Okay, I’m about 1 hour away from going on my crazy ambitious vacation, which involves carrying 1200 USD in my backpack. Yeah, me am stoopid.
Okay, first stop if Nanjing, to be followed by either Nanchang, or Fuzhou, then off to Hunan Province, Guangxi, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and some more shit.
Yay, will write more as time comes.
Playing poker with the buddies last night, happen to drink 2 bottles of red wine all to myself. Looks like a giant grape mutant got destroyed in my bathroom.
It was a total Curb Your Enthusiasm moment last night. While going downstairs to get some dinner, I ran into a new foreign teacher who got here this week. He was talking to Korean American Matt, whom I call KM for short.
I’m not what I’d call a friendly person, but I feel like I had to introduce myself to this new guy just so I didn’t look like I total ass around here. “Hi, my name is Joe”, I said to this new guy. 5 seconds…nothing 10 seconds…. and finally a “..Hi.” was said by new guy.
Fucking excuse me? When someone god damns introduce themselves to you, you better fucking say a lot more than just Hi in the course of seconds.
Anyhoo, KM joins me for dinner and so I had to ask him what fucking deal with that guy was. “Oh you know what dude? Seriously, I think that guy is a little slow. That’s my third time talking to him. After I start talking to hi, it literally takes him a few seconds to say something back.”
What a prick! Alright, so you’re a little slow, and you get a free pass for being total dick? Yeah, life am good, huh pal?
Then KM tells me the gritty details of this dude’s existence in China. Apparently he met some girl online, went and visited her, dined and dashed; so to speak. Finally ending with the coup de grace of getting a teaching job in this uni and apparently already seen with a few different girls, KM tells me.
Wow, that’s pretty good for a retard that can’t introduce himself. Ha, even KM doesn’t know his name. hahahaha..Life AM GOOD
LISTEN:::::http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1316
I remember that show, Andromeda with Kevin Sorbo, (Yeah, I know he’s some meathead, but the first 2 seasons of that show was some surreal sci-fi goodness) there was something that good ‘ol Sorbo said, which was, “We’re all the heroes of our own story.”
Which is Fucking true.
Sometimes, some people that live and teach here in China have absolutely nothing going on with their lives simply because they’re in a foreign country, not truly understanding the culture, language, or having significant relationships with Chinese people.
Well, I’m drunk off a bottle of red wine, minus a cup or so that went into my soup that I’m making right now, so I won’t ramble too much.
Point being, I think the mind has the ability to make otherwise mundane things more exciting through paranoia. “Oh, what did he mean by ‘NICE HAIRCUT..?’ You know, that sort of paranoia. Reading between the lines. Also, gossiping and backstabbing. Yeah, that shits pretty interesting.
I mean, we all witness this shit at work. You know those co-workers, and you might be one yourself to one degree.
Me am trying to overcome this story making. It’s not really healthy, but I am working with some annoying people, but luckily I avoid them.
I’m really not making sense at this point..
Joe
The other day I had to wipe my computer, which is great to do to get rid of all those digital skeletons in your closet, but completely awful to do in China because I can’t get any windows updates.
But seeing as Microsoft swears to blow up any computer using a pirated copy of windows (look here), it can be understandable that the great powers of be in China has decided to prevent users in China from updating Windows.
Okay,
Five weeks in the fall semester, just 11 more to go!!!
Today was a surprisingly nice day in Linyi. Well as far as the weather was concerned. As you can see in the above pictures: the left photo was taken today, the right one was taken on any other day! No photoshop was used! I’m fucking serious!
Picture of some children during recess across the Uni
We got paid last Friday and not surprisingly, no one got paid for the English intensive training that we did three weeks back. Everyone here is just taking the wait and see approach, which is one of the two options you can take in terms of facing payment issues in China. The other one is confrontation, which is a crapshoot from what I understand. You might piss your boss off in vain, and I don’t think anyone is ready to do that yet.
My classes suck again this year. I don’t really blame the students though. They don’t want to learn, and I get paid either way. I refuse to go crazy because of them. Too bad for them, I really don’t have media rooms this year, so we can’t watch movies.
Seriously thinking about moving to another city in China, but it was hard enough for me just to get this job! “I’m sorry, you just don’t look white enough!” I got that response a few times when applying for jobs last year. Oh well!!
Looks like the GFW has managed to block most free proxies this past week. I’ve tried for the last 2 days, and couldn’t manage to find one that works.
I might have to bite the bullet and actually pay for an internet service, like a VPN. Bah, who am I kidding? I hate facebook.
I think the GFW (Great Firewall) is getting smarter.
Normally I’d use a web-proxy to circumvent said firewall that blocks popular websites like youtube or facebook, but a funny thing has been happening: Whenever I try to connect to either of those websites with a proxy, I can’t, then I can’t connect to the proxy. Even weirder, when I try to connect to a normal website that isn’t blocked (like yahoo.com) with the proxy, it’s all right. It’s WEIRD!
It seems like the new teachers here are frustrated with the quality of the students that we all are having. The non-English majors here can’t speak English worth shit.
Maybe it’s because they don’t care, or the crappy quality of education, but let’s put that thought aside.
The fact of the matter is that this city we’re in is only about 20 years old. In fact, China only started teaching English in school as a compulsory course only after the fall of the Soviet Union. So you have all these Chinese teachers learning to speak English blindly by using IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet).
When I go to bigger cities in China, the quality of English speakers is hell of a lot better. Maybe with time, this place might get better.
Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to convince myself.
Have a colorful life…
