Christmas in Kinmen

To be honest, it didn't feel like Christmas. On the whole, chinese people do not celebrate christmas. Therefore, there is a definite lack of decorations and holiday spirit.

But, the Chinese New Year is their gift giving holiday and that's right around the corner. The Chinese decorate with red. period. some decorations might be tinged with gold or black. So there's a lot of red around town.


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Today i was Santa for the kindergarten class. I thought i was going to give them the gift of christmas cheer, but they ended up giving me the coolest gift ever....

it was a Christmas Tree made out of paper hand tracings. how cool is that! It was even decorated with candy underneath it. They also included a thank you card w/ pics of our english classes.

Afterwards i ate lunch with them. One of the little girls kept flirting w/ me and demanded that i be her boyfriend. i haven't had a kindergarten girl friend since pre-school.

;)


i'm gonna miss the little buggers.

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Last night steph, ben, and i went to shu-pin's house. She's got a traditional chinese house so its really cool. It has the large wooden double doors and a small courtyard in the middle. we ate a traditional chinese meal called hot pot.

To eat hot pot, a group of people set a bot of broth or soup base in the middle of the table on over a heat source. Then you set plate of raw meat and veggies around. Everyone then just starts cooking what ever they want in the soup. Its a lot of fun and requires massive amounts of time and conversation which is great. i'm going to try it when i go home. Oh yeah, there's rice too, but that's a given here.

After dinner we played Mahjong, a traditional chinese game. No, you do not stack these in a pyramid and try to get rid of matching tiles. Its completely different from bill gate's version.

all we needed was some opium and a kung fu duel to top off the evening.

We settled for watching the movie Hook.

Bangerang!

It was gonna happen at some point......

So there is this class i've had to take here. it was supposed to be "Chinese Economic Development." In reality it was "Hire a lecturer to show up late and read off wikipedia pages for five hours on a saturday."

Needless to say, i skipped out on the first few classes to hit the beach. I learned more chinese economics from a book david gave me than that class.

so i really hate that class.

Saturday was the last day i was "asked" to attend. (though grades had already been turned in)

The first two hours of class weren't that bad. It was student presentation day which gave me plenty of time to read a a clive cussler novel since i'm not fluent in mandarin...yet.

then the class went to the beach to have a Barbecue.

that's when it happened.

at first all was well. life was sweet. it was the last day of the class i hate, i was at the beach, and i being served free food while enjoying a good book.

that's when i made the mistake of trusting the students to cook raw meet over a tin pan of charcoals.

i would pay dearly for the next 24 hours.


food poisoning is never a fun experience. every stage feels like the worst part. there's never actually any pin-point pain. just blanket nausea followed by convulsive fits at the foot of the porcelain altar.

it was terrible.

the next day i went to church and slept through everything.

Mrs. Patti took one look at me and told me to grab my things. They took me to their house to rest and regain my strength.

Thank God for the Jernigans.

she makes a wicked awesome chicken soup.

I'm feeling much better now. i have a lunch appointment with my chinese tutor. she's gonna make sichuan chicken.

more later....

Arise My Blog

I've come to terms with the fact that I am not cut out to be a blogger. I apologize for everyone who has stopped by to read my posts and not been rewarded for your dedication.

I still have a month left here and i'm going to make the best of it....and blog about it.


In my last entry i complained about nearly everything.

You can forget that stuff. Life here has been a real eye opener. I was really spoiled by life in the states.

Also, this island is beautiful. Other than the water quality, courtesy of the PRC, this place is a great get away. The surf is good during most times of the year. The island is struggling to make this place a tourist spot. So far they really haven't done that bad of a job. I applaud them.

Yesterday I was having lunch with one of the coolest professors i've studied under. We were discussing the future of Kinmen. We both agreed that the island would make a great college town. The trick would be to get more than one university to set up shop here.



Oh yeah, i also watched the sunset behind the mainland. The one good thing about pollution is the fantastic colors it produces through filtered sunlight. Also the smog hides the distant mountains so you never know when that sun will just disappear.

more later.


oh yeah, my camera broke, so i have to borrow most of my pics.

photos

The internet here is unreliable so i'm posting my photos on facebook.com from now on. Here are some links to my albums.

http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2046156&l=77e5b&id=50100857
http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2045821&l=160e9&id=50100857
http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2045820&l=c18e5&id=50100857
http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2045819&l=776f7&id=50100857
http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2045579&l=c8717&id=50100857

Photos

THE INTERNET HERE IS UNRELIABLE SO I'M POSTING MY PHOTOS FROM NOW ON.

HERE ARE THE LINKS TO MY PHOTO ALBUMS.

Welcome to the caribbean love.

WRITTEN ON 9/15/08

So I’ve made it to the other side of the world. I’m thirteen hours ahead of my body clock and it hurts. If you are reading this after 11am then I’m also in tomorrow by your watch. Here’s a hint about the future: tomorrow won’t be as bad as today.

I arrived on Sunday morning. I picked up a bug so the first few days have been snotty (I have a cold). I landed in Taipei and waited through the longest customs line every. Chinese people have no concept of queuing. Dolly was waiting for me and helped me to get the bus ticket to the next airport and the island hopper to Kinmen.

Patti and David Jernigan met me at the airport in Kinmen with their car to give me a lift. My first order of business was to shower. I smelled like a bear. The Jernigans then took me around to get furnishings.

After I was settled in, the Jernigan’s daughter, Ginger, took me down to one of the beaches to do some surfing and BBQ. The surf was non-existent, but people were trying anyway. Only like six people on the whole island can surf. Everyone else just paddles around.

I slept terrible the first night. I’m two inches too tall for my bed and the roommates keep shutting of the A/C. I woke up every few hours in a puddle of sweat and mucus. (let me apologize for the vulgarity. I’m still a little sick while I write this and I’m angry about it.)

I used the two days before class started to explore the island a bit. Below are some of the pics I’ve taken thus far. I’ll try to add captions to them when I post them on facebook. I’m very tired right now, so I’m fairly useless even to you guys. This jetlag is terrible.

So I evacuated from Gustav on that sunday and then spent 5 days in NYC. Due to the intermintence of internet connections i took notes each day and would then type up my entry. below is the copy/paste of my first entry.

Firstly, I want to thank my parents for everything they’ve done for me. They are the reason I am prepared, capable, and brave enough to take on an adventure like this.

I love you and I miss you terribly.


Please bear with me and my writing style. I’m going to test different methods of posting information to see which is the most efficient and palatable for my audience.

The internet here is patchy at best. I’m going to attempt to upload photos in the future. I haven’t had much luck so far. (for a country who exports so many microchips, you would think they’d be fast than 10K/s)

I also wish to say thank you to my Deb Baber and Andrew Lindsey. She is the loving aunt who provided me with free lodging during my stay in New York. Drew has always been a perfect travel buddy. I could not have seen everything and enjoyed it without his incredible ability to get things done. He doesn’t go on trips; he goes on adventures.

I have spent a total of five days in New York City. Three of those days were sight seeing days. Two were chill days. Drew believes in doing as much as possible on the first day of a trip. That way, as self initiative decreases, there are less reasons to get up so early.

Here’s the complete list of what I saw or did in New York City.

Day 1
Statue of Liberty
Ellis Island
Wall St.
Ground Zero
China Town
Little Italy- Lombardi’s “Original” New York Pizzaria
Biked Central Park
David Letterman---> Nicholas Cage
To Dai---amazing 200ft sushi bar; all you can eat
Madison Square Park
Flat Iron Building
McSorely’s—oldest pub in New York; only serve two kinds of beer: Light and Dark
Some Random Night Club—wasn’t paying attention at that point

Day 2
Walked Brooklyn Bridge
Toured United Nations-very cool
Spamelot on Broadway-swallows and coconuts
McDonalds at Time Square—not very exciting but we we’re hungry after the play.

Day 3
Empire State Building
Grand Central Station
Here are some pictures of what we did.

Check 1, 2, 3......Check, Check.

So this is my first blog and i must admit that i'm neither excited nor sad that i now own my own blog.

Most blogs have a "Writer/Reader" ratio of 1:1.

Which is another way of saying that bloggers are their own biggest fan.


With that said, they're are a lot of people who helped me get this trip set up and they'll definitely want to know how my life is going.

So this blog is for you guys.