Anniversary and Living Easy

So I wake up in the morning and I feel like a rock star or, as they say in translated Chinese, Super Cute-girl !! ^^ But you must be asking why…. Well, I shall tell you.

Today is my first anniversary of living in China. You…might not be excited. Me? I’m glad I’m still alive. 

Between open manholes and unclean street food (both of which I’ve encountered), I’ve stayed well and relatively healthy while living in China…still !!

I wake up and proceed to wake the boys up for school. --- Oh yeah, did I tell you I’m living as house mom for five 16 year old boys while they discover a truly Chinese experience in rural Yunnan Province?? In any case, I am.

So I wake the boys up. I take one with me to go buy breakfast and I take them to school in the small van we conveniently call “the short bus” (mainly because the driver’s name is Mr. Short). We are headed up to Dali University for class.

What’s so special about Dali University? Besides the fact that it is fengshui’d in the shape of a butterfly, it is also on the side of this mountain overlooking Lake Erhai. I don’t think the weather could have welcomed my 1^st anniversary in a better way. I’ll just let pictures tell the story. But, keep in mind when you look at these photos that a strong wind blows in your face as you squint into the sun.

The dirty streets of Shanghai drift away; violence and corruption take a seat; taxes and bills are a faint thought; homework and exams hardly make their way onto the horizon.

This is a paradise, un-claimable by Wal-Mart, untouched by Meijer, and un-impressionable by any man who walks around in a fancy suit pretending to be important.

Life exists on a different plane here. Life is suddenly clear and uncomplicated. Life is simple; and simply put, life is easy. Enjoy these photos I took this morning:

I've Moved!!

Instead of living in my quaint little Chinese town of 8 million (that’s Nanjing, baby), I now live in a real town of Dali, located in southwestern China.

The final days of my program were so exciting and busy. I wrote about 10,000 characters in essays and did some presentations (all of which were conducted in Mandarin). Some of you may think this isn’t a big deal, BUT I’ll tell you, this is a big deal for me. I graduated from a graduate program conducted completely in Mandarin Chinese! Take that all you teachers who said I could never learn this language!

I graduated, the ceremony was beautiful, yadda yadda but the best part, by far, was that my diploma is bright pink! Who would have thought Johns Hopkins could be so fashionable (and Asian) at the same time?!

Nevertheless, I packed up (which always takes me 50billion hours) and headed out to a small town of Dali, in Yunnan Province, to act as a manager for a study abroad program for high school students who come over to China to learn about China and Mandarin! It’s through a company called Rustic Pathways (had to give a little shout out…Woot!)

I arrived in Dali on June 20 and it was raining cats and dogs. This was so harsh. After 13 hours of traveling, (taxi, plane, taxi, bus, taxi…), rain wasn’t the way I was looking to be welcomed into my new home.

Either way, Dali is awesome. There are so many more minority groups in this province! For those of you who don’t know, let me give you a bit of history on minorities in China for those who DO know about minorities in China, please skip down to O~(o.O)~o:

China has 56 ethnic groups. Most of China’s population, about 96%, is Han Chinese. The other 55 ethnic groups are minorities and all have their own language, attire, education, culture, and customs. These minorities range in populations numbering just under 3,000, to over 1 million (and yes, a group of people number over 1 million is STILL a minority in China, there are a lot of people over here, by the way). Yunnan province boasts a whopping 25 ethnic minorities, most of which are the Bai, Dai, Yi, Hani, Naxi, etc.

O~(o.O)~o

Ok—So I’ve been busy getting ready for the kiddos to arrive but had a few hours to take some photos. I thought I’d share. This is a woman is of the Bai minority:

Another photo I took my first day in Dali:

It’s quiet, it’s beautiful, it’s laid back. I don’t want to leave!!

Visibility in today's weather forecast: 400 meters

I don’t want to beat a dead dog with this, but China is polluted.

I’m told the pollution is because China is a developing country and with so much ‘stuff’ to do (to develop, I guess) there is no time to stop throwing wrappers on the ground or exhausting all up in the air.

Either way, I accept it as fact that China won’t stop polluting because I decide to, one day, beat a drum. The foreigners in China take pollution as a given. Eventually, if you’ve been here long enough, the snot you blow into your tissues will be a little tinted to the color of, say, dirt, or you will wake up feeling like you smoked a pack of cigs the night before. The only reason I’m actually a little concerned today is because I’m sick (flu), it’s exam week (nothing to do with pollution, really), and I’m going on my 9^th straight month of having a rather admirable hacking cough (which I’m rather proud of) … I’ve never cultivated one this bad in America. Living in crystal clean, sustainable Vermont has actually had the opposite effect upon me i.e. making me more healthy (drat).

So, without much ado (and because I don’t think many people from the US get to see photos like this that are taking by an actual friend and not from a news wire trying to make some righteous point) –-- has anyone noticed how much I’m using parentheses in this post? –-- here are some photos that I took this morning when I woke up.

*inhale

*exhale

I must say, there is nothing quite like the taste of 9 million people’s grime in your mouth at 8am.

Chinese Mafia Wedding

There are few things you pass up in life. One of them is attending a Chinese wedding.

For background information, a Chinese wedding is a huge party. There isn’t really a religious aspect because religion is not a prominent aspect of Chinese society.

I got invited to a Chinese wedding. I was told it was a “mafia wedding”, which if you’re aware of the obvious in any way at all, means that those getting married would be mafia hands. Given this briefing on the party to which I was just invited, there was no reason I was not going to this shindig.

One hang up, though: it was that it wasn’t really a wedding.

It was actually a 1^st birthday party for the happy couple’s illegitimate child, only everyone knew that the party was also celebrating their recent and unceremonious marriage (FYI: having illegitimate children in China is about as socially cool as … well… having illegitimate children in the US, except you’re disowned by your family and friends, leaving your only option to move away from home).

So the party was 300 of your closest friends (including me? I didn’t really know the kid) to celebrate a birthday. The other odd part about the party is that it was 95% men, who looked like they could whoop your booty if you messed with them at all.

No joke, they all had one thing in common: scars on their faces or on their heads (you know how you can see scars when you’ve hit your head…even when the hair grows back).

I was slightly scared, but that was clouded over by the food I was trying to politely decline eating. It was filled with organs, fish, and weird colored chickens. I was lucky to be distracted by some karaoke performances by the ‘groom’, who was followed around by ‘assistants’ afterward refilling his cup of wine that he had to drink with every table.

So—the whole party lasted about 2 hours. I’m not going to lie. I hate to think of how many pigs were slaughtered for this 1 year old’s birthday. It seemed like a huge waste of food. Either way, we were shuffled out of the banquet hall early because we had to leave while it was still fashionable to do so. We walk out into the hallway to meet with the mafia boss’ entourage of 25 stern, unsmiling, and ominous looking ‘friends’.

From here, we left and just went to a club district in Nanjing. It was a great club and basically the concert club where all the bosses/owners of the other clubs in Nanjing come to hang out, so…I got to hang out in style with Nanjing’s high rollers. How do I get myself into this sort of thing?

All I know is that there was a lot of Remy Martin XO, and me looking at my watch realizing, finally, that this is exam week…

Yeah... I should get started on that...

Ludacris loses dignity while Justin Beiber rocks

Ludacris is officially the Samuel L. Jackson of the R&B world.

Just as Samuel L. Jackson will be contracted for almost any movie where he can wear a funny hat (case and point: see pic below); Ludacris will likewise do anything so long as his credibility is compromised.

Case and point: Justin Bieber

Now, I’ve recently become a great fan of this munchkin (Justin was born in 1994). I find his songs addicting and have them constantly running through my head, but not without reason:

Need to rock it at the gym? Listen to Justin Bieber, “Eeenie Meenie”.

Need to wallow in the goodness that is love? J-Beeb’s your man-boy with “Baby”.

Want to cry a little after breaking up? That’s right, Justin, assuage me with “That Should Be Me” (sometimes I feel like no one understands my emotions like a 15 year old bean sprout).

But – as I am prone to tangents – BACK TO LUDA:

The lyrics in ‘Baby’, on which Ludacris is featured, go as such,

“When I was 13, I had my first love… she’d wake me up every day,

don’t need no Starbucks (woo)”

Let’s get one thing straight: This is lyrical genius.

Now that we’ve gotten that outta the way, we can move on to the fact that Ludacris is using his skills to talk about being awakened by his 13 year old girlfriend …

(Justin Bieber, infant) 

WHAT?!

I just don’t think this is something he should be spending his time on. I like him better when he talks about Escalades and the Georgia Dome in his song “What’s Your Fantasy”. Get real, this is the man who taught us to ‘shake our money makers like somebody’s gonna pay (us)”.

Subject matter aside, I think once you’ve become famous for ‘dirty rap’, you can’t go back, pretending to play a controlled, eloquent, and dreamy Edward Cullen.

It just doesn’t work that way, especially when the original beat for “Baby” is that of a 1950s bubble-gum pop song.

I’ve gone on enough with this. Yet, I just wanted to note that singing about tweenage love is low for Luda, almost as low as remixing various Christmas songs in the smash hit “Ludacrismas”. Yet, I must be kind. I am, in fact, jealous. Rock on Luda – make your money, fill cups like Double Ds, buy your bling. I wish my dignity was as disposable as yours is.

Oh that’s right, it is. 

Other moments where the audience’s immediate reaction should be, “Is this a joke?” and the answer from actor/performer is, “Why yes, yes it is. I got paid millions to do this…”:

Usher’s lyrics: “Peace up, A-town down!” (referring to good, ol’ HOT-lanta)

Samuel L. Jackson in Snakes On A Plane:  Noted Quote: “get these m-f’n snakes off this m-f’n plane!”

Jackson in The Spirit:

Christopher Walken, pretending to be Japanese, in Balls of Fury:

Moral of the story: if you can’t have fun with your career, why get in the business at all?

Amen.