My last box arrived!!!

Ok, my 3rd and final box I had shipped from China came. I'm going to be brave and open it in "real time" right here. I'm dorky, excited, and sad all at once. It's the last bit of my life in China, finally arriving in the US. That's it. All done now. All 3 boxes were earlier than China Post quoted, though quite beaten up. Two of them had actual holes you could stick your hand in, like this one. Yes, the straps came like that. Pack WELL if you're shipping the cheap ground route overseas.`

Now I'll go open it and see what was so special that it was packed in the first box I packed and was worth 343rmb to send and weighed 13.48kg. (29.7lbs, $50) I hope it's nothing embarrassing or stupid, because I'm about to show it to the world.....


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I forgot it was a box within a box....















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YES! It was TOTALLY worth it! It was all books, no wonder it was so heavy. Good stuff, stuff I can't buy even in Chinatown. If I ordered just 3-4 of these books online (if I could find them and know if they're any good first) I'd pay that $50, and some of these are sentimental too... and some DVD's, some bracelets that will be gifts...



Boring part: naming everything in the picture. I won't be offended if you stop reading now, but I'm going to do it for the person who said "You can buy Chinese books in Chinatown." Sure, find me these books.


From top left, COUNTER-clockwise-ish:

Pamphlet from donating blood (the thing with the guy's arm sticking out; he's famous and those ads were all over subways, etc); bracelets strewn about; pamphlet about the Olympic Torch Route. I also have pictures of me with a real torch (behind glass) and some sketches of other possible torches, from working at Lenovo, who made it.

Dark blue book: How Languages Are Learned

Yellow: calligraphy practice book

small handmade notepad (green with fish)

handful of DVD's & CD's

Pinnochio (bilingual)

100 Topics for Business English, which I sometimes used in class but can also use for myself learning Chinese; it's evenly bilingual

Teahouse (middle) - the script of the play; it's really super famous and I saw it in NYC before I went to China (all chinese, no english, beyond me but a high quality thing to study in the future)

2 DVD's of old 1930's Chinese movies; beyond me now but good practice material for future; I think old movies like that are really interesting


dark blue book: dictionary of characters (yes, chinese characters can be arranged in dictionaries; it's not hard to look them up once you get the hang of it, but I'm still proud I can)

small black, white, & red thing: deck of playing cards with pictures of the Nine Gates of Beijing from the 1930's.

light blue: writing practice books (cute and cheap as heck; schoolchildren use them and you can buy them anywhere)

colorful book with pink flower bit: children's book describing flowers and plants. I also have one describing vegetables & fruits, and a few of a different publisher describing animals, household items, etc. VERY useful. For example, "ONION: Onions grow underground. They have many layers, and when you cut them they will make you cry." Good vocabulary in a simple way.


stack: YiJing (I-Ching) on top, another philosophy under that (both above my level but fun to tackle a small paragraph of when I want a huge challenge, and awesome for the future: and thank you Raymond for them; if I could only choose one book I got in China to take home it would be the YiJing) ...

Under those are 4 elementary/middle school level science books. They have a variety of topics, 1-2 pages on each, with Pinyin. It will be an extremely useful tool for studying; TONS of vocabulary, and the topics are so compact and neat. Chock full of info but bite sized. Picture follows....

middle: Spitting On Ghosts: A collection (bilingual) of old fables with morals and stuff. It's not great but it has pictures, like a cartoon book but not very funny.

In the box is misc... Garfield comic book, small kid's books of poems or fairy tales, notebooks, etc.















Ok, I *really* have to go ... now what shall I read to bed?....


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Little stuff I found

I unexpectedly had off today, so I'm unpacking a bit from moving. In a little bag I found some little items. They made me miss some things, particularly eating in the Lenovo cafeteria, and walking around there from the subway to work. The green ticket is 5 mao, half a kuai, and was to be used by non-employees like me who didn't have swipe cards. We buy tickets from an office then use them to buy food. I liked the food, though the employees there said they liked it too but only for the first few weeks, and I'd start to not like it very shortly. They were right. Same foods repeated, and not much tofu. But it's a nice warm fuzzy memory.

The big thing on the left is my VIP pass to an MMA event, which my son gave me for Christmas. My own pics are here, and you can go to their real website at www.mmachina.com . Going clockwise we have the green lunch ticket; a McDonald's salt packet; my archery card giving me about 40% off, I think; a piece of chinese Dove chocolate (yeah baby); and my ATM card with the account number covered by a toothpick from the Kempinski Hotel, which is very famous and fancy, and I never stayed in. I don't really know where I got that from, but I have a bunch. How exciting.

There's a bathroom on the right... in Shanghai.

Ok, I haven't written for 2 months, since I've been back in the US. I want to keep this blog mainly about my time in China, so I'm going to add memories now & then. It'll be nice for myself (because really I'm the most important person here and not many of you really care about my time in China very much), but if someone out there finds it pleasant or amusing or interesting, well, that'll be a nice bonus and I'll feel good.

So here we start anew... not with my present daily life (much), but with memories and/or comparisons, thoughts about China, etc.....

I'm currently listening to a song called "Xiao Wei" which you too can listen to, see the video of, read the lyrics of (in hanzi, Pinyin, or rollover English) here...
http://www.chinese-tools.com/songs/song/85/xiaowei.html
...and everything got all misty and wiggly and black & white, and I heard that harp sound effect of when a tv sitcom person goes back in time in their mind....

I was in the back seat of Grandpa's SUV. Not my Grandpa, the Grandpa of the two Chinese kids I tutored. He'd drive one of them to and from school while their driver drove the other. I had to go along on all those 2-hour long rides at 7am and 2pm making sure the kids studied and didn't fall asleep or goof around in the car. Yeah, that part of the job stunk. But the hour without the kids, that was ok because I could look out the window and daydream... or listen to whatever music the driver was listening to, or try to talk to them a little. Grandpa had a CD of some soft rock, and Xiao Wei was a song that stood out in my mind. It's short and catchy, heard in supermarkets; everyone knows it. It was the first Chinese song I really "heard".


In fact, I was walking to a store one lovely evening and 3 guys sitting on a little bridge sang the last line of it to me as I walked by. It's a Chinese way of flirting or goofing with somebody, to sing them a line of a song. I looked back and smiled in a way that said "You naughty boys! But it's ok, I liked it." I didn't know what the line even meant at the time but I had a vague notion, and I knew it was a love song. It meant he's going to pick a star from the sky with his very own hand and give it to me. The part I mostly heard them say was the last part, "give it to you with my very own hand", so they could've meant anything really, but they looked innocent enough and as if they'd mustered quite a bit of courage to sing that line to a "foreign girl" like that. All 3 of them sang it together. It was cute.


But that wasn't my memory. I meant my memory to be this...
... riding in the SUV with Grandpa, hearing that song for the umpteenth time (wish I had that whole CD now), realizing it was a song about a guy loving something a lot, but being too dumb to realize it was a woman he was talking about. Sounds REALLY DUMB now. But after realizing the "love" part, I pondered, prepared my sentence, and dared to speak out loud to Grandpa in Chinese, "Wow, I think he must really love Shanghai a lot." Grandpa busted out laughing and told me he wasn't saying Shanghai, he was saying "xiao nu'hai"("girl"), which to my untrained ears (and in a song) sounded very similar. You see, (my defence coming)... our brains, when faced with uknown sounds or images, try to match it to the closest thing we know, and so I thought he said Shanghai and was singing about his love for the city. Yeah. But I laughed with Grandpa when I realized how dumb I just was.


Sort of like singing, "Theeeer'es a bathroom on the right..." because you never heard the phrase "there's a bad moon on the rise", so your 14 year old brain didn't even think of it. What. Tell me you didn't mess up that CCR lyric somehow.

Here's the gist of the lyrics to "Xiao Wei" in English:

There was a beautiful girl (not a city) whose name was Xiao Wei.
She had a pair of warm gentle eyes
She quietly stole my heart
Xiao Wei, can you realize how much I love you...
I want to take you up into the sky
See all those beautiful stars...
I'll pick one down to give you with my very own hands.

That's my own loose translation, not perfect.

I have some pictures from inside that SUV, of the scenery, the kids, etc, but I can't find that ONE out of my 5 USB thingies right now. It figures I can't find that one.