Just some things I’ve noticed:
1) With every student in the school dressing in the same uniforms, kids standout by their shoes. Last year, most of my students wore Chuck T All-Stars. Xixiang was a poor school. This year, I see a lot of Nikes and New Balances.
2) There is usually 15 minutes in between each [...]
Miss Chan is the worst driver I have ever seen in my entire life. This is a bold statement. I’ve seen some pretty bad drivers in my 28 years (road trips into Ohio and my year and a half living in Virginia comes to mind). Miss Chan beats them all, though. I’ve ridden in a [...]
At this point, I really don’t even need to tutor DJ. I’m only getting paid 150 RMB per hour, and he lives all the way out in Luo Hu, which is on the other side of the city. I might drop him, depending on how much work I get from Miss Chan and her foreign [...]
To describe how I feel as relieved would be an understatement. The G-20 Summit is over, and my brothers made it through without any injuries. They’re just exhausted from working 12 hour days for a week, wearing full riot gear in the heat. I watched the news videos Friday afternoon before going out. I almost [...]
I saw the pictures on the Post Gazette’s web site: anarchists pushing a dumpster, a protester throwing a brick at a cop car, police on horse, chasing people through the streets, people dangling from a bridge. I just saw video of CNN’s Brian Todd in Lawrenceville. It took Wolf Blitzer four minutes to say the [...]
The head of our school’s English Department is a man who goes by the English name Ian. He’s awesome. At our Teacher’s Day banquet, he told Beer Monster to go talk with a Chinese woman. “She enjoys sex,” he said. “She is very loose!” Beer Monster and I eat lunch with him at least once [...]
Nowism is a term many of the expatriates here in Shenzhen use to describe Chinese people’s inability to know what’s going on in the near distant future. For example, last year when my Spring Festival holiday was approaching, I asked the contact teacher at my school when my vacation would begin, and he said he [...]
It was the end of a long Sunday. I had just gotten done tutoring four little girls, and all I wanted to do was sit back, drink a beer, and relax. I walked to a bus stop and waited for the 396. I had my laptop, and my MP3 player (I refuse to buy an [...]
I was way off about my weekend. The majority of my friends came to their senses and stayed in Shenzhen. We hit up a couple clubs Friday night. Outside of one, I watched a cab driver clean vomit off the side of his car. It looked like someone dumped a bucket of puke on the [...]
It’s Friday afternoon, and I wish the weekend would just come and go already. It’s a horrible thought; I know. But, it’s probably going to be a boring one. Most of the people I know either are going to Guangzhou or Hong Kong for the weekend. In Guangzhou they’ll feast at the all you can [...]
