QDUD #1

(Is anybody old enough to remember MS-DOS? The command prompt OS that existed before Windows? When doing a report on Microsoft once in grade school I read that Bill Gates actually bought the code for MS-DOS from the guy who wrote it, who had instead called it QDOS. That was literally short for “Quick and Dirty Operating System.” Well, this is a Quick and Dirty UpDate, so…QDUD.)

It was a very interesting weekend, and I should really dedicate the time to write about it, but I just don’t really feel like writing a blog post (still got this weird laziness towards blog writing that’s been with me since four days ago.)

But the obligation exists, so here it is in a very non-literary bullet point list:

Saturday
– Traveled to the Dongmen shopping bazaar in Luohu District with Hunter in search of some cheap shirts. Couldn’t find any. Instead, found a lot of frustrating shop clerks with sub-par wares. My Chinese isn’t good enough to bargain aggressively, yet. My usual way of dealing with people – getting on their good side, which here means playing the fool very often with my bumbling Chinese – certainly won’t work on the jaded hawkers of Dongmen. We didn’t get any shirts.
- In the evening the Yucai School Group foreign teachers were picked up by our contact teachers and taken to a fancy evening dinner at the Garden City megamall. There we were ushered into a private room, which by Chinese standards isn’t uncommon, but even by Chinese standards this was an extraordinarily fancy room. My suspicions about the fanciness of the evening were proven correct when Roots (the head headmaster of all the Yucai Schools; real name Liu Genping, but “Gen” means “roots” so that’s what everyone calls him when he’s not looking) showed up. He was accompanied by a few secretaries from the main Yucai office and the headmaster of Yucai Second Primary. Also in attendance: not only our handlers, but our handlers’ handler, another office lady in the main Yucai office named Lily. Then Judy from the Shenzhen Education Bureau. And finally, to top off the evening’s list of important VIPs, the Shenzhen Foreign Affairs counsel, who alone was responsible for every single foreigner in Shenzhen (probably more people than are in all of Wyoming).
- Going to a Karaoke bar with said VIPs.
- Singing ridiculously with said VIPs.
- Dancing to My Humps with said VIPs. Most mortifying experience of my life, watching Roots shimmy to that.

That karaoke bar, by the way, was the most ostentatiously extravagant place I’d ever been to, almost as large as one of my 50-student classrooms and done up like a Vegas hotel lounge. A long way from LA’s Koreatown, boys and girls.

Sunday:
- Teaching a day’s worth of classes on a weekend, because in China, school missed due to holidays is made up for on the weekends.
- Going to meet up with Kami, Hunter, Murray, Emily and Katie for an evening foreigner rendezvous.
- Remembering only when I got there what they had been planning to do on said rendezvous. Walked through the door of Milan Hair Style and laid down for a spa hair treatment and massage along with the other prone and satisfied Americans. Struck up a mostly one-sided conversation with my own amused hairwasher/masseuse guy.
- Remembering only when I was called while having said hairwash that the Yucai Third Middle Single Teachers’ Midautumn Festival Dinner banquet was that night. Ran over to the restaurant after hair wash and joined in the eating of such delicacies as pig faces and chicken bones. Nana and Tiantian were not enthusiastic about the pig face, but remembering the marshmallow turtle shell and snake hoods of the fancy banquet yesterday, I felt like I could do anything.
- Dreading the much-talked about karaoke session rumored to follow the dinner. Apparently last year’s was pretty riotous and all the teachers got absolutely wasted.
- Escaped from having to go to it when it turned out that this year, most all of the teachers were studying for a professional exam.
- Came home early and decided to go shopping in the evening.
- Visited again the music store at Gongye Ba Lu to ask if it was possible to rent guitars there. No, but I could get a discount on a cheap guitar. Tried a few out and chatted with the girl there as I did so, who by this point remembers me from all my previous bumbling-ins. Conversation was all in Chinese!
- Walked over to the grocery store to find eggs and butter for my cookie baking experiment (I have one of Shenzhen’s rare toaster ovens in my apartment) and agar powder for a coconut jelly recipe. Asked an attendant about the agar. No luck. Asked another attendant about the butter. One 15 minute search and 5 other consulted attendants later, the response: “We don’t have butter here, because this is a Chinese grocery.” I did find the eggs, though. And another pack of dumplings with Jackie Chan’s smiling face on them.

And that was my weekend, in bullet form. Ta da.