On my last day in Shenzhen, I woke up early and sorted through my things. I cleared my desk of the things I had made ready for the single day and ran a final check through my suitcases. Even though I was leaving them here for a few days, I wanted all to [...]
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I was thinking again the other day about coming here, and whether I accomplished what I thought I might, or if I even had figured out what that was to begin with. I realized that sometimes when you look into a dark corner, you don’t always necessarily find out what’s there. Sometimes you just find [...] “不好意思，我又把我的钥匙留在房子里面。” I think that’s right. Is it? It’s what I plan on saying to the groundskeeper who lives on the floor below me when I return home tonight, because I need to get back into my room. After closing the door and fishing through my pockets, I realized belatedly that I left [...] (Hopefully, I’ll have pictures inserted throughout this long-ish post soon.) The first stage of cultural exchange is commonly called the “honeymoon” period, the time when baby expats get moonstruck by being in a brand spankin’ new place. But when I first got to China, I didn’t feel particularly excited. It could have been a [...] At almost the eleventh hour the Shenzhen Education Bureau – that is, that peculiar section of the Shenzhen municipal government that is “responsible” for us in the way an insurance agent is “responsible” for your medical bills – has decided to throw us a Christmas party after all. Magnanimous! Us “foreign expert” Americans+Assorted British Commonwealthers [...] I’m sitting in a Starbucks – the one at the Coastal City megamall complex a few blocks north of my school. I took the bus to get here thinking that I needed to restock on frozen dumplings and could also use another space heater since it’s getting a little chilly again. But I guess I [...] Near the end of the two-and-a-half-hour lunchtime every day, the students here always hijack the school PA system to blast pop music throughout the rafters and courtyards. The teachers don’t seem to mind, though after my lesson on music I’m always a little paranoid about which songs they play might have come from me. [...] This blog isn’t dead, I promise. The combination of dead laptop (which makes it inconvenient to come here to the office to post) and additional writing work from NaNoWriMo just crowded out the time it took to write magnum opus posts all the time – and while I could twitter away various opinions and [...] Hoo, it suddenly became chillier than I expected Shenzhen could get. Currently it’s a nice 55 degrees Fahrenheit, which of course is balmy for back home in Washington, but then I’m becoming less used to those temperatures ever since I left home for Los Angeles. It’s the curse of the well-traveled: people from [...] I have been wanting to watch television in Mandarin for a while so that I could improve my vocabulary, but the news isn’t suitable (the words are too hard; I can’t imagine translating ‘bilateral trade negotiations’ on my iTouch and feeling very much accomplished) and the Chinese soaps I find on TV are too silly [...] |
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