HAPPY ANNIVERSARY !!

TO MARIAN AND JACOB: HAPPY ANNIVERSARY – 1ST YEAR!!!

Love you guys.

(I hope it’s still Sunday back at home)

 

Day 3

It is Sunday. We get up and go to a gathering of other language teachers. They talk about recent events. Amazing things are being done by these people. I meet some really cool guys here. [omitted] – has been here 3 years, and [omitted] has been here only 3 weeks but came with his fiancee. He really seeks God an loves his fiancee. Rad. None of them speak Chinese though, even the ones that have been here for years. I find this a bit irritating

Afterwards, we went to a fantastic lunch. Well… not as good as the White House. Except for 1 thing – the ba si xiang jiao. It was basically fried, carmelized banana mush. My body liked it.

Came home, played mazhang (sp?) together w/Linda. Interesting, funny person. Then we left to pick up some food, because some of Myron’s students were going to cook for us that evening. [inserted - I found out later that the students don't have kitchens. Since they love to cook, Myron often gets a lot of free dinners in exchange for the use of his kitchen.] On the way out, we meet up with a girl named Bloom, who just got done talking with Chad and Crystal (married couple down the hall from Myron).

This girl is very interesting. She is Hui, which is a minority group in China. I have been interested in minorities in China for a long time, but the Hui held special interest for me, and she is the first that I have ever met. She is not confident in her English, and is nervous, but tags along anyway and I get to talk with her. She teaches me the Chinese words for a lot of things. She nervously blurts out “you have curly hair!” I guess that was supposed to be a compliment. She is really, really pretty. It is weird to me that an incredibly attractive girl just complimented me.

We get to the veggie and meat market and meet up with one of Myron’s students. Her little sister is riding on the back of her bicycle, toting a giant bottle of wine. [quick MS paint version of a pencil sketch on my journal]:

The little girl has a plump face and a jovial expression. I laugh hard. No one else thinks this is funny for some reason. We get food and go back to the house. The students are busy cooking in the kitchen, and Mari is watching them. Bloom is fascinated by the guitar. I teach her E and A2, along with a basic rhythm. She picks it up really fast. She and the little girl teach me how to use an abacus. The dinner is good. Myron and I clean up. When they all leave, Myron and I watch a move called Next. It’s pretty good. Day 3 the end.

 

*** Day 3 pics! ***

Myron’s fellow teachers. It is strange, but the day we were visiting was the last time that a lot of them were going to see each other, since it was the end of the semester, and a lot of them were not coming back for the next semester.

A really great group of teachers, and I was glad to get to meet them. I was not to picture snappy that afternoon, but this here is the group that came along for dinner, and the food they cooked:

Myron engaged in an orange-juice drinking contest with a few of the girls:

Myron complains that the orange juice was spilling over him. I laughed. The little girl in the back was the one totting the giant bottle. She and her older sister need to take off. Before everyone leaves we take a group photo. Bloom is the one on the left. I don’t remember the names of the others, unfortunately

China Day 1 – 2

I posted a preface you might want to read first. And a preview pic summary here if you want to see a photos from a couple days of the trip. Also, I accidentally deleted all of my photos for the first 2 days, so, uh… yeah, more words than pics for the first couple entries. Most of the entries were written within hours of the experience, but sometimes I had to wait a few days. Enjoy!

DAY 1

***

Out of Sendai @ 1:15. Off to a bad start. I’m gonna be late for my flight.

1) I missed the from campus [cost: - 20 minutes].

2) Just missed the Shinkansen to Tokyo [cost: - 30 minutes].

3) Barely the Narita Express by a couple minutes [cost: - 30 minutes].

Talked w/a guy on the N.A. who develops games. Works for the company that put out Grad Theft Auto. He tells me he wants to find a church, and asked how I got hooked up with mine. Got to airport w/1:35 to spare. Hardly anybody is here, so I got through security really fast.

I’m hungry. A man is discussing with a woman how to get food for his crew of asian kids. He and his wife are not asian. His kids must all be adopted. The mother must not be as mean as she looks. They don’t have any yen. I think about giving him some of mine. Thinking that would be un-dignifying to the man, I don’t. He looks well off enough. I see the kids munching, later. I grab a Big-Mac meal in the airport. I offer some fries to a Chinese girl who sat down near me. She motions thanks, but doesn’t want any.

*** on the plane ***

Sat next to a huge fat lady who could barely fit in the seat. I haven’t had experiences with huge fat people for quite some time, now. “This sucks” I thought. She talks a whole lot about her boyfriend. She’s, like, 50 years old, I’d guess. This is strange. But she is amiable, and just as I am starting to enjoy sitting next to her, her daughter (?) comes and says that a seat opened up next to her. The lady leaves, to sit with her family. The girl I offered fries to comes and sits down next to me. Cool coincidence.

She is Chinese. We start talking in Chinese. My Chinese really sucks. She switches to Japanese. She tells me her Chinese is best, Japanese second best, and English is her worst language. Funny – exactly opposite of me. But, Japanese is a happy medium for both of us. I have never talked with someone so easily in Japanese before. She knows all the right vocabulary, for me to understand her. We talk a lot. I am amazed that I am having a conversation in another language.

*** in China ***

Smoggy. Dirty. The people are informal, and go around w/out their shirts on. The men roll up half of their shirts, exposing their stomachs. And walk around as if nothing is weird about this. I guess it’s not, if everyone else is doing it. We meet up with a friend of Myron’s – Liu Kai. He whittles down the price of a hotel for us, from like 400 yen to 50 yen a head, or something. The lady behind the desk was wearing normal clothes and had no uniform. We went to a small convenient store. A guy was looking at us funny, pointed @ us and made fists. Huh? He lifts up my sleeve and I play along, flexing and motion to arm wrestle. He’s much short but bigger than me. I’ll probably lose. He’s all for it. We try to wrestle on the fridge glass top. The manager will have none of it. We do it w/no surface. I cream him. He wants the L-arm. Closer this time. He laughs and thinks it’s so great. Wow… China is different.

DAY 2

Wake up

1) Go to temple of heaven

2) Meet up with Liu Kai

3) Pearl Market – Myron barters down a scroll to a great price. I buy one. Myron is the master bargainer.

4) Meet a guy named Tony. One of Myron’s friends. He’s a stud, I guess.

5) Go to airport. On the way we take a bus. I sit next to a Polish guy who want to talk. I don’t really. But I try to anyway. A guy a row up overhears. Starts talking to us. EE student from BYU, name is Spencer. Studying in Nanjing. Mormon? We pick up Mari (her flight is 42 minutes early). We catch a ride to Qinghuangdao. Mari handles the lag reeally well. The ride looks like Eastern WA. Qinghuangdao looks dirty and kind of dumpy. We take a taxi to Myron’s place. Meet his friends. Seem cool. Go to the “White house” (a restaurant near Myron’s campus that he commonly eats at). Ganbiandoujiao – tasty but overrated. The crispy fried pork – now that’s good stuff!! Watched a movie. Still in shock about being in China. The movie is Children of Men. It is pirated, like everything else. Interesting movie.

China trip – preface

I apologize for the absence – I was in China for a couple weeks. It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life. It’s kind of hard to explain why, because I wouldn’t know where to start. I did keep a journal every day, though, so I will be occasionally posting excerpts from that, supplemented with pictures. However, before I do that, I know that Myron wanted me to compare China and Japan so I’ll do that here. These things, especially the personality things, are sweeping generalizations that I observed in high percentages of the population I encountered, but don’t represent the whole population.

1) Japan is rich. China is, for the most part, poor.

I haven’t really been around poor people that much. It changed my understanding of a lot of things, to be around people that don’t have things I take for granted (a well organized and, for the most part honest civil authority structure, sturdy houses, houses w/heating, hot/clean water, showers, toilets that work,  extra sets of clothes, drying machines, etc.)

2) Japan has almost no beggars. China has a lot.

But gosh… though I saw some beggars, I saw some people who were incredibly determined to “stand on their own two feet”- even when they had none. I saw a man with legs so deformed, he had to drag himself around on something looking like a skateboard. But he was working on cars. I saw another man, who had no arms, and was doing beautiful calligraphy… with his feet. Some of the beggars were kids. This was sad. “Ni de baba zai nar?” (Where is your father?) I asked one boy. “Mei you…” (I have none) he responds. How do you turn away kids? Well… I don’t. When they ask me for money, I ruffle their hair. And, if they are persistent, I reward them w/something. I didn’t lose a lot of money this way, if you were wondering. And, I don’t think you would. You could give to every kid you see begging enough to keep them happy every day, and not make a dent in your American, even graduate student salary.

3. China’s people are louder, and more direct than Japanese people.

This comes out in the way they talk (they really like yelling, and they sound irritated but they aren’t), how they interact in th market place (haggling over prices), how they drive (honking ALL THE TIME even for no apparent reason), and how they socialize (they party really hard, and really loud, in public). Ok, the Japanese can do that last one, too, but they generally avoid the former. Chinese people also push and shove, hard, without apologizing, which brings us to the next point:

4. In China there are no lines, for anything.

You shove to get tickets for the bus. You shove to get on the bus. You shove inside the bus. You shove to get your bag from the massive pile of others trying to get theirs at the bus security check points. Basically, it’s a free for all.  And it goes for other things too, like restaurants and bathrooms. I remember Mari taking like, half an hour at a bathroom once, and I was like “what’s the problem.” The problem was, people kept cutting in front of her, and she thought that there was some sort system to it, based on age. You couldn’t be more opposite than the Japanese if you tried. If you accidentally brush a fold of clothing on someone in Japan, you say “sumimasen” (excuse me). I think, if a Japanese person saw a situation like the “lines” for buses in China, they wouldn’t know what to do, without adapting real quick.

5. Chinese people know how to relax.

You always get the impression from the Chinese students in the US that Chinese people are always really smart and really hard working. The thing is, we are only seeing an incredibly small fraction of the best of the best, in the US. It’s a skewed perspective. I saw people of every age, all over, in Chengdu, just sitting around and socializing, at all hours of the day. A guy who was living there commented about it, saying that they pretty much do that every day. People just take life easier there. Of course there are factories and coal mines, and stuff where people work horribly long hours, etc. But it does not seem to be the general rule of living here.

6. Japan has clean water, and lots of it. They like to soak, and shower, and stay clean. China doesn’t, and people take showers less often.

7. The buildings  in China look more industrial, and are not in as good shape as Japan. Furthermore, the sky in the big cities is very rarely blue. More often gray. This is in contrast to Japan, where even Tokyo has reasonable air and sky.

8.  The driving is CRAZY in China,whereas it is tame in Japan.

In China, when you cross a street, you are literally taking your life in your hands and playing the real life version of Frogger. On the van ride back from the Tiger Leaping Gorge, the driver was honking his horn around the valley turns, to alert anyone on the other side that his car was speeding around. Sometimes intersections between 4-lane roads are just free for alls an you think you will die.

9. Chinese people are bolder and talk to you easier.

I had people just come up and start talking to me, just cause they were curious. I had tones of kids look at me, smile, and say “hello!!” Gosh… I love the kids in China. In Japan, people don’t talk to other people. No one will just come up and talk to you, unless they are selling something. I really liked this aspect of China.

10. The streets in China are dirty. In Japan they are more often than not completely clean.

11.  Chinese people don’t bow very often. In Japan, bowing is constant.

12. Chinese people have a wider variety of features.

13. Chinese people dress more colorfully than Japanese people.

14. Chinese youth did not seem to have a standardized sense of fashion. In Japan, there is a general look/style that most kids are aiming at, but in China there was hardly any uniformity.

15. Chinese people made a real hard attempt at talking to you in English, whereas in Japan they seem to prefer talking in Japanese, unless they are in hotels, restaurants, etc.

16. They assume you can use chopsticks in China, and don’t look surprised if you are an expert, cause “what else would you use?”

17.  Chopsticks in Japan are tapered, in China they are thick at the ends.

18. China was not as bad off, space wise, as I had always heard. And, I think the 1 child policy is a load of crap. There is plenty of space. The streets are huge. There seems to be less space in Japan, and they are trying to get people to have kids here, as opposed to China.
19. Media is pirated in China. It is not here.

20. The local government seems to be less corrupt and power is used with more integrity in Japan, it at least appears.

Hmmm… that about sums it up for the moment. I love both countries. I really love China. Gosh… I got to meet many of Myron’s students and they were wonderful. I met some Christians in Japan and they are wonderful. The Naxi’s running the hostel in Lijiang just broke their backs for us. I even like their less proper demeanor. My uncle commented that Chinese people are very different, but Japanese people might as well be from a different planet. You still feel foreign in China, but I think I get his meaning… China has a really earthy, “real” feeling to it, whereas in Japan sometimes it seems that society is a veneer.

At any rate, Journal Day 1 coming soon.

Mongorujin

They’re loud, they’re obnoxious, they’re hearty fellows and ladies, they are… bum ba da dummmmm!

THE MONGOLS!

If Japanese were white, Mongols would be black. If Japanese were yin, Mongols would be yang. If Japanese were small, Mongols would be huge. Which… THEY ARE! Three of them are in my Japanese class. From L, Jigumet, Tsutsugume, ?, and Norumon. To characterize them, if Japanese are very polite and do not prefer physical contact, the Mongols are they type who would smack you hard on the back if you do something dumb and have a hearty guffaw. I really enjoy these guys. They also hardly speak a word of English, so I basically only talk to them in Japanese. They are a lot of fun. Yes sir.

And in other news, I have so much to do before I leave for China that I don’t know if I will get to post pictures from going to Matsushima with the CCC people visiting from HongKong, or the really cool trip the church took to Kawasaki, or any of the pictures of the billions of animals I catch. But… we’ll see. I got to go. If I do not post again, before coming back from China,

HAPPY FATHER’S DAY (yesterday, but I got to talk with you then and it was great) DAD

Abunai…

AAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh I JUST DELETED A HUGE POST!! AAAAAAAAAGH.

ok Marston… regroup… I had a funny story about how I went to the daily lunch meeting of the bible study and we they were all murmuring the word “abunai” and finally I heard them say “Timu wa Abunai” [which I thought meant "Tim is dangerous"]. I reacted to this with a “Watassshiiiii????” (who, ME??). To which they tried to tell me something that I couldn’t figure out. Then, they pulled out their pocket electronic dictionaries, and showed the two following:

“Vaccinate the boy!” [there's a word for that?]

“measles”

And, if you wikipedia Measles, you will find that a number of universities in Japan have actually closed in 2007 because of large outbreaks of Measles. Well, now I guess it’s Tohoku’s turn. They haven’t closed Aobayama or anything, but I guess it’s going around pretty bad.

Uh, mom or dad – am I vaccinated? (I think I am… but keep the others in the Bible study in your prayers please).

And, in other news, here’s a bunch of pictures from my trip to Yamagata last weekend. Blast… I had such great captions for them all. Well… here will be the quick summaries!

Erei, Megumi, and Ai (yes they are gorgeous. Darn my Japanese ineptness!!)

 

Takuma (church music leader), Maki (pastoral intern) and Reika

Waving good-bye to Masako-sensei and Guy-Smiley (I don’t remember his name, but he is always smiling. You will remember him as the one draped in kids from the Song-farewell party)

We set right to work on Bingo!

Megumi hands out the first prize…

Bei-san acting (acting) all tough

These kids won a prize! A Kleenex box! (They still loved it)

Bei-san and his wife won in the same round. He is excitedly waving the Kleenex and other, probably similar, prize around, and demanding a photo

Beautiful Japan out the window… monkey probably hoping around in there.

When we got there, all the women carried umbrellas around, because of the sun. I found out later its because they are scared of getting little black dots on their skin from the sun.

After the sermon, we had a group photo (with MY camera!!! Victory!!! But that means I have to make prints tomorrow…)

The students eating together. You will recognize Erei and Pearl eating w/eachother and on the right is Takuma and Masato.

I ate with this group, and who were so great. I sat next to the Kawakami-sensei, and little girl who is always looking at me suspiciously. She accepted this time, though, especially when I asked her what her favorite food was. She proudly told me “jagaimo!” (potato).

We busted up to the small petting zoo afterwards. I was unaware that Ostriches are so funny looking

Feeding the goats

The girl who fascinatedly rubbed my nose (“hana nagaii!” – long nose!) now examining a deer:

Poking the Ostrich again with grass

Skipping the part where I find and take photos of dragonflies and giant furry caterpillars, etc. these are some great older people in the church who are always serving everyone else:

When we got back we were so beat

 

machigaita (“oops…”)

“Primarily hemotoxic; symptoms may include local swelling, progressive numbness spreading from bite site, bleeding from bite site, bleeding gums, & hematuria. Fatal human brain hemorrhage & renal failure have been reported. Numerous bites by this snake are reported in Japan each year.” [Armed forces pest management board-> venemous snakes www.afpmb.org]

… is the description of the venom of the snake I grabbed yesterday. When it lifted half of it’s body off the ground and flattened itself out, I semi-got the point, and let go of the body. I tried to go for behind the head, instead, but it slithered into the bushes. [Oh well.]

More interesting facts:

1) Tiger keel backs are fairly docile and normally don’t bite.

2) Rear fanged, so it’s tough to get a large dose of venom.

3) One of the two members of the Colubrid family with anti-venoms developed (the other being the Boomslang) .

4) I guess they are considered a delicacy in Korea, according to one website.

5) update: The japanese name is Yamakagachi.

5) update: It can shoot an irritating substance at predators through a pair of glands in the dorsal skin.

6) update: The locals are more scared of this water snake than the local viper, the mamushi.

for more info, follow this link

Lesson: I initially grabbed for it because it didn’t look like a viper. The lesson is, don’t assume a snake is non-poisonous, and don’t try to catch it, unless you know what type it is. (I’m now looking up all the local species of snakes on the web).

cat.inst.fr: “The epidemiological analysis of the severe bites indicates that most of the bites occurred in warmer months, from April to October. Most of the bites occurred in males trying to catch snakes…” [insert guilty smile here]

Pictures from the church trip to Yamagata, where me and the paster were looking for snakes, coming soon!

Spider Canyon

Today, for the first time in ages I went exploring! I’m itching and wet, I reek of river water and my R.hand is swollen, making it difficult to write. But it was so worth it!!! My bicycle had a flat, so I dropped it off at Hayasaka and then headed up to my office. But on the way, I remembered that there was a canyon I wanted to explore, a while back. So, I turned left, and headed towards the mouth of the canyon, beyond these houses:

Anyway, found the old fence, with the sign that says something about “Dangerous: falling rocks” etc. and crawled through the passage around it. A little path made it’s way down to the stream. And when I saw it, I was like “perfect!”

For a while, I tried to stay dry, but after a while the trail petered out. And I realied: “Oh yeah! I’m wearing sandals and shorts!”

As I kept going, the valley sides grew higher and higher. And everything was REALLY GREEN

One thing you can’t see are the spiders. BILLIONS of them. Strung across the canyon. Maybe there weren’t billions of them, but… I hate spiders… I can handle any creepy crawly thing. I love snakes, frogs, bugs, etc. But I can’t stand spiders. And feeling their webs draped over me, and thinking that they might be crawling me, I resorted to waving a stick in front of me to keep me from walking into the webs that were everywhere.

Eventually I could see what I came to find: the bridge between Aobayama and Yagikama:

You probably don’t remember, but I took a lot of photos of fall leaves off of this bridge last Autumn. It’s on the Foreigner page. Anyway, I hear that a lot of suicides jump off that bridge. So I would rather not walk below it… fortunately, a different canyon jutted off to the left:

It looked… a tad bit more difficult to negotiate though. And, I was right. It was dark inside this one, and I had to keep scrambling up waterfalls:

One in particular was pretty tough, and if it weren’t for a little scoop in the side that I had to jump to reach, I would have been able to climb up it. It actually really freaked me out to do this. But, I wanted to make it to Yagiyama instead of having to walk all the way back, since it was getting dark.

[Looking down from above the falls.]

I celebrated my soon to be pointless victory, by taking my photo in the middle of the small but deep little pool at the top:

The guy in that photo is forgetting that his wallet is still in his shorts.

Anyway… a ways past that, I came to a waterfall that was just to high to climb. I have no pictures because it was dark. Maybe if I had two people and a rope we could have done it. There were some vines hanging over the cliff, and I thought of how cool it would be to say that I climbed a cliff using vines. But, when I grabbed one and it split immediately, I changed my mind.

On the plus side, the spiders were mostly gone, replaced with… TOADS! I love toads!!

[my prune hands]

Anyway, after the crushing defeat, I headed back home, with only minor scrapes and bruises, and a cool exploration under my belt. Now if I can convince someone to go up with me and tackle that waterfall…

One last shot of the bridge, at full zoom:

Recent pics

Paula sent me some pictures [this was my favorite!] of my mom’s birthday on Wednesday. My mom is so wonderful. I’m glad everyone was able to get together for the party, and it sounds like it was a very good time. In addition to eating great cupcakes Paula made for her, dad read some poetry to her . Happy birthday mom!

 

These are just some random pictures from things I’ve been up to recently. Like, my last dinner w/John, at the Kaizen-Sushi, which is one of those shops with rotating plates of fish. See my full stack of plates? You pay based on the color of the pate. John took the bill that night… thanks dude, it was good times. Then, after that, I have a host of pic’s from the KGK annual meeting. Where, again I was blown away and blessed by the kids. And, was also surprised by the presence of quite a few students older than me, I’m used to being one of only 2 grad students in the group. They are so disciplined. Then, just some misc pics after that. Enjoy!

(The guy above’s adana [nick name] is “Karache” which means “brake.” As in, car-brake)

Hebi (snake!)

I’ve caught two snakes since coming here – 2 weeks ago a rat snake at Matsushima (w/John, but in my excitement I forgot to take photos,) and today – this one!

What happened was, I was walking over the canyon to the Kawa-uchi campus. And down below I saw some guys probably 30 yrs old or so old, poking at something with sticks. I thought they were to old to be playing with sticks, so I looked closer and saw that they were whacking at a snake and taking photos of it. So, I climbed down there, and picked up the snake. This freaked them out (hahaha) but I knew it wasn’t a mamushi, the local poisonous one. It freaked them out even more when it started biting me, (again, hahahaha) but I told them it wasn’t dangerous, and asked them how to get back up to the road, because believe it or not the climb down wasn’t easy, and I couldn’t climb up w/a snake in my hands. I wanted to take pictures of it, before letting it go. I walked up to Aobayama, then found an un-visited canyon and let it slither off.

It was a gorgeous snake! I think it was just a garter, but it was waaay bigger than any garter I’ve ever caught before. Here’s some more pic’s:

** Update – this is a Japanese four-lined rat snake, “shimahebi” in japanese, or Elaphe quadrivirgata* *

On another fun note, after it got used to my left arm, it settled down just fine. But it struck at the first few bicyclers that whizzed by me on my walk up to Aobayama. Fortunately, they didn’t notice. And it calmed down after that.