff put this material together for CHILDREN! They pulled the jokes off the intent and put them into a packet of material without reading them. It’s a good thing somebody noticed, because the plan was to read the jokes at a celebration for International Children’s day in front of the school tonight. But, nobody would have really understood anyway probably.
I walked back to my apartment in the late morning to pick up a pair of earphones so I could work on the school children’s music project more easily. Walking back, I stopped by the monkey’s cage to watch it for a few moments. The monkey gave me a sad stare for a few moments, then turned around and stuck its butt up against the edge of the cage towards me. It held that position for about a minute before walking going off to hide in a corner of the cage that wasn’t facing me. A girl then came out and brought it two pieces of lettuce, which it mostly ignored. This is not a happy monkey. The cage probably isn’t even six square feet.
The school held thier activity to celebrate Children’s Day in the evening. We put a few dozen chairs outside and hired some people to set up a projection screen to show the movie “The Polar Express” on. The plan was to get a group of kids to sing to the crowd. We had asked two of our foreign teachers to come early and help prep some kids for singing, but neither of the teachers showed up, so the job was handed over to me. Several young students had agreed to some sing a couple days ago, but not many of them showed up, so one of the staff members and I recruited some random kids who had stopped to take an interest in us setting up for the event. It took a bit of coaxing and the promise of a free gift, but they agreed. So, I took this group of kids into a classroom with a CD of children’s music and tried my hand as a music teacher. The kids had somehow gotten a hold of some balloons and were much more interested in that than singing. So, I had a balloon fight with them for a few minutes in the hopes of getting it out of their system, but my effort just seemed to get them even more hyper. I eventually asked one of the staff to come help me organize them.
There were about 50 people sitting outside in front of the projection screen when I came out of the room with the kids 20 minutes later. This was quite impressive since we only started advertising the event two days ago, in the form of a couple handwritten signs put up in the area. I directed the kids to sing to the crowd from the front steps, and they at least did OK. The performance only lasted about 5 minutes.
My adult class started immediately after the performance. Things seem to go better with that class every time and I think all of the students are satisfied that they are understanding now. During the class’s ten minute break, I stepped outside to check on the celebration, which now consisted of about 100 people. There were all gone by the time class was over.
A young man with a severely swollen hand came in to enquire about signing up for classes at nine o’clock. He said the hand had been recently crushed and was holding it as if in a lot of pain. All of the bones must have been broken, but there was no cast or bandages. If he has the money to sign up for these expensive classes, then he should also have the money to visit a hospital. English is the priority. Deformation is not.
Johanna met me at the school just as it was closing. We stopped in a small store so she could buy a bit of food for dinner, where a one month old puppy kept chewing at our feet. Talking a walk around the area after she ate, we ran into Xiaolir, the girl who works at the donkey restaurant next to the school. She’s 18 years old, but Johanna first guessed she was 10. Again, I say this area really is like a small town. It seems that I run into several of my students and coworkers every day.
People are always flying kites in a field across from the school, even at night. I noticed for the first time that the sky appeared to be lit by flashing UFO’s, which are actually kites with LED lights.

Saturday: 6-2-07

Johanna and I had an early lunch of noodles at the donkey restaurant at 10 o’clock. She hung out in my office for a few moments checking email before I saw her off at the bus stop. Joe was supposed to bring his daughter for a two-hour English lesson at noon, but they didn’t show up till 1:30. The daughter was just as hyper as last week and it was nearly impossible to keep her sitting still to read any text for more than 30 seconds at a time. This isn’t too abnormal though, considering she’s a five-year-old. She was again disturbed by unusual electricity phenomenon. A faulty light switch kept switching on of the lights in the classroom off and on.
Customer activity is really picking up at the school now, as people were coming in all day enquiring about lessons, at least a couple of which actually enrolled. A big part of my job is helping to close the deals, by showing my face and sharing positive information about the school. Three young kids came in alone asking about lessons in the afternoon. I thought it was probably a waste of time since the parents weren’t around, but the girl in the group actually signed up. Her dad called after the initial meeting, saying he would pay the tuition if she first attended the children’s class for a few minutes tonight and still felt like taking more classes. She did indeed return while I was teaching the children, then her dad was there filling out the paperwork at 9 o’clock when class ended. It’s quite impressive that the little girl took all the initiative completely on her own.
When the children’s class started last week, all the kids were too shy to do anything but sit still in their chairs, but now they are developing personality, making the teaching more challenging. They are always resistant to start any textbook work, but then each of them can’t wait to show me when they are the first to finish an assignment. Teaching the kids is definitely harder than teaching the adults.

Sunday: 6-3-07

I spent nearly the whole workday resorting some of the class materials that I spent hours sorting last week. Joe asked me to do this because we structured the children’s class with more daily material than could be completed. So, I took the 15 days of material for the level one class and separated it into 30 days of material. That might sound as easy and quickly separating each day’s material into two days, but that’s just not the case. Each day consists of material from 5 different books, so the process is very tedious and a single error messes every consecutive day up. There is no room in my small office to lay out dozens of piles of paper, so I spent the day working on the project in the main office.
Having dinner with the school staff at 5 o’clock, one of the girls burst out laughing and spit her food into the dozen or so dishes laid out across the small table. Luckily, I was already full by that time. She even spit all over the side of my face. Thunder rumbled in the background during the meal, but as usual, not even enough rain fell to coat the ground.
It appeared that the teacher who teaches the Sunday night children’s class, David, wasn’t going to show up, but he did at the last minute. He’s the only foreigner I know who would rather speak Chinese with me than English. His is a lot better than mine. Joe brought his daughter to sit in on the class tonight, and she didn’t like it much. I continued working on my class material reorganizing project in the main office after the teacher arrived. Joe asked that I return to the school for a few minutes during each of the children’s class’s breaks. The school is only a 5 minute walk from the main office.
The most “involved” parent approached me during the first break, questioning things like the showing of DVD’s and the students not being given homework. She’s the mother of the youngest and smartest student in the class, a girl named Tina. I kept trying to answer her questions, then Joe stepped in and kindly asked that she trust the system and leave the details up to us. The mother just laughed and didn’t show any offense.
I still had a few minutes of work to do in the main office finishing up my project there after the school closed at 9 o’clock. I accidentally locked myself out and had to ask Joe to go there with me and open the door. I have a key to the office door, but not the door that opens the corridor on the exterior of the building.
I spent the rest of the evening doing laundry, moping my apartment for the first time and continuing to read the book Almost a Revolution.

Monday: 6-4-07

This morning I helped my coworker Johnson with some problems he was having working on the company’s website. Both of our skills are very basic, so he later convinced Joe to hire a professional to spice up the site. I spent the afternoon finishing up the children’s music project I’ve been working on for so many hours, typing up the lyrics and burning CD’s of another 24 songs.
My website wudaokouapartments.com has been hacked by terrorists. Doing a Google search, I learned that the same group has hacked about 80,000 other sites also running phpBB software. I thought the problem would be as easy to fix as replacing the old files with my backed up ones, but the hack still somehow remains.
My adult class met from 7-9, then I spent 30 minutes talking outside of the school with Joe before returning home. Johanna called at 10 o’clock. Her job is so normal compared to mine. She went out on an activity day with her coworkers instead of working in the office today.

Tuesday: 6-5-07

In my ongoing hopeless search for an acceptable Chinese breakfast, I purchased a box of chocolate cream pies from the supermarket this morning, eating most of them immediately. Due to the total lack of any western food around the neighborhood, I’ve gotten into the habit of eating little or nothing for breakfast and lunch. Then when dinner is provided by the school every evening, I gobble up even things I wouldn’t normally touch. Every dinner includes a personal dish of rice to eat along with several meat/vegetable dishes that everybody shares. This is the traditional way to eat in China and everybody dips their chopsticks into the shared dishes for every bite. I don’t even think about the sanitation issues anymore. But, I’ve noticed that my boss always orders separate dishes and won’t touch the communal ones.
I spent about six hours in my office sitting at the computer drafting out detailed lesson plans for the adult and children’s classes that are underway right now. These plans aren’t just for my own use, but also to give other teachers that will teach these classes in the future. After dinner, Joe and I went to his office to review his file cabinet full of teaching material in order to plan out other classes that will be taught in the near future. In the end, about 75 different levels and kinds of classes will be offered, so this planning is going to be quite a big task.
New customers show up at the school just before closing time a couple nights per week, as two more did tonight. One of tonight’s people, a woman I gave the English name Lisa to, could barely understand a spoken word but could read quite decently, which is not uncommon.

Wednesday: 6-6-07

A high-power mortar firework was launched from the courtyard facing my bedroom window at 7AM sharp this morning. An old man living in the adjacent building walks out every once in a while carrying a big metal pipe. He always lights a cigarette, launches a single mortar from the pipe, finishes his cigarette, collects his pipe and goes back inside. This is the earliest he has ever done so. It usually happens in the evenings. So why would an old man behave in such a way? Probably because of the traditional belief that the noise of firework explosions scares away evil spirits. So, the man was probably just hoping to have a good day, but maybe he didn’t consider that it was at the expense of many others having a bad day.
Joe came to my office in the afternoon and asked that I go with the staff and set up a promotional stand at the nearest subway station at 4 o’clock, an idea I had proposed last night. I thought it would be nice to play some American music at our stand, so I walked to the supermarket to buy some batteries for a portable tape player that sits in my office. Normally, my coworker Johnson is in charge of buying such supplies, but he was gone at the time.
Back at the school, I realized that nobody had any tapes of American music. The school plays a lot of American music on its sound system, but it’s all in CD format. So, I hooked my iPod up to the school’s system and borrowed its portable CD boombox to use at the stand. The batteries I’d purchased were not the right size for this player, so I returned to the supermarket, only to find that they didn’t have any size C batteries. My only option was to take the bus four stops to the nearest large shopping center. Arriving back at the school, I learned that my boss no longer wanted me to participate in today’s promotional event since I had to teach my adult class at 7 o’clock.
The young waitress from the donkey restaurant, named Xiaolir, comes to my office a couple times a day now to pinch my cheeks and speak with me. She often grabs my hand and gets right in my face the whole time we talk. The talk is pretty simple since she only speaks Chinese. Of all the Chinese girls I’ve met, she’s by far the least shy. I would assume she makes less than $100/month in her 6 days per week of waitressing.
One of the women in my adult class got sick and ran to the bathroom to throw up tonight. It must have been my teaching. After the class, Joe and I went back to his office and came up with a great new promotional idea based on an American gameshow. One great point about my job; it really offers a creative outlet.
Sitting up in bed reading a book at 1:30 in the morning, my electricity went out and stayed out. This is most likely because the system works on a credit system, with a rechargeable card that must be used to credit the meter. But, my boss or coworkers never told me this was the case or presented me with the card….

Thursday: 6-7-07

Because my electricity went out last night, I didn’t even have hot water for a shower this morning. The water is heated by natural gas, but the hot water heater uses electricity also.
There is a parrot in a window by my courtyard that regularly says “Hello” to me in Chinese.
I spent time in the main office this morning and afternoon reviewing textbooks to plan out about a dozen new English courses. In his desk, Joe had the card I needed to get charged with credit in order to get my electricity turned on. I took the card to a nearby bank and the teller gave it back saying there was some kind of problem. Going back to the bank with my coworker Annie, she translated that the teller was saying there was already $12 credit on the card. So the last guy that lived in my apartment, the one that ran away, must have charged the card and never put the credit on the meter.
The meter is inside a closet in the stairwell near my front door. I put the card into a slot in the meter and the $12 credit showed up on an LED display on the meter. However, the electricity didn’t turn back on automatically, and I discovered that a breaker in the closet was flipped to the OFF position. Flipping it back fixed the problem. Joe said the $12 of credit would last months, so electricity must be even cheaper than I thought.
At 4 o’clock the company’s driver took me, Annie and another one of my coworkers to the nearest subway station so we could set up a promotional table and give away flyers for three hours. Handing out literature or other information in public areas is prohibited by law unless it is done from privately-owned property. So, Joe had earlier made a deal with a small shop by the subway station, which allowed us to set up our table on its property. Our display included three educational posters, some candy and me, the token white guy. There are barely any foreigners in this area, especially ones manning promotional booths, so we got a lot of attention immediately. Traffic in the area really picked up for the five o’clock rush hour and we started giving away more and more brochures. We ate Chinese egg/pancake thingies for dinner, which were made by the small store we sat in front of.
We attracted a huge amount of attention when I attached on of our brochures to my tie clip and sat on a stool in the middle of a pedestrian bridge. Several dozen people stopped to giggle at me, at least 10 of which not only took brochures but also left their names and phone numbers. It was a large group of young girls and they were just hysterical about the whole thing.
We ran out of flyers by 7 o’clock and the driver took us back to the school. A couple potential customers stopped by before closing time. Walking back to my apartment, I realized that my keys were still on my desk in the school, and I had no way to get back inside. All the other employees had already left, and my best chance at getting back in the school was contacting my coworker Denver, who lives in the main office. Unfortunately, he wasn’t home and his cell phone was not getting service. I was able to contact Joe by phone, but he couldn’t get ahold of Denver either.
I saw Xiaolir at a little park on the edge of my apartment complex(girl who works at the donkey restaurant). We sat for a while and talked with two of her friends. She kept saying things trying to help me out, I think, but I couldn’t understand.
So, if I wanted a bed to sleep in, the only choice was to take a cab to a hotel, but I didn’t feel like spending the money. Luckily, the exterior door to my apartment’s stairwell corridor was not closed properly. It requires a key to get in but doesn’t always close well. I went up to the 5th floor and decided to sleep sitting on the tile floor leaned up against my door. Sitting there typing on my laptop, I received call from Joe, who said he was coming back to let me in the school to get my keys. I insisted that he not do so, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer, and was even pleasant about doing so. Walking around the streets waiting for him, I discovered a kabob stand set up on the edge of the big open field right across the street from the school. A guy was sitting on a stool over a makeshift grill cooking several different kinds of meats and breads. There were several tables set up behind him made from old bricks and pieces of wood. Several people were sitting at the tables and there was even a waitress taking orders and giving handwritten receipts. Business is not as usual. I had 10 small chicken kabobs and part of a large beer, all for less than a buck. The griller said that he works there every evening till 1AM, so I’ll surely be back.
Joe arrived in a taxi just before midnight, even laughing about the experience. I like him more all the time, I just hope I can keep up with him. We retrieved my keys from the school and he took off in the taxi to return back home.
It was incredibly humid tonight and I decided to use my air conditioner for the first time. It works with a remote control that has about 20 buttons all labeled in Chinese, but I randomly pressed a few and ended up with crisp cold air…..ahhh.

Friday: 6-8-07

It cost $1 to run the air conditioner in my bedroom overnight. Having an electrical meter that shows a real monetary value really helps to quantify electricity usage. I have never in my life bothered to learn how to read the traditional kind of meter and translate such costs from it. If everybody in the world had such a meter, then many would use less electricity. Maybe.
There’s a horribly smashed up truck sitting on the sidewalk near the school, which everybody seems to be ignoring like it’s not even there. It appears to have run into a telephone pole so badly that the chances of survival were slim to none. I’m yet to see a single person even look at it in passing or walk real close to it. It’s almost as if they’re secretly scared of it. Ghosts?
The pretty young American teacher from California, named Thea, came to have dinner with my coworkers and I for a second time. The boss had invited her here to talk about some business ideas in which she may be able to help promote the school. Thea will blurt out some unusual things sometimes. She asked how much my apartment cost, and said “Sugar Daddy” when I said I didn’t know because Joe pays for it.
The temperature hovered in the 90’s again today with extremely high humidity. The school has only fans, no air conditioning, so my adult class was very uncomfortable tonight. The students were noticeably affected by this and were slow to respond for the first hour. Teaching three-hour children’s classes like this may be a real problem, so hopefully it’s not a real hot summer.
An agriculture professor was in the lobby enquiring about the school when my class ended at 9. Johanna showed up a few minutes later on the bus, then sat talking with Joe, Annie and I for a few minutes. She had brought her broken laptop computer for me to fix, which has an ailing operating system that won’t even run Windows in safe mode. Amazingly, she had not backed up her photographs for two years, so recovering those is the first priority. The computer won’t boot from it’s CD ROM drive either, but luckily has some special software built in that runs separately from Windows for the purpose of recovering files. The files can be transferred to a USB drive this way, but my USB is broken. So, she will leave the computer and I will finish fixing it over the next week. Speaking of my USB drive, I’m going to violently destroy it. I bought it in Zhuhai in February and it has caused me nothing but trouble since, evening losing a few dozen pictures once.

Saturday: 6-9-07

Johanna left at 11 this morning after we had noodles for breakfast at the donkey restaurant. She was on her way to spend the hot day at a pool in a park while I went off to work in an un-air conditioned building with screaming kids. Needless to say, I was a bit jealous. Joe arrived with his daughter for me to teach two hours at 1 o’clock. He asked that I get her to do some writing today, which ended up being just about 10 words over the whole two hours. She’s usually pretty pleasant with me, but when I tried to help her with some of the writing today, she said, “Don’t talk to me or look at me”.
I took an hour off after teaching Joe’s daughter and went home before returning to the school for dinner at 5 o’clock. Joe had taken the rest of the day off and didn’t eat with us. The more acquainted the students in my children’s class get with each other, the harder to control they are. They talked and played around during an entire 30 minute video tonight, probably because it’s made more for adults than children. The only student that paid attention was the youngest one, Tina, as usual. I almost hate to have any kind of competitions in the class because Tina always wins, and the other students get a little upset at this, especially because she’s so much smaller than them. But, maybe that will motivate them. Tina is so sociable and intelligent because of the strict class regiment her family has her on. Her weekends consist of dance, math and English lessons. Her mother invited me to have dinner with them after class, but I politely declined. It was just too hot and the day had been too long to sit in another un-air conditioned building and eat hot food. Tina, her mother and father had all been eating this morning in the donkey restaurant at the same time Johanna and I were there.
A potential new student and his mother were in the lobby enquiring about classes during one of the children’s class’s breaks. The kid was tiny for his age of 13 years and had braces. His English was good for his age and we spoke for a few minutes. After class was over, Annie came in the room and gave me a high-five, saying my talk had helped her close the sale, meaning a nice commission. More new potential new customers are coming in all the time because of our increased marketing efforts, and most of them want to see a foreign teacher in the building before they pay any money. A customer earlier had even asked the staff to show him a copy of my resume, but we didn’t provide one and he seemed happy after just speaking with me.

Sunday: 6-10-07

Invisible mosquitoes are still driving me crazy. I’ve still never actually seen one, but I’ve killed a few by letting them get comfortable on my skin in the dark before smashing them. This has gone on for the first couple hours of every night lately, meaning I don’t get to sleep till quite late. I search the whole apartment for the little pests and find nothing, but then there is always a buzzing in my ears within minutes of turning the lights off.
After briefly stopping in at work, I rode my bike to the nearest shopping center this morning, the same one that I took the bus to earlier in the week, only about 20 minutes away. After having a breakfast/lunch at KFC, I purchased 2 dress shirts, 2 dress pants, 2 ties and a USB drive, all for about $50. Since I have to dress up every day of the week now, I’ve had a serious lack of clothes lately, especially clothes that are comfortable in the extreme heat.
Leaving the shopping center, I realized I didn’t have the 3 cents needed to pay my bike parking fee. Luckily, the attendant let me go without paying. I thought I’d take a shortcut, but ended up accidentally taking a much longer route. I was trying to judge my location by the nearby mountains, but mountains are so big that a small distortion of your perspective can lead you way off course.
A single student needed to be taught in the afternoon, a 14-year old boy in middle school. We usually don’t teach one-one-one, but Joe had promised this boy’s mother we would put him in some kind of class immediately. Joe taught him for the first two hours and I took care of the last hour. The boy is studying English so he can go to Stanford and become a physicist, “Like Einstein”, he told me. He’s already even gone to San Francisco to have a look at the campus there.
A Chinese woman named Monica joined us for dinner, who is a professor at a nearby university that might be able to help us with some upcoming business ventures. Monica brought a bag stuffed with mini-peaches and cherries to share with us and seemed a bit shy. The American teacher David came at six to teach the children’s class. After the school closed, Joe showed up with chips and coke to share with me in his office so we could talk more about upcoming plans.
I spent about 4 hours in the evening rescuing 5GB of files from Johanna’s ailing laptop computer. I continued using the factory installed recovery program since I was unable to get Windows to boot in any way. This factory program is terribly inefficient and requires restarting the computer each time you take the USB flash drive out after transferring files to it. It didn’t bring enough money to the store this morning and had to buy just a 512MB flash drive, so you can imagine how inconvenient it was to transfer 5GB of files.
The factory-installed recovery system includes an option to restore the system to its original settings, including re-installing Windows from a backup of the installation disk that’s built into a special hard drive partition. This is what I planned on doing since I’ve been unable to boot from the CD-ROM drive, but the computer gave an error message when the process began. So, maybe the problem is being caused by some corrupt part of the hard drive. That might not make sense, but it’s my theory for now.

Monday: 6-11-07

Air conditioning was being installed in the lobby of the school when I went in at 10 o’clock this morning. This doesn’t make the whole school really cool, but does make a huge difference in the overall humidity level. I picked up liang pi from a nearby store for lunch for myself and two other employees. The store, next to the entrance of my apartment complex, doubles as a restaurant. They set up tables and cookers in front of it at night, and serve liang pi to go during the day from the inside of the store. Liang pi is a cold spicy dish with large noodles and some vegetables. The tiny store is not air conditioned and full of flies. A young boy was running around completely naked except for a shirt. Making the simple 3 simple liang pi dishes took nearly 20 minutes.
I spent an hour in the morning erasing light pencil markings from a textbook, so many markings that my whole office was full of eraser leavings. A whole large gum eraser was consumed. I’m not sure how the school ended up with a used textbook. In the early afternoon, I found contact info for a couple hundred talent agencies online, following Joe’s lead on yet another new project idea. Talent agencies have some of the most amazing websites I’ve ever seen, very animated.
In the late afternoon, I got on a bus, subway and taxi with Joe, headed to a large market not to far from the Xizhimen subway station. We took public transportation because the driver had asked for the day off. Our mission was to purchase supplies to build a portable promotional gaming device, which we will use when we go out and promote the school. Our purchases included a dart board, a wooden foldable easel and a few bolts. Joes picking of these devices for our idea was simple and smart. It’s not a matter of simply attaching the dartboard to the easel, but a bit more complicated. The dart board won’t be used to throw darts at. Two dressed-up foreigners buying such things drew some attention, and Joe’s extreme bargaining drew even more. Surprisingly, the initial quoted prices were always better than I usually get, but Joe didn’t even accept that. He got the heavy duty dartboard for about $5 and the well-made easel for about $8. He even walked away from a vendor that wouldn’t give him a 25 cent price break on a pair of bolts. I convinced him to go back because I thought the bolts would be perfect for what we wanted to do.
Next, we paid a guy in a beat up van to drive us to the nearest McDonalds for $1.25. There, Joe ate three Big Macs, a large fry and drank a large coke with no ice. He claims he can eat up to six.
The subway was packed like sardines on the way back, making holding the dart board and easel a bit difficult. In my adult class tonight, we began watching the movie “Flubber”. Explaining some lines can be nearly impossible. We only got through about five minutes.

Tuesday: 6-12-07

I spent pretty much the whole day working on constructing the spinning game wheel for the school. I rode my bike to a nearby construction materials market in the morning to see if the stores there had the pieces of hardware needed. This area is a conglomeration of tiny stores packed together on a network of narrow dirt alleyways, like probably a hundred thousand of other such areas just like it all over China.
I later walked back to the area with Johnson to help me buy the supplies from several different stores. These supplies included little pieces of piping, wood, plexiglass and various other small metal hardware.
These things worked quite well for the job, but the wheel still has a slight wobble since we never found a bearing for the wheel to spin on. The wheel is the dartboard that Joe and I bought yesterday. In place of the bearing, Johnson and I hollowed out the center of dartboard and hammered a small piece of copper pipe into it. A perfectly-sized bolt extends through the pipe and the board spins on it. The board is held into place by bolts and washers that make loose contact with either side of the pipe.
The next step was to hammer nails between all the numbers of the dartboard, but the nails were making splits in the paper-like material. So, Johnson and I had the driver take us back to the construction market, where we paid a shop owner $1 to drill little holes between all the numbers, which worked great.
The second most difficult part of the project was developing a clicker system for the top of the wheel, which would click along the nails and stop on a certain number. The original plan had been to use a piece of plexiglass attached to a small board that extended over the wheel’s top, but the plexiglass was too fragile and inflexible. We next broke a hacksaw blade thinking a section of it would function better than the plexiglass, but this also didn’t do the trick.
Denver had also been helping Johnson and I with the project all afternoon and was full of good ideas. He pulled a small plastic card from his wallet and proposed slicing a strip from it to use as the clicker, which worked beautifully.
During the last hour of the construction process, we kept joking that the goal of the project was to make it as ugly as possible, mainly because Joe had asked us to attach 8 small finger handles to the edge of the wheel. It actually didn’t turn out that ugly and I’m quite happy with the work, despite the lack of a bearing. After completion, all my coworkers came in the classroom where we had been constructing it all day to have a spin.
A surprise downpour thunderstorm happened at 8 o’clock, sending random pedestrians running for cover under the school’s front awning. I’ve never seen rain like this in Beijing before.
At home in the evening, I spent another 3 hours getting Johanna’s computer up and running. I was hoping to repair the broken operating system, but had to settle for a fresh install. This was not really a problem since I was already able to recover all the data a couple days ago.

Wednesday: 6-13-07

The air actually felt cool today, even a bit chilly after a brief shower in the evening. One of the old men living in my apartment building, named Mr. Ma., struck up a brief conversation with me in the courtyard. Talking to a young person is difficult enough, but older people are usually nearly impossible to understand. I’ve read a few books about the last 50 years of Chinese history and really wish I could ask the old people for their opinions on things.
I went with Johnson and the driver to the nearest large indoor market in the afternoon so I could buy some construction paper to finish up my spinning wheel game project. Cutting the paper into long triangular shapes makes the perfect inserts for the wheel, on which I can write various prizes. After spending a couple hours making a plan for the game and putting inserts on the wheel, I realized that I’d made it too difficult for the young children that will mostly be playing.
A mother brought her 7-year-old son in to enquire about English lessons in the evening. The boy had a new “Pioneers” pin on his shirt and was very proud of it. To the best of my knowledge, the Pioneers are like the communist version of the Cub Scouts. I think the organization is an offshoot of the Communist Youth League for younger commies.
My adult class ended at 9 o’clock and I went home to battle mosquitoes for the rest of the evening. I absolutely cannot figure out how so many are getting in. And how can they be so smart? They are truly educated to the lifestyles of human beings. The always try to bite from the back, and when I turn around they are always careful to stay close to backside of me. I at first thought this was just a coincidence, but they stay to the back even when I turn around really fast. And they always hide when the lights are on. My best hunting method is to turn a single light on very low and prowl around the apartment with a shirt in my hand for smacking them. Even after I killed at least 25, several still bit me overnight.

Thursday: 6-14-07

I took a couple short trips for work today, the first time with Joe to buy some children’s gifts for our wheel game at a market. We decided on some exciting pencils, some stickers, 5 little toy trucks and a larger toy limousine that plays some music and has doors that open. I yesterday designed the game to be a bit too complicated, so I spent some time simplifying it today, by changing the inserts on the wheel.
I took another trip in the early evening for dinner, on a bus to a western-style buffet restaurant with Joe. There, Annie met us with two managers from a luxury apartment complex that’s near where the school is located. We had invited the managers out to dinner because they had agreed to let us hold a promotional even at their apartment complex tomorrow.
Joe and I took a taxi back to the school at 8 o’clock and I spent a few minutes helping Annie translate some Chinese to English. She has a friend who is opening a printing business, who wants to put all his advertisements and his website in English. She’s often lately been asking me for advice to help him.

Friday: 6-15-07

I got an email this morning from my friend Leslie, with a link to an obituary of our mutual friend Ashley. Ashley was only 25 and it’s unclear how she died. She had moved away from Southern Illinois and I hadn’t seen her in about two years. She had come back to Carbondale once to visit when Johanna was in town, when we’d met her, Leslie and some other people for drinks at Tres Hombres.
The school held a promotional event at a nearby luxury apartment complex tonight. This sprawling complex is built around a small scenic pond and connecting waterways. Our event was held on a patio built over the pond’s edge. About two hundred people had arrived by the time the event started at 6:30, more people than the chairs we had available. We had a rented sound system and microphones to address the crowd. After a brief introduction by Joe and the apartment complex management, I led the crowd in singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”, and some song about five ducks. Next we used our new prize wheel for a 30-minute word game. The kids were so excited about the wheel that we almost had a kid riot as they crowded closer and closer around. We tried to get them to move back twice, but it was of no use. Annie and I both had the microphones for the game. I was the host and she was the co-host. I drew numbers out of a box to see what kids got to play the game. Our original plan for the game quickly developed into something much more simple, so we could be sure that every kid got some kind of prize.
Two older kids played, one of which very unexcitedly won the grand prize, a toy limousine that had opening doors and played music and sound effects. Some kids were so little that they couldn’t play on their own, so we picked them up and guided their hands to play. Some kids were unhappy with their prizes and tried to exchange them for others. Other kids kept tugging on my pants begging to play. Some cried and left when the game ended. It really was a bit chaotic, but an overall success. I think we should use tasers and pepper spray next time.
The main event was to play the movie “Robots” on a big projection screen, but the DVD would not work. The only part of it that would play was the bonus material, which detailed the making of the movie. Surprisingly, quite a few people stuck around and battled the terrible mosquitoes to watch it. There were literally 50 mosquitoes for every person. I spent quite a bit of time talking to a meteorology professor from Beijing University, who offered me a tour of the campus sometime.
I my coworker Maria a monkey in Chinese tonight, but she told that’s actually a compliment in Chinese. Calling someone a turtle is an insult. Monkeys are considered smart.

June 16, 2007

I took the morning and afternoon off work today, although I did go to the school and unlock it at 9 o’clock. The girl that was supposed to lock it last night wanted to leave early, so I agreed to take the keys since I live so close. The girl arrived late this morning wearing her shirt inside out, so I had to sit around and wait for a while.
I spent the morning riding my bike around scouting for a way to climb the big nearby mountain with a pagoda on top of it. This was my first time to randomly explore the area by bike. There are many small well-manicured parks all over the place, however, the grounds crews will run anyone off that tries to walk onto the nice green grass.
I didn’t climb the mountain today, but just wanted to find the trailhead so Johanna and I could walk it tomorrow. I next went on to the nearest indoor market, which has a department store called Merrymart in the basement. Here, I purchased a new sheet for my bed and three white socks. At the entrance of Merrymart is some kind of promotional display that features a real bumblebee nest in a plexiglass box, with real bumblebees inside. The top of the box is within child reach and could easily be opened. The only protection is a warning sign. I know from bad experience that bumble bees are very protective of their nests. One chased me for about 200 feet when I was a child after getting too close to a nest with a lawnmower. It eventually caught me.
Having lunch at KFC was tough. The mass of unorganized lines at the counter took 15 minutes to get through, then only a single stool was available to eat at in the downstairs dining area.
On the ride back to my apartment, I stopped at the construction materials market and bought a floor-standing fan for $9. It was already put together, which may or may not have made it easier to carry on my bike.
Kids are can often be seen carrying realistic-looking fake guns around the streets, which is really a contrast to anything I would see at home in the US. I mean, if anyone over 10 years old is waving a gun around on a US street, people will panic and somebody might shoot the kid. But, since real guns are illegal here, and definitely never found in the hands of children, nobody takes notice.
I soaked 13 big green beer bottles in the afternoon, which I had drank over the past month living here. The point was to remove the labels and use the bottles as free decorations for the bare apartment. I hate looking at a bare apartment everyday, but there’s also no use in spending any money on it. Drinking interesting bottles of liquor is the best answer for décor, and a handy excuse for drinking. There are hundreds of different kinds of unique alcohol bottles for sale, including some that even look like traditional Chinese buildings.
I went to the school and taught the children’s class from 6-9. If they don’t start behaving better, then I’m going to have to have one of my coworkers to start sitting in on the classes. This is how most schools that teach young children operate; a foreign teacher in the classrooms with a Chinese assistant.
Johanna came by taxi at 11 o’clock. Neither of us knew how to tell the taxi driver how to get to my apartment building, so I asked some people outside on the street to speak with the cab driver. A married man and woman gladly helped out with this by the south gate of the apartment complex. The even walked a couple blocks away with me to meet the cab driver when he wasn’t understanding the instructions.
Johanna was starving so we stopped by the BBQ meat vendor that has his “restaurant” set up in the empty field across the street from the school. The man and wife who helped us were very friendly and even game me their phone number in case I ever need anything else.

June 17, 2007

Johanna and I walked to donkey restaurant for breakfast this morning. It was supposed to be my first day off work in a month, but I stopped by the school for a few minutes before breakfast because yesterday I’d forgotten to prepare teaching material for today’s foreign teacher.
After the meal, we walk 40 minutes to the nearby mountain with a 3-story pagoda on top of it. This area is scenically developed with nice facilities and trails, but there were few people. Climbing the mountain took less than an hour. At the top, about 30 or 40 people were lazily enjoying the Sunday afternoon, having snacks and playing games. The view was mostly obstructed by the regular layer of smog, but we sat on the ledges for about an hour and enjoyed what we could see. The pagoda was securely locked up. There is an easier trail leading up the other side of the mountain, which some people had made with baby strollers. Also located at the top is a small temple that’s open to the public. There are lifts on the mountain’s north face, but they are well rusted and appear to be just for moving supplies. Many of the other surrounding peaks have various kinds of small statues on top of them.
Returning to the base of the mountain, we sat a few minutes in the same park that I’d visited yesterday morning. There were no grounds crews there at the time to run us off the grass. I caught some girls taking pictures of us with a cell phone from behind some bushes.
It got hotter by afternoon and we tried to watch a movie in my apartment, but the movie didn’t work and we ended up falling asleep for a few minutes.
I got a call at 3 o’clock saying the teacher who was supposed to teach the children’s class would be an hour late, which meant that I would have to teach it from 6 till 7. Johanna left at 5:45 just before the class started. I was really disappointed in working on my day off, but at least my only job during the first hour was to show the first half of the movie “Spirit”. The kids were quite disappointed at first when they realized we had to watch it in English with English subtitles, but they got into it by the end. The foreign teacher, David, didn’t show up till 15 minutes into the second hour.
Headed back to my apartment, I stopped at the supermarket to pick up a huge new decorative bottle, which just so happens to be filled with about a gallon of red wine. I went back to the school at 9 o’clock to pick up the keys because Annie had asked me to do her a favor and open the doors in the morning.
I ordered 10 lamb kabobs from the guy that sits in the field before returning to my apartment. Here is a list of websites about Ashley’s death that I put together this evening:
http://garthkiser.com/documents/2007/Ashleigh/index.htm

Monday: 6-18-07

I went to work at 9 o’clock instead of 10 this morning because Annie had given me the keys to the school last night and asked that I open it.
Annie bought me lunch in exchange for my continued help editing some text that her friend will put on his printing business’s website. I ate two pieces of pita bread stuffed with donkey meat, which I like because it’s the closest thing to a hamburger I can get. I asked an employee from the donkey restaurant to start making donkey hamburgers, saying I would promise to order one for lunch every day. He said they would start making them, but I think he was just joking.
Joe paid me for my first four weeks of teaching this afternoon, which added up to quite a substantial amount.
We continued watching the movie Flubber in my adult class. The student named Coco arrived 30 minutes late, and Joe made her wait another 30 minutes, until the first break, to enter the classroom. Watching the movie was quite difficult because I had to try and explain some basic vocabulary used to describe substances, in this case, Flubber. It’s not easy to describe things like “elasticity” when the class only has an extremely basic vocabulary. Demonstrating with a rubber band finally did the trick. The classroom was full of dozens of mosquitoes, but they luckily were not hungry.
After class, Joe invited me back to the main office for chips and soda. I learned today that my coworkers Johnson and Denver no longer work here, which was apparently a mutual decision between them and Joe.
I just installed Photoshop on my computer and spent a lot of time this afternoon doing online Photoshop tutorials. You are all in trouble.

Tuesday: 6-19-07

My new anti-mosquito method is working great; turn a fan on high and blow air over my bed so the mosquitoes can’t fly there. I win.
I stopped by the main office this morning to look for a file on the computers there. Like the school’s computer’s, all the computer terminals in the office are running off a single server, which is not really powerful enough to handle multiple terminals. Joe’s Chinese employee, Mrs. Chen was working at another terminal in the office and it locked up when I logged off mine, making her loose some work. I was at least able to recover some things for her. I don’t even use the computer in my office any more because it locks up for about 10 seconds of every minute. I just carry my laptop there every day.
I took a bus to the nearest shopping center in the morning to have some passport sized photos made. Joe needed one for some documentation he must file with the local government. I also purchased a Chinese language DVD from a bookstore in the shopping center. It’s an older movie with English subtitles, so I thought it would be both interesting and a chance to learn a little more Chinese. A movie made during the 70’s probably contains some heavy propaganda.
My passport photos were not ready till 1:30, so I went back to the school for two hours, then returned to pick them up. Not really a lot else happened. I worked on a couple small projects and emailed a joke job resume to my coworker Annie from an anonymous email address. Annie is in charge of hiring foreign teachers. The resume is from an “Albert Gore”. It contains all kinds of weird info and the picture on it is of the former vice president. The point is to see if she actually forwards it to Joe. My guess is that she won’t pay any attention and will send it on thinking it’s for real.
At 8 o’clock, Joe asked that I email about 15 pictures to the guy who works on our website. Some of the pictures were on his USB drive, but the drive would not allow us to open files from it, so we couldn’t tell which pictures to email. Strangely, files could only be transferred to and from it. I spent another hour trying to figure out what was wrong with the drive. It had to be formatted before it would work correctly. After all that was taken care of, the web-based email client I used rejected the email after it had already spent 20 minutes uploading some of the pictures. I had exceeded the attachment limit, but why couldn’t it have told me that before making me wait for 20 minutes. Finally, I sent the pictures in two separate emails, then realized that I had sent them to the gorzo@... Instead of gorza@.... So, somebody named Gorzo got a bunch of pictures from some English school that they have no clue about.
I heard that Joe and his driver got pulled over by the police yesterday because the police thought that the driver was operating a “black taxi”(black market taxi). The city is full of thousands of ordinary people that use their cars as taxis, which is illegal. So, the police had seen this beat up car with a Chinese driver and a foreigner wearing a nice business suit in the backseat. All indications were that the driver was operating a black taxi. From what I heard, convincing the police otherwise was no easy task.

Wednesday: 6-20-07

My water bill remains unpaid. Joe handed it to me last week, then Johnson said that it had to be paid at some bank near the subway station. My coworker Mandy told me this morning that it could be paid at the bank right by the school. She walked over there with me, but the teller informed us we were at the wrong location. We were at the China Rural Commercial Bank, but the teller said the bill had to be paid at the China Commercial Bank. The word Rural just messed everything up. There were also several other banks that the bill could be paid at, several of which Mandy said were located by the subway station.
So, I took the bus to the subway station and found absolutely no way to pay the bill. I did find one bank listed on it, called Everbright Bank, but the security guard at the door said it couldn’t be paid there. I walked around a while and took the bus a bit further, but found no other banks.
Returning back to the school, I had two donkey meat pitas for lunch. Watching how they prepare the meat, I’m almost sure I’ll eventually get sick. The restaurant is not air-conditioned and the meat is cut on the same block of wood all day, which is just a slice from a tree trunk. That wood is almost surely used all day without any real cleaning. The meat is at least kept in a cooler when it’s not being used.
Joe gave me his camcorder in the afternoon so I could transfer video to my computer from the school’s last two promotional events. I’ll eventually use this when making some promotional videos for the website and for DVD’s. I spent the rest of the afternoon, several hours, trying to learn how to use Adobe Acrobat Professional, which I just installed on my computer last night for the purpose of designing a new brochure for the school. Acrobat takes a couple gigabytes of space and seems incredibly complex.
A new prospective customer named Jessie sat in on my adult class for 15 minutes, then paid for 30 hours of English classes afterwards.

Thursday: 6-21-07

I got an email this morning from a random American in Shanghai that had seen my Tanner video online. He said in the email that he graduated from SIU in 98’ and could never forget Tanner. One of his friends had forwarded him the address of the link. He invited me to have drinks with him sometime when I’m visiting Shanghai. The $20 I gave Tanner for that interview was a good buy. Knowing now how popular that video is, I wish I’d taken Tanner up on his offer to do more filming for free.
I worked all day on designing a new brochure for the school. This is my first experience using Acrobat and Photoshop, so it’s taking longer than it normally would.
Joe invited me to have dinner with him and another person at 6 o’clock. We traveled by bus and subway because the driver was eating dinner at the time. The dinner was at Mr. Pizza in Wudaokou, which I’d been to once before with Johanna. The person who was meeting us, an American patent attorney named Nancy, was running 20 minute late, so we went ahead and ordered the pizza’s before she arrived. She came carrying some old beat-up backpacks and was wearing what looked like military fatigues. Her personality was just as unique, we all laughed a lot. She was definitely not boring. We all shared funny stories about China for about two hours. Nancy said that the law firm where she works forces all their employees to have nap-time in the afternoon. Everyone is provided with a mattress and some people even bring blankets and stuffed animals to sleep with. Nancy rebelled against nap time and kept working, then the employer said that she did not have a choice in the matter. So, she just quit going to work. This was her way of politely quiting the job, but the employer called a month and a half later to ask if she was still sick. As it turned out, her boss relented on the nap time and she went back to work.
On a more serious note, Nancy brought up the topic of unrest among China’s 900 million poor farmers. As big technologically-advanced farms develop, the lifestyle of these people will be threatened and there will be no other jobs for them. Such peasant revolts have resulted in some very devastating civil unrest in earlier generations. So, the farmers must be eliminated….
We arrived back at the school just at closing time. Back at my apartment, I watched jet crash documentaries on YouTube and burned DVD’s of data off my hard drive to free up space. The huge bottle of wine I bought late last week is gone and the bottle successfully became decoration.

Friday: 6-22-07

So, I spent another entire day editing the new company brochure using Photoshop. Then I took a rough draft to Joe’s office in the afternoon and he didn’t really like it much at all. Maybe the second draft will go faster now that I am getting accustomed to the Photoshop shortcuts.
Another new student joined my adult class tonight, a high school student named Mike. The sick woman Kelly also returned after a two week absence. So, the small classroom is almost packed full now, and another student will also join next week. So many students that I ran out of teaching material packets. All the students had a packet, but I didn’t and had to look off of a student’s packet.
New customers were in the lobby when class ended at 9 o’clock, a tall young shy IBM software engineer and his not-so-shy wife. The wife was fluent in English, but the husband understood little. They stayed and talked with us for an hour.

Saturday: 6-23-07

I opened the school this morning at 9 o’clock. I’m really getting sick of working on the brochure. For lunch, I had two donkey meat pitas. The young waitress named Xaiolir returned to work at the donkey restaurant yesterday. She’d been gone for several weeks because her baby cousin died.
I donated $5 to the American Red Cross International Relief Fund online to test a new Visa bank card that I received a few weeks ago. The donation was made on behalf of a fictitious group called Citizens Rally Against Pugs. Pugs are really ugly, so maybe it could be considered a community beautification group. This test of the card was necessary to make sure it will work when one of the companies that hosts my website automatically charges it in a few days.
I got so sick of working on the brochure in the afternoon that I went home and slept for two hours, then returned to the school for dinner. There was a new student in the children’s class tonight, and two other potential students sat in on the class for 15 minutes. The new student, named Andy, is only 7 years old, younger than all the rest. But, he surprisingly can read and understand a little bit. So far, he’s much more well-behaved than the other students, except for the Tina. It got to the point tonight that the other students were being so unruly that I just taught to him and Tina.
Tina’s mom showed up yet again to ask me questions after class. This family is just too serious. During class, Tina even complains about watching movies, as she would rather do paperwork. Like mother, like daughter. The father also showed up tonight for the first time.
I sat at a table in the field across from the school at 9:45 and ate 15 lamb kabobs from the vendor there. It’s really impressive how much business this guy gets. There are plenty of other vendors around, but none of the others have tables and chairs set up in fields. A little fat stray dog waddled around under my table while I ate.
Back in my apartment, I had part of a beer left that I’d opened last night. The plan was to just throw it away, but I shook the bottle and noticed it still had a lot of fizz. Sure enough, tasted like new. It’s the Yanjing brand, which is the cheapest at 25 cents for a very big bottle.
Lastly, I watched part of a classic Chinese movie with English subtitles, hoping to pick up a few things. The name of the company that produced the DVD is Red Movies.

Sunday: 6-24-07

I taught Joe’s daughter Laila again for two hours today, from 1 till 3 o’clock. She was a bit better behaved today, but she came in my office after the lesson and poked the screen of my laptop really hard. A spot stayed on the screen for several seconds, but eventually went away completely.
I also had to teach a high school-aged boy named Mike for the second time. He told me that he went to space camp in the United States with the son of China’s very first astronaut, or whatever you call Chinese people who go to space.
A strong storm came through while I was teaching Mike, cutting power to the school just before the lesson was supposed to end. The power remained out through dinnertime and was still out when the children showed up for their class at 6 o’clock. The American David taught that class. The classroom was too dark, so he taught the first hour outside on the school’s front patio, then the power came back on for the second and third hour.
Other than teaching, my other project for today was to design a flyer advertising a new modeling training program. According to Joe, there are lots of Chinese people who want to get into modeling with Western companies, so we can teach them industry-specific English. Searching for pictures of models online to use on the flyer, I kept coming up with mostly hardcore porn.

Monday: 6-25-07

A new employee named Lisa was waiting at the front of the school when I went to open it up at 9AM. Several other people also came in looking for jobs.
Joe came to the school dressed exceptionally nice this morning so I could take some photographs and video that will be used in promotions. The pictures will be used in the brochure, and the video will be on the school’s website and a DVD. Joe thought he looked too tense in the pictures, so I said, “Not that I think you normally look tense, but I think you look normal”. As for the video, it took about 20 tries because he kept getting words jumbled or forgot to say things. The experience was quite hilarious actually and my laughing ruined at least one take by making him laugh.
At 2 o’clock, the driver took me and Janet to the nearest indoor market, where the school has rented space for a promotional booth. The rented space is actually just a spot on the floor, on which sits a stand with the school’s logo. The stand was made by a local printing company and is collapsible. The market consists of 5 floors and our stand is in the basement, where the largest single vendor is located, a supermarket called Merry Mart. Merry Mart is about half the size of a Wal-Mart and ensures a steady flow of traffic. Unfortunately, on a Monday afternoon, that steady flow was not too strong, so Janet and I walked around the upper floors of the building to find more potential customers. Security guards immediately started stalking us as we went from floor to floor. Technically, we are only allowed to approach customers in the basement. We tried to be more subtle about approaching people, but more and more guards kept watching us. Up on the fifth floor, the food court level, we found a business man sitting at a table alone who seemed interested in learning English. About two minutes after we sat down with him, 5 guards appeared and began questioning Janet. They even took a flyer out of the businessman’s hand. There are just too many guards in China, so they are bored and just waiting for anything like this to happen. It probably made their day.
We gathered our brochures and retreated back down to the basement for the next hour and a half. Traffic began to pick up for the last hour and we were able to speak with more people. Our stand just so happens to be right where I saw a promotional display containing bumblebees a couple weeks ago. The display was promoting a vendor selling a special brand of honey. The bees are no longer there.
I spent about 30 minutes talking to a business English student that picked up one of our flyers, who had some of the best English I’ve heard recently from a Chinese person. The driver was supposed to pick me and Janet up at 5 o’clock. Janet’s boyfriend stopped by and we waited with us outside for the driver for 30 minutes. Janet is child sized and probably weighs less than 90 pounds, so her boyfriend calls her fat.
When the driver hadn’t shown up by 5:30, Janet and I got on a bus and slowly made our way through rush-hour traffic back to the school, where dinner was waiting on the patio. When my adult class ended at 9 o’clock, Annie came in to ask that the students sign up for classes again. This class ends on Friday. A student asked her if I would be teaching the next class, but I’m not sure if it was because they wanted me to or didn’t want me to.

Tuesday: 6-26-07

After stopping in briefly at work this morning, I took bus 333 four stops to the market. On the fourth floor, I purchased 25 blank DVD’s, then bought two dress shirts and toothpaste from Merry Mart in the basement. I had come back to Merry Mart specifically for the dress shirts, which I’d seen on sale for less than $3 each last night.
Before returning to work, I bought myself KFC for lunch using some coupons I’d saved from a bag of potato chips. Joe asked me to come to his office at noon to watch an English-learning video that we will use in a class that’s beginning Thursday. The new employee that started yesterday, Lisa, is now Joe’s office assistant. She helped me open doors and offered me water.
Back at the school, a tiny puppy and an old dirty white dog were on the patio. The old dog, which I’d first seen yesterday sleeping in the tiny park nearby, was sound asleep again. The puppy, no more than one month old and barely able to walk, was screaming as it tried hopelessly to get through the glass doors to the air-conditioning inside. It obviously couldn’t have traveled here on its own, so I figured somebody might come around looking for it. It gulped frantically when I offered it a cup of water, as the temperature was in the mid 90’s. I also gave it a box to sleep in and someone else brought it some fried rice.
I spent the afternoon sorting class material packets for the new class that starts on Thursday. After dinner, I got in the car with the driver, Joe, Janet and the Lisa. We dropped Joe and Lisa off somewhere, then Janet and I went on to Merry Mart. We worked the school’s booth here for two hours, just as we had yesterday. The traffic was much more substantial tonight and we gave away hundreds of flyers. I also actively gave out flyers to help pass the time. Before, I’d thought it best to just show my face and speak English with anyone who was interested in the school, but I think actually handing out flyers is a much better promotion. I said, “Yingyu kaoyu paishun”(oral English practice) and held out a flyer as each person passed by. Janet said the same thing and was only able to get about 40% of the people to actually take a flyer. When I said it, people did a double-take and about 75% took a flyer. Some people just burst out laughing.
The driver came back to pick me up at 8:30 and Janet walked to her university, which is very near the store. Back at the school, the puppy was still on the patio and Joe wasn’t happy about it. He’d just about thrown a fit when he saw it under the table during dinner, then it apparently had crapped a couple times on the patio while I was at the store. I was going to anonymously drop it off in the “zoo” behind my apartment if nobody claimed it today, but it turns out that Donkey Girl actually owns it.
The seemingly-gently new employee Lisa abruptly kicked the puppy off the patio so it would go back to the donkey restaurant. It flipped twice over the stairs and yet out a yelp as it hit the pavement.
At home in the evening, I talked to my dad on the phone for about an hour, which was my first substantial phone call abroad since taking the new job a month ago. We talked about him and Clara maybe coming to visit in early November.

Wednesday: 6-27-07

A tall very pretty conservative-looking Chinese girl began working at the school today. It seems we change employees all the time now.
An impressive storm passed through this afternoon, worthy of any tornado-producing storm I’ve ever seen in Southern Illinois. Walking from my office to the rear of the school, I noticed that the window was as black as night. There are supposedly no tornadoes in China, but that’s hard to believe after seeing the sky today. I quickly got my camcorder from my office and went outside to film. The wind and rain did get strong, but it was never too serious. Several random people took shelter under the school’s front patio. Moderate rain continued for the next two hours.
Joe hired the Chinese student that I met two days ago when handing out flyers at the supermarket. His name is Henry and he’ll work as a marketing coordinator. On first impression, Henry seems to be one of the nicest people I’ve met here. It’s hard to imagine him kicking puppies, and he also comes with some very good business ideas. He joined us for dinner tonight.
During the second half of my adult class tonight, Joe came in to talk with the students for 30 minutes about their feelings concerning our teaching methods.
Returning to my apartment, I discovered that today’s storm had flooded the balcony and half the living room. Much of the water had dried, but there was still standing water on my desk and the living room rug is soaked. The only permanent damage is to my computer’s subwoofer, which soaked up quit a bit of moisture into its cheap particle board casing.

Thursday: 6-28-07

Sitting outside in the courtyard this morning, my old neighbor Mr. Ma and his wife struck up a conversation with me. There also just so happened to be a young pregnant lady there that could translate a few words for us. Ma and his wife were tending to some melons they have growing on a terrace that is built over some benches in the courtyard. The melons are getting big now and hang over the heads of the people sitting on the benches. I don’t sit directly under them.
Joe called and asked that I go to the office to have a look at the phone system, because none of the phones would work. Shaking some wires around did the trick. At my office, there were more telecommunications problem, as the Internet access will not connect to my website. My computer is getting confused between the connection at the office and the one at my apartment. The one at the office is always on and the one at home requires a user name and password. This has been a problem for some weeks, but it always just seemed to fix itself when I would simply close the error windows. Very strangely, it now only affects my website and will not allow itself to be ignored. I can view all other websites fine, but when I try to visit mine, then the computer insists on trying to connect to the connection at my apartment, which obviously isn’t available when the computer is at my office. The computer gods are obviously not happy with me. That’s the only explanation.
The new girl Joe hired yesterday is so pretty that she’s distracting me from my work. She got lunch with me today and I almost couldn’t bear separating myself from her when lunchtime was over. In the afternoon, I went to the local police station with my old grey-haired landlord and the other new girl named Lisa, for the purpose of getting a residency permit. All foreigners living in China are required to have this permit, and to update it every time we move, just like sex offenders in the US. This was the first time I’d been in a Chinese police station. The nearest one is only a five minute walk away, which is a tall modern grey brick building of about 10 stories. There is little security at the front door except for a few officers sitting at desks. The inside of the building is also very modern, but the air conditioning and most of the lights were off. There must be limited police funding, because most of the cars are also about 15 years old.
All landlords are required by law to accompany foreigners to the police station who are staying on their property. My coworker Lisa was the translator. We went into a large mostly empty room with 4 people sitting at desks behind a vast marble counter. The 30-something year-old woman with orthodontic braces who waited on us seemed very unhappy at first, but became happy after talking with Lisa a bit. The landlord just provided his ID and didn’t say much except for chatting casually with Lisa.
Lisa had a lot of explaining to do because foreigners are required to register with the local police within 48 hours of moving to a new residence. When staying in hotels, the hotel automatically takes care of this, but when you live on your own, you are held responsible to register. No documentation is provided about these laws when entering the country, but there is a potential $75/day fine for violators. I’d recently heard about this fine, but also heard that it is usually waved for first-offenders, so I wasn’t really worried. So, the woman with braces handed me a pamphlet written in Chinese and English and pointed to a paragraph that said I could be deported, then she gave me a form titled something like “Self-admission of residency violation by foreigner”. I was told to basically write an apology saying I wouldn’t do it again. This form reminded me of the “self-criticisms” that I’ve read about in some modern Chinese history books. During times that the Communist Party reinforced its hold on the country, random people would often be accused of absurd crimes and forced to write “self-critisisms”, which were basically an apology for a political “crime” that never actually happened. Residency regulations are indeed important, but if you never tell anyone about them, then it’s not really much of a crime.
The whole application process took nearly an hour, then I was given two forms, one acknowledging my self-criticism and the other approving my residency. As weird as this process is, it sure is a lot simpler than the US, where I would have been very rudely kicked out of the country and never allowed back. I didn’t have to pay a dime today. So, where’s the freedom in this case?
An accountant that works for Joe came to have dinner with the staff. We spent quite a bit of time talking in my office about random things. I briefly went home and fell asleep for 15 minutes before starting a new adult class at 7 o’clock. There are only two students, an animal science professor from the agriculture university and a tech employee from the software park. They both have a basic level of fluency and can understand some fairly complex topics, so I enjoy teaching them. Joe’s accountant also sat in on the class for first hour.

Friday: 6-29-08

I made a flyer with Uncle Sam on it this morning to be printed for the school’s upcoming July 4th promotional event. In the early afternoon, I took bus 333 to the supermarket area to buy more electricity. My meter only had about 50 cents worth left on it, and the bank near my apartment was unable to provide electricity payment service because their Internet access was out. Their access was also out yesterday, and it’s unclear how any bank could do business without Internet access.
I went to the same bank today that I paid may water bill at earlier in the week, the China Industrial and Commercial Bank. Everyone must take a number and wait in the few dozen chairs in the lobby. There was a crowd and it took over 20 minutes to get the bill paid. Maybe this kind of electrical payment system is actually terribly inconvenient.
Next, I had a huge meal at KFC before returning to work. I didn’t have the regular dinner with my coworkers because I was so full of KFC, but instead printed out certificates to give my adult class, as it was their last night of a 30-hour beginning level course. The power went out for 10 minutes during the first hour of class, then we stayed 30 minutes late, till 9:30, to make up for the time that Joe spent talking to the class on Wednesday.
Walking outside after class, a man in a small car backed into a tiny kid driving a Power Wheels-type truck. It was just a fender bender, but a mob of angry people instantly surrounded the small car. The driver had no choice to get out or run the people down, so he got out. A few people screamed in his face for a few minutes, then he sped off.
Johanna arrived at 10 o’clock and we ate 30 lamb kabobs at the “restaurant” in the field across the street. Some old guy offered me a drink from a bottle of rice wine, about like vodka. Johanna and I drank some more in my apartment, a bottle of Great Wall wine.

Saturday: 6-30-07

Rain all day long. Johanna and I took the bus to eat the buffet at a Big Pizza restaurant for lunch. The nearest Big Pizza is at the same bus stop where the supermarket is located. We briefly walked around the marketplace and supermarket before going back out so she could find a cab. It was pouring at this time and we both got pretty wet even with an umbrella. There were no real cabs and a “black taxi” driver kept trying to get her in his cab, but she refused. She eventually found a real cab driver sitting in the passenger seat of his cab eating KFC, who agreed to let her sit in the backseat and wait till he was done.
Next, I got back on the bus and went to get my hair cut at the barber shop next to the school, which is the same place I went for my last haircut. The same young guy cut it this time, which took a whole hour. The hour provided a lot of Chinese practice, as the guy always is very talkative. After the cut was completed, the cashier did not have change for my 100 yuan bill, so they told me I didn’t have to pay. I bought two soda’s from a store next door and then returned to the barber shop to give the barber 10 yuan and a bottle of Sprite.
Back at my apartment, I cleaned up from the flood that happened earlier in the week due to the storm. The water had all dried up and left thick layers of dust. The subwoofer of my computer speaker set seems to have been destroyed, as it just lets out a constant deep hum now when turned on.
I went to work at 3 o’clock and taught my children’s class at 6. I made the mistake of giving a paper-airplane making lesson. A couple of the kids threw them at me. They also said my new haircut looked really bad, and so did my coworker Echo. Joe’s friend the patent attorney Nancy taught the advanced adult class from 7 till 9. I asked her afterwards to take a picture for the brochure and she initially refused because her hair had been messed up from the rain, but she relented and eventually let me take it.
The “restaurant” in the field was not there when I left the school, so I walked a block down the street and ate at another vendor set up on a corner. A lone woman was preparing the food and there were only two other customers sitting underneath a tent. Light rain was still falling.
I’ve spent time the last couple evenings online researching an obscure industrial product for Joe that costs more than gold.