Kelly and Liz

We would all be dishing out 狗屁 or gǒupì, literally meaning “dog-farts” aka bulls**t, if we claimed to never have encountered computer problems. In the case of working and living in China I would be flat out lying through my teeth if I said my IT world was all happy with smiles. Oh Lord the frustration; so in my usual effort to avoid too much direct confrontation, perhaps mid-November, I gave up on Chinese computers all together. As it turns out, we don’t need computers for everything and often times a piece of paper and a pencil do the trick just fine. Third graders don’t care if their lesson on kitchen utensils is presented on a hand-drawn worksheet instead of a Power Point presentation. Why should I? Since this small revelation mid-November I have sat myself ... read more

While working at 北京新东方扬州外国 语学校 or Beijing New Oriental Foreign Language School at Yangzhou, we have enjoyed many generous offerings from the institution. Field Trips. Early spring, sometime between mid April and mid May, every student in every school in the province of Jiangsu (population base of 74,000,000 people in 2008) goes on a field trip. 1st grade all the way to Seniors in high school receive the opportunity to explore outside the intense study-based pedagogy of their school walls. Traveling two hours south and east of Yangzhou to a city called Changzhou, six bus loads of third-graders (half of them mine) and I visited a dinosaur theme park complete with a Jurassic Park-style entry gate. They call dinosaurs kong long or ‘scary lizard’ and after our mandatory ten minute to see dinosaur fossils the kids ... read more

Nestled into the hills and sitting on the coast of the Yellow Sea, Qingdao offers wonderful reprieve from China’s polluted urban interior. Home to China’s 2008 Olympic sailing events, at least one generation of Germans (they caught whiff of subtle hints and left post-haste during the Revolution), and China-famous Tsingtao beer, Qingdao made for an excellent sensory recharge before plunging into the final six weeks of our work here in China. At the turn of the past nineteenth century China sat ripe for the plundering by outside interests as internal power struggles slowly weakened imperial rule. Thanks to Lonely Planet we learned that in 1898 German forces got busy in taking over the exceptionally ideal harbor and after the murder of two German missionaries, and a bit of military huffing and puffing, the harbor town was ... read more

Time and travels in Yunnan Province The good ol’ US of A, as we all know, makes regular use of time zones. Excluding Alaska and Hawaii, with their own special place in time, Within the ‘lower 48,’ people operate on four major time zones and all around the world a similar effort has been made to respect the traditional notion usually, but not always, the middle-of-the-sky-ish location of the sun and twelve o’clock noon like to be on the same schedule. This general concept said, when the sun hits high-noon somewhere in Georgia or New York, people out on the west coast, say San Francisco or Seattle, are just beginning to arrive to work. It makes sense to account for the 3,000 miles average distance from east to west coast and the time the sun takes ... read more

After dropping off Ross and Gus at the airport in Guilin on a warm February evening we walked over to the nearest travel agent and looked into a few “what ifs”. We knew we had been cold for three months with little, if any, reprieve. We craved more than anything to simply plop down outdoors, breath clean air, and enjoy a cool (not cold) 633ml Shan Shui, Mountain-Water beer with a good book. Not shivering for more than an hour was also a high priority. What if we could find a cheap ticket south? We had cash, passports, our small travel backpacks, and a solid ten days to travel before Donna and Larry would arrive to Yun’an Province. So we that evening we marched into a small well-chilled travel agency with open minds based solely on ... read more