Christmas

I'll be the first one to admit that Christmas is a little different out here. Actually, it's a lot different. Other than the things that my friends and I have done, there is no way to actually know that it is the Christmas season out here. There are no lights, trees, Santa Clauses, nothing. It isn't entirely bad though; there isn't any commercialism, going into debt over presents, or little old ladies getting run over at Wal-marts. I guess that it is all what you make of it. The past couple of nights some of us have been getting together to watch Christmas movies. It has actually been really busy out here the past couple of weeks. There have been a lot of events to go to and just stuff going on. We had a big Christmas party at the English Corner at the college this past Tuesday. It was a lot of fun and a good opportunity to share a lot with the people there. A huge group from Singapore came out and put on a lot of the music. On Christmas eve a small group of us got together and had our own little candle light Christmas eve (followed by watching Home Alone 2). I also found out on Tuesday night that I'm headed out to the village. Actually I'm leaving in a couple of hours. One of my local friends out here is from a village several hours away (I've heard anywhere from 5-9 hours by car), and her brother is getting married. It'll be a good cultural experience, however I hear it is COLD there. I think it is somewhere around 10,000-10,500 feet and definitely no heating. Actually there probably aren't even windows on the houses, just holes. So that'll be interesting. Okay, well I've got to go pack.

Thanksgiving

So I took a week off from writing last week in honor of Thanksgiving (which is different from other weeks where I just take a week off because I don't get around to writing). The past couple of week out here have been pretty busy though. Last week we only had a few days of class because of the holiday, but there were a lot of opportunities for me to go out with people.

Last Monday I got a call from a friend about a couple of us going and visiting a guy he met. The guy is a tour guide in town and he invited us over to his house for dinner. It ended up being him, two of his friends, one of his friend's girlfriend, his father, and the three of us. We spent about five hours at his house, which is about how long it takes to really have dinner out here. Being out there made me remember how much I enjoy being out in the village. Life is just a lot different being outside of town and in someone's home. So basically getting invited to dinner out here usually involves sitting around for a couple of hours while dinner is being cooked, eating for an hour, and then sitting around for a couple more hours talking and drinking tea. So that's what we did. It was really nice because one of the guys studied to be a cook and it was seriously the best food I've ever had in a village. After dinner we sat around a fire in the kitchen to keep warm and all talked. One of the guys was pretty educated so we talked to him for a while about philosophy (and another guy was a big fan of Nirvana, so we talked about that for a while too). It was good to get out and meet some new guys. I'm planning on going back out there here in the next couple of weeks.

Tuesday night I went with some local friends up to the gym and talked to the owner for a while. He has been asking a lot of questions and the local guys did a great job of answering them for him. It is pretty amazing to see how much he has been changing over the past few months.

Thursday was Thanksgiving and we had a huge get together. There were probably fifteen adults at our party and TONS of food. There are a few people out here who can really cook and the food was really good. The guys also went out and played a game of football. My team actually won, which is pretty amazing considering the other team had all the athletes. I did get to relive the intramural glory days by throwing four td passes and receiving one. It was definitely different from holidays back home, but still a lot of fun.

Tonight I just got home from working out at the gym. One of my good friends here is also an environmental manager in town and we've been spending a lot of time together. Another of my friends and I talked to him for over an hour tonight in the gym and it was a really good conversation. We are planning on grabbing dinner this weekend and talking a little more.

I'll try and be a little better about posting things over this next month. Christmas time is usually kind of busy, so there should be a lot to write about.

Trying to Stay Busy

So as I was saying last week, it is a pretty slow time of year out here. There just isn't really a lot going on. A lot of people are busy with the fall semester of school or just starting jobs (a lot of big jobs hire in waves at certain times of year). So a lot of people have been too busy to do things. I've been able to keep up with a few of my friends though.

On this past Friday night I went and ate dinner with the environmental engineer that I have met. We went to this place a couple of blocks from my house that is this coffee shop. I had seen it before, but over the past few months I had forgotten that it was there. So we went there and had some American food. It was really good and not too expensive. He insisted on paying though, which made me feel a little bad. It isn't uncommon for people to point blank ask about things that are usually a little off subject in America. So during dinner he started asking about things like how much my apartment costs and how much money I would make in America and things like that. He also told me how much he makes, which is about $150/month being an environmental engineer. So when the ticket for dinner came I tried to pay, but he wouldn't let me.

I also had a basketball game this past Saturday morning. We played at the number one middle school in our town. I'm still not 100% sure how the whole school system works because everyone there looked like they were at least in high school. I think some people call middle school high school and others call it high school. I really have no idea. Anyway, we had a big game out there and there were around two hundred students surrounding the court watching. It was a lot of fun except that the rims were about three inches too high. So it was an ugly shooting day, but it was a good chance to get to meet some new guys.

Finally, I've started meeting again with my tutor. He has been missing in action for the past couple of weeks, but we have met together twice this week. Usually we meet for about two hours. We end up talking for about the first forty-five minutes, then always get off subject on something, and then end up playing basketball or watching an episode of Man Vs. Wild. No joke, during one of the episodes he saw something Bear Grylls was eating and said "oohh, that looks pretty good." We've had a few opportunities to talk about other things while we've studied too. He is a guy who has gotten a little off track over the past year or so, but within the past month he is starting to have a renewed interest in things. So even though there are some frustrations, it has been a good time.

Pretty Much a Normal Week

So life out here can be kind of funny sometimes. There are some days where I am out traveling or out heading to some remote village, but for the most part, life out here seems pretty normal. Well, normal to me I guess. It is amazing how quickly we can adapt to different things and our day to day life, no matter how strange it seems to others, can end up being pretty normal. With that being said, the last couple of weeks out here have been . . . pretty normal.

This past week has been pretty slow, which has actually been a blessing. Because I haven't had a lot going on I've been able to get back to normal things like playing basketball, getting to see my friends, and going out to eat with them. I've had a lot of opportunities to catch up with some of the basketball guys this past week. We had a surprise game on Friday afternoon and we played some gov't team. The team was actually really good. They had a guy who was bigger than I am (and who actually knew how to play a little post) and another guy who was at least my size and knew how to get to the basket. I honestly have no idea how we beat them. Well, I kind of do. We basically stuck a big older guy on their big guy and he just fouled him every time he touched the ball. It is kind of cheap and really not the way you are supposed to play basketball, but at the same time they do it to me everyday, so I didn't complain. After the game I went out with five of the guys and we went to some random restaurant that they had heard about. I have no idea how they heard about this place because it was a shack and the food wasn't even all that great. I made the mistake again of letting them order, so we had some pretty random stuff. There were some potatoes cooked under pig fat, some kind of gelatinous intestine thing (which wasn't all that bad), and then, my personal favorite, stinky tofu. I didn't eat it this time though. I figured I ate it last time they ordered it and, since I've tried it once before, I could take a pass on it this time. It was a great time of getting to catch up with the guys and hopefully we are going to get together again this weekend.

I've also been able to run into my environmental engineer friend. I talked to him at the gym last night and we are planning on going out to eat sometime this week. He speaks really good English and he also has some of the best local language out of anyone under thirty that I know. We were talking last night and he was explaining to me about how most people under the age of thirty or forty can't really speak the local language all that well. He is actually the third or fourth person that I've heard that from. With that being said, his language is really good and he is willing to get together and he can give me some tutoring.

Other than that, not a lot is going on out here. I'm planning a few things for next month but other than that I'm just going to class and doing things in town. It is also getting a little colder here. It still gets up to about seventy degrees during the day, but it gets a little chilly at night. All things considered it is really nice for mid-November. I think it just seems colder because there is no carpet, heating, and I have to ride my bike everywhere. Hopefully it'll stay warm for another month until we get out out of class for winter break.

Reconnecting with Friends

So I know this is a little late. I usually try and post blogs on Tuesday evenings, but this week things were a little thrown off with a surprise birthday party. Everybody out here actually did a great job with the surprise except for one guy. About thirty-minutes before I was supposed to meet up with everyone a local guy called me and apologized for not being able to go to the party and wanting to wish me a happy birthday. So I kind of knew going into things. It was still a great night. We went to eat at this local pizza place that is run by an Italian guy. It is about the only place that you can get decent pizza in town. Afterwards we went back for cake and watched some downloaded football on tv.

Other than that this week has been busy with school and meeting a lot of new people. I've started meeting with one of my friends for tutoring. We met a couple of times this week and it has been a lot more fun than tutoring has been in the past. Up until now I have mainly focused on working out of books and learning sentence structure. Now I am finally to the point where our tutoring is mostly conversational. It is a LOT more fun than just learning vocabulary. We are actually talking about going out one of these weekends with my tutor's uncle and going hunting. The word out here for hunting literally translates as 'bird and dog' because you hunt with a falcon and dogs. So that'll be interesting.

I also met a guy this week who is a 24 year-old environmental engineer. He speaks great English and just moved back to town a few months ago after he finished up at university. We've gotten to talk a few times in the gym and we're going to plan on getting together sometime this next week. I've actually had a lot of opportunities this week to reconnect with some people that I haven't seen in a few months. I've made sure and gotten their phone numbers so that, hopefully, we can keep in better touch. I'm currently looking for a local guy to be a roommate. Hopefully one of these guys will work out.

A Crazy Week

So I’m finally getting around to updating this thing. Sorry it has taken a little longer than I was expecting. Things out here have been pretty crazy over the past few days. Classes have all started back and are in full swing. On top of that we had a health clinic this weekend. The clinic was in the village that I spend a lot of time in so I went and helped out. Friday we had some training, and I learned how to take blood pressure (which is a lot harder than you’d think when you have grannies with five layers of clothes on). We had a dental hygienist and a physical therapist come and help out with things. Mostly all I did was help out by filtering water, taking blood pressure, and talking to old grannies who were just sitting around. We made a lot of contacts though and had some really good talks when we went to visit people with follow up. One of my friends also moved back to the U.S. on Sunday after living here for three years. So there was a lot going on with getting her moved and goodbye parties and things like that. Things are definitely going to be different out here. I think I’ve eaten noodles about two meals a day since she’s been gone, and I don’t know when I’m going to get another home cooked meal. There have also been a lot of people sick out here. My roommate and a couple of other guys have caught some kind of bug that has knocked them out of commission for a few days. Today I was the only one in my class. I don’t know if I’ve said a lot about my Tues/Thurs class, but it is pretty hard to sit through. The teacher doesn’t speak English and (literally) for the past week and a half we have been working on learning local songs. So I was a little freaked out when I was the only one who showed up to class today. It actually turned out to be one of the best classes I’ve had since I’ve been here. We still worked on songs for about the first forty-five minutes, but then we spent the next hour having a conversation. We talked about all sorts of random things, but I was just proud I could hold down a conversation for that long. Granted, she can understand a little English, but about 90% of it was in the local language. So maybe all of the random songs I’m learning are paying off. Hopefully things will slow down a little bit this next week. I don’t see how they could be any busier.

A Busy Holiday

So I'm going to apologize up front for this being a little bit late this week. Things out here have been a little bit crazy. Most of last week was spent working on a project, which took up about forty hours. It is going to be a long thing and we've spent about nine hours/day working on it for most of this week too. Being out of school has really helped with getting things done around here too.

One of my good friends is leaving this next week and heading back to The States. Things are definitely going to change around here. For starters, I bet I drop about five pounds in the next month because she won't be around to cook every time we show up at her apartment. It will also just be different because she has been here for the entire time that I've been here (including summer visits). So I guess what I'm saying is, please send food to my roommate and me so that we won't starve.

To celebrate her leave we took off and hiked the Gorge on Monday and Tuesday. There were four of us Westerners and then we had three local friends go with us. Even though the weather wasn't the best, it was still a good time. It was mostly cloudy and you couldn't see the mountains nearly as well as last time, but everyone enjoyed just getting out of town for a while. It was also a good chance to get to talk to our local friends and encourage them.

This next week is going to be pretty crazy. I'm trying not to schedule anything of my own because I know that I'm not going to have a lot of free time. Classes start back on Monday, we have a new family that just moved out here that everyone is trying to get settled, my friend is leaving to head back to the states, and we are also hosting a health clinic in a village. The village is the one that I spend a lot of time in, so I'm helping out with things too. The plan is, as of now, that I'm going to be in charge of the dental hygiene training. I think there is a video and I'm supposed to show how to brush your teeth. I don't know how much more complicated it could be than that though (since they don't sell floss or mouthwash out here). So next week is going to be a little crazy. I'll try and make sure and update this when I have a chance.

Pig Farming

So I don't know if the technical name is pig farming or pig ranching, but either way, I'm going into the business of it. This past week I was out of town and spent about eight days down on a farm. It was a great environment and I learned a lot. There was a hog expert from the states that came out and did a seminar for four days. It was really interesting and I learned things like pig nutrition, how to build sanitary pens, pig development stages, genetics, pig breeding, and how to perform artificial insemination (which definitely falls under the 'more than I ever wanted to know about pigs' category). It was a lot of great information. Also during the week we talked about soil testing and applications in rural settings. It was a great week of training and I'm going to be applying a lot of what I learned soon. The hope is to take what I'm learning out to villages and use that to create some access and build some relationships. Things are really picking up with it and soon we are hoping to create a testing facility in town to use as an example to bring local villagers out to see the technologies. We have actually found a potential site and, hopefully, I'll be working with some locals to get that up and running here in the next month. So things are moving pretty quickly on the whole thing.

In other news, we have a two week holiday from school. It is kind of sad that I'm excited about having a holiday when I've been gone so much lately. I enjoy school and I'm learning a lot, but can you blame me for enjoying a ten day holiday? I have a lot going on in town at the moment, so I don't know if I'll get to do some traveling. Some of us have been tossing around the idea of going out and hiking the Gorge again. We can travel out there, hike it, and travel back in under two days and it'd only cost about $30. So that might be an option. I'll try and keep this updated a little better over the next few weeks now that I'm going to be in town more.

Himalayas

So this week has been a little bit different than most out here. I still had class last week (and went to most of it), but I also had two friends fly down and we took some vacation and backpacked for a while. We traveled out to the deepest gorge in the world and spent two days getting through all of that. It was pretty amazing. On one side you have an 18,000 foot mountain rising straight up from the river, and then on the other side there is a 17,700 foot mountain. It honestly has to be one of the most beautiful places on earth. It was hard to actually hike the trail because we spent so much time looking around at the scenery. Also along the path there were tons of waterfalls and different surroundings at every turn. Because the elevation changed so much we would go from a forest, to a mountain forest, to rocky cliffs in just a few hours. It was a great time of getting to go out with some friends and just enjoy being in the wilderness.

After the two days of hiking the gorge we went and stayed at the bottom of the 17,700 foot mountain. Just to put the mountain in perspective, it would be the second tallest mountain in the United States, behind Mt. McKinley, and it is well over 3,000 feet taller than the tallest mountain in the lower forty-eight states. So it was pretty big and an amazing sight. We set out to climb the mountain on Friday and hiked about six hours up to Base Camp. While eating dinner at Base Camp one of the guys who came to visit started throwing up and had a serious case of altitude sickness. I guess going from 1,000 feet to 13,000 feet in just a few days is not a good idea. Because he was sick the other two guys decided to go down the next day and not attempt to summit with us. My roommate and I took off with our guides at about 4:45am on Saturday and reached the peak at about 9am. I wish that I was cool and could say that the climb to the top was easy, but it was one of the physically most demanding things that I've ever done. We started off taking breaks about once every twenty minutes and by the time we reached the top of the glacier we were taking breaks about once every twenty steps. It is crazy how much altitude can slow you down. We made it to the summit though, took some pictures and then headed back down to Base Camp. The trip down was much easier, however it still took about two and a half hours. At Base Camp we took a short break, ate some lunch, and then made the three hour hike back down to the village. Overall, it was a great trip; however it was incredibly exhausting.

So pretty much the rest of this week I have been trying to catch up on sleep (getting up at 3:50am to climb a mountain will really mess with your sleep cycle) and I've been working on school work. Class is continuing to go well and I'm finally starting to pick up more of the language. I can't really put together complex sentences yet, but I'm getting a lot closer. Hopefully that will fall into place soon. As far as other things going on, I'll be heading out of town on Thursday to spend some time down on a farm. I'll spend about a week there working on some agricultural projects and learning fun things like how to immunize pigs and plant soybeans and all sorts of useful life skills. So if I don't get this updated next week it is because I'm out of pocket and I'll make sure and add more once I get back.

School and Mountains

School and mountains, that pretty much sums up my week. This past week was our first week of class out here. I have two different classes, both of which are teaching me the local language. One meets on Monday and Wednesday mornings, and the other meets on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Both classes have been very good for my language and I'm starting to be able to put together a little more complex sentences. It is pretty strange to finally start to understand this language. The sentence structure is completely different than English (and most any other language on the planet). All of the practice that I've been doing over the summer with learning vocabulary is finally starting to pay off because I can focus on sentence structure instead of trying to understand the actual word meaning. Well, most of the time anyway. It is a little harder in my Tuesday/Thursday class because my teacher doesn't speak English. So basically I'm trying to translate from a language that I haven't formally studied, into English and then back into the local language. Needless to say I'm a little slower with my answers than a lot of the others in the class. But I'm doing really well in my Monday/Wednesday class where the teacher speaks some English.

In more exciting news, I'm heading out of town tomorrow and will be gone for about five days. I have two friends flying in today and then we are heading out, along with my roommate, to go and climb a mountain. There is one big benefit to living out here and it is the mountains. I can get on my bike and ride for about forty-five minutes and be at the base of mountains that are taller than any in the continental U.S. So some friends and I are going to take advantage of this and go and climb one that is a few hours away. This is one of the tallest mountains in the world that is still 'easy' to climb. By easy I mean that it isn't technically hard, but at the same time it is over 17,700 feet and there is a large glacier that we have to climb. So hopefully we'll make it to the top. Two of the guys that are going live at much lower elevation so we are going to take a few extra days to do some lower hiking before we get up too high. I'm a little concerned about someone getting altitude sick or having bad weather, but we're going to take a run at the mountain anyway and see what happens.

In other, and even more exciting, news my local friend who's parents are staying with her (whom I told you about last week) had her mother believe this weekend. Today she will go out 'swimming'. So over all it has been an exciting week out here. Okay, I've got to run and finish packing. I'll post more next week, assuming we make it back from the mountain.

Vacay

So I know that this post is a little overdue. Sorry, things out here have been a little crazy. So over the past week and a half I have been out traveling a lot. I spent about four days down south on an island. Our hotel was right on the beach and had an amazing pool. It wasn't a total vacation (there were still some things I needed to do while I was there) but for the most part it was a great four days of relaxing on the beach. It was hot though. Really hot. I've gotten used to living in the mountains and summers being in the mid-70's and the jump to 95+ degrees is a little bit of a shock. After we left the beach we went to Hong Kong for about five days. I think I suffered from a little bit of culture shock. Everything there is ultra-modern and it would be like taking L.A., filling it with Chinese people and then making it really humid. It was a good break though. While we were there we took in a lot of the sights of Hong Kong (the bay and the peak), went to a few museums, Disneyland, saw a couple of movies, and ate A LOT of Western food. It is strange how when you live in a culture so different that doing things like going to the movies is a nice break and seems so normal. After Hong Kong we traveled up north and spent a couple of days with some friends from college that just arrived. It was good to get to see them again. We got a little carried away with walking, talking and eating lunch and ended up missing our flight out (three traffic accidents on the road there didn't help either). Because we missed our flight, we had to fly back to our city the next day and, instead of spending the $10 on a hotel room, we spent the night hanging out in a 24-hour McDonald's. So needless to say when we got back to town we were exhausted. It was great to be back. When we got home it was about 60-degrees, the sun was shinning and there were mountains and clean air. Vacation is not only good for getting to go somewhere but also to help with appreciating being home.

Before we left my friend's local roommate had her parents come to visit. They live about nine hours away up in the mountains and they are in town to see the doctor about some back-pain. For the three days before we left town my roommate, my friend and I spent the evening teaching them how to play a domino game and then sharing with them. The father, who had never seen a white guy before us, has gone back home but her mother is still in town for at least another week. We are planning on trying to spend some more times playing games and talking to her.

In other news school has started back this week. I have class four days a week. I'm glad that I've been here studying with a tutor for the past five months because, even with having a head start, the learning curve is pretty steep. Class has already been good for my language and I'm starting to finally put some things together.

Finally, I'll be traveling next week. Two friends, my roommate and I are going to be traveling out a couple of hours to climb a 17,300 ft. mountain. It'll be an adventure to say the least.

Randomness

So I don’t really know where to start with the craziness of this past week. Actually random is probably a better description than crazy. It was all pretty normal, well language study and doing my usually weekly things, until Thursday evening. For the past couple of weeks my tutor has been bringing his cousin, who is eight, to our language lessons and I’ve been helping him some with his English. For an eight year old his English is really good. Well, during my Thursday language study I got to meet my tutor’s uncle. He is a very nice guy. He is kind of loud and speaks English really well. It turns out he is something like the regional gov’t guy, which apparently is kind of a big deal. I got to meet him and then he said maybe we could meet up next week. Well, I got a phone call from him at about 6pm and next week turned into meeting him and some friends at 7pm. So he picked me up and went to this random restaurant with all of these middle-aged gov’t officials. Several of them were in from the capital and I think they were kind of big shots. The whole thing turned out to be this college reunion that happens for them, so I really have no idea how I got invited to this. I felt way out of place though. The guy who brought me was a good host and he said it was great that he could work on his English again while I was there. I ended up sitting at the table next to this guy who was already a little tipsy when I got there. He was pouring some kind of local moonshine out of a clear gasoline container and he kept insisting that I drink some. I kept trying to explain to him that I didn’t really want to drink any of it but he didn’t really understand that because EVERYONE here smokes and drinks. So after about an hour we left the restaurant and headed over to another part of town. We ended up at this really cool restaurant/bar that is owned by a Frenchman and we sat outside and tea. There was also a concert that started with a girl singing, a guy on the keyboard, and another old guy that played the flute and saxophone. They weren’t bad except they kept butchering songs from American that haven’t been popular for at least ten years (if ever). I about died laughing when one of the guys sang ‘Don’t Break my Heart’ with this very thick accent. I also heard some John Denver, The Temptations, and Ricky Martin. The best moment had to be during the Ricky Martin song when two of the women and one of the men in our party got out of their chairs, climbed on stage and started dancing. There just aren’t words to describe seeing a drunk, middle-aged, high-ranking Asian official doing the cabbage-patch to a Ricky Martin song. Eventually I managed to talk my friend into taking me home, since it was his son’s bedtime.

Friday morning three of us took off on a bus at 7am to head out to another city to meet up with some friends. The trip up there was supposed to be a five-hour bus ride (which in actuality was 10 ½) and then a three-hour train ride. I think it was about the most miserable bus ride ever. We even took a different way back, which turned out to be a 15 hour bus ride, and that actually seemed a lot better than the one on the way up there. Once we got there the weekend was great. We got to spend some time with some great people and also got some great food. Sometimes I forget that there are actual restaurants that serve good normal food. There are definitely some advantages to living out in the middle of nowhere but as far as good restaurants and travel go, we are definitely lacking.

So things are going to be a little crazy over the next few days. I’ll be taking off this weekend for a little vacation at the beach. I’m looking forward to getting away for a few days before school and everything gets back into full swing. I’ll be gone for a while so I’m pretty sure this thing won’t get updated for at least a week.

Being Caught Up

Things have been good out here over the past week. Everything seems to be slowing down some and getting a little more back to normal after a crazy month in July. To be honest, things have been a little bit on the dull side. It has been great for language study though. I’m back in my routine of trying to get in five hours a day, including time with my tutor. And it feels really good to be fully caught up on emails and paperwork. I’m going to enjoy it because it will probably only last for another week or two.

This upcoming weekend I am planning on traveling with two others to meet up with a guy who lives in the province to our north. While we are there he is going to show us how to set a few things up that we might be able to use down here. It should be an interesting trip. None of us really know where we are going but we have a rough idea of where to get off the bus and hopefully catch another one. It should be a solid day of travel, then we will be there for about two days, and then spend a day traveling back. We will get back to town and be here for about four or five days and then we are taking off for a little bit of training/vacation. I’m definitely excited about that. I love it here and it is beautiful, but a few days on the beach are always a good thing. It will also be nice to have a few days to hang out in Hong Kong. Other than going to Disneyland I’m planning on eating a lot of good American food and maybe doing some shopping. I’m not really a big shopper, but considering that you can’t really buy much of anything here it will be nice to have a few options. You can’t even buy cheese here, much less anything really nice. And once we get back to town I’ll be starting school classes, so I’m pretty sure that I need to enjoy being caught up on things while it lasts.

A Little Bit of Down Time

So things have finally slowed down some over the past week. It has been raining a lot and it has been kind of nice to not have a lot to do that involves being out and about. This past weekend I did get invited to go to a local’s house for a party. I’m not really sure of the name for the celebration but I think it is basically for having all of the wheat harvested and all of the corn planted and having a lot of free time. So what better to do with all the free time than cook a lot of food and have everyone over. It was actually the family that I stayed with my first week out in the village, who are also related to the family I stayed with my second week. It was good to get to see everyone again and I think it was great for my language. I’m finally getting to where I can understand the point of conversations as long as I know the topic. Mainly it is trying to put words together that I know. And I can usually answer back with one-word answers. So basically I sound like a three year old, but it is better than nothing. The baby over there is about a year and a half and he has started walking around everywhere and saying a few words. It is humbling to have a kid who barely speaks saying things better than I can. The party was a lot of fun. The food wasn’t too weird considering that they usually bring out all of the really strange things for celebrations. We even had some things that I figured we would have somewhere back in the States (I mean, why haven’t I seen mashed potatoes that are deep fried into little balls back home?!?). While I was there it kind of struck me how much alike people are. Basically all of the women were in the kitchen cooking and getting everything ready and all of the guys were outside sitting around playing checkers or just sitting around drinking and talking. Except for everyone being shorter and speaking a different language I could have sworn I was at a holiday back in the States.

So this next month is going to be a little crazy again, but in a good way. I’m finally getting to take a little vacation, and I’m looking forward to it. Don’t get me wrong, I love it here and it is a beautiful place to live, but after having been here for almost four months I’m kind of wanting to get out of town for a while. So we’re going to take a trip in the middle of August down to an island to the south that is out in the ocean. We’ll spend about four days on the beach and then head over to Hong Kong for a few days. One of the girls is dying to go to Disneyland while we’re there and so I think we’re going to do that, see some sights, do some shopping, and eat some really good food. I’m also going to have some friends come down to visit me in September and we’re looking at going and climbing a 5,500 meter mountain out here. I’ve actually got to talk to a few more people about that one and make sure that we aren’t going to be getting in way over our heads. Information on things like that is usually kind of spotty when you talk to locals, but from everything I hear it should be doable. I’ll make sure and take lots of pictures!

Volunteers

This past week has been another crazy one. It has been really good though. We have had several volunteer teams out and I have been doing a lot with them. One of the groups has six college students and we have been showing them around and taking them out to villages with us. I’m a fan of having groups come out. I know a lot of people argue that money could be better spent by just sending it to people who are living in other countries instead of paying for travel, but I disagree. I think it is great for people to go on short-term trips because it helps them to catch a vision for what all goes on; plus a lot of people who end up overseas do it because of an experience they had while on a short-term trip. And from this end of things, it is really nice to have a break from the day-to-day routine. I know that everyone thinks it is exciting and different over here, and to some extent it is, but just like everywhere else there becomes a daily routine. So it has been a nice break to get to get to know new people and play tour guide. We have traveled out to some villages and done a lot of walking through areas. The group has also been great in that every time we go out to eat or do something they pay. I mean, I’ve been eating very well this week and have gotten two massages, so I can’t complain.

Other than that it has been a pretty typical week out here. I have been studying language quite a bit and am finally getting to where I can understand a little bit of what people are saying. Being able to speak is a little bit trickier though. I’ve basically gotten to where I can get the point of what people are saying then give out short one word answers that can usually get my point across. It is better than nothing though.

The Earthquake

So this past week has been pretty crazy. It has been good because I've gotten a lot of things done, but there hasn't really been a lot of down time. Most of this week has been spent trying to get some things together for school and my visa and also doing some things with people who have come out to visit. It has been very busy but a lot of fun.

On Friday I went over to a friend's house for his 2 year old son's birthday party. While I was there they told me that there was an earthquake to our south that had destroyed about ten thousand homes. Some people said they could feel it here but I was out playing basketball so I didn't notice it. So while I was there he got a phone call asking if we could bring some food, water, and medical supplies down and possibly help with disaster relief. So my nice slow weekend was pretty much gone with that phone call. I left from the party, threw some things in a bag and then thirty minutes later we were picking up supplies from around town. We got about 900 pounds of rice, twenty boxes of bottle water, a large box filled with medical supplies, 100 pounds of fruit and several boxes of dried noodles to take out there. I was a little worried that our truck wasn't going to make it on some of the mountain roads but it held up just fine. It was about a six hour drive down to the city where everything happened. The trip went by pretty fast and there is amazing scenery all along the drive. One thing that stood out was that there was hardly any damage along the drive down. Even once we got to the city we spent the night in there didn't seem to be very much damage. There were a few concrete walls that had fallen down but a lot of that could have just been from weathering and being old.

The next morning we got up early and took off to meet a gov't contact that was going to take us around to the area that was hardest hit. The area that we were in is very closed off. Anytime a westerner goes out there he must be accompanied by a gov't guide and they basically are there to 'make sure you do what you say you are going to do and nothing else.' Some of the guys we met up with knew this guy so he offered to take us out. I think our guy that we met up with is in charge of all of the schools in that region and so he told us that he would take us to some schools that were in the areas that were hardest hit and we could give them some supplies. He took us around to about three different schools and in all of the towns there were some homes that were cracked and damaged but there was nothing like the '10,000 homes destroyed' that was advertised. Most all of the homes out in this area are made of mud brick and straw and it is no surprise that some of them would have fallen down. Most every place that we went our gov't guide basically would say, "Look at this area. Look how poor these people are. They survived the earthquake but they still need food and we can make sure and distribute it better than you can." So most of the places we went we would have to leave food because we didn't want the man to lose face and not help us anymore. Don't get me wrong, I'm all about giving poor kids food for the winter and things like that but not when there are people who have nothing because of an earthquake that happened just down the road. We gave most of our food away to the schools, which was fine, but we saved a lot of the water, medical supplies and the things like noodles that could be eaten right away.

So for most of the afternoon we wondered if either: 1. We were getting the governmental runaround and not getting to see the area that was hardest hit (which was very likely), or 2. The media out here had blown things way out of proportion (which was also very likely). So at about 3:30 we took the guy back to his office and we made a call to go out without him and see if we could find some things on our own. We took off to the area that we thought the epicenter was at and we soon saw where all of the damage was. We started getting closer to another village and almost all of the homes had walls that had collapsed and were totally destroyed. I don't know if there were 10,000 houses that were destroyed but almost all of them in this small village were gone. The military had established a camp out there where they were organizing relief work and we went in and met with all of the officials there. They were very welcoming of us and I'm sure they did a good job distributing all of the supplies that we brought. We wanted to go out to some of the more remote villages that were hit because we had three trucks with us, but they wouldn't let us go out there; however they did allow us to take a tour of the village that we were in. We had a chance to walk around and talk to a few people and it was heartbreaking to see people who had lost everything. We had an opportunity to go and talk to a few people and they wanted us to take pictures and they all told us about what they had lost. We also had an opportunity to meet with some of the high up gov't officials in that area and make some new contacts out there. Hopefully this area will open up more in the future. People are still trying to figure out a game plan for helping the people who are living in this area.

So after all of that we took off and headed back home. I think we got home at around 2:30am and then were up and running again the next morning. It made for a long weekend but it was really good. This week there has been some visitors come from the states so I have been busy trying to get them set up and taking them around town. My roommate also got here on Monday night and we've been doing some things together. I was supposed to take him out to a village for his first week but we are putting that off until the beginning of next week. I'm sure that will be an 'interesting' experience for him.

The 4th on the 6th

So the crazy month of July has officially begun. There has been a lot going on this past week. A lot of people have been out of town and traveling and I have spent a lot of time trying to get things together for my roommate. He was supposed to arrive here on Saturday but there was some confusion with his ticket and he had to remain in the states until they got everything rebooked.

So the big event of the week has been our 4th of July party. I'm pretty sure that it was the most amazing 4th of July party that has ever been thrown outside of the states. We had about twenty people meet up at a friends house and then we had a cookout, games and some fireworks. One of the guys out here was in a big city over the weekend and he snagged us some American hotdogs and they were amazing. They have hotdogs over here but they are gross. I don't know how it is possible to make hotdogs any sketchier than they are back home but it is. So the American hotdogs were pretty great. One of the guys also brought a lot of marinated pork chops (there isn't a lot of beef out here) and those were pretty amazing. We had all the traditional sides and all of that. It is amazing how big of an effect food has on your life out here. There are very few things that can pick you up (or put you down) as quickly as food. Having a good meal can totally make the week. The college guys that are out here living in the village have had a little bit of a tough time. I think they've had pig heart at least once this past week. So they are totally understanding the point about food. They are living out in the village for a month, so they still have two and a half weeks left. I'm sure they will be having some more strange meals.

After dinner we played a bunch of games. All of the neighbors had fun watching all of the white people run around. I'm not even kidding, they brought out their cameras. The guy I partnered up with and I won most of the events. We had a wheelbarrow race, a three legged race, a watermelon eating contest and an egg toss. After all of the games we went out and had a fireworks show. I was in charge of getting all of the fireworks and, as you would expect, you can get a lot of them for cheap out here. So we had about a thirty minute firework show. It was a lot of fun. We even had the grand finale with some huge fireworks. There were definitely some dogs going crazy in the surrounding neighborhoods once we finished.

So it has been a good week out here. Lots of things are starting up this next week. I'm going to be pretty busy running around and trying to get everything ready. We have several different people coming out to visit and I'll stay pretty busy doing things with them.

Sorry this is a little late

Okay, so I know I’m a little late on posting. I’m actually post dating this one a few days late. For the record it’s not my fault. The internet has been acting up here. Well, not really the internet but the trick I use on the internet to write on my blog. There is no such thing as free speech here so things like blogs are blocked and, unless you know a trick or two, you can’t access them. So other than having internet issues, it has been a pretty good week out here. I’ve been working with my language tutor a lot over the past week. I have a new tutor and I think that we are making good progress on things. For the first eight weeks that I was out here I was doing a language sprint where I spent 4-5 hours a day working on language. Most of the language study was vocabulary based, so I was learning a lot of words but not really how to communicate. This past week I’ve switched to my language book that I will use at school and it is a lot more conversational based. It has helped out a lot. There have been a lot of ‘ah ha’ moments this past week with language, which is always encouraging. My tutor is a local taxi driver and he speaks a little bit of English. He is very good about pronouncing things and, after I tell him to slow down a few times, he says things slowly. The local language out here is just going to take time to learn. I mean, there are maybe only ten westerners who have ever learned this language and the only one that I know said it took her a year and a half before she became conversational. There are some big payoffs with learning the local language though. The big one is that everyone wants to talk to you. I’ve gotten into a lot of conversations because of language and, once I learn how to speak more and tell some stories, I think this will help out a lot. It is just getting to that point that is going to be hard.

Other than language this week has been about the same as always. It has been a busy week though. In less than a week I’m going to have a new roommate living with me and we will have a lot of people coming out to visit over the next month. I’ve spent a lot of time this week trying to get things set up for him and getting things together for his time here. I’ve gotten to do a few fun things though. This last weekend I went out on a bike ride to a small village with a couple of local friends. The village is supposedly where the people here originated and it is right by the mountain. The village wasn’t anything to write home about. It was small and most everything was just a tourist trap. The view of the mountain was great though. It was fun just to get out in the mountains for a while.

One other thing this past week. On Friday I went out with 'A' to eat lunch. There is this restaurant in town that has amazing cheeseburgers. I don't know why it took me three months to finally eat there, but that burger was amazing. I think it would even be really good by American standards. So after lunch she had to go and try to set up some things for a group coming out in a couple of weeks, so I figured I'd go with her so she didn't have to go out to the village alone. The village is sort of in town but not really. It is still in the valley but it is about a fifteen to twenty minute drive out of town. The trip out there is great because there are green mountains all around. We got out to the village and basically found out what we were working on was a dead end, but we decided to go and talk to a lady she knows that runs a small restaurant. And by small restaurant, I mean a hut with an open fire pit and a bunch of tables. So we sat around in there for a little while talking to the lady who runs it and got to set up a few things with her. While we were there it started raining and so we were basically stuck there for another hour until the rain died down. When the rain finally stopped we walked back to the main road, about a mile away, and then tried to find a ride back to town. We stood around trying to get a taxi or hitch hike for about twenty minutes and finally decided to start walking back. After a little ways a cargo truck finally pulled over and let us ride back into town in the back. It was good because it was starting to rain again. So yeah, my free Friday ended up getting pretty full by spending my afternoon stranded out in a small village.

The other big thing this past week is that on Saturday a couple of college guys arrived in town. They are going to be spending the next six months out here. They will be living out in a village for their first month, so please be remembering them. They seem to fit in really well and seem like the kind of guys who are laid back and willing to do anything (after all they did eat pig heart the other night for dinner). It is good to have a couple of other guys around and just more people to hang out with in general. Okay, I’m going to keep this one kind of short because it is going to be a busy week and I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to write next time.

Harvest Time

Okay so first off, it is actually harvest time out here but I haven’t spent any time harvesting. The title is more of a metaphor for what has being going on out here (see below). Second, sorry that I didn’t get around to posting last week. Things have been a little crazy out here. I’ll try and catch everyone up on the happenings of the past few weeks. So a couple of weeks ago I went out with another worker out here and we went and had lunch with the potato man. We call him the potato man because he sells potatoes out at the back gate of my apartment complex. One of the girls who had been here for a couple of years and just went back to the states had been sharing with him for a while and she wanted us to do some follow up. So we went out to talk to him and asked if we could take him out to lunch so that we could talk and practice our language. So we went out to eat lunch and I went over some language stuff with him and then my friend started to share with him. The potato man listened to the entire story and then at the end of it said that he believed it. He actually said that he had been listening to stories that my friend had left him and that he had believed for a while. So we spent some time talking to him and explaining to him what all that meant and what to do next. Towards the end of our conversation his wife came over and things got a little awkward. She doesn’t approve of his decision and I think it is tough for him. So please be thinking of the potato man.

I also went out to eat lunch with my friend Gao. While we were out we started talking about things and it turns out that his best friend, the one that we went out to the lake with about a month ago, had sat down during the week and had shared with him. Gao said that he believed it and so we talked about what all that meant and we had a great day of just getting to talk about things and hang out. At the end of the day I gave him something to read and told him that we should get together and talk about what all he is reading. He seems very interested but he has also mentioned over the past week that he has been very busy and it has been hard to find time for him to read. So be thinking of him and hopefully he will start going deeper with some things.

So other than that the week has just been busy. I met with some friends for about four hours this past Monday and we talked about what all has been going on and what all is coming up. There was a group of people who came to visit from the states and did some great work out here over the past week. At our meeting we looked at pictures of people who have been shared with and believed and talked about each one of them. Over the past week there have been twenty-five people that have joined the family. There are some pretty crazy things going on out here. A lot of times it is hard to see any fruit when you are doing groundbreaking type work with people who have never been worked with before, but when you do see things happen it is great. So it has been a very encouraging week. I’m glad too, because I think we’re going to need it with the month that we have coming up.

July is going to be crazy out here. Basically we have people coming from the states to visit every four or five days throughout the entire month. This means a lot of work and showing people around and helping them get things done. I’m excited about it though. I’m going to have a roommate coming on July 4^th and I’m looking forward to having another guy around. He will be doing the same thing that I did and spending his first two weeks out in a village. So I think July is going to be pretty crazy but I’m looking forward to seeing what all will happen over the next month. There were two college students here last night that I got to spend some time with and it is great just getting to swap stories and talk to people in English. Things are going to be busy, but I also think that things are going to be good.

School Stuff

So I’m a little late on this week’s post. I have good reasons, mainly because I was out on my bike for about ten hours yesterday. So this past week has been a little different. I rolled my ankle landing on a guy’s foot on Monday and haven’t really been able to play basketball all week. It isn’t too bad but it is one of those things that I need to make sure and not play for a couple weeks. So hopefully I’ll be back out on the court sometime next week. Also, monsoon season is picking up even more this past week. It has rained pretty much every evening so a lot of people haven’t been out. So I’ve had a down week of just getting to finish up some language and have spent a few days out at my tutor’s house. I finished up my eight-week language sprint this past week and now I am just doing some review until I find another tutor. I have a few guys that I think can do it, but since it has been raining so much I haven’t been able to track them down. I’m thinking I’ll try and get the new language stuff started back up again around Monday of next week.

I spent my day yesterday getting everything ready to become registered at the school and get my student visa. It is a big process. I spent most of the morning up at the school getting things filled out and then in the afternoon I went to the police station to answer questions and get registered and then made the trip out to the health clinic to make sure I don’t have AIDS. The police station was a little bit of an experience. We went to three different stations until we finally found the right one. Every one we went to told us to go to another, then that one told us to go to another, and then finally we found the right place. That happens a lot here. I spent about an hour at the station; 10 minutes answer questions and 50 minutes waiting (apparently some things here work very similarly to back in the states). Then I rode my bike all the way across town to the health clinic. About out way out there it started to rain and my friend who went with me assured me that it wasn’t much further, and twenty minutes later we were still riding on our bikes. The health clinic was pretty sketchy. Not nearly as sketchy as the hospital but still was a little weird. I only had to have a couple blood tests so it was pretty painless for me. The lady opened up a clean needle and, except for the open vials of blood sitting on the table my arm was on and the fact that her gloves were reused who-knows-how-many-times, it was pretty sanitary.

Today has been another errand day and I also fit in a little language. Tonight I went over to a friend’s house for some homemade Mexican food. I decided to invite one of the guys who speaks English and so both of us, her and her roommate all made some tortillas, salsa, fajitas and then we had some brownies and ice cream for desert. Afterwards we all sat around and played a game of Risk. It was a fun night. I’ve got a pretty full rest of the week too. Tomorrow I’m going to turn in all of my forms for school and then go out with a friend to visit a few people and then on Thursday I’m taking a road trip with a few others to a village on the other side of town. Hopefully on Friday or Saturday another friend and I can make it back to visit the family I got to talk to last week. So there should be enough going on to keep me out of trouble for a while.

A New Family Member

This has been a crazy week out here. On top of language study and everything that goes with that I have been helping a friend move for most of this week. Between all of the moving and the crazy weather, it has been raining nonstop here for the last few days, it has left little time for getting to do fun things like play basketball. We do, however, get the NBA playoffs here on TV every morning. I have had some opportunities to have guys come over and watch games with me, and while I was working out in the gym on Friday I ran into my friend that I met last week on the bike ride. He invited another foreigner and myself to go watch basketball with his family on Saturday and since I didn't have anything else going on at 8am I figured it would be a good idea.

It turns out that the weather yesterday was awful. It was raining almost all day which made it a little rough meeting up on bikes. We made it over to his house though and spent the morning getting to know his father and watching a not so great basketball game. We ate a pretty good lunch and then after lunch just sat around and talked for a while. My friend's father is a local author who writes a lot of history about our area and we had a good time learning some things from him. I started asking him some questions about his beliefs and he said that he didn't have any. He started to ask us about some things and my friend who was with me started to share with him. Our local friend who is a believer also helped to clarify some things that we couldn't get straight with our limited language. My friend who was with me did really well though, for only being out here less than a year he spent about fifteen minutes explaining things to this man and he understood every word. Towards the end he said that he believed and we spent some more time talking to him about everything. His wife was also in the room for most of the conversation and I asked her about what she thought about everything and she said she wasn't sure and wanted a little more time to think about everything and for someone to walk through somethings with her. My plan is to go back later in the week with one of the girls and have them talk to he some more.

The trip to my friend's house took up most of my morning and afternoon on Saturday. The rest of my afternoon was spent trying to dry off. Saturday evening I met up with a couple of friends out here and we went and ate some Mexican food. You know you are in a good place when you can live about 8,000 miles from Mexico and still get some decent Mexican food. It isn't quite the same as back home, but I'm not going to complain. The lady who runs the place is from Mexico and spent some time in the Metroplex and some other places in Texas, so most of the food is pretty legit. There isn't much better than Mexican food on a cold rainy night out here. Other than that it has been a pretty down week. It has been busy. This next week I am planning on hitting the books pretty hard and finishing up my intensive language study. I only have four days left and then I will move on to working with a new tutor and doing more conversational types of things. The language here is a long and slow process, and I am ready to move on to the next stage.

A Long Week

So if you want to talk about a random week… this has been it. There have been all sorts of crazy stuff happening this past week. There are lots of great things starting to happen out here but at the same time it has been very draining. I’ll try and give everyone a rundown so they know what all has been going on:

Wednesday: I got an invite to go out swimming with the guys to this large pond/small lake that is on the northern edge of town. It has been pretty hot out here lately so I figured it would be a nice chance to cool off for a while. The water was actually really clean and FREEZING. There were about eight or nine of the basketball guys all out there hanging out and going swimming. It was a fun day, and as random as it is to be in an Asian pond with a bunch of little guys in their undies, it actually seemed fairly normal. I don’t think a lot of the cultural things really phase me anymore. Don’t get me wrong, every now and then there will be something and I just have to go ‘huh?’ but a lot of the random things out here are starting to seem normal. I’m pretty sure I’m going to have a great dose of culture shock coming back to the states.

Thursday: I ran into another friend from the states in the gym and he invited me to go get massages with him and some other friends that night. I still got all my basketballing in but it was nice to just get to hang out with some English speakers for a while. While we were getting massages he told me that he found a shop in town that sells basketball nets, and since our court didn’t have any we decided to go out and buy some. They were only a few dollars but they pretty much made us rock stars. All the guys were very excited to see them and it is helping to build up some of relationship. Things out here operate a lot on a relationship currency. If you have a good relationship with someone you can make all kinds of things happen; however if that relationship isn’t there you aren’t going anywhere. It is the same idea with buying things here. You basically have four prices for anything: the stupid white person price, the smart white person who knows how to bargain price, the local price, and the good relationship price. Everything is negotiable and totally depends on your relationship with the person. So while basketball nets seem like a small thing they might end up paying off with helping to establish some relationships.

Friday: I spent most of my day Friday up at the hospital. I wasn’t sick (thank goodness) but one of my friends from the states was. He had been traveling down south and came back with a lot of symptoms of Malaria. But after five IVs and about six hours in a sketchy hospital he was up and moving again. I’m praying that I never have to go to this place for treatment. I’m pretty sure it would be like going to an American hospital in the early 1900s if you took out sanitation. At one point I had to go and hold the IV while he went to the bathroom and other than being filthy there was no sink (or soap) in the only bathroom in the entire hospital. It was pretty gross. At least one of my friends out here is an American nurse and she can help make sure that everything gets taken care of.

Saturday: On Friday night I went out with the basketball guys to play some games and on the way home one of them invited me to go with him and a friend on a bike ride out to a mountain lake. I figured that it would be fun and he is pretty much my closest friend out here (since he is the only one that can speak English) and so I agreed to go. We left early in the morning it took us a little over an hour to get out to the lake. The bike ride was pretty intense. We basically rode up the ridge of the valley to the other side to this alpine lake. It was a beautiful ride, except that I couldn’t enjoy it because my legs were burning the entire time. It was good to get to meet the other guy who went on the trip with us. He is home for the summer from working on his master’s degree in a big city and he also speaks pretty good English. We got out to the lake and, like a lot of things out here, most of it ended up being a tourist trap. There is a new wetland preserve that has just been built on the lake and so we paid the couple dollars to get in and walked around for a while. Eco-tourism isn’t really a big business out here so we had the entire place to ourselves. The environmental manger side of me was freaking out about this place because of how many things they did wrong. Like so many other things out here, nothing is spared at the expense of making money, so a lot of the ‘preserve’ had been paved over, construction was everywhere, there were new huge buildings and conference rooms, and there was even a local art museum. While it doesn’t seem like a lot, there was a pretty good environmental impact. While we were walking along the paved roads it looked like there were thousands of bugs moving around on the ground. It turns out that they were actually very small frogs and they were everywhere. We went inside the museum/conference center and looked at a lot of local ancient religious art. I asked the guys about it and then said that I didn’t know a lot about all of that because of what I believed. The friend who was studying with us also told me that he was a believer and then he started asking me all sorts of good questions. He brought up the subject throughout the day and we had a lot of good opportunities to talk and also to talk to the other guy who was with us. After lunch we went back to my house and played around on the guitar for about an hour. I had a few opportunities to share with them more while we were playing. Both of the guys wanted to get together again soon and hopefully I can start a weekly study with the new guy that I just met. It was a very tiring day but worth all of the exhaustion.

Sunday: So on Sunday we were supposed to have our basketball game but the other team didn’t show. A few of us were out at the court and it started to rain. We were about to go inside when the man who is a former pro-basketball player called us over, put us in his car and drove us to his workplace. He is a big shot in the local gov’t here and he took us up to his office and let us hangout, made a phone call and then a small army of men showed up to cleanup the court and play. We sat around and watched his team play a match and then played the other team after they did. It was a good chance to get to connect with this guy and he and I had a good chance to ask each other some questions about family and things like that. He seems like a very good guy to invest in because he is always looking out for all the other guys and he is very patient with his son, which is a very rare thing out here. Hopefully I can get some more opportunities to get to talk with this guy.

Monday: Today we had our makeup basketball game. I’m pretty sure the guy I was covering was about six-three and two hundred forty pounds. He was a big guy. He was one of the guys on our team’s former sports teacher and he wanted to lean on me the entire game. Between that and not getting to sit out the entire game I was pretty worn out afterwards. We won though. After the game all the guys went and got dinner and then wanted to come back to my house and play guitar for a while. I had an opportunity to play some songs for them and used that as an opportunity to share some. We are supposed to all get together again later on in the week and hopefully we can make coming over to my house a weekly thing.

So that’s been about it for my crazy week. Needless to say it has been hard keeping up with my language study because of all of the random things that keep coming up. I only have a week and a half left on my initial stage of language study and then I should have a little more free time with it and it will be more conversational. I have had a lot of good opportunities to speak the language and I think moving into the conversational stage will be helpful because I can still spend a lot of time with the guys I have met and also work on language at the same time. I’m also hoping that I can find some downtime in the next couple days to relax a little bit. I have been going pretty hard over the last week and I’m looking forward to taking a break for a day or two.

Karaoke

Monsoon season has officially begun out here. It doesn’t rain all day every day, but there is usually a pretty good rainstorm every day. It hasn’t changed getting to play basketball yet, but I have a feeling that over the next couple weeks it might. So our big activity this week was going out and singing karaoke at a local place. It is a pretty high tech set up. You go into this big building with neon lights and walk down these long hallways to a room that your party has all to itself. There is a big screen TV, a touch screen computer with all the songs, and the whole rock band lighting set up. We were planning on going swimming, which is what I wanted to do, but the weather didn’t cooperate. So karaoke it was. It is kind of a weird thing that twenty-year old guys with tattoos and who like to play sports also love to go and sing karaoke. And man, do they LOVE to sing karaoke. So four of us went and spent the afternoon at the karaoke place. Most of the time we were there I just sat around and listened to them sing these random songs that I’ve never heard before and couldn’t understand. After three and a half hours I was starting to go crazy. At least one of the guys, who had never done karaoke before, was also dying to get out of there. I did end up having to sing a few songs. The had a lot of English songs, and I found a few by Coldplay and some other decent bands that I stuck in there; however there was this option to basically take a song and stick it in front of all of the other songs, so… none of those songs ever came up. The only English songs that ever did come up were ones by the Backstreet Boys or Avril Lavigne. I’ve heard them before but they would not have been my first choice of things to sing. After about the third hour of songs I had one of those intense thirty-seconds of culture shock. There was just this sudden feeling of ‘where am I and what is going on?’ It passed pretty quickly but for those thirty seconds I was freaking out.

After our karaoke party we walked back and the guys wanted to eat. It sounded good to me; however after seeing the food it didn’t look so good. We stopped at a small hotdog stand and picked up some hotdogs. I don’t know how hotdogs can be more sketchy than they are in America, but they are. It didn’t come with a bun; just a toothpick and they put some kind of spicy seasoning on it. I’m glad that they added the seasoning because it covered up the weird taste. Actually the taste wasn’t near as bad as the texture. It is hard to describe but it was crunch outside and kind of squishy on the inside. I managed to put mine down though. After the hotdogs we walked a little farther and one of the guys paid a street vendor for some ‘fish’ on a stick. The only think worse than fish on a stick from a street vendor (actually I’ve found out there are a lot of things worse) is when the fish has a tentacle on the end of the stick. I’m about 90% sure it was squid, but there is that 10% that still has no real idea what it was. Don’t get me wrong, most of the food out here is great, especially the stuff that I order for myself. I just think most of the locals have different tastes. So that pretty much was my Sunday. We got back and went and played some basketball and I called it a night. Other than the weekends basically I study all week long. I’m on my sixth week of intensive language study and I only have two left. I don’t really know what the game plan is after that. I think I will get another tutor, possibly one of the basketball guys, and we are going to start working on conversational kinds of things. I’m looking forward to getting to start something a little different.

Shao-Kao

So this week has been more language study. I know that everyone thinks that being over here is this huge adventure and is always exciting, and in many ways it is, but in a lot of ways it is a lot of studying. There just is not a lot you can do until you get the language down. So once again, most of my week has been spent learning the language. Well, that and playing basketball. That is about the one social outlet that I have. I had to take a few days off this week because I kind of jacked up my back a little bit. Some would say it is because I'm getting old, but I'm blaming it on the fact that the court we play on is super slick and the fact that I ran into the most solid guy I think I've ever seen. I was driving to the basket on Tuesday night and this guy kind of jumped into me. Normally it wouldn't have been that big of a deal except this guys was solid (and really good, it turns out he is a professional basketball player that lives in our complex) and when I landed kind of funny i slipped a little which I think thew my back out of whack. A few days of stretching and taking it easy and I'm back at 100%.

On Tuesday I went out to an area of town that I'm going to focus on. It is only a few blocks from where I'm living but if you walk about a mile it starts getting into a village and it is a little more rural. The area just seems like a very dark place. It is very dirty and there are a lot of apartment/hotel types of places, except very run down. We walked around for a while and eventually came to a more rural section. We saw a Buddhist temple and it was packed full of people. We had an opportunity to talk to a couple monks for a while and it was just a strange place. We visited some folks that were parents of a friend of a friend and sat and got to share with them for a while. They invited me to come back anytime and gave me their phone number. They offered to take me out to some different villages for some culture, so one of these days when I get a little more language I'm going to try and follow that up.

Other than that this week was pretty low key. I spent a lot of time hanging out with the guys I've met playing basketball. They took me to lunch on Friday and we went to an internet bar and shot zombies on computers for a couple hours. One of the guys had to go to a class so I decided I could better use my time doing something else and bailed with him. We played some basketball that night and then grabbed some dinner and then went and played a little pool at a place close to our complex. Last night we I told them that I would take them out to dinner and so we went and ate some shao-kao (pronounced shaow cow and roughly translated as 'fire food'). You basically sit around a little metal table with a fire pit and a grill in the middle of it. It is great food if you have a lot of time and want to do some hanging out. I made the mistake, which I will never do again, of letting the guys order. They got some normal stuff like dumplings, grilled potatoes, sliced beef, and egg plant. They also got some not so normal stuff. We had some pig brain stew, which actually wasn't bad (except it was hard to get over the texture). We also had some some blood sausage, which wasn't good. And last but not least we had some stinky dofu. I've eaten a lot of bad things in my life but this is pretty close to the top. It smells like distilled gym socks and mold. Oh yeah, and it has hair. Lucky for us it was the second thing brought out to the table and the last thing that got totally eaten. One of the guys dropped one in my bowl and they all watched to see if I would eat it. I did and I'm pretty sure they got the show they were looking for. I almost choked on the thing but I managed to eat it. I had to brush my teeth twice last night to totally get the taste out of my mouth, and sometimes I think I can still taste it. I think the flavor is burned into my brain. I've been regretting it ever since; not just because of the taste but because I have been sick to my stomach all day today. It has been over twenty-four hours and I'm still not feeling so hot. It probably could have been any number of the things that I ate that has done it but I'm going to blame the stinky dofu.