Stuck...

I should have known better. The first half of my flight was too good to be true. I had two seats to myself and no crying babies. The second leg is more than making up for that comfort already.

I hate United Airlines. Their service on board isn't great, but what's worse is that they are always running late! Today, my flight is a ridiculous 2.5 hours late (if it arrives at the predicted time). I tried to change my flight to an earlier one, but since I had already rechecked my baggage, they refused to help.

I'm jet lagged and I am getting pissed off really easily. It doesn't help that people go out of their way to make traveling difficult. The guy routing people into various lines for the security check insisted that I had too many bags, but as long as I held some of my stuff in my hands without a bag, THAT was o.k. WHAT?! IT'S THE SAME AMOUNT OF CRAP YOU MORON! Needless to say, it only gets better when you have to practically strip naked for the security check. Take off all of your coats and sweaters (in winter this is a feat in itself), take off your shoes, take your laptop out of the bag and your toiletries too. And, don't forget that you have 15 seconds to get it all back in order before the next person's crap will slam into yours. I don't know anybody that can get their shoes on that fast!

I have been awake for 24 hours now, and I still have at least 7 hours to go before I can sleep well.

35/60

35 out of 60. It looks like a barely passing test grade, but it is way better than that! 35 out of 60 is how many channels on my cable that show the same 7 o'clock news! Dan and I noticed this before, but tonight was the first time we counted, 35! This new information adds to my love of Chinese Cable Television. Is it not just a little ironic that CCTV also stands for Closed Circuit Television?

A little too much holiday cheer...

Or perhaps just a little too much wine last night and too much whining this afternoon. Last night was the staff Christmas party. Though I'm not usually a big drinker, I did have a tad too much. I blame the waitresses who refilled my glass when I wasn't looking. In all honesty, I would be talking to somebody and poof my wine glass was full again. I'm not good at staying sober if I can't count. In spite of my excesses, I had a good time. I danced like it was going out of style, and my legs haven't stopped thanking me for that. I did eventually figure out that the food was downstairs, but it was a little too late to balance out what I had already drunk.

When I got home from the party, I discovered the true disadvantage of not being able to drink water out of the tap. If you're thirsty and have about 10 ounces of water per person to last till morning, you either have to be thirsty or boil water. I was too drunk to be hanging out by the gas stove, so I went thirsty.

Dan and I slept away most of the morning, and at 1:30 I headed over to school. I had the priveledge, yet again, of working on a Sunday. Granted, I enjoy coaching, but I don't enjoy the hour and a half of down time when the kids aren't playing. I don't generally mind hanging out with the kids because I really don't feel that much older than them. I can joke and play around with them and they don't treat me like an old lady. Yet, there are times when all they do is winge. Today was one of them. They complained that one of their friends wasn't allowed to play, they complained about the refs and the scores, they complained about each other, and on and on. I am a complainer, but come on, it's soccer! Have fun, play the game and don't worry about whether or not the refs made a bad call. I'm not sure how some of the kids even knew what a bad call was since they haven't played a whole lot of soccer. The bus ride back to school was also trying as kids insisted on spilling things, yelling and cursing at each other and, you guessed it, complaining! Andrew asked me if I was planning on having kids. I told him I wasn't really sure how anyone could reasonably say yes to that after spending an afternoon with the kids on our teams. A father of one of the boys piped in and said, "Two is manageable, it's just that you have too many." Perhaps.

Why Chinese People Love Hitler: A very long post.

It's been exactly a month and four days since my last post. I am ashamed. At this point, I'm going to have to personally notify people that I've blogged again because they may have assumed me dead. I'm baaaaaaack! I've been seriously overworked, but the semester is almost over and three lovely weeks of rest and relaxation will soon be mine. O.K. so there might not be much rest or relaxation for that matter, but I will get to spend massive amounts of time with friends and family, and that makes me happy. Needless to say, my lungs could use the trip out of Beijing. They scream for clean air every time I find myself running to work.

Not a whole lot has happened in a month, actually. I started studying Chinese characters and stopped again. I'm sure you're surprised. I worked, coached, worked some more, ate and slept a lot. I haven't had a single work-free weekend since October holiday!

Last weekend we met up with the Aleonards (Dan's parents' friends from Carriers) and their friends for dinner. It was fun. I spoke French till my head was about to explode and then had trouble switching back to Chinese. It's sort of reminiscent of my sophomore year of college when I had trouble keeping Russian, Spanish and French in their proper places. I have also noticed my Spanish waning, but there isn't a whole lot I can do about it at the moment.

This past Wednesday I bussed my butt out to Changping to visit Dan and our village people. It was not an average visit with them! As a matter of fact, I think I got more of a cultural education in two hours than I've had in the past six months. I'm well aware that there is so much about Chinese culture and people that I don't understand, but this was pretty jaw dropping.

To start the night off right, it was just Song Bo and I chatting. For some reason I asked her if she didn't have much time to rest because of her job. Her response was to tell me she was pregnant. Uh, congratulations? I wasn't quite sure it was a good thing since she spent the whole last year telling me how she didn't want kids. But then, maybe that's just what Chinese people say. So she told me exactly how many days pregnant she was, which took me an absurdly long time to figure out. I think I was expecting her to talk about months, but she was telling me 45 days. Since the word for days and money sounds pretty much the same, I was a little confused. She talked about how she felt fine and had lots of energy and that she was planning to work until she was seven or eight months pregnant. I said I thought that was a good thing... at which point Dan arrived.

Thinking our previous conversation was something to be excited about, I blurted it out first thing. "She's pregnant!" Dan turned to her and asked in Chinese and she got all weird and said, "No, no, no..." And I was wondering if I really missed something in our conversation during the last half hour. So, I asked, "You're not?" "Bu hao yi se (It's embarassing)," she said.

Ooops. Apparently, only women can talk to women about that kind of thing and men to men. Yeah. HUGE faux pas. So, in an effort to down play my aweful social skills Dan CONTINUED to talk about it, until I told him to shut up, he didn't know anything. And he told Song Bo that he didn't know anything, but I think it was lost in the cultural translation.

Later in the evening, when Luo Mo Cong came back, we were just sitting around chatting and the news was on. It was something about protests in Taiwan. The conversation that ensued was long, so I'll get to the salient points. Basically, both of them thought China should just go to war with Taiwan. They insisted that it is Chinese and that it cannot exist appart from China. Luo Mo Cong seemed to think the best course of action would be to just bom the crap out of the country. Dan made the point that if you kill all the people and flatten the country, there won't be any Taiwan. "Mei wen ti (No problem)," was his response. It was at about that point in the conversation that our jaws dropped, and we didn't think they would go any lower, but they did.

This led to a conversation about rulers and who were great rulers. His list consisted of Deng Xiao Ping, Napolean, and... HITLER! I don't think I've ever seen Dan look so stupified. See the dramatic recreation below.


Luo Mo Cong talked about those three people for about half an hour. Deng Xiao Ping was great, according to him, because he was a good leader. When Tibet wanted independence he went in and killed them all (this proud nationalistic outpouring was accompanied by gestures in case we weren't sure what he meant by killing). Napolean was great because he killed people and presumably Hitler as well, though to be completely honest both Dan and I were in a fuzzy state of shock. Dan's jaw reached its lowest point when Luo Mo Cong said, "Wo hen xi huan Hi te le (I really like Hitler)." At that point we decided it was probably appropriate to tell him he shouldn't say that to foreigners. He explained that Chinese people didn't care if a few thousand people were killed and we felt he had missed the point. "Yeah, but, you can't say you like Hitler." He still didn't get it. "It's like if we said we really liked the Japanese, they're really great people." "Oh, bu, bu, bu... (no, no, no)." Chinese people dislike the Japanese, to put it lightly, so he understood.

After all of that, I was starving. Dan and I went to a restaurant and I ate a pound and a half of dumplings! What's weird is that I didn't even feel full after that. The next morning I had a stomach ache, but details.

The rest of the week has been far less interesting. I made truffles last night, gave end of semester exams at school and visited my first dentist outside of Bath, convinced I had cavities. I was wrong, according to the dentist, but that doesn't change the fact that my teeth are sensitive. Her advice... don't eat sour, hot, or cold... and pray tell, what shall I eat? Melted ice cream ought to do it... or perhaps room temperature lettuce... mmmm! Anyway, I'm glad there's nothing to be fixed. It had been four years since I'd been to have a cleaning, but she said she couldn't tell. God bless whoever invented those spinning toothbrushes!

Signing out from an absurdly long post, but before I do I'd like to let you in on a little bit of news you might not get in your part of the world. There's a crisis in Thailand. There aren't enough pink polo shirts! Seriously, this made CNN news here. The Thai government actually produced 40,000 pink polo shirts to avoid a price increase. Why pink? Because the king wore a pink vest when he left the hospital a week ago. Wow. I mean, they have good food, but wow.