english class

here's the latest lesson from sam's preschool. rach and i noticed the english lesson on the door to her room last week.



the interesting phrase that they are learning is "get off the bus piggy". who is piggy? i hope they aren't learning to call fat people piggy. that would be a shame. i'm not really sure what they are learning. i was hoping that sam would be going to english class, because i think it would be funny and her english is probably better than the teacher's. but she only goes to school in the morning and english is in the afternoon, so i guess she won't be going. oh well, at least her english is pretty good.


here's also a picture of the cabinet that i successfully opened.

my life as a criminal

there is a cabinet in our apartment that we inherited from another teammate 6 yrs ago when we first got to china. at the bottom are two doors with a lock on it. the doors have been locked for 6 yrs and no one ever gave us a key. on sunday i decided that i was tired of having a locked cabinet and really needed the space for all the extra stuff we recently inherited from our teammates who went back to america. so i went to our building "handyman" (term used loosely) to ask for a drill to drill out the lock. he wasn't there so i explained to another lady what i needed. this was all in chinese and i didn't know how to say drill, those are vocabulary words that you don't cover in introductory chinese classes. she said she would tell the guy when he got back. so i headed home anxious about getting this stupid lock opened (not sure why it bothered me so much, but after 6 yrs enough was enough of having a locked cabinet). so i started researching online how to pick open a lock with a paperclip. i tried multiple methods and nothing worked. the people online make is seem so easy to be a criminal and pick locks with minimal tools. finally i stumbled across a youtube video of a kid with the metal thing from a pen cap and paper clip. i attempted to pick the lock for the 20th time of the day and to my surprise it totally worked. i know, it was awesome! i'm totally going to break into people's cabinets now. i told sam that there must be some kind of treasure inside the cabinet too. because really, who would lock a cabinet and then take the keys with them? something awesome must be inside. when i opened the doors, there was nothing but an old iron and 2 paper bags. what a disappointment. it was like when geraldo opened up that tomb and there was nothing. man, geraldo, i totally feel your pain. it wasn't even a cool iron. it was like the first iron every made to plug in, it didn't even have the steam function. just a big block of metal with a cord.

i should have been preparing for class, but now i learned a valuable life skill. thanks a lot 13yr old kid from youtube!

back in action

here i am back in chiner :) we just arrive 3 days ago. i love me some jet lag too. how do you explain to a 3 yr old that even though their tummy says it's time to eat, the clock says it's time to go to bed. the first night here, sam went to sleep at 3 pm and then woke up at 1 am ready to go for the day - ugh! at least things are starting to look up. we're all going to bed around 9 pm now and getting up in the middle of the night, but at least the little sam actually goes back to sleep (without a snack).

so here's what's shakin' in china:

1. pizza hut!!!!!!! seriously, we have a pizza hut now. we don't even have a mcdonalds, but we actually have a pizza hut. we went for lunch today and they wouldn't make us a pepperoni pizza. how lame is that? isn't the pepperoni pizza what all pizza places were started on? it was difficult to explain that we didn't want the seafood toppings and that we only wanted the pepperoni, after the manager put the negatory on it, we were stuck ordering off the menu. but don't order the cheese pizza today, they don't have it. i know you're thinking - is it really pizza hut? according to the logo and prices it is.

2. crappier roads and an increase in taxi fares that's what else is new here.

3. chinese food still jacks up my tummy. i think i put some weight on after living in the states for a few months, but after the last days, i'm pretty sure that i'm back down to my "china weight".

now were are trying to wipe all the dust off our stuff and unpack all our stuff. i'm also realizing that 3 girls in one tiny apartment is going to be a difficult thing. man, those girls have a lot of clothes!

i'm still in shock about the pizza hut. when we first arrived in siping 5 yrs ago we just got snickers, and they were even hard to find. now i'm waiting for the mcdonalds.

austin's animals

i was born in a city, no farm animals or farms. the closest thing to the farm was the orange groves (which is cool but lacking in big farm animals). so whenever i go to the midwest, i love the cows and farms. i'm also a fan of the small towns in america. that's the reason why i love to go to rach's hometown and read the local newspaper there. it's pretty awesome. one of the things they have in the paper is the local police reports. here is where they chronicle every activity that the police do throughout the day. so today's blog is dedicated to the entries in the police report that relate to the animals of austin.

tuesday:
* deceased cat found (that's it? nothing said about if there was an owner looking for it)
* officer dispatched to a deer that was hit by a car near international paper
* checked the area of 13th street and ninth avenue for loose dog, returned to owner
* report of a dog to be tied to duffle bad on interstate 90 (this is my favorite)
* loose dog in the 500th block of 4th street

wednesday:
* picked up an injured rabbit at 900 block of 23rd ave sw
* report of an animal complaint at the 100 block of 10th st
* checked on a dog that was inside a car for several hours at 600 block of 9th st, dog was fine
* checked the area for a dog that jumped at a mailman at the 1400 block of fifth street

so i came to the conclusion that the police in austin do more for the animals than the people.

on another note, here's a picture of us at austin's most famous museum - the spam museum.

hangin' in NC

i realize that i'm the world's worst blogger, but i'm okay with that. the last entry was from china and now we are in cary, nc. we've been in the states since july and we're heading back to chiner in feb 2011.

since we've been home, we've been to a ton of place. we're putting miles on my parents mini-van, cuz they don't. here's some highlight so far of our time in america.

sam learned to waterski - this is more of a highlight for her dad.


we went to disney world.


we've carved some pumpkins (my is the one of the right).


we also went to the state fair last weekend and it was quite the experience. i love people watching in china, but the fair is way better. it's like i was in another country. ahh the fair, full of awesomeness!

chinese walmarts

if you ever wondered what they sell at a chinese walmart, just think chinese stuff all packed into one ginormous store. last month we went to walmart in changchun with my parents and they had pigs hanging from their feet and some butcher cutting slabs off of it for people to buy. this website also had some wonderful images from walmarts across chiner. so if you think your local walmart is kinda trashy, think again ... at least they don't sell this stuff. although walmarts in china are actually pretty nice compared to the local stores.

chinese walmarts

thatched butt?

today in class, we were talking about different types of homes. the students were supposed to brainstorm as many types of homes as they could. one pair of students wrote down "thatched butt". i politely corrected their mistake and then went on my way to the next group of students. but i'll be honest i did the junior high giggle the whole way up and down the isle of students. i couldn't stop laughing, it was just cracking me up. i'm not sure if it was because she had actually wrote the word "butt" on the paper or the mental image of a "thatched butt", either way i had a good laugh.

just so you know, i was not thinking of this image:


but now i am. i could really use a little time on the beach. we've had some crummy weather this spring and it's raining again. yuck! i hate the rain!

60 bottles of beer on the wall

where's wu? yes it's been a month since my last blog entry (and i was doing so good). this last month has been so crazy!!!

for the first time in five years, we as teachers had to "supervise" seniors for writing their senior thesis papers. talk about crazy chinglish, 20 pages of pure awesomeness. i want to pull my hair out when reading some of these papers, they didn't make any sense and those that did make sense, i had to bust for plagiarism (i'll save that for another time). so that's been consuming the majority of my time.

also i've been coaching the department soccer team, who decided that practicing at 6:00am was the best thing for the team. when 13,000 kids share one field for the entire school, field availability times can get a little crazy. even though we get there at 6:00am, we are only given a quarter of the field to practice on. if we are lucky we can actually get a goal to practice on. ughhh, the joys of living in a land of 1.3 billion people. but we just played our last game this week and lost in the semifinals. which is where the "60 bottles of beer" came from. we had a celebratory banquet for the team to finish the season, in which the team and i and some department leaders gathered for one big party. basically it was all the boys and leaders toasting until the cows come home and drinking themselves into a drunken stupor. if you know anything about the "asian glow" these boys had the "glow" going on! since our organization has a no alcohol policy and the leaders and students know it, i was saved from being a causality of the asian glow. even those i was saved from the plethora of alcoholic beverages, i still had to drink something every time a toast was given. which was a problem since every single kid had to toast the coach, so i downed an entire 2 liter of pepsi and some during the festivities (i don't even like pepsi). i've also never seen so many grown adult males cry. every one of the seniors weeped as they thanked me for being their coach and said they should have played better to be the champions. to which i told them, "you're right! you made me get up at 6:00am everyday, and you didn't even win, you guys really are losers!" just kidding, what do you say to these kids after that? i just smiled and said that it was okay. but i did learna few cultural lessons that night:
1. chinese people are even formal when they are having a "party". i tried to imagine american college students doing this, but i couldn't even fathom that.
2. there is an extreme respect for those in authority (teachers, coaches, leaders).
3. when you are being toasted you have to drink everything in the cup or else it shows you don't respect the person toasting you. which meant i had to pee the rest of the night.
3. even big boys cry.
4. i hope samantha inherits the "asian glow" so i can bust her for drinking if she ever tries.

so that's the latest scoop from wu's world. sorry it's been so long.

also in case you don't have facebook:



coming around thanksgiving of 2010 :)