last saturday night iwent out for my first karoke experience in china. it brought back many memories, and here are a few highlights.

my first karoke experience was a table set up in my high school's dining hall. as we ate a special dinner that consisted of a bunch of fried food (i can't remember what the occasion was) my dorm mates and i went up and sang bohemian rhapsody. (i'm not sure if my college friends realize how far back the group singing of bohemian rhapsody goes back for me.)

my next experiences were in taiwan. there were quite a few, but i think unchained melody on the bus after watching a bootlegged copy of star wars episode one before it was released in the states. the video feature two asian people doing pottery together. how sweet.

the other very memorable time was when we visited a cultural village at sun moon lake. it was like a taiwanese version of williamstown. after our tour and after we had all donned vintage taiwanese garb, we were treated to a dance performance. after they cleared the stage, they gave us the opportunity to sing karoke. justin man, ms. fontaine, and i, in our traditional taiwanese clothes, sang a delightful rendition of knock three times.

this ktv, as they call it here, was not as family friendly. the bar was smoky, and they projected the picture and words onto a blank wall, and people sat in their seats and sang. that way there wasn't as much pressure. i convinced a chinese guy i met there to sing unchained melody with me. it was great. brought back some really nice memories...

the chinese spit very unusually. they spend a lot of time phlegm clearing and gathering. they seem to relish making the loudest noise possible, like glass-pack mufflers that one might drive around dc in the 60s. they make a lot of noise, but when it comes to the actually spitting, they lean over and let it dribble out of their mouth.

now i, brought up on the chairlifts of king ridge mountain, do not spit that way. ithis is where this blog might get a bit graphic...feel free to skip the next part.

like a good glass-pack clearing myself, but i need to rocket the loogie away from me. i rest the loogie on my tongue, and while it's sitting there, i purse my lips to create a wind tunnel. i raise the loog up into the path of the airway, and foom! it's off like one of those cylindrical containers you put mail in at an old timey office and lost.

there's no force to chinese spitting, no strength. i am planning to stage the first spitting revolution of 2006. i better get busy. 2006 is running out.

notice how i no longer mince my words. thank you chinese censorship!

so midterms are coming up, and my students are freaking out. now, i'm always one to procrastinate to the last minute, even the last second, but i'm afraid i'm getting teacher-y in my old age.

tonight my 8th graders have an oral exam. they are given a topic, and they are meant to speak 10 sentences on that topic. i have wondered today if i could do the same thing in chinese. the answer is certainly not. well, maybe if it was about food.

the frustrating thing to me is, they have this native speaker in their midst for about 2 and half months, and they do nothing. but come the night of the exam, they want help on speaking. i stopped my lesson plan and tried to switch to something that might be beneficial for an oral exam, but i quickly realized there was nothing i could do with thirty kids that could be helpful. so i continued on.

one of the activities in this week's lesson plan is an icebreaker type thing centered around sleep. you have to find someone who...overslept this morning, had a nightmare recently, sleepwalks, etc. one of the things i stressed was that you must speak english. the questions were basically laid out for them, all they had to do was knock it out of the park. frustratingly, the only class that complained about the exam was the only class who had trouble speaking english. now that i type it there seems like there might be a correlation there.

so after the activity, i slowly lectured about how this is how you get better at speaking. if you want to do well on your oral exam, don't come to me the night of, just try to speak in class. that's it. i think i got a little fired up about halfway through and might of lost them, but hopefully the first part registered.

i guess i'll see when i get the grades. yeah, right, like they'll let me see grades.

today i had my weekly "official" chinese lesson. i call it official, because i try to study every day, and when everyone speaks the language, isn't your life a learning experience?

we were going over the days of the week. a fairly simple thing in chinese--monday translates literally to week 1, tuesday, week 2, etc. the only one that doesn't follow that pattern is sunday. sunday is written as xing qi ri, or week sun. isn't that interesting.

in my classes today, i tried a new lesson plan about fables. at the beginning of the class, we go over the definition of morals and fables, and i tell them (i think) a particularly rousing version of the tortoise and the hare. after that, i have them write fables of their own in groups. in each class, on average 2 out of 8 groups wrote the story of the boy who cried wolf. it was very interesting to me, especially after one student described it as an "ancient chinese story."

now i'm not sure when xing qi ri or the boy who cried wolf was adopted, or how it came to be that both things are intergral parts of western and eastern culture. i just think it's amazing that two cultures that are so different have some very similar historical artifacts.

tar but no feathers

sorry for the short break...censorship's got me down.

today, the improvements around my apartment continue. first they were ripping out all the grass, and now they are sealing all the cracks in the sidewalk.

this is an arduous process to say the least, especially for just one man. he started coming last week, with simply a hammer and a chisel that resembled a railroad spike. at each crack, he took the chisel to it without mercy, perhaps to make the surface even, and give space for the tar to stick. on monday, he began to fill in the cracks. he had two chunks of solid tar just sitting on the sidewalk, looking like a 3 pack a day elephant's lungs. he built a wood fire, again on the sidewalk, and stacked some bricks around it. he took one of the lungs of tar and put it in a metal bucket and set it on the bricks over the fire.

soon it was a boiling pitch black substance. he transferred it to another bucket, this one with a spout, and began to pour it liberally into the cracks he had made. while he did this, people walked around him and on the already filled cracks, paying him no mind. at the end of the day, he strapped the buckets and solidified tar to the back of his bike, and rode into the sunset...a tarman's job is never done.

Completely Blocked

now the chinese government has blocked access to blogger.com, effectively disabling me from posting completely. sweet. luckily, i have a proxy (read my ma) who is happy to post for me. now karl is an ist guy, so he may be able to help me work around it, but i guess for now, i'm going underground. darn it!

chinese mashed potatoes

what a pleasant surprise. i walk into dining hall, and begin to bother the lunchlady about lunch. everyday i point at one thing and say, "na ge," (that). she points to one bowl, and i say "bu yao" (don't want), and then she points to another and another, until she hits the bowls i want. today, i just wanted her to pick anything, and i don't know how to say, "i don't care." so i said i don't know. the lunchlady thought i was confused, and looked around for help. at that point, a chinese english teacher came up and helped. she said that that bowl was potatoes, and to avoid anymore fuss i said yao.

she plopped a spoonful on my plate, like any good lunchlady (unfortunately, it wasn't an ice-cream scoop). when i got to the table, i plunged my chopsticks in, and i could not believe it. mashed potatoes! (i think i kinda blew the surprise with the title, there.) a very smooth mashed potato with a nice addition of scallions and chives. eating mashed potatoes with chopsticks was a breeze as well. the consistency requires no chopstick skill at all, just poke and chomp. great! it was a welcome respite, and was the most homey meal to date in the cafeteria.

i love my cafeteria.