SZ

more random photos from shenzhen.

some cool horse architecute in really the middle of nowhere.
a ghetto that is about to be torn down (i think)
and notice to Mat and Greg, fear the ackward photo when i have my camera and you guys grow facial hair.

shenzhen: the return

i have not written on this thing for ever, i hope people still read it.
but i just got back from shenzhen where i spent the christmas holiday. it was still damn hot and the skateboarding was awesome as ever.
here are some pictures of random crap i took while i was there.
the first one is me and greg getting nuts for the holidays
For christmas day it self i went to a christmas gift exchange, limit of 20kuai for a present. so i bought some toy guns, really its what i wanted for christmas.and in the spirit of giving i got crakers back. at least i made this Che Guevaro dude happy.

have a good new year!

Sunday was boring the hell out of me so i labored to get myself out of bed and go take some photos and try and enjoy myself some. I jumped on the only bus i sort of know and headed in a direction i have never been before. It ended up being pretty similar to the rest of town. I did see the olympics facility that they are building (it acutally looked like they just started). It supposed to be run by wind and stuff, but I would not be surprised if they pull backa curtain and they have 1000 chinese on bikes making power. But i also got some pictures of some dudes squid kite that he left on cruise control. I then went to the dock area and as soon as this dude saw my camrea he insisted i take a photo of his crabs. The lighting kind of made it look cool.
thats really all, not much more to say.

an introduction to my thrown.

well i know it may seem weird to talk about your bathroom. but the "can" is something most people take for granted. In China you have many types, from insanely elegant to a hole in the ground, and i have tried them all but really wish i had not tried to later. but here is the one in my current residence. The washing machine is not a permanent fixture, it is moved in and out as i need it to be. But the one main difference that my place has that the many places dont is that i have to fill the washer up, and on top of that i have to fill a bucket with water from the sink every time i want to flush the toilet. which seems crude but is really not that bad when you think about it. It is kind of a bitch to wash my clothes in hot water, but i figured out that since the shower is just right there i can just use that water to fill the washer when hot water is a must. It weird when you start to feel like a western toilet is a gift not a necessity.

Burn one down

there is a custome in China to burn money for the people in your family that have died. Apparently the after life is pretty boring if you aint got the loot. So people buy fake money and burn that shit down to mourn thiet loved ones. Seems kind of weird to me, but hell when in ROme right? So about a week ago, i have no idea why, everyone in my neighborhood took part in some good old money burning. Later that night I found some non burnt Benjermins on the ground and took them home. I hope it is not a bad omen to steal a dead persons fake money.
I then burnt the hell out of it (DUHHH). man it feels like i am burning threw money these days.
god i am lame!

b-day blow out

i guess after 2 of them they just dont really hold the same kick they used to.

could not have said it better my self

浪费时间

你好
so i was bored and took some pictures of some random crap that i found interesting or funny. the can of fruit juice was just so damn funny the first time i saw it i had to buy it. It tasted weird, but not too bad.
then there is the basketball magazine. I bought it some for practice, but got aggtivated because they have really bad chinese names for every one. i.e Kobe is 抠比（kou bi) which sounds like his name, but it has no meaning and in chinese you dont capitalize. so imagine running into a name like Zydrunas Illguaskis but in chinese. So i gave up. but the cover is awesome because Kobe plays for the lakers (the yellow jersey) and has never worn the red Bulls jersey. Its completely Photoshopped. Also it would be hella illegal in the states to do that, considering they just faked a photo of him. And i doubt he is getting paid for that shit.
then there is the money. dont know why i took a photo of it. Really its just to illustrate the whole Quantity vs. Quality issue. but then again i normally use the dollar and that is not worth the paper it is printed on.
then we have just a creepy artsy shot of the street i live on, at around 3am. just bored walking back from a 酒吧，
i hopefully will have something good to tell everyone next week! keep your fingers crossed.


edit: next time i will try and make sure the photos are not in the wrong directon.

so i went to beijing to see my friend Brian a couple weeks ago. and i took like 4 pictures all together. and here they are. i was only there for a couple days and i really love that city. It is like a break from China to go there and actually see what could resemble a world city some day. I have yet to go to Shanghai but i hear that place is like many world famous cities. So here are some pictures of skate spots. But i put those up because of the photo i include of the dead mice and glass in the gutter.This skate spot was a huge area for recreation, had ping-pong tables and all that jazz. But on the other hand it had dead mice and broken glass everywhere. also there was some steps that went down to nothing (totally a chinese thing) and at the bottom there was just piles of human shit. it was gnarly as hell. This place had to have been a shitter for bums for a long time. And this is China, they are trying to change. But change in attitude come a lot slower than change in how tall your buildings are and how much money you make. Picture China as a giant Beverly Hillbillies. You can take the china man off the farm but you cant stop him from taking a shit in an empty hall way.
also the other photo is from Brians apartment. its about 26 stories up. Its a modest place, still nice. but they have an elevator girl that pushes the buttons for you. He lives in a nice place, but not nice enough to justify elevator assistance ( does anywhere justify that?). just goes to show that labor is damn cheap here. i dont want to make China to sound absolutely horrible so i will stop now.

behind the language

so now that i can speak a little bit of chinese i think that i can say some things about the language. i am only doing this because so many people back home have asked me if i am learning chinese. and I am, but i would like to share some general knowledge of the language.
So, we all know that chinese uses charecters. They do look scary i will tell you that. but each one is built off of parts from others. so there is a method to the madness. the worse part is that there is no real phonetic guide to them. they have some things that help like (jin)近 looks a lot like （xin) 新 they both have a similar right side. look at them in a big font to realize it. but others like (wang) 往 and (zhu) 住 look very similar and have nothing in common. some are pictures as well like (ren)人, its a fucked up looking person. and ren means person and people. from there you take 人 add another 人， and get （cong) 从, which means to follow. so the charecter has two people following each other. it also means from, that makes some sense. but that works out hardly ever.
the charecters are really not that hard. i can remember 40-60 new works in about a week or so. so its not impossible. the hard part is that there only about 500 sounds in chinese. That means that EVERY word falls into those sounds. for instance there are about 100 different meanings for the sound SHI. some are more used than others. but that can make for some interesting situations.
Probably one of the worse things is that the average Joe ( or really average Wang) has really bad chinese. If your poor you dont get a good education, plain and simple. So a lot of people have bad chinese and are hard as hell to understand. they also speak in ways that could have many meanings, but you have to know what it means for that situatuion. for instance a bus driver asking if there is anybody for the next stop will just yell XIA(下）! which has about 20 different meanings, it just so happens to sort of mean to get off the bus. its hard to explain and things like that dont really happen in english
the last thing is that there are four tones in chinese. that just means that any word can be said four different ways and mean four different things. so this was made to along with the fact that many words have the same phonetics. but its totall bullshit. no one uses them, it just does not make sense to change the pitch of your voice all the time. So something that was supposed to clarify the language has just muddeled it up. YEAH!
well that is the basics, then there is the fact that the charecters have gone through simplifications in the past ( some up words of 40 strokes). so they have lost a lot of the differences in them and the are no longer pictures of what they meant.
thanks for taking time to read this. it is a real basic explanation of what i have been doing for 7 months here.

they all look not a like

well i had a talk with my brother last night and he brought up some interesting questions that i would like to answer. manly being that i am bored and forgot to upload my pictuers of my Beijing trip last weekend.
But the first was asked after i mentioned that Qingdao has 30,000 koreans and maybe 20,000 japanese. he asked if i could tell the difference. now lets just take this as not an "all them asians look alike" joke and more of how do you tell the difference between a Frenchie and an American? (obvious, Americans dont talk like they have peanut butter stuck to the roof of their mouth). But it is actually really easy, especially with koreans.
they tend to take pride in standing out. All the Korean guys have long hair, and a lot wear hats. Not much of a disguise right? but because of this not chinese person here will have long hair or wear a hat, because they dont want to look like the Koreans. i dont think its because they hate them, i mean would you be happy if someone said you look Canadian?.
the Japanese are harder to spot, but they do stand out. they tend to keep to groups of only japanese people. the chinese and japs do not have a great history of getting along. but, i think the japanese make it worse by staying in only japanese areas. they also tend to hide their japanese-ness, maybe in fear of the chinese. who knows. they also carry themselves with this air of stoic confidence. They as well have different hair cuts then the Chinese.

so thats the way to stereo tpye and pigeon whole about 2.3 billion people. all in two paragraphs!!!! man i am good.

next post will be on languages, and learning them. well more on lack of learning them.

laoshan

yo folks,
this last weekedn i busted out of Qingdao, and went a whole hour away from where i live. But the thing is that it looks nothing like the city. I went to a place called Lao shan ( lao mountain). its famous and stuff. it is supposedly where taoism started, the scenery made some old guys invent some religion. here are the pictures. it was cool and far more scenic then your average Chinese city. they also had some mammoth sized spiders that scared the jesus out of me (was jesus ever in me?). There was also a kick ass beach there too, so overall a day well spent.

some pictures dude

howdy there, we are in the middle of some typhoon BS or something. Not really the end of the world..yet
but here are some random pictures from the shoreside of Qingdao. Its a rather nice area and has some cool stuff to see. like that big red thig for example. It is called the wind of may 5th or something like that. but it marks the day that the Boxer Rebellion started. That is when the chinese decided to expell all the foreigners from its country and go back into the dark ages.
other than that not much here. I put the photo that has the women leaning against the post because it is a funny story. I was taking a some pictures when i saw this lady in my photo and she was possing for her photo for like 10 minutes. I finally looked at who was taking her photo and it was some old lady who was looking threw her camera backwards! it was hillarious to watch them try and take a photo and she had no clue how to use the damn camera. she kept saying that it looks wrong. So i finally stopped laughing and decided to practice my chinese and tell them how to use the damn thing. I went up and said "ni hao ( hello)" and she looked at me then turned around and ingnored me for a minute. Then in proper chinese fashion shuved her camera into me hands and went and possed for me to take a picture, all the while not listening to a damn word i had said. People are just so amazing sometimes.

not all doom and gloom

here are some photos to appease the masses. just some random beach stuff and that kind of jazz.
the one i like the most is the kid giving the thumbs down. He was at the summer camp that i taught at, it sucked everyone hated it. Kids are really the great at telling you the truth.

trains, pains, and anurisms

sorry about the lack of posts. time is harder to come by these days than a chinese man over 5-5. HAHAHA. shit that was lame,
anyways. i do not really have the pictures you all have come to rely on, but i will give you a taste of what China can offer the stupid traveler.
So went to Bejing to sight see and all that before i came to Qingdao, and of course i waited till the last minute (3 days before) to buy train a ticket to Qingdao. The train takes about 7 hours and is a night train, so you really want to have decent seat. I asked for a good seat and they said they had none, but they did have the hard seats left. So i got that thinking that i was going to be spending the night on a bench all uncomfortable or something.
i got to the train about 20 minutes before it left, thinking that would be the prime to get a seat. What i did not realise was that i had no seat. the ticket i got reserved a SPACE on the train for me (if that much). So when i got there i saw that there was just a horde of people tryjng topush their way onto the train. I had two big ass bags with was pretty sure that this ride would suck, but i had no idea how much it would suck. So i got onto the train, this was accomplished by pushing shuving and being a dick. All my efforts got was a standing in a hallwall next to the toilet, So i obviously was not a big enough asshole. SO the train was packed to the brim, shoulder ot shoulder, and we headed off. Stupidly i assumed that people would get off the train at the next few stops and all would be well and in an hour or so i owuld be in a seat and counting sheep till Qingdao. HA!
After about 30 minutes the train stopped and i moved to the side to let all the people i was expecting to leave off the train. ABout 10 people started to push their way to the front of the car, not nearly what i thought. But the worse part was that 100 people were waiting to get on. So after these people some how managed to squeeze and squirm into the train we got going again. i thought this could not get any worse! HAHA, stupid me. Apparently all these people must have been in a rush to get to the train station, because all of them needed to piss once they got on, and i was luckily right by the bathroom doors. For about 25 minutes i endured the chinese politlely askeing to get by ( I.e Elbows to the groin and all major organs) great patience ( trying to open bathroom doors they goddamn know to be full, and then asking if someone is in their (to me for whatever reason) about 100 fucking times) and their great bathroom habits ( i.e shit everywhere, literally).
I dont want to bore you with how many times we stopped and how no one ever got off, but thats what happened 7 and a half hours. It was super bad because it was 4 am when most of this was happening, i was sweating the whole time, my buzz only lasted till the first stop, and the people were just fucking rude pigs. not that all chinese are rude, just every asshole on that train was.
but then to make matters worse the tracks were flooded and we had to stop at a train station outside of qingdao, and wait in the rain for a bus ( 1 and a half hours later it came). I also had no where to go, since we got to QIngdao at 7 am. So i chekced my luggage somewhere, and went to a coffe shop where i pretended to read a book ( horribly might i add) while i was actually face down init sleeping for an hour.
But now everthing is okay, that horror show is over. and i am a better person and all that bullshit i dont actually mean.
take home Lesson for the kids: dont buy the cheap ticket in china, just fly for christs sake.

sorry to rant, but it is a blog, i think thats what god intended these things for.

So I know I have been half assing this whole blog thing, but since no one has really been bothering me about it I figured that it was not a big deal.
So as you should know by now I am living in Qingdao now. Qingdao is on the northern coast of China. Its got the normal 3-5 million people living in the city. The city is supposed to be one of the prettiest cities in china, as far as big cities go. I would sort of agree with that. It has trees lining the streets and the beach is only 15 minutes away from my house. BUT again it’s China, so its not that clean. They are in the process of tearing up all the sidewalks and laying down new tiles for them. So the city looks like its in shambles. Also there are tons of people who sell seafood and other crap on the streets by where I live. They just kind of throw any meat scraps or leftovers onto the street and then leave. So it really can look quite gross and smells bad to boot. But I do like the city, it actually has stuff going on, unlike Shenzhen.
My new job is also better. They pay double what I got before and I work less! Also I am not just some foreigner monkey that they like to parade around. All I have to do is go into a class read some stuff from one of their books and TRY and get them to talk about it. Most of them are high school aged so they wont say anything. So basically I speak English for 50 minutes 3 or four times a day. One of my classes is about grammar I don’t know shit about that, so that will get bad before it gets better. But whatever.
Qingdao is also the city that Tsingtao beer comes from. They are both pronounced the same, one is just a German way of phonetic Chinese (makes no sense, no one uses it) and QIngdao is the proper way of saying the cities name. I arrived right about the time their annual beer festival started, and me being me, I cant turn down a chance to celebrate beer. So me and some people went to check out the festivities. It was actually kind of lame for a beer festival. It was more festival then BEER festival. But I have added some pictures for those who care. I think the fact that the average Chinese person gets wasted off of two beers really made the beer drinking odd. In about an hour most of the people were too drunk to do anything. Some of the more ruckus types got up on tables and danced shirtless. The worst/best part was that in a giant room of about 500 people I was the only foreigner so everyone wanted to ganbei me. Ganbei literally means “dry glass” ( I think you get the idea of what you have to do when someone says “dry glass”), so by the time we found a seat I hand ganbei’ed about 3 or four times. It just went down hill from there. But was fun never the less. Here are some pics, enjoy and try sending me some emails, I am bored as shit most of the time.
Oww I guess the pictures might need an intro. One of is beer ans squid legs, they go to gether so well! Not nearly as well as the monkey brains we ate with the next beer (joking, maybe). The others are of the people I went with. And the last is just a little cultural take on china. There was not parking close enough to suit the people who went to the festival so they just started to park where ever they damn well pleased. Like in the middle of the street.. on the wrong side. Awesome.

photo shopped wall

so these are my " i am so bored that i will use i photo to change my great wall photos". love them or leave them i guess. but the one of me is not photo shopped, there is no BADASS filter to add to a photo.