January 2006

January 27
Spring festival
Spring Festival aka Chinese New Year is coming up this weekend. It's seven days off work, although only three of them are paid. Figure out how that works and let me know. Anyway, so our big plan for the past four months was to go to Huang Shan, or Yellow Mountain, which is a pretty famous place in China, just west of us, in Anhui province. I was actually quite proud that I had made this decision so early on. Plans, exciting. So, it came time to make the arrangments and the whole thing fell apart. It's absolutely impossible to get tickets for long trips since everyone is going somewhere to see their family. The Chinese Transit Authority told the newspapers that they expected to take 2 billion passengers on the trains during this festival. Now, the last time I checked, the government was saying there are 1.3 billion people living in China. Even assuming one trip is one passenger, that's still the majority of the country trying to get train tickets, not to mention buses and planes. As a result of these multitudinous long trips, adult diapers have been a big seller this month. I guess people don't even hope to get into the washrooms on the train. One of the FTs here apparently ended up stuck on a stopped train for 7 hours while they were clearing an avalanche off the tracks - and they lock the bathrooms when the trains are stopped for some reason. I can imagine that was painful.

Anyway, so we decided to wait until sping or summer to see Huang Shan. It won't have those beautiful snowy mountain views, but on the other hand, no avalanches either. So, our backup plan is to try to do some short day trips to cities around here that we haven't seen yet like Suzhou and Nanjing and the city near Shanghai with the Museum of Chinese Sex Culture.

But now, last minute of course, we have been given an opportunity to go to some island in South Korea, which would be awesome, although expensive. I did the research this morning and found out I don't need a visa for South Korea, so I could go last minute. Unfortunely, the price isn't right yet, so we probably won't go. But, I'm ready to go on a moment's notice if it is. So, we'll see. More on this after the break. I won't be back on the computer until February 6, 2006 so don't be worried if you expect to see me on MSN and I'm not. I don't have a computer at home.

So, merry spring festival.
6:17 AM

January 25
blogs
I'm not going to apologize for not posting lately. I have been busy, but that's not intended to be an excuse. I'm starting to wonder what the purpose of a blog is anyway. I created mine to keep people up to date on my time in China and to make it easier to share pictures with people. Frankly, I hate this thing. It feels pretentious. I hate pictures and I hate taking them and that's why none of the ones on my blog are mine, also I don't have a camera. Ian recently bought a nice new one, so maybe I'll bother to put up something interesting. For now, I'll leave the pictures up, but I'm planning to take them down soon and archive them somewhere. So, for those who like them, please save copies, because they won't be there forever. I haven't really figured out what to do with this space after I go home, in about 7 weeks. A friend of mine referred to blogs as verbal diarhea. Initially I was shocked because I couldn't imagine my love for writing treated that way, but now that I've read all the shit that other people put on their blogs about their boring lives and complaining cryptically about nothing, I'm inclined to agree with him.

There's this one blog a bunch of us read that's done by one of our fellow foreign teachers. Of course, he doesn't know that we read it and that's part of the fun. You see, people forget that the world wide web is public and anyone can read whatever whiny crap you unload onto it. Which becomes infinitely amusing when you accidently come across your colleaugue's blog while aimlessly surfing and/or googling your own name. So, of course, we read this guy's blog to see what's he's written about us and the people we know. Aside from that, I'm not really interested in his incredibly verbose self-glorified rambling.

Thinking about going home has motivated me in various ways and now I'm thinking about my blog and whether or not I'm contributing to the verbal septic tank that is modern blogging. I saw one today that was interesting. It's done by a girl named Helena. She's a FT in Wuxi and from what I can see, has a blog for something more than complaining about China, which seems to be the norm. I'll put up a link to it later maybe. I kind of wish that I'd read it a little earlier. I've kind of neglected to get to know her, and I think that was a mistake. It's refreshing to read something good for a change.

Anyway, so I'm going home on March 13 for a break and then I don't know what after that. I'll make that decision after I sober up from my welcome home parties. I'm not happy about the election result. But, I'm trying to be positive and hope that with such a minority, Harper won't actually be able to accomplish anything disastrous and we'll get a new Liberal party leader in time for the next election, at which point everyone will forget about how much of a tool Martin was. Well, that's my free speech exercise of the day.

6:36 AM