Blogs from Kaifaqu, Dalian, Liaoning, China, Asia

I went grocery shopping yesterday. Here is a picture of one of my favorite produce stores in Hong Mei (the Korean part of town). I also added a picture of what I bought for 25RMB or about $3.96. Life in China is going good. It has been almost 2 months since my winter holiday. In less than 2 weeks is our next holiday. I will be flying to Korea for 9 days to escape the chaos that is China during any sort of National Holiday (I learned my lesson in Suzhou in October).... read more

Our Sleepover in KaiFaQu Our last minute flurry of travel before we leave China began with a simple overnighter in KaiFaQu, the development zone of Dalian. An early Qinggui into town got us to The Real Eddie’s for brunch, one of our favourite activities. Their brunch is a bit different from most. Rather than a massive spread with a lot of different choices, brunch consists of the regular menu! For a fixed price, you can choose anything you want. The portions may be a little smaller and may not be quite as elaborate as when served as individual dishes, but the fact that you can choose as many as you want makes it superb. The items are cooked fresh rather than sitting in chafing dishes. Because you don’t heap your plate with a little of a ... read more

It has been a long time since I wrote an entry here. Much has changed. For starters, I just saw Blindness (like I just-turned-off-the-DVD-player just saw it), this movie I'm sure most of you have heard of about a city whose inhabitants all suddenly become mysteriously blind, and then devolve into a Lord of the Flies-type scenario. I have found that I am very impressionable when it comes to movies, books, and music, and after watching 90 minutes of this depressingly realistic display of human fortitude and decrepitude, I was feeling a bit of resentment towards our species. Then I got a phone call from one of my Chinese coworkers, whose new policy as a whole is to take me out to eat Ma La Tang every chance they get for the next week. The reason ... read more

As I'm sure most of you folks back home are aware, Thanksgiving was last week. Here in China, obviously, it's not much of a holiday, but those of us teaching English to Chinese kids did our best to make it one. For us, Thursday is a work day, but thanks to the tireless organizing efforts of our resident Holiday Coordinator (teacher by day; my own term), we had a Thanksgiving feast nonetheless. The foreign staff all were required to make a dish; I was assigned the green beans (exactly 4 pounds of them, according to the email listing our school's feasting needs). We ate lunch here at the Kaifaqu school, with all of our staff, Chinese and American, including the people from downtown, which is like a 45-minute commute away. That and the somewhat dictatorial form ... read more

I've been busy lately, but as opposed to the first month of utter chaos, I have managed to develop a daily schedule. I wake up and run in the morning, which due to the increasingly chilly weather has caused me to catch a cold. I have tutoring three days a week with a soft-spoken and very studious Chinese college student majoring in English. In my spare time I hang out at the local university basketball courts. I met a kid down there who, from what I can gather, spends more time playing basketball than going to class. I've been hanging out with him more and more, and he told me once (either in confession or, more likely, in the hope that I could offer him some assistance) that his dream is to go to America and ... read more