Programming Note

The last week before Christmas break at our school has come and gone in a blur! We've had birthday parties, staff holiday parties, winter concerts, and the craziness that is planning the last week of school combined with planning a 3-week long vacation, but it's finally here!

Today was pajama day at my school. I sleep in my boxers, which is probably inappropriate attire on a school day, so I went in my joggers instead.

To finish up a unit on Native Americans, we made "three sisters salad" by mixing corn, squash and beans and using them as a "salsa" for some corn chips. It looked and smelled disgusting, but my kids couldn't get enough. I'm glad they enjoyed it! We watched The Polar Express and had popcorn, I got absolutely spoiled with Christmas gifts by my kids' parents and that was it! More than a third of the school year is finished, and we won't be back until January 7th!

After work, we popped open a bottle of champagne (a Christmas gift from a student) and made homemade chicken tortilla soup for our friend Kerry. It was the least we could do, considering she's catsitting our little friend while we're away. Thank you, Kerry! I'm so glad he has someone to keep him company. He made himself right at home at her place, and then we came home to pack.

Tomorrow we take the early ferry to Hong Kong airport and then we fly out to Singapore. We'll be there for a day (it's a random 29 hour layover), then we're in Ho Chi Minh for 3 days, Phnom Phen for 3 days, Siem Reap for 2 days, Krabi for 8 days, and then Bangkok for 3 days. It's going to be busy, but so fun! Neither of us have ever had a long vacation like this before, so we're really freaking excited. We probably won't be able to update much while we're away, so happy holidays everyone! See you next year!

Looks like we'll be missing out on some amazing festivities in Shekou while we're gone, though!

An Overreaction?

There are lots of noises you don't want to hear at 4am, and I think just about the worst is the buzzzZZZZ of a mosquito in your ear! Last night, Mel and I were up from 4:15 until 6:30am for that exact reason. Asian mosquitoes are so sneaky, you guys! At home, they're so dumb. They just land on the wall, you hit them with a magazine, and go back to sleep. Here, they hide. As soon as the light switches on, they disappear. They hide under the bed, behind the headboard, or they land on some dark wood that makes them hard to see. We never saw last night's mosquito once, but every time we'd turn the light off it would be buzzing by our ears within minutes. By 6:30, we gave up. We were exhausted and felt sick, so we moved into the spare bedroom (and were immediately bothered by our cat, who started meowing outside our door for the next 5 hours).

Maybe this is overkill after finding only ONE single mosquito in our apartment ever, but today we bought a mosquito net for our bed. Yes, it's pink. And frilly. But it was all we could find! We were traumatized by mosquitoes in both Korea and Taiwan (Asian apartments leave something to be desired, no matter how nice the building), so for peace of mind we HAD to take immediate action. They're usually pretty thick all winter long, so we figured this purchase was inevitable, so it was better to buy it right away rather than have another sleepless night. Come at us, Mozzies. Just try us now!!

HOME Holiday Dinner

I'm still not quite sure what we were doing there, but on Saturday night, Mel and I went to a really nice dinner at the Ascott Hotel in Shekou. Earlier in the week, the councilor at my campus sent out an e-mail about this holiday dinner that the nearby HOME Women & Children's Hospital was having, and that they'd offered a bunch of free tickets to our school's staff. Lots of people we knew were going, so we decided to join in too and I'm so glad we did! 

There was turkey! We'd just spent over $50 a piece for a turkey dinner at the Ritz a few weeks ago, and here we were being served a turkey dinner for free. There were loads of other dishes to choose from, too, and bottomless glasses of red wine.

And a chocolate fountain! Not posted: the picture where I hopped in the chocolate fountain.

Dinner.

Dessert.

Chinese Santa got to enjoy some turkey too.

Our table. I'd say 85% of the people at the event were from our school. At the end of the night, they held a draw (we'd each given them a business card as we entered) and nearly every winner was from our school. We all have identical business cards, so they'd just pull out the card and start laughing "oh, another QSI winner..."

So, naturally, guess who won some chocolates?

After the dinner, a group of us went over to sing at the KTV behind RenRenLe. It was a lot of fun! Everyone was pretty impressed with the range of Justin Bieber songs that I know.

There was something wrong with the karaoke system in our room, so every now and then a worker would have to come in and break the fuse before we could start singing again. I noticed that this also seemed to reset our singing time, so I may or may not have tried flipping the switch myself at the end of the night.

We got some street noodles on the way home. You take a basket and fill it with whatever veg and meat you want, and then they fry it all up with some noodles in the wok right there on the street for 12RMB ($2). It was great. Not turkey-and-wine great, but a good end to the night nonetheless.

Snooping Around, Plus a Trip to Luohu

Sooooo on Tuesday we had a school meeting where we were told that my campus is closing.

Not exactly what I wanted to hear, but neither of us were surprised. There'd been rumors like this floating around since we arrived and ever since we met up with other teachers at a PD day a few weeks ago, the rumors seemed to be increasingly pointing towards my campus closing. Our school is under pressure from the board of education to unite our 5 campuses under one roof to match our one educational license, and closing my campus is the first move towards that.

I'm not totally screwed, but I am a bit screwed over. My campus is re-opening... on the other side of town. And the school seems reluctant to move teachers to an apartment that would be closer to the school... they say it's too undeveloped in the area and there aren't any suitable apartments to rent for us. Mel, if she stays at the same grade level, will still be working here in Shekou so whether they move us or not, one of us will have quite a commute. They may offer a shuttle bus to take us there every morning, but they're going to make us pay for it. On a good day it's a 40 minute drive in traffic. Or we could take a public bus- it's only a 90 minute trip. One way. We already work from 8:15-4:30! Oh, and we aren't actually moving into a new, permanent school: it's an old convention center that they're just going to use for 3 years. Really. I'm really, really trying to look for a plus side to this.

So to help us wrap our heads around the change, we took a trip up there to get a feel for the area and to see what we might be getting ourselves into. For the first day in over a week, the sky was blue, and the weather was perfect for nosing around.

We took a taxi to the new campus, and I timed the trip. The results were a bit skewed because the driver took us to the wrong place. In all, it took 37 minutes on a Saturday, when traffic is light. When we arrived we could see that the site is fenced off by this charming cement wall with jagged shards of glass sticking out from the top.

This is the convention center, which will be the new campus. The building looks quite modern and nice from the outside. It's located in an industrial park which is laid out quite attractively.

Here are a bunch of apartment buildings. Wait a minute... I thought there were no apartments for us to live in? We spoke to someone who pointed out the villas in the foreground are for TCL employees (TCL is the major company in the industrial park), but I'm not sure if the taller buildings there would be available for rent or not?

If not, there are probably some free units in the cluster of apartment building skyscrapers so obviously located next door.

We nosed our way into a building across from the convention center and met a guy who offered to give us a tour of the "club". We'd stumbled onto some kind of clubhouse! We took him up on the offer and he brought us up to this meeting room. If I'm ever looking to host a meeting in China, I'll be sure to give him a call.

Then he showed us this fitness room.

And this heated swimming pool. This place was 20 feet from the new campus, so it would be very convenient! He said the memberships run around $100 CAD per month, which would probably be a bit too rich for our blood but some of our teaching families might enjoy this.

After thanking our guide at the clubhouse, we went back over to the new campus. This is pretty much what it looks like inside everywhere. They're going to have a lot of work to do to get this place ready for mid-August!

One thing we liked was that there's a small grocery store right on site.

It was somewhere in between a 7-Eleven and a full grocery store. It would be nice to have a place to grab a few small groceries after work, anyway.

There's a cafe there as well.

And a billetin board, too.

Directly across the road there's some kind of military building with armed soldiers out front. Could be a good field trip opportunity next year?

We decided to walk around the area a bit to see if there was anything around. We were looking for some restaurants or any other amenities which would make the place livable. Instead, we found this cement bunker.

This picture is pretty much representative of the area. Just a bunch of roads and overpasses and nothingness.

After walking for about 15 minutes and finding nothing, we turned around and walked up the road the other way and saw... nothing. The road ended here at a dead end at the edge of an impassable freeway. There were a few squatter huts built in little nooks along the way. You can see one person's laundry hanging in the top left in the picture above.

Another home made out of found items, hiding in the bushes.

Well, that was that. We decided to get a taxi to take us Christmas shopping in Luohu, near the Hong Kong border. I think I'm still confused by everything, even after seeing the area. The facilities looked better than I anticipated (though it looks nothing like a school yet) but the neighborhood was much worse than where we live now. Another note: there were no taxis in the area. We probably waited 15 minutes for a cab to finally drive by us. This would really be something to consider if you had to stay late at work some day and missed that shuttle bus you paid for.

 Here's Mel in Luohu. This is the immigration building, should you want to take the Luohu crossing into Hong Kong. At this crossing, you can travel by subway.

 The square outside the shopping area and immigration building. This is what Hong Kongers first impression of Shenzhen would be when they cross this border into China.

The shopping center.

The shopping complex is 4 stories tall. The products are all very familiar to anyone who's spent any time shopping in similar Chinese markets: Beats by Dre headphones, knockoff phones and tablets, speakers, jade, converse shoes, purses of varying degrees of ugliness, tailors, normal looking young men's clothes, gawdy and tacky young women's clothes.

Just a random shop that sold electronics. These are Nintendo DS 270-in-one games (I don't remember Nintendo releasing that title), plug adapters and binoculars. You could find this identical store in at least a dozen other places in the same mall.

Piles and piles of clothes to dig through. Mel and I bought a couple of t-shirts and bartered a little (150 down to 110 for 2, not that impressive) but I got my steepest discount ever when I bought a dress shirt from the most aggressive salesperson I've ever dealt with. She started with an offer of 250 RMB for the shirt, which is nearly $50. When she didn't agree to the lower price I countered with, I started to walk away. She physically blocked my way! I moved right, she moved right. I moved left she moved left. When I tried to sort of slide around her to just get out of there, she grabbed my arm really aggressively and yanked me back in. She must have seen the look on my face, because then she quickly blurted out "Okay, 60". From 250 RMB to 60 RMB in one arm grab. Mel was annoyed that I bought from her after that, but hey, in China a deal's a deal. And I really liked the shirt!

One of Melodie's tactics when bartering for her shirt (I prefer to just grab the calculator and start punching low numbers into it) was to point out that her shirt wasn't even a brand name shirt. The salesgirl gave an interesting excuse for this: she said this is a Miss Sixty brand shirt (whatever that is), but they put a fake label in it so you can cross borders with these clothes more easily.

Random shoe store. There were about, ohhh maybe 150 of these identical stores. Some of the shoes look pretty nice and are really identical to the real deal, and some of them just look super cheap.

As you walk down the hall, vendors are constantly calling out to you, repeating- in a very bored voice- "hey, Missy (well, Mel and Kathy got that, not me) bag". How many times a day must they say that line? Or as you walk into their store, a lot of them say "Hello, looking". My name is not "looking"! My favorite line of the day, though, was "DVD movie? Headphone? Golf club?" It was just so random. YES, I need one golf club and a copy of The Amazing Spider-man, please.

These signs made us laugh. Apparently some shop got closed down for selling fake goods. They must have tried to charge the wrong cop 250RMB for a shirt, because every single store in the mall was selling fake goods. Bad luck!

Luohu was okay and I had fun looking around, but I doubt we'll go back. The vendors are quite a bit more annoying than at other markets, and the stores were just selling the same stuff at every shop. It was all the same things you can buy in Dongmen and Sunggang, but a little bit more expensive, with less variety, and you have to work harder bartering to get a good price. Plus, this was just one mall. Dongmen has like 5 malls this size to choose from. So guess where we decided to go next?

We totally went to Dongmen. It's only like a $2 cab ride from Luohu. Since I know this market so much better, I was able to find a lot more things for my Christmas shopping. Ima be honest- I only shopped for myself in Luohu! I just love all the random things you can find at Dongmen. I can't really share too much because it would spoil the presents I bought, but I did buy a Domo wireless mouse for our netbook, some bulk gummy candy, and some fleecy socks for walking around in our chilly apartment. Mel got some tights, and Kathy got some new shoes and a bunch of Christmas stuff, too. And that was our day. After a kind of stressful week, we deserved a little retail therapy!

This Day is a Gift

I thought something was seriously wrong. I was in the shower on Friday morning and I could hear Mel speaking very expressively in the hall. Nobody calls on Friday mornings- what was up? Well, both her school and mine had no water so there was no school! Yay! But only for students... we still had to go. Noooooo!

We put on JEANS, and then took our time walking over there, discussing all along how we'd manage to go the day without using the bathroom since we had no water. On our way, we stopped in to McDonald's to check out their breakfast menu for the first time. Mel was elated- they had egg mcmuffins! I was pretty happy too, because they also serve sausage mcmuffins. They even had McHot Dogs! It was going to be a good morning.

When I got to my campus, I was surprised to find that, actually, we totally had water. They closed because they thought they might lose water since Mel's campus already had lost it on the top two floors. Whatever! So, our director gathered us and told us "This day is a gift, use it to work on whatever you need". I was pretty pleased. I got everything ready for the last 2 weeks of school, finished up my online emergency unit, and just took care of business. There is ALWAYS something to take care of, trust me! Poor Mel had her day filled with meetings, which is so, so typical of our school, so she hardly got anything done. She really needed the time!

It was an unusual start to the weekend, and a day I'm sure we'll all remember and wish we could have a day like this again in the near future. It's nice to know all my lessons are planned and printed for the rest of the year. And it's good to know that I can pick up a hot dog from McDicks on my way to school from now on if I want. 

The Rainy Season is Here!

We woke up Friday morning to our first really, really rainy day. This, as we remember all too well from Taiwan, is winter in southern Asia. I remember it rained for months and months straight in Taiwan, and the first time we saw a blue sky all winter was when our plane broke through the clouds as we left the place for good! The rain here really isn't like we get at home- it rains twice as hard as the hardest Canadian rain I've ever seen... and it tends to rain sideways too. With the rain has come a sharp drop in the temperature. Last week we had the AC on everyday and this week we're wearing head to toe sweat suits and have the electric heater on to stay comfy inside. Also, all of our clothes and towels feel damp because we don't have real heaters in our place. It's familiarly uncomfortable.

When we woke up Friday and heard the rain, we hoped it would pass before we had to go to school. But by the time I was in the shower it was pounding down even harder and I could see the lightning flashing through the frosted bathroom window. Chinese schools were closed, but not our school- lucky us! We ditched the bikes for the day and walked it, feeling pretty glad that we'd brought boots and K-way jackets from home. The food cart in the above picture usually does a good business with the migrant workers near our place in the mornings, but there weren't any customers lined up on Friday.

I've been told that China's not as bad as Taiwan was, but we'll see! It's rained pretty bad all day Friday, Sunday and today too. Anyway, see the above photo for the way I like to enjoy the rain: from inside! Sunday morning the weather didn't bother me at all. I just enjoyed watching the heavens pour down on us from the comfort of my balcony, poop-shaped coffee mug in hand.

Sungang Stationary Market

You know when you go to the dollar store and everything is labeled "Made in China"? Well, it's made here but you rarely see any of that stuff for sale here. When you're teaching, you rely on dollar store items- specifically from the craft and stationary sections- for activities with students, so we've really missed having access to a good selection of stationary. In Korea, stationary stores were everywhere and they sold the coolest things, but in China they just aren't common. Anyway, when we first moved here we were given a welcome basket with a city guide for Shenzhen, and one of the places highlighted under "shopping" was Sungang Stationary Market. We had no plans for the weekend (and we were spoiled with two full days off after last weekend's manditory Saturday-swallowing PD session at work), so we decided to check the market out.

 

We met our friends at the Sea World Starbucks, but the path we usually take there was flooded, so we walked through a little park next to it to avoid the puddles. We often do this when the path is flooded, but this time we were met with a little surprise- barbed wire was blocking the path! After slipping through the fence, we were on guard for land mines and trip wires for the rest of the walk. What the hell?

The market is about 5-10 minutes from Dongmen Market by taxi, so we went to the toilet restaurant for lunch, of course!

I noticed something new over the urinal at the toilet restaurant: a cartoon of a Chinese and Japanese soldier arguing while another soldier takes a big steamy poo in the foreground.

So, after eating out of toilets, we got separate taxis (no one would take 5 people) and traveled to the market. It. was. awesome!

We arrived to find ourselves in a winter wonderland! Wasn't expecting that! Recently, I mentioned that all of the Christmas ornaments I've seen for sale look really crappy and dated, but this is where to shop for your Christmas needs for sure. There was stall after stall stuffed to the max with beautiful Christmas ornaments, trees, snowflakes, lights, decorations, stockings, everything! The selection was overwhelming, and everything we asked about was so cheap. Kerry got a tree with decorations for $5 that would have easily been $25-$30 at home, and we got stockings for 70 cents a piece!

Entering a Christmas explosion.

There were blinding stalls just selling Christmas lights.

There were a lot of stores flipped to sell only holiday merchandise, but most of the shops were still selling stationary. It's also a wholesale market so things could be bought in small or very large quantities. There were three buildings with multiple floors, and each floor was stuffed full of small shops with very narrow aisles stocked full of every kind of pen, paper, or pencil sharpener you could ever imagine.

There was even poop shaped bottles of white out.

There was more than just stationary, too. There were sports stores, music stores, toys & games shops, and educational supplies stores. Everyone in our group was a teacher and we were so excited by all of this stuff! Alphabet dominos, number jenga... my teacher mind was racing. And it was all cheap, cheap, cheap! 50 cents for a cool pen, 75 cents for stickers, $5 for a board game... the prices were very fair, and you could bargain too.

Just a random shot of one corner of one of the floors. There was a lot to look through!

Of course, the reason a lot of the products were so cheap was because they were fakes. Here's a game of "Squares" aka Blockus. $10 versus $40 that we paid in Canada for the identical game.

After 4 hours, and only covering 1 and 1/2 of the 3 buildings, we hired a van to take us back home. Even that was cheap! The traffic was rotten, and we spent an hour driving, and it still only cost 100rmb split 5 ways. That's about $3.30 each! When we got back, we treated ourselves to Korean food and fruit sojus with Kathy before heading home to veg out and watch three Top Chefs in a row. Now we're all caught up!

So, here was our haul. Actually, looking at it now and thinking back to all the things that tempted me there, I feel like we showed some restraint in our purchases! We got 2 stockings, some writing paper, a set of markers, a pencil sharpener, craft feathers, a Domo pen, a game of alphabet soup (for my class), and two poop-shaped coffee mugs.

They came in boxes labeled "grotesqu cup". That's the cup for me!

Almost forgot to mention our most exciting finds- gigantic fleece blankets for $5!! I mentioned a few days ago that it's starting to get a little cooler here, and blankets are so expensive in China. I couldn't believe when Mel found these ones for $5 and they feel like a cloud. The softest blankets I've ever touched, for sure! So, here I am this morning, watching the rain from our balcony under the warmth of my tacky Angry Birds blanket, drinking from a poop mug. Take me seriously, world.