Spring Festival Fireworks #1

Spring Festival is in full swing, which means that everything is very loud. It's ten at night here and people are setting off M-80s and huge strings of black cats outside my window. Last year I only really blew stuff up for a day or so before retreating into my house (due to shell shock), but this year I've had a lot of fun blowing up anything I can wherever and whenever. In case you can't tell from the picture, I'm enjoying myself.

Two night ago was the kickoff. We went to Holly's house to eat dumplings and have ridiculous, dangerous fun. Her son Josh, as a Chinese person, was our designated artillery sergeant a

nd assisted the white people in operating in relative safety. There were a few misfires, but no one got hurt. It was like a warzone that night; most people went inside to watch the Spring Festival show on TV, but after that everyone went to their communal courtyards and commenced turning the place into a warzone. The streets were filled with smoke and barren of people; everyone was at home, but the skies were filled with competing reports of mortar shells.

Yesterday was a lot quieter. Most of the shops in town were closed. Less explosions. The malls were open or business, but there was no line at Dairy Queen so I treated myself right.

One of the best parts about Spring Festival is that there are fireworks stands everywhere, usually just heaps of explosives piled on a pair of folding tables on inauspicious street corners. Safety last: a year ago, one of the stands caught wind of a wandering spark and exploded all over the street.

The best stands are the ones that do free demonstrations of their wares. A place near the Jinshui Canal shot off very loud things along with other things that shot up in the air before parachuting the burned out core to the earth and safety. Last night we came across a stand willing to show off their biggest, loudest and most colorful before we bought. They were more than willing to show off their 20rmb per round gi-fucking-gantic artillery shells. They were also willing to negotiate with me.

Email #3: in which Eddie Murphy saves my internet

My internet crashed last night, disrupting my plans to talk to my girlfriend on Skype this morning from ChinaFort1. Email #1 was me apologizing for the disruption. Email #2 was me telling her about how, in the face of mandatory achievement awards for finishing classes despite academic accomplishments, I gave a student a perfectly reasonably award laden with hard-to-detect innuendo about his future as a bachelor. Here's number three, written while the glow of the resumption of home broadband access washed over my ecstatic face (and please note that the moniker "Boo-boo" is for variety of pet names ONLY, and should not assumed to be my normal greeting protocol in any non-randomized situation):

Hey Boo-boo,

I can normally deal with internet outages if I know they're coming, like when I go on vacation without my computer, or when I see a plain white van across the street occupied by men in black suits eyeing me through binoculars, all while nonchalant, orange-helmeted linemen clip the wires heading to my house. That's when I usually put in the earplugs (even though I always come out with my hands up, I hate bullhorns; they make me panicky).

In America if the internet goes out I'm on the phone with Comcast within thirty seconds demanding status updates, assuring them that yes, I've restarted my computer, my router and my modem in all applicable combinations and would they just freaking get the green lights blinking again? It's different here in China. Sure, there's a phone number I can call, and through the combination of pressing random numbers and pounding the phone on my head I can usually get someone on the line to yell at, but at that point, my terse demanding tone is exactly that, only it's in a language that's mostly foreign to the operator unless, especially as the situation escalates, he or she was an English major and had attended a graduate-level course in "The Art of Swearing, Level 2: Fuck You Fucking Motherfuckers."

Chinese internet censorship and the big picture

A friend of mine was complaining about Dropbox being blocked in China and drop.io being bought up and deactivated by Facebook, leaving him no available large-file storage sites that he could use in China and America. After thinking for a minute, I sent him the following. Please note that when I say "China" it is a metonym for the Chinese government and Chinese business leaders, not the Chinese people, Chinese culture or Chinese tea, all of which are wonderful for many reasons.
___

I just figured it out. I think that the government started blocking foreign sites like Facebook and Twitter with the stated intention of halting civil unrest, which most people here were able to swallow pretty easily. Those brown people are twittering scooters to blow up and facebooking mass stabbings with AIDS-infected needles. And Youtube hates China with their pro-Dalai Llama promoted content. What they're actually doing is creating a Chinese intranet where Chinese people only use Chinese products. Baidu will forever be ahead of Google here because that's where you can get free movies and mp3s if you want them. No need to block them, really. But who needs Youtube? Tudou has more locally-targeted content and everything has subtitles. Renren basically negates the usefulness of actual Facebook as everyone here has it. You can get news in English from the Global Times. Blogspot? Pfffft put that shit on a BBS. QQ will probably eventually displace MSN and Skype once it figures its stuff out.

Everything I Know About Teaching ESL, Part 1: Know Your Audience

Captive audience via peruisay

Within a week of arriving in China I was teaching my first class, an hourlong "fun" lesson offered as a perk to students already signed up for normal courses. The topic was up to me. I wouldn't know the ability or exact ages of the kids ahead of time (anywhere from six to thirteen, which is a huge spectrum), and I was terrified. Before I came to China I had almost no experience with kids, especially not the Chinese kind; I didn't know how to talk to them, what they were interested in, what they needed to learn. I quick skimmed a few books on teaching theory, making note of different styles of teaching and lesson planning, possible games to play, things to watch for in students. I spent an hour prepping for the class, although one book specifically mentioned such a time investment is a waste of time. I had two full pages of notes and activities suggested by other teachers.

Needless to say, I bombed. The kids were all over the place; one near-fluent eleven year old was sitting next to a six-year-old who couldn't remember his colors. I ran out of my carefully prepared material within the first fifteen minutes before leaving (running out of) the classroom to catch my breath and begging anyone and everyone in the teachers' office- staff, students, desks, the ether- for ideas to fill the rest of the time.

Many of my first classes went this way. Students staring, doodling. Assistants looking at me with "Where did they dig up this fucking foreigner?" looks on their faces. The whispering in Chinese made me paranoid. The stench of boredom followed me from classroom to classroom. I thought I knew what I wanted to teach (English, of course), but I had no idea where to start.

The solution came in a short introduction to teaching written by a colleague: "Problem- Students don't find the class interesting. Solution- Be more interesting."

Hmm. Couple of things.

I've been blogging for a few years at different places, but for some reason I couldn't get the jump to work when I started this thing, so sorry for the long blog is long design. Maybe I'll work on that again some other day, but since no one's actually reading this all I have to say is: piddlewax farthing hopscotch limbo.

Thing the second: this is a personal blog dedicated to the too many things I'm working on, so posts can range from what tea I'm obsessing about to the little fart boy student disrupting my class last Thursday to my pathetic epiphanies about the Chinese language. I've tried to include helpful tags for each post, so if you're interested in further reading on anything I'm writing about (but why should you be?), just click on a tag and voila or something. Along those lines, as much of a grammar and punctuation nazi as I may be, my computer lacks a number pad, so diacriticals are fucking out.

Also, if you'd like to send me a giant wedge of delicious cheese, please email me at gcdonohue@gmail.com and I'll send you my shipping address here in China. I really miss cheese and the selection at the foreigner supermarket is pedestrian and inconsistent at best. We're talking Land'o'lakes on the top shelf here.

Fartsmuggler.