Flush with Rage

I haven’t been having very good luck with toilets in this country.

In most public places, they don’t have toilets as we quaint American’s know them—big, porcelain thrones upon which to relax and do business across a wide spectrum of import. Instead, they have small porcelain or stainless steel depressions in the ground that have a little hole in them: squatters. Most of the time the squatters are as clean as any other public toilet you might see, i.e. not very, but about one in ten just has a nice, foul-smelling pile telling you that perhaps you should try the next stall.

Also, toilet paper isn’t something that’s publically available except in the classiest of establishments; you bring your own or you go without. As it happens, the Chinese don’t have social stigmas against things coming out of your nose, so picking your nose and shooting snot rockets is perfectly okay. Hell, it’s necessary given that almost every male over the age of 16 smokes. With their powers combined, these two facts have resulted in an interesting phenomena: people sell tissue packets as toilet paper, and they look at me like I’m crazy when I use them to blow my nose.

It took me a long time to use a squatter for anything but number one, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The toilet in my room is in the Western style. I greatly appreciated that when I got here and I still do. However, I’ve never seen a flush mechanism like the one’s in China before. Instead of having an easy-to-maintain handle and chain setup, they’ve got some sort of strange, pneumatic, alchemical button thing that makes the toilet flush. But you don’t push the button directly, instead, the lid of the tank has another button, and you press that button, which presses the button in the tank. At least, that’s the idea, but the button on the lid isn’t quite long enough to reach the button in the tank, so really, it’s just for show, a symbol of functionality that is utterly without function. In other words, I have to take off the lid to flush the toilet.

That’s not really a big deal, but apparently some plumbing under my room is creating torrential downpours on the first floor. In order to allow maintenance to fix this, I moved to a room across the hall about a week ago. Well, that’s partially true: my Internet connection was not moved, so I have my computer on a small desk in my old room and everything else in this new room.

The new room is similar to the old room, as you might expect. However, the toilet is completely broken. It leaks into the bowl, which means that it never fills up, which means that it never turns off, which means that it is always using water. And it doesn’t have a lid, which means all this fresh but slow moving water is open to the air. Which means that the first time I walked into my new bathroom, a cloud of mosquitos erupted from the toilet area. My scream only reached the halfway point of its crescendo before my mouth and nose was filled with the hungry critters.

I beat a hasty retreat. It was clear that I would have to lead a military campaign if I wanted this new room. And I did want it. Because all of my stuff (except my computer) was in it. So I grabbed my book from orientation—the one I haven’t looked at since orientation—and put on some death metal. And then I mosquito after mosquito after mosquito. It was very much like Independance Day, except without Jeff Goldbloom or Will Smith, the mosquitos had no chance.

Things would get worse in my new room before they got better. The next day I awoke to find that the room I was to use to hang my laundry was instead home to about four of the big ass wasps I put up a picture of a few posts ago. "Oh, teehee, one big wasp; I’ll never go in that room again." F that. I just conquered an entire nation of mosquitos and my orientation book was hungry for more blood. More death metal, and I took it to the limit.

A few days ago, Adam and I went up to Datong, which has some Buddhist grottos and a hanging monastery. We took a sleeper train both ways, which, let me tell you, is far and away the best way to get long distances. However, before I closed my eyes for the night, I was enjoying some Ben Folds when the fancy took me to use the bathroom. Down the narrow hallway I went. Into the bathroom, closed the door. I untucked my shirt and the cable to my iPod snagged. Ben’s mellow voice was silenced so abruptly. Then a slight jerk on my head as the iPod reached the end of the headphone cable and slipped off. Clang. Clong. Down the squatter it went.

I blinked. It had all happened so quickly. I peered down into the toilet. Could I retrieve it? Hmm. Hmm. I couldn’t see it. Did I dare reach my hand into a poop chute that almost certainly hadn’t been cleaned since the train car was put into service?

No. No, I didn’t.

And I still had to pee. Would I piss on my iPod, still patiently, unsuspectingly waiting to resume Ben Folds in its new, terrible grave?

Yes. Yes, I did.

And during my day in Datong, Adam and I came upon a Wal-mart. Having some hours to kill, we walked around it for a while, but lunch didn’t agree with me. I had to use the toilet, squatter or no. I approached an employee. "Ce suo," I said. She looked confused. I repeated myself, with more urgency, but to no avail. I made a gesture of washing my hands. Her eyes lit up in recognition.

She led me to the hand cream aisle. I didn’t hand cream. I needed to not poop my pants. She brought over a coworker who spoke slightly more English. Adam found the key with "WC." Hooray.

I was led to the bathroom. There was a western style toilet, but it was covered in filth. I used the squatter, and I would visit that stall another five times that night. It was a magical, cathartic night.

Burning Love in Dongying and To Taishan! – Pictures

Until I can get pictures from Adam, these are the only pictures I have of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th days of my National Day Holiday.

Dongying

• Band of Brothers: why not use it to brand your military goods store?
• Yes, people recreationally use nun-chucks here.
• This Lee shirt bore the best Chinglish–English butchered Chinese-style–I’ve seen yet. I will surely buy some sort of similar article before I leave.

To Tai’an

• Picture of the train station at Dongying.
• Information regarding exiting the train platform in Tai’an.
• Some shots of Tai’an around town, including proof that I was there and am not just ripping these off some guy’s deviant art.

Taishan

• Good God, I hate spiders, and I’m going to sleep on a mountain that’s home to these…
• And then, through the magic of editing, I’m at the summit of Taishan. It was much harder than this—again, many thanks to Joe and Kedo.
• The Chinese await the sunrise in their rented Communist Army coats.
• The sunrise. You can just see the sun, which is a small sliver below the dividing line between light and dark.

a shrine on taishan

band of brothers store

family values

in taian

nunchucks1111

jesus

scenic taian

taian hostel view

taishan summit

well obviously

taishan sunrise sliver

taishan just before sunrise

Goodbye Baoding; Hello Dongying – Pictures

Picture highlights from day 1 of my National Day Holiday.

• The rundown station of our first and last pit stop, as well as the bathroom’s restrictive policy.
• Adam, a constant ray of sunshine.
• "Dan is a Man Who Focuses on His Passion" – a one act play as performed by Dan’s fridge.
• Our bus driver was a friendly guy, but never ask him about his trafficking in questionable goods.
• Our last stop before Dongying was for a cigarette break; I was treated to this brilliant dog house.

first and only bathroom stop

illicit shirt trade

one at a time please

best doghouse ever

dans fridge

friendly bus driver

traveling companion

To Taishan!

In the morning, Austin and Ian arrived. Both Ian and Dan had come to China before, and so they knew each other. Austin is a fellow CIEE guy whom we met in Shanghai. We get lunch and bid Dongying adieu for Tai’an.

The train ride is a 4 hour hard seat. The seat isn’t literally hard, that’s just what they call the least comfortable train seats available. Either way, the promise of discomfort is kept; the train ride seems very long. To help stretch out every minute, it’s freezing outside but the air-condition-free inside is packed to the brim, creating a nice temperature difference between those freezing with window seats and those baking alive in the aisle.

I suppose I shouldn’t complain as much, considering that we actually had seats. In China, if a train is sold out of seats, that doesn’t mean that you can’t ride the train, it just means you don’t have a seat, i.e. you stand until you spot an open seat, then you shiv anyone who gets in your way unless they can prove—with ticket, photo ID, blood sample, and the testimony of three personal relatives (or just a bigger shiv)—that the seat belongs to them. Upon arrival, I stood to take my bag from the overhead rack only to find that I had trouble getting out of my seat because people had already taken it.

We make it into the waiting arms of Dabria and her posse. Dabria, like T-Pain, is a student of Dan’s. Unlike T-Pain, Dabria knows how to get shit done. She has cars and taxis waiting for us when we arrive. She brought us snacks. And the hotel she takes us to has a TV channel that plays the Warcraft III mod, Defense of the Ancients; oh, sure, it’s like a low budget, Chinese ESPN for nerds, but it smacks of nostalgia before Kedo went off to war-torn Washington.

We find a restaurant for dinner. Travel-weary, we don’t realize until after we order that the apparent other customers are all one family—the family that operates the restaurant, sitting down after a hard day’s work, preparing to close up. I hate being one of those people who comes in at closing time, but apparently I’m the only one in the group and we’ve already ordered.

What makes Tai’an a place of interest? It’s the town at the foot of Taishan—or Mount Tai—which is one of the body parts of a fellow in China’s creation myth, and subsquently home of a God of Wind, I think. Supposedly only those who are fit to rule China can make it to the top of the mountain, and everyone who’s anyone in China has climbed it, including Confucius and Mao Zedong. It’s all steps.

So the next day, Allie, Ryan, Austin, Dan, Ian, Adam and I set out to tackle the beastie. For the record, Taishan is, well, somewhere between amusement park and pilgrimage spot for the Chinese; we, like everyone else there, started out laughing, talking, jumping, taking pictures of every rock with a Chinese character on it (and there where many).

After about an hour of step after step, however, we began to get a bit weary, and we took a short rest. At this point, a very old, very dirty Chinese man passed us. He looked as if he hadn’t bathed in a long, long while, and on a large bamboo pole balanced across his shoulders, he was carrying two large bags filled with empty plastic bottles and other recyclables. He stopped, looked at us, then held up three fingers and said something. A random Chinese guy that had joined—perhaps crashed is a better word—our party ("because [his] father said that if he found any White people while climbing Taishan alone, he should join them") translated: "Ya got three more hours!"

At this point, the crazy man started laughing on of the most jovial, crazy laughs I have ever heard. It was so insane that everyone in our group started laughing with him, which only made him laugh harder, which only made us—well, you get it. The old man doffed his hat to reveal an extremely greasy, tangled top-knot of gray-black hair and was off. Needless to say, for the rest of our climb back up the mountain, we would periodically shout, "Ya got three more hours! Bwaahahaha!"

Maybe an hour later, we came to a resting point as the sun was setting. It wasn’t exactly a small mountain town so much as three buildings on a large landing. Allie and our Chinese (sunshine) friend decided that they had had enough, and were going to take the bus back down to Tai’an. I don’t blame Allie as she had been sick for several days, and the ever-thinning air wasn’t likely to help her stuffed up respiratory system.

Having lost Allie and the Chinese guy, we decided to break for dinner as the sun set. This dinner proved to be the most expensive, saltiest, worst-tasting meal that I have eaten in China. I knew on Taishan, towards the top, they charge 10 cats for a bottle of water, and that being a closed park, I was going to get gouged. I had made peace with that. But I have eaten many meals in China; some have been spectacular; some have been repulsive; nearly all have been oily and salty; but this was just plain bad. Dan exhorted me to tell the world how offensively bad it was, and I have.

We kept climbing.

Ryan is a big guy, a football player I may have heard. In other words, not fat, but a lot to move up steps; he started to lag behind. Despite the fact that the temperature justified people renting out old Communist coats at the rest village, Ryan took off his shirt and continued to climb. Imagine a large, white man with a backpack, at twilight, heaving up step after step amidst smaller, fully clothed Chinese.

Now imagine a Chinese couple resting during their long ascension up an ancient pilgrimage/amusement park. Running with that, imagine them having the bejeezus scared out of them when this giant, shirtless yeti stealthily scales the wall, and with a feral, grunting dexterity–but no ill will–appears behind them.

Now that shit made the climb worth it.

At long last, we made it to the top of Mount Tai. At first, I didn’t think we’d made it, mainly because the shopkeep who had just gouged me on water assured us that there were two hours left; at least, that’s what Dan said. And yet, twenty minutes later, we arrived at the top.

It was a great feeling, and many times during the climb it occured to me that I want to thank Joe and Kedo: without their efforts I know I would have been on that bus with Allie and Mr. Random Chinese Guy.

So we arrived at the top at about 10 pm, which meant we were camping on the top of the mountain. This isn’t quite as rugged as it sounds, because the top of the mountain was fairly civilized, by which I mean there were about twenty shops and several table vendors. We rented some old Communist cold-weather coats from one of them for a pretty decent price and proceeded to whittle away the night. We ate noodles and watched parts of a Chinese-dubbed Transformers 2; we walked up and down the row of shops and had Chinese vendors laugh at us when we tried to speak Chinese, or when we refused to speak Chinese. Finally, we found a spot on what we thought was terrace that allowed for the best view of the sunrise, but was actually just a terrace for the toilets. We huddled up against a wall here and tried to sleep for a few hours.

This failed miserably, mainly for three reasons. One: sleeping against a backpack on stone is not comfortable. Two: the long Communist coat wasn’t long enough to cover my ankles, and it was damn cold on the top of the mountain. Three: it is common practice for small Chinese vendors to advertise their wares by shouting what they have to offer, but that’s hard on the vocal chords, so this being the 21st century, they record their shouting and replay it endlessly over a megaphone. I have made a personal vow to never buy anything from a shop that advertises thusly.

After giving up on sleep, I got up and bought some coffee overpriced coffee. This was not good coffee. Hell, it wasn’t even bad coffee. In China, especially outside of the big cities, finding real coffee is nearly impossible, so on top of a mountain? Forget it. Instead, they had the common Nescafe powder, the ingredients to which are, in order: sugar, coffee creamer, casein, emulsifier, flavouring, anticaking agent, soluble coffee, flavouring. There’s more anticaking agent than coffee in my coffee, dammit!

Watching the sun rise is the main attraction of Taishan, so just before dawn, we figured out that we were, in fact, not in a good spot, and proceeded to follow the herd to a good spot. We stood around for about an hour, holding our ground against Chinese trying to push in for a better view, as the skyline began to oh so slowly illuminate. Then everyone in the group decided that it was as good as it was going to get and it was time to go. I said that was crazy; we just spent hours climbing this mountain and several more hours huddling in the cold being abused by a megaphone, but we couldn’t wait another ten minutes for the grand finale?

So they left, I stayed. I had the key to the room, so I figured I could get back to the hotel.

Four minutes later, the sun rose. It was pretty neat.

I decided to head back to the cable car that lead down the mountain–walking down the mountain, after all, is for suckers.

Burning Love in Dongying

Okay, I’m working on getting a batch processor for my photos so that I don’t have to resize every single one of them, which is a pain.

A point of clarification: Adam’s last name is Gillan. So when I refer to Gillan, I am, in fact, referring to Adam. Likewise, when I refer to Adam, I am referring to Gillan. Very circuitous.

So I woke up from the floor in time to go to Dan’s class, which is comprised of about 20 girls and 5 guys. The guys are all in the back of the room, and Dan claims that–bar one of them–they’re not great students. Apparently learning English is not a manly thing to do?

Dan teaches a class on poetry: "Men like poetry because it helps them impress ladies; girls like poetry because it lets them talk about feelings or something." Priceless. He lays down a few genres of poetry and then tries to have the students read some poems, emphasizing that what is important about poetry is what it means to the reader, not the author’s intention.

I disagree, sir! But that’s neither here nor there.

The students read Robert Frost’s "The Road Not Taken" ad nauseum to themselves, but they seem unable to glean much from it. They respond in the affirmative to "Do you understand?" But they don’t; Dan tells me this is SOP for college-level students.

After class I’m tossed back to T-Mac, who I haven’t mentioned yet. T-Mac is a student at Dan’s school; he’s extremely nice, and like most Chinese, rather fond of touching. (As you may know, I am less fond of touching.) The catch with T-Mac is that his good intentions usually lead to nothing; for example, it is he who marched us up and down looking for hotels, and it is he who led me in vain to two camera places looking for repair after the servo on the lense started to make ominous clicking noises.

And yes, his English name is T-Mac, given to him, I imagine, by a previous English teacher. Allie and Dan kindly gave him Tyler as a new name, but I like calling him T-Mac or–more frequently–T-Pain. He frequenly observed that I bore a striking resemblance to–and might even be–Harry Potter, and that if I didn’t go back to school in the U.S. for my masters degree, I could just as easily go to Hollywood to become a movie star. It’s like he knows me.

Anyways, T-Mac took me to yet a third store, where I was yet again told that they had no interest in repairing my camera.

I returned to the school to find everyone playing some bizarre card game. It came out at that point that Mike, one of Dan’s extra-cynical peers who wasn’t going on vacation with us, played Magic, which I know far too much about, and we proceeded to ruin everyone’s afternoon with our geeky discussion.

Come dinner time, we went to a place that served everything on skewers. It wasn’t shish kabobs, it was just skewered. Tofu, chicken wings, entire tiny fish, little slices of bread, everything. The only things left unskewered were the drinks and I’ll eat my hat if they didn’t try to skewer those as well. At this skewer place, I ate the hottest chicken wing I have ever eaten. I can’t describe how hot it was, but Gillan has a picture that tells the whole story. I’ll try to get it from him, but for now suffice to say that it was so hot that it drove me insane because now I kind of want another one.

Also at dinner, a Chinese woman–the wife of one of the older teachers–claimed that Dongying was, hands down, despite the smog, despite the prostitution, despite everything, the best town in the world, and that she had no interest in going to America. Mike asked her why, but she could only say that it was the best.

After dinner, we wound down with more Halo 3 and some drinking card games.

Also, I got the batch processor working, but I’m going to attempt to work out now. Pictures later.

National Day Holiday – Goodbye, Baoding; Hello, Dongying

So I’m back from my National Day Holiday; let’s recap, shall we?

The first order of business was to secure a train ticket from Baoding to Dongying–a small, coastal town owing its entire existence to an oil company. More importantly, it’s the place of business for Dan, one of the cooler guys that Adam and I had met in Shanghai. There were no tickets available, but this was to be expected. Traveling during the National Day Holiday week is notoriously difficult; I think it’s supposed to be analogous to Christmas season in the U.S., just much more difficult.

Train tickets being unavailable, we settled for a 7-hour long bus. This wasn’t such a bad compromise as the bus was only a third of the price and the bus station is just down the street from the school. By which I mean it’s about a 20 minute walk. But really, quite close.

Provisions were necessary for the bus, obviously, so a quick stop at the Military Square grocery store yielded sun-flower seeds, a pomegranite, some peanut butter sandwiches, and a bang bang chong, which is sort of like a cream-filled donut. A word on those last two: they are Bimbo products. I don’t know who decided to come up with a bread company named Bimbo, but it happened; it’s real. Their logo is a smiling white bear, with a little chef’s hat and apron. Bimbo products aren’t bad by any means, but they obviously maintain a preservative threshold of at least 20%. Their products are similar to what you might find in an American gas station, but outside of expensive, rare, direct imports, they’re the most western grocery I can find.

At 5 AM, Gillan and I get up to head to the bus station. The bus departs at 6:40 on the dot. At 8:45, I start eating a pomegranite, and by 9:30 I’m out of pomegranite, my fingers are sticky, and I have no solution to this pickle. The next several hours are a blur of neck-straining, restless sleep and endless Chinese comedy skits that are, of course, meaningless to me. Gillan is tortured for an hour or so before the bus makes its one bathroom stop for the entire trip.

Every so often, the bus randomly stops at the side of the road where there is a waiting van, shop, or vendor cart, and conspicously unlabeled packages are hauled into or out of the bus’ undercarriage. I am convinced that the bus driver is making some extra money smuggling drugs. Near the very end of our journey, I learn the terrible truth. A man whips out an exacto knife and cuts open one of the packages. "Just like in the movies," I thought.

He reaches in to sample the illicit product.

He draws back a T-shirt? Yes, we’ve been running fake T-shirts. The guy has an original and he compares the two. Apparently he is satisfied, regardless of the cruel product he is unleasing upon the future potential of our children.

At 3 PM, we finally arrive in Dongying. Don’t let my description of it as a small, coastal city fool you. The oil plants have left a perpetual haze over the city, and there’s not much beautiful about it. Our plans for the hotel quickly fall through; we try a few more, but we end up deciding to crash on Dan’s floor. Or, more accurately, I will sleep on the floor; Adam will get the futon and we’ll switch tomorrow.

I meet Ryan and Allie, Dan’s fellow teachers who will be going traveling with us. They’re nice enough. We grab dinner and play Halo 3 in Ryan’s room. He opted to bring an XBox 360 over a computer. I still suck at Halo.

Then we go out to JJ’s Pub. JJ is a Chinese national who speaks impeccable English–albeit with a ton of expletives, because his pub is a hotspot for foreigners (who come on business for the oil company, mainly from Texas). His pub is located on "Hooker St," which is mostly brothels. This differs from the rest of Dongying, which is mainly composed of brothels disguised as KTVs. There is literally a KTV every 50 feet in this town. As Dunkin’ Donuts is to Boston, KTV is to Dongying. Dan tells us that there is a large hotel in town that is famous for having the best prostitutes in China. It’s a colorful city.

National Day Holiday

6:20 AM bus leaving for the National Day Holiday. Not bringing the computer, so updates upon return!

Yogurt and Talent

So yesterday was a rough day.

The little bucket that is my shower/bathtub gets its water from an electric water heater directly over the tub. This means that every shower—in America so mundane and uninteresting—now carries the thrill and intrigue of being crushed by a burning water heater. Or just being electrocuted.

I can’t do much about the former, but to counter the latter, you have to unplug the water heater before you use it. Not a problem, provided that you remember to plug it back in later. You might also recall that my tub bucket doesn’t actually drain into anything. It just drains onto the floor. So I don’t plug the thing in immediately after a shower because the floor is all wet, and God knows that if I’m going to die in China, they’re not going to find my char-grilled husk on my bathroom floor—naked but for slippers—if I can help it.

So two days ago, I forgot to plug the thing back in. Which means that yesterday I woke up and had no hot water. Also, I was scheduled to teach seven classes that day instead of five. Why seven?

The run-around with my residence papers a few days earlier had one of my classes rescheduled to yesterday. The ruinous disaster with kindergarten led to the class being split into two classes. Thus seven classes, so I probably didn’t want to go in there unshowered.

The day was more or less okay after that, but come kindergarten time, I started to bomb again. I don’t quite get it. In my other classes, I’m kind of like a super-star. I’m kind of like Harry Potter and Hanna Montana and Ultraman—some sort of Bandai Power Ranger type fellow; huge over here—rolled into one. I get smiles and waves when I enter the classroom. It takes me ten minutes to walk down the hall as I’m besieged by high fives.

Not with kindergarten. They started playing the wrap-it-up music at the thirty minute mark in my first class, and then at the twenty minute mark in my second. I went from the hokey pokey to colors and shapes. "Still too hard they said. Needs more duck-duck-goose."

Evidently kindergarteners just do duck-duck-goose. I don’t know.

Then I found out that the eight-day National Day holiday was being moved around, and as a result, I had to teach my Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday classes…. today, tomorrow, and Sunday.

I didn’t have any lesson plans prepared, and Adam and I were going to take these days to practice our routine for the talent show.

Now, I don’t have any talents—at least, not the kinds that manifest on the Chinese stage. But we were led to believe that there was some sort of talent show for the National Day holiday and we were expected to do something.

Erm…. okay. A poll of Adam’s blog’s readership led us to try .

I want you to savor that. Savor the mental image of me doing Evolution of Dance in front of a boarding school full of Chinese nationals. Try not to let your regret at not being there taint the emotional palette.

So the point is I’m busy.

I’ve also just been bit by being adventurous. Never thought of yogurt as a realm of adventure, but I never thought of a shower that way either. They’ve got your standard berry yogurt, some red bean yogurt—which is quite good—but I had to try the Green tea & Konjac & Nata yogurt. I don’t know what two-thirds of those words are, but I had to try it. It was in a green container. It looked light and vanilla-like.

It tasted like cream cheese. But it felt like yogurt.

Mmmm.

That’s What It’s All About

So they cancelled my afternoon class yesterday so that I could get my picture taken for my residence permit. Residence permits are the registration papers that let the jingcha know you’re here, and thus they save you 500 cats a day that you would otherwise be charged. How do they charge you money for being somewhere if you don’t let them know you’re there in the first place?

A catch 22, but I’m sure they have their ways.

"Josh, what would they do with 500 kittens per day?"

Cats. I call a yuan a cat. Why is this? Because every single bill–and yuans come in 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, and 100 bills as far as I’ve seen–have your pal and mine, Mao Ze Dong’s face on them. I mean, I would expect his face to be on one of the bills. After all, the USA has only been around about 300 years, and we came up with different faces for each of our bills; I would think that a country with a millenia-spanning history such as China might be able to come up with a few more faces for their currency. I don’t know. Confucius comes to mind. The guy who invented fireworks, perhaps.

Well, anyways, Mao is all over the money. And a mao in Chinese is a cat. Also a hat. But the notion of spending hats on things is ludicrous; I simply won’t hear of it. So cats.

Yes, it’s a bilingual pun. Groan.

So I went to get my residence permit, but the guy who does that wasn’t there. Seems like the kind of thing that would have regular hours, but what do I know. So I went today. Just more classes to make up.

I also tried to teach my kindergarten class the hokey pokey. "They need more games," all of the teachers told me.

Okay. Games. What’s a game the littlest of children could play?

Hokey pokey. If I can play "London Bridge is Falling Down" in safety school—big hell yeah for anyone who remembers safety school—then I can teach the hokey pokey.

Wrong. Wrong.

Unmitigated, total disaster. Do you know how many words are in the hokey pokey?

Too many. God, it went poorly. After initial attempts at communication broke down, I tried to rely upon imitation. In other words, I stood at the front of the class and did the hokey pokey by myself, hoping others would get it and join in. About a third of the class got there.

The rest went into utter chaos. Some were fighting, some were just laying on the floor, one girl was just spinning around in a circle.

Things reached a crisis point when the spinning girl fell down—surprise!—and started crying. She refused to get back up and, despite their being three kindergarten teachers in the room when I started class, there was nobody wielding anything resembling authority in the room at this point. Where had the teachers gone?

I don’t know. Apparently watching the Hindenburg crash into the Titanic as interpreted by kindergarteners and directed by yours truly just isn’t interesting to Chinese kindergarten teachers.

So I leave the swarm to rapidly consume itself to the first one to figure out crude weaponry and sprint down the hall to the teacher’s office.

"hello girl crying emergency," I said. I rubbed my eyes with my fists since that was probably the only thing that would convey meaning.

So random-teacher-to-the-rescue and I head back down the hall to find everyone still alive and one of the teachers had returned to the classroom. Relief, sort of. Except that I still had no idea what to do.

Then Helen, one of the English teachers in the school, came into the class and bailed me out. Eventually things settled into duck-duck-goose.

Nightmarish.

Other than this, things have been good. I can buy enough candy to send an elephant into a diabetic coma for about $2, and children are utterly powerless to resist candy. Even the promise of candy will make an entire class pour out of their seats to answer my questions. I don’t even have to ask a question, they just keep their hands raised.

Sometimes I call on students who have their hands raised when I haven’t asked a question. They don’t know what to do. Perhaps this is wrong of me, but I find it utterly hilarious.

Behold the Beast

I recognize that there’s nothing there for scale, really, and so it could be any bug.

But it’s not.

It’s some sort of tyrant bug, a cruel and wicked sovereign of thoraxes, lording over and oppressing lesser minions like mosquitoes. I’ve never been a fan of the spiders, but if anyone can take this thing out, it’s them.

He’s much too high up for my slipper, anyways.

Again, I recognize that I might—on occasion—overuse hyperbole, that this is the Internet, where truth is a rare commodity, and that there is nothing by which to scale the sucker—even if there was, surely ’tis ‘shopped. But come now: I wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble if the little monster wasn’t as big as my thumb.