Travel

January 27
poland
Haven't posted anything in a while. I have some issues with msn spaces. I was going to move to blogspot but their method of uploading photos is aggravating, so I gave up on that. I'm considering some sort of facebook thing, but they seem kinda nazi about security and I'm not up for faceless internet corporations telling me what I can and can't do, so I think I'll continue to abstain from jumping on that train.

Anyway, thinking of heading out to Poland in the fall for a semester at the Jagellonian University. Things are going well with that so far, but I won't know for sure until February and then I'll have to do a bunch of stupid things with the University of Guelph to prove I'm not going to be a liability. Like take a online travel preparedness course. I don't really feel it's necessary to learn how to make lists of things to pack or take multiple choice quizzes on travel safety.

I might go to China for a few months before Poland to make some extra money, and because I can. Then I was thinking I'll fly out to England on the way to Poland (from Canada) because I might to able to get some cheaper plane tickets by stopping in London. I also have some friends there I'd like to see, but that's a more detailed level of planning to be reserved for August.

So that's my update. Decisions re: blog to come soon.

11:38 AM

May 01
Italy - in slightly more detail
As promised, I am going to give you a bit more detail about the trip. For the sake of convenience, I'll break it into three parts, as with the pictures - Rome, Florence and Venice.

Rome

First we took two flights to Rome from Toronto, stopping in Amsterdam. I'm not going to bother describing the flights, too many of them to talk about every one. So the first day in Rome we went to the Vatican. The first group of pictures are from the Vatican Museum and the Pope's garden. We went to see the Sistine Chapel as well, but you can't take pictures there, but I was able to take pictures of the staircase leading out. Beside the Sistine CHapel is St. Peter's Basillica and square. The Basillica is huge and is the place where they put all the dead popes, as you can see. Then I have a bunch of pictures from St. Peter's square including the current Pope's residence. From there we went to the Colluseum, which is the second major group of photos. Later that night we went to the Pantheon, which is the large domed temple with the hole in the roof. From there we went to a large fountain which is quite famous and beautiful. After that we walked to a restuarant built in the ruins of the ancient amphitheatre I think, which is where Caesar is rumored to have been assasinated. The musicians serenaded my Nana.

Florence

So the next day we headed to Florence by bus. In Florence we saw numerous Churches, including Santa Maria Croce where Gallileo, Dante, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Rossini and Florence Nightengale were buried. Also a bunch of pictures of statues including copies of the David. We did see the original, but it's no cameras allowed. In the evening we headed just outside Florence to old Monastery that's worth millions of Euros but only houses 6 monks who spend their days making really potent liquor and honey. Anyway, it's really beautiful. So, the next day we headed off to Verona, where the story of Romeo and Juliette comes from. I took pictures of Juliette's balcony and Juliette's oft molested breast. Apparently, it gives you good luck in love, or something like that. We only stopped for lunch and then moved on.

Venice

So in Venice. The first thing we did was go on a Gondola ride. Our Gondola was half full, so there was more champagne to go around. I took quite a few pictures of the "streets" of Venice this way. After the tour, we ended up in St. Mark's square for more pictures and obese pigeons. There are also some pictures of St. Mark's Basillica and its four horses of the apocalypse. Also the Palace of the Doges. We also did qute a bt of shopping in Venice. From there, we had to head back to Rome via Orvieto, which is a classic Etruscan settlment on a hill and is famous for wines. We had to take a cablecar to get up there.

The next day we got up very very early to go to the airport and catch our flight home. I'm a complete idiot and lost my ticket, but we were able to get it replaced in time to catch the flight to Amsterdam. We had four hours there so much shopping was done. Then we headed back to Toronto.

5:38 PM

April 18
Italy
Well I'm back from Italy now and I have something like 400 pictures to show for it - i did put all of them up. But most of them, so take a look if you have like an hour to spare. Anyway, I'll write more of a story about it later when I'm less jet lagged. But the pictures are all up anyway. I haven't really edited them at all so some of them are a little blurry or dark. You'll just have to deal with it for now.
12:15 AM

March 22
escaping again.
So, I've been home for 10 days now and I'm so incredibly completely bored. I've never been this bored before in my whole life and it hasn't even been two weeks yet. How did I ever make it through summer holiday? Eventually I'll get a job - but not until I get back from Italy in April. Yay, escaping. Anyway, my Nana and I have planned a trip to Italy from April 8th to the 16th. We're going to Rome then Florence and then Venice, and back to Rome, with a possible stop in Verona. I'm pretty excited about it. I went to Chapters (like I need an excuse) last night and picked up a phrase book and guide book, so I spent some time last night learning Italian. It's a lot more complicated than Chinese, though I'm sure that sounds hard to believe. I'd love to spend some time working in Italy. I have a friend who spent some time teaching English there. Unfortunately, It's difficult for me to work there without an EU passport. But, I'm ready to learn a new language, so maybe I'll make some business contacts while I'm there on my vacation. Seems like every time I go anywhere I get offered a job, which will be handy if I ever can't find a job teaching kindergarten or want to work in a trade company in LA as that girl who can speak Chinese and look pretty.

So, now that I have something to look forward to, things are getting better. I managed to get out of bed before 5 pm two days in a row now and I've got some things to do before I leave - laundry, return my broken luggage to the store, pack, learn about Italy, learn some useful Italian like "please leave me alone" and "I want some coffee" or "your fettuccini noodle is obstructing my view of Michelangelo's David" etc.

Of course, there's also the fun of banking, credit cards, student loans, taxes, and re-establishing a home to take care of, all of which make my spoiled ass want to run back to China and my well-paid but still entirely affordable cleaning lady.
4:35 PM

March 20
mechanical weather failure
I'm back in Guelph now, well actually, I've been here for a week. My flight left Beijing last Monday. My only real problem was my luggage. I managed to get it all in underweight, except for my carry-on which was apparently 2 kg overweight even though there doesn't appear to be any posted weight limit for carry-on luggage on any airline anywhere. SO, they told me to go the duty free and put some of my stuff in plastic bags...

The flight was only half full and I had a few seats to myself which made it a lot more comfortable. I managed to get some sleep on the plane and it wasn't too busy or crowded. We flew away from the sun so we had darkness most of the flight, which kept the air temperature down as well as made it easy to sleep. On arrival in Vancouver, we flew low over the coast, which was amazingly beautiful to see. I spent an hour waiting in Customs there which was horrible. The woman standing in front of me was going on about "those damn asians" slowing everything down. She let me go in front of her though because I had a connection in fifteen minutes and didn't want to miss it. It's probably a good thing she's home though.

So I ran around the airport trying to make it on time and I finally got to the gate - via Tim Horton's - and it was delayed for no reason, fine. An hour later it was delayed again - mechanical failure. Then delayed again, fog in Toronto, fine. Delayed again, more fog in Toronto. Delayed again, still fog in Toronto. Delayed again, fueling. Delayed again, waiting for the captain.... delayed again - too much fuel on the plane? Here's the explanation we got - we were on a 767 and they wanted to switch us to an airbus because it's bigger and they could accomodate all the people on all the other Toronto flights they had cancelled, so they switched our 767 with an airbus headed to Hong Kong - which probably would be half full considering it's the low season for China (after Spring Festival). The result was that they had to de-fuel the airbus because it was already fueled for Hong Kong and a plane can't land with too much fuel in the wings otherwise they'll break off, or something, I won't admit to having a complete understanding of this. Plus, they waste fuel carrying fuel.

Anyway, the flight was supposed to take off at 1:30 pm PST and it took off at 7 pm (only half full), so that's almost six hours. When my parents called Air Canada to find out what time I'd be landing, they said it would be around 11 pm EST - we didn't even take off by then. Basically, no one employed by Air Canada seemed to have any idea what was happening. But here's the thing - my flight was supposed to take off at 1:30 pm PST and the flight to Hong Kong was supposed to leave at 2:00 pm PST (there's only one flight), so if they were going to switch the planes, they knew that way before I even landed in Vancouver. Furthermore, why did they wait until 6 to tell us and why the fuck did they tell us it was weather in Toronto when that had nothing to do with the fact that they were still fucking around taking fuel out of the plane? Either they're lying or they're fucking idiots. The thing that pisses me off the most is that I could have been doing something in Vancouver for 6 hours since they clearly knew we weren't going to be leaving for a while. I honestly think the weather story they were using was an attempt to deny responsibility for the delay, since Air Canada is not responsible for hotel fees and flight changes when the cause is weather. Weather clearly wasn't a factor in the delay since the fog cleared up hours before we left Vancouver.

We ended up landing about 2 am EST and I went straight home from there. It took them forever to get the luggage off the plane, but the airport was dead, so it made things faster.

Anyway, now I'm home. I haven't been jetlagged because I was awake for almost two days and my bodyclock has been completely reset. I've still been using the jetlag excuse to get out of doing anything useful though. I have some more pictures to put up from Beijing and from some other things I didn't get around to, so those will come.
5:31 PM

March 09
Beijing
So I'm in beijing now staying with Stacey and Dave. Beijing is very historical, but annoying because eveyone here keeps lying to me in order to scam money from me and I can't understnad anything they are saying because Beijing people have really thick accents that I'm not used to hearing. Also it's cold. So it's been a frustrating couple of days but worth it. Monday I flew here by plane and dragged my heavy luggage all over Beijing's inconvenient and access-unfriendly transit system. Tuesday I slept most of the day and then wandered around Tian'AnMen Sqaure until after dark when the PLA everyone off the square for some unknown reason. The square was pretty beautiful all lit up. It would have been more fun if every third person didn't accost me to buy postcards, maps and Mao memorabilia and every fifteenth person ask me where I'm from and then tell me they want to take me to some one-day-only National Art Exhibition that is in no way related to the nation and is every day. But that's just more people trying to scam me. Anyway, I wen back the next day to see Mao's embalmed body, but it was Women's Day, which is actually an important holiday here so everything was shut down, so I came back to the apartment and spent the rest of the day tryng to register for my courses, which was largely unsuccessful and time consuming. As a sidenote, I was able to register at 8:30, because apparently, that's when the day officially starts at my university. Most people would say it started at midnight. 24 hour registration my ass. Anyway, so today I got uo early again - this two days in a row now - and got on a subway and then a bus and then a taxi to MuTianYu, which is one of the more accessible sections of the Great Wall. I was feeling energetic, well, mostly I was irritated at the women in the ticket office yelling bad annoying chinglish at me, so I decided not to take the cable car to the top and toboggan ride down, and walk. After about three sets of stairs I was reallt regretting that decision and I pushed on and half an hour later I was at the top, of the lower section of the wall. Now the wall in this section has been rebuilt for tourism so it's not really authentic. I wanted to see the older sections, which were at the highest section of the wall. So, I walked up and along the wall for two more hours and finally got to the top of the highest part of the wall which was incredibly steep and a little dangerous. But at the top, the reconstruction ended and i was able to take pictures of the old, more original wall. I'm sure the ruins weren't the original ruins since the wall's been rebuilt a bunch of times over the past few thousand years. I'm in a lot of pain now, but i feel a sense of accomplishment. The climb got a lot easier when I got up into the fesher non-polluted air and it was pretty cool to see something so famous. Plus, the whole place was empty of tourists so it was perfectly silent and peaceful, which for someone living in China, is pretty damn rare. Anyway, there are pictures to come as soon as I figure out how to upload them - tomorrow probably. Anyway, so tomorrow is Summer Palace and if I have time, also the forbidden city and Mao, but we'll see. Weekend will be shopping and repacking. Monday will be heading for Canada. Tuesday will be sleeping and meting with a professor to get into a course about modern Chinese politics. Course registratin is so damn inconvenient this year. That is all.
10:19 AM

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

October 14
October National Holiday
We had nine days of holiday for the Chinese National day, so we went west to Xi'An by train, which took 18 hours. We had beds though, so it wasn't too bad. We arrived there at 5 in the morning and it was sooo cold there. I was totally unprepared for it. We met Jessie and her friends Zak and Chelsie (forgive me if I spelled that wrong) and Talwyn two hours later and headed straight for the Terracotta Warriors, which were amazing. In fact, most of the soldiers have not been excavated. Then we went to a recreation of what they think the King's Tomb would look like if they could excavate it, which they can't because according to records, they filled the tomb with liquid mercury to resemble the Yellow and Yangzi rivers and it could get into the groundwater. Or something like that, I couldn't understand entirely. Then we went to the Queen's Baths, which are a number of pools and bath houses that were built around a natural hot spring from the mountain. Apparantly, the King, although he had a wife, was in love with one of his concubines, whose name is Yang Gui Fei, with whom he spent much time at the baths in Xi'An. After that we went to the hotel and then we had dinner at a Brazilian Bbq place and then tried to go out to the bars but we were all so tired by nine o'clock that we just went back to the hotel to sleep. So much for clubbing in Xi'An!

So the next day we hit the Muslim quarter with the markets and the amazing market food and the temples, which were almost beautiful enough to consider conversion. Soem of it we couldn't see because we weren't muslim, but it was still pretty cool. After that we ate and went to the Drum Tower which is right beside the market, and then we had to catch our train. Now, because it was the holiday, you can't buy return tickets, so you have to get them when you get there. I asked our tour guide to help us, but she was only able to get us tickets to Nanjing, which is still two hours from Wuxi. This train was slow, so it took 20 hours to get there. Then we had to get tickets back to Wuxi, which took forever, but we did get, and then we had four more hours in Nanjing to kill. So we decided to get some food and then we went to Nanjing's Drum tower and looked at some old photos of Nanjing which was really cool. And then we went home. And then we went to Shanghai for the weekend, which was amazing for me, but shitty for Ian. And now we're back to work.
4:55 AM

August 18
More Photo Albums
I've posted some more albums, of admittedly, mostly likely Ian's pictures, although I took a lot of them. Do you define ownership by the photographer or the owner of the camera? Anyway, there are three there - one of our apartment, they're horrible, but it should give you the general idea - one of our ski trip (see below) - and one of our trip to a park on Lake Taihu with Sisi, a friend of ours who is in the picture with me. Taihu is the biggest freshwater lake in China, though freshwater is a bit of a misnomer as the lake is nuclear green and smells almost bad enough to make you vomit. The park, however, is quite beautiful and full of gardens and reconstructed taoist temples. There is also a replica of a byzantine church near there. There are also two pictures taken on the boat - these are pictures of members of the Communist Party of China taking pictures of all of us, because, well, we're so white.

Okay, ski trip. Our school likes to organize various extra-curricular activites, or ECAs in order to help market web, and to be fun I guess. They decided, as one of these, to go to this indoor ski centre in Shanghai. Ian and I went with a couple of the Chinese tutors - Jayce and Sophie - and ten students. This would have been easier with six year olds and the school told me I couldn't put them on leashes, so we spent most of the day trying to find out where the students (mostly adults) were running off to in all different directions. It took almost three hours with the train, the subway and the taxi to get there. The ski centre is designed for more of a thrill crowd I think, because almost every person there had never skiied before. The centre provided light ski suits, boots, skis, gloves, poles and even little sock like things to every patron. The hill at its highest wasn't more than thirty feet high, and it was about fifty feet wide. The outside temperature was somewhere over thirty so it was difficult to keep it quite cold enough inside. As a result, the conditions were like end of March skiing. Everything was wet, and the little snow actually on the hill was pretty slick. This combined with the fact that Chinese people try to ski the same way they drive resulted in a lot of collisions and well, general falling on asses. No one, however, mastered falling as well as Ian on snowboard. He won the best wipeout award with his accidental triple flip. Many onlookers were impressed. But, a good time was had by all. More pictures will be stolen from other people and posted on the site soon.

5:53 AM

August 06
Typhoon
I survived my first ever typhoon. It was mostly just a huge rainstorm that lasted for twenty-four hours straight. The winds were pretty high, though. Apparently it caused some damage in Shanghai - a building fell down and killed a few people and a lot of signs and trees were brought down. It was the most serious storm to hit Shanghai in a long time. Anyway, no damage to my life except a soaking wet balcony, a humid house and a leaky office. So, for anyone following the news, I'm still alive, and still posting. Although, I'm not sure that it was an entirely good idea to open my blog up to the public. I hope all those who read my blog realize that most things are said with a note of humour, and are not intended to be entirely serious, as is the case with my Chinese Job of the Week. Anyway, not dead. Actually, I've always liked big storms, and the rain tends to clean up the area, keep down the dust and kill the unrelenting heat for a little while.

10:48 PM

July 29
Shanghai Museum
Ok, this is just an explanation of the pictures in the photo album. I've assigned arbitrary numbers starting with the picture of the man in the costume.

Pictures 1 -5 were taken in the Chinese Ethnic Minorities Gallery. China has several hundred different minorities, but the government only recognizes fifty or so of them.

1 and 2 - The man in the costume - this is a picture, though a little blurry of a man in a traditional Tibeten woven wool coat. We also took a picture of the sign beside the display. Ian was amazed not because he looked cool, but because this kind of dress was still quite popular in the late 20th century, so basically the eighties and the ninties. I guess that gives you an idea of how China is developing. But, then again, everybody dressed terribly in the eighties.

3 and 4 - This is a hand carved bookshelf, made from one solid piece of wood. I think this is also Tibetan. Apparently, they like to sit on the ground to read.

5 - This is a ceremonial Tibetan mask. With bad light, glass and and a camera with no focus, this picture took forever to take with poor results. But, I think he looks scarier this way.

Jade Gallery

6,7,8 - These are pictures of some cool looking jade carvings. Most of these were made by ethic groups that used to live in the area where Wuxi is now - around Lake Taihu.

Calligraphy Gallery

9-15 - These are pictures of calligraphy from various different dynasties - poems, letters, official documents. The two that don't look like modern Chinese are written in offical and seal scripts, which I know absolutely nothing about aside from the fact that I can't read them.

16 - This is a picture of one of the earliest recordings of the tales of Confucius.

Pottery Gallery

17 and 18 - This is actually a pot shaped like a dragon. The mouth is open and you can put water in it.

22 - This is a pillow shaped like a house. I can't imagine how comfortable it would be to have a pillow made from porceline, but it was quite beautiful.

23 and 24 - This is a blue pot. They somehow managed to make the glaze blue, this isn't paint. It's pretty old too.

25 and 26 - pictures of some other cool pieces in the pottery gallery

27, 28 and 29 - These are some earlier versions of pots made in Yixing city, which is near where I live. Yixing has been famous for teapots since who knows when and is the only place in China where they mine the special purple clay that Yixing is so famous for. These three pots are about 300 years old.

30 - This is the picture of the small red pot. This is quite possibly one of the oldest intact pots in China. It's about 8000 years old and is basically the oldest thing in the museum.

31 - another cool dragon plate

Sculpture Gallery

32-35 - A bunch of pictures of things from the sculpture gallery. Most of the pictures from this didn't turn out because of the light, but we did get a few Buddhas and a dog.

Anyway, that's basically it for the pictures.
3:30 AM

July 28
Shanghai Story Number 2
So, Ian has been here for a week or so now. My friend Jessie from Dongying, Shandong province was going to be in Shanghai for a week for some corporate training, so we decided to head out to meet her for our weekend. Shanghai is really close to Wuxi, so that's easy.

I've put an album of our pictures up, but some explanation is needed, so here it is:

We got our train tickets, got on the train - even though the Wuxi train station is under construction. When we got to Shanghai we had some time to kill before we were going to meet Jessie, so we took the subway down the People's Park and wandered around. It's a very beautiful and well manicured park. The pictures of me in the bamboo were taken there. We were amazed to disover literal swarms of dragonflies around all of the bushes. There were so many that they looked like black clouds. Ian tried to get some pictures, but they fly around too fast to catch on film with his digital camera. But, you can see the bushes.

Anyway, we were headed towards another part of the park when two students said hi to us and we started chatting. Cathy and Friday are students at a university in Xi'An and they were on holiday in Shanghai for a week. They invited us to have some tea, and we had some time, so we went along. We actually ended up in a private little tea shop, where they performaed tea ceremonies. We sat down at this amazing hand carved table and the lady did the ceremony with special teapots and teacups and about eight different kinds of tea. It was really interesting. We had to run, because we were running short of time, so the lady said we could have a special teabox and some tea. Then she brought the bill. She told us that Ian and I owed 1072 RMB. This is an outrageous price for a hotel room let alone a few sips of tea. It turned out the boxes of tea were not free and so we were able to get out of there just paying for the ceremony at a totel of 252 RMB for both of us. Which, isn' really that much when you convert it but was a lot more than I had expected it to be. However, the tea ceremony was worth it. You can see a few pictures of us with the students and the amazing table.

Anyway, once this was all sorted out we were really getting late and had to run - literally - to meet Jessie and the JinJiang Hotel. The subway was packed so tight you couldn't move and it took forever to get to the other end. Then we had to search for the hotel. We tried to get a taxi, but he had no idea. Fortunately, it was pretty close. With four buildings, we had to run around trying to find the lobby and someone who could speka enough english to help us figure out what room Jessie was in. After ten minutes of confusion we figured out that there was more than one JinJiang hotel and that we were at the wrong one, but the concierge was able to give the taxi directions and twenty minutes through rush hour traffic later, we were hugging Jessie and meeting her friend Laura.

After that, we had dinner at an outdoor cafe and then we went to Malone's American Cafe, which is the big foreigner bar in Shanghai - that's where the dark pictures were taken mostly. It was okay, but expensive, and the band was a little lacking in talent.

The next morning, we all headed out for breakfast at McDonalds for pancakes, which are rare here, and then Jessie had to go to work. Ian, Laura and I headed for People's square to go to the Shanghai Museum, where most of the rest of the pictures were taken, but I'll explain those in the next entry for anyone who is interested.

So, we had dinner with Laura and then headed back to Wuxi. Our train ended up being almost an hour late, but fortunately, we were in the soft seat waiting lounge, so we had leather couches and a full bar to entertain us, all for a measely 31 RMB each. China prices can be so disproportionate sometimes.

1:55 AM

June 10
Chinese Dragon Boat Festival
Today is the Dragon Boat Festival and the festival where people throw sticky glutinous rice wrapped in bamboo leaves into the river. There aren't actually any dragon boat races here. Apparently, only in Beijing and Hong Kong. So, basically, there are more dragon boat races in Canada than here... but, here there are real chinese in the boats...

As for the rice thing - here's a blurb that I stole from a website that stole it from the US PRC Embassy website, which is no longer displaying that information on the page, in favour of telling the US that Bush said relations with China are good enough:

"It is generally believed that the festival originated to celebrate the memory of the ancient patriotic poet Qu Yuan. Qu Yuan, a native of the State of Chu during the Warring States Period, repeatedly offered his king proposals aimed at forestalling political corruption. Subsequently, slandered by treacherous court officials, he was sent into exile by the same king he had tried to help. In 278 B.C., the capital of the State of Chu was lost to its enemy the State of Qin and Qu Yuan drowned himself in despair on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month. Aware of the tragedy, the local people living beside the river went out in their boats to try to find his corpse. Every year thereafter on this day people continued to row dragon boats on their local rivers in memory of Qu Yuan's life and death, throwing sections of bamboo filled with rice into the river as an offering. Legend has it that someone once met Qu Yuan's spirit on the bank of the river and was told: 'The food you have given me has all been taken away by the dragon. Hereafter, you should wrap the rice in bamboo leaves tied with five-colored thread. These are the two things that the dragon is most afraid of.' Thus, people began to make zongzi, glutinous rice wrapped in a pyramid shape using bamboo or reed leaves. Today, zongzi is the traditional food for the Dragon Boat Festival still eaten in memory of Qu Yuan."

It should be noted that the rationale for giving Qu Yuan rice is so that the fish will eat the rice instead of Qu Yuan's perpetually rotting corpse. But, hey, it's tradition. Also, glutinous rice, which sounds disgusting is actually really good. It tastes like rice with sauce. Though, it's hard to digest, so you can't eat too much.

10:27 PM

May 31
Shanghai
It was a month ago, but here's my Shanghai story, anyway. For May holiday, which was four days for me, though some other teachers ended up with as much as seven - don't ask me why - I decided to meet up with Stacey and Dave in Shanghai for some shopping and sightseeing. We went to the knockoff market, which was really the highlight of the trip for me, and bargained with the vendors for various things. Dave and I ended up with nice pairs of fake Oakley sunglasses and Stacey got a really pretty traditional silk shirt. The market is entertaining with hundreds of people asking you if you want dvds or rolexes. If somebody makes it, you can a get a pirated version there.

We spent an afternoon at the Shanghai natural history museum, which had a small array of pirated dinosaurs. Stacey insists they are real, I disagree, however, I do admit they had a few real bones there. Anyway, I've posted a picture.

Stacey and I spent a morning trying to find one museum, though we were unsucessful. The museum was a display on the history of sex culture in China, but from what we were able to understand, had moved a few times to various inconspicuous locations.

Stacey and Dave were able to get some great pictures of the Shanghai skyline, both day and night, and I have posted some of these stolen photos as well. I've also put up some photos of Stacey and me looking like tourists.

6:35 AM