What's going on now?

It's entirely possible that some people read this.  I've seen the statistics: some people do.  Now, they might be odd bots that automatically visit any new blog posts that go up, but at least they're electronic company.

What's been happening for the last while? I made a pitch at getting employed in Canada.  It has not gone particularly well - as such I have other magically lucrative potions brewing.  I've really only done one thing effectively since I got back, and it is this:

As the weather turned slightly colder, I've finally found the key to catching trout on Salt Spring Island.  After trying for about a decade, it was as though a switch was flipped and I couldn't keep them out of my boat.  I gave some to neighbours, froze some for later eating...rowing and rowing while taking in lean protein.  It's been a healthy time.

So while I while away the time while turning my wiles towards the job hunt, know that I haven't entirely disappeared.  Get to work, odd presumed bots that scan all new content!

The future?

Recently, I had a choice of sorts.  I could either (saving my money not really being in the consideration) go to Taiwan for a brief period, or completely leave the china for a literal/figurative breath of fresh air before my final home stretch.  I made the right decision.

Seoul, South Korea, is a real place.  This is the kind of statement I can make to anyone who has lived in non Beijing/Shanghai mainland china and they will at least kind of know what I'm talking about.  It has all the hallmarks of Asia - black hair, pointy roofs, occasional sewer smell when you're walking around on the streets - but is a 'real place' in the sense that things are easy to find and do there.  You want a particular kind of restaurant?  Go there.  You're trying to find a palace of some kind? Read the English maps all over the place.

Some people would complain about this level of modernity-baiting, but not me.  There are something in excess of 150,000 expats in Seoul, and you can tell that the accessibility game has been raised as a result; compare that to the less than 100 foreigners (including non-english speakers) in my city which is just shy of half the size of Seoul.  You can tell which place is shittier, without going beyond population demographics.

Is there air pollution in Seoul?  Yes.  Would anybody who has lived in the china laugh at it in a bemused, Santa Clause realizing he just ate pot cookies kind of way? Oh yes.  There are, however, easily visible environmental initiatives...

This is a shot of a river which was reclaimed about ten years ago.  At one point they had an ugly concrete highway over the top of it, but, realizing they didn't want their city to be a concrete hellhole (are you listening china?), they took the highway out, and planted willows/native grasses/etc along the banks before stocking it with fish.  The largest fish are over a foot long, and were correctly predicted by myself as an object for culinary debate amongst my students when I showed them a picture.  Nature isn't always for eating.

I really liked it there, and I'm applying for jobs there.  Will I get to go there?  Maybe...at any rate it was a great visit, and a tantalizing peek at what Asia can be like if it's not corrupt, not selfish, and thinks about the lives of its citizens.

The beginning of the END

Things are slowly starting to wrap up here, which I'm viewing as a positive development really.  My last time has been spent on domestic jaunts, the last being to a place called 'Qufu', famous for being the birthplace of Confucius.

The highlight of the trip, oddly, was walking around in a graveyard:

It was a nice place to be because you had to go off of the path to find the more interesting stuff, and because the people here are afraid of nature that meant a complete lack of spitting/peeing tourists.  I walked around there for hours enjoying the quiet.

Since then it's been a question of going into work each day, trying to get the material covered before the exams next month.  Part of the challenge is staying motivated with a group of students who largely 'checked out' of school quite some time ago, or so it seems, in this increasingly hot time - and I say hot because I've taken to running (thank you expensive Hong Kong shoes) and have done more sweating in the last while than any other in recent memory.

The other thing I've been doing is running a Japanese club, where I teach elementary aspects of Japanese language and culture.  It's a bit of a stunt admittedly (I like the idea of promoting Japan in china), but it's been a nice respite in a semester of 'best behaviour'.  Recently, I even taught 16 kids how to make sushi:

(note: this will be the only set of student photos to exist here, as small revenge for the thousands of photos of myself that exist on chinese microblog sites)

It was a fun, if slightly messy, time, and a nice diversion from the day to day.  As it stands there are now less than 6 weeks remaining, a polluted drop in the grimy bucket, all things considered.  I only have two more trips planned before my soujourn here is over:

Taishan part deux

Seoul, South Korea

Oh, it's go time (almost)

Domestics

It's been nice having company in the china lately, because it has spurred me on to do a bit of domestic tourism that I'm quite sure I would have skipped on otherwise.  For example:

The city of Suzhou might not have been on my to-do list, had I not been told it was a place to see 'old china things'.  However, a few hours on a weekend train later I found myself there, soon to walk down a famous historical street (Unesco also-ran - and proud enough of it to leave a huge stone plaque up).

It's a street/canal system nationally famous enough to be officially imitated at other better known tourist locales, and proved a good choice for browsing oddities - and finding food I didn't particularly want to eat:

I actually have no idea how you are supposed to eat an entire fried crab.

The main attraction of the city was the 'humble administrator's garden', which is a legitimately-recognized Unesco site (more on that as we go).  It offered nice walking about in the pre-spring cold - an interestingly brief period of the year as spring is often skipped in this country (spring festival, of course, falling in the late-middle of winter).  Clutching teas, we gamboled around landscapes like this before returning to the 'city' I live in:

A couple of weeks more of faking my way through being a senior science teacher (who knew?) I was ready to launch out of the 'bo again to see a bit of a world-class city: BeiJING (you must go absurdly high on the latter syllable).

After a requisite trip to a bourgeois grocery store (kettle chips; one more thing I'd missed where I live) we were off to see the great wall.  As it's incredibly likely to be the only time I see it, I made sure to take photographs.  This is a big photo-post...whatever:

As you can see we got rather lucky when it came to air quality...we were at a semi-restored section (a scant day before Michelle Obama went there which would have made it tricky I'm sure) and had a great time knocking around the wall.  I absolutely both had a beer on a decrepit watchtower roof (mild climbing required) and a pitstop out a watchtower window (glancing around before required).

I have to say that the wall delivers, really: it's a giant serpentine Mongolian-blocker of the highest order.  I mean, the ancient emperors could have swallowed some pride and addressed the problem of the keshiks with gold or steel...but building a monumental stone edifice that will take a long time and prove ineffective is just so damn much more chinese.  They are experts at that.

It's been nice to go around to these spots (it being crazy to live here for two years and not see them etc etc), and we've got Hong Kong coming up two weekends from now.  It'll be nice to get out of china.  I might even get a suit made...crazy...

Loooooooooooooooook!

'Spring' festival

Just a quick bit of writing to catch up.  It's the beginning of March now, and my stupid blog has been inactive enough to annoy me - as a person who likes to read blogs - so I will say what I did.  Or, more specifically, where I did whatever that was.  Here:

As you can see, I went to the next town to the north for my vacation.  Note the glorious chinese scenery and air quality.

The Philippines is a very nice place to visit on vacation not only because most of the people speak English, but also because there are dogs everywhere:

It's kind of like a paradise for dogs; you constantly see dogs that are on missions....or asleep.  It's hot enough that you don't see any fluffy ones, and perhaps because of the canine abundance there aren't cats lounging around all that much.  But you do see these:

...both in real life and fighting to the death on television.  If you are lucky, you can also see things like:

Giant lizards.  Looking back at these pictures now....I kind of wish I was still there.  The only problem for me was that it was ungodly-level hot.  Siesta-style hot.  Sun-burningly hot.  Plus the food was unspectacular...but:

Scenery!  It was an inescapably beautiful place, made more so by having escaped one of the dreariest times of year in one of the dreariest cities in the china (one assumes).  The Philippines: recommended.

Prodigal stunned - part 1

It's the middle of June, and I haven't seen my passport in 2 weeks.  This is a source of consternation, because I am going to be leaving the country on June 26th.

With about seven days to go before departure, I demand to have my passport back.  The reason for this demand? The 'helpers' have said that they are finally going to get off of their asses and take our paperwork to the local security bureau to get our residence permits re-upped.  This will take an inordinate amount of time, so much so that my passport will only be given back to me (assuming nobody loses it, gets drunker than usual, or just decides to take a 'me day') on the early afternoon of my departure day, some 2-3 hours before I am to leave the city.  This is unacceptable, so I ask:

"Is it a question of me spending 2 hours in an office now, or two hours in an office in the fall?  Is this going to matter in any way?"

"No no it's the same, it will be no problem!"

The director of my program having assured me there would be no problems with me re-doing my residence permit in the fall, I confidently re-acquired my passport with a smattering of time to spare before I fled this wretched berg.  I'm sure eeeeeverything will turn out just fine, and no directors will lose their jobs as a result.  The china, everybody!

Prodigal stunned - part 2

So picture this: it's late August, and I'm beginning to actively dread my impending re-departure.  To add to it I have real concerns over whether I'll be able to visit the country (see part 1) at all due to visa issues, but I am officially packed up and off to the airport.

It's worth noting that I had spent about a week emailing everyone involved about the visa issue, to which I got some confident 'don't worry, the police in the city know you are coming!' - type responses.  At a certain point, you just have to believe people.

The check-in person at YVR, alas, was having none of this, and so it was that I informed my higher-ups that I was, in fact, not bound for China on the day I was supposed to due to not being given a visa.  Their solution?  I go beyond my contract's scope and get down to the travel agent (something of an idiot savant for inefficiency about 98% of the time) and arrange my own visa.

The only thing that could be accomplished with any speed was a tourist visa, as a work visa requires city-specific documents that take weeks to get at the best of times because, you know, China.  However, I was assured confidently by the travel agent (whose entire job is knowing everything about Chinese visas) that I could somehow transmute it into a working visa while in-country.  Awesome.

Having already said all my goodbyes, I checked into a hotel for a couple nights to wait the visa process out, rather than going back to the island/crashing friends' couches in Van into oblivion.  The flight was uneventful, and I was picked up by school car (AS IS THE RULE when coming from Vancouver).

I was sure my working permit would be organized in a few weeks.  After all, I'd been given a generous 60-day stay on my visa with which to illegally work, what could go wrong? Many local adults were working hard on rectifying this situation.

5 weeks later they admitted they couldn't get it done....but....was there another option in 'China'? (dramatic sound cue)