Sorry it's taken me so long. I had to get a VPN

I'm so sorry it has taken me a month to post my first china blog. I had to buy a VPN to access this website. In China, the internet is censored to prevent people from expressing negative opinions about China, and more so, to protect the Chinese from viewing other peoples' negative opinions about China. It's all well and good. For $5.99 a month, I am now over that. Factor that into the RMB 180/month that we pay for internet service (which my roommate and I split the cost of), and that's still a little less than what most people in America pay. Unfortunately, it comes at the cost of being a bit slower. About China:

The toilets. They are holes in the floor. You squat over them. One of my first days here, I was peeing in one of the squat toilets, and it's really hard to squat and take a pee without grabbing on to something for balance, so I grabbed onto the bottom of the door of the bathroom stall. I guess gravity was the only thing keeping that door on it's hinges, so as I was taking a piss, I accidentally removed the door from it's hinges. So there I am squatting. With my pants down. Taking a piss. And "boom!" the door crashes to the ground in front of me. There were other people in the bathroom. Actually, it was for the best, because they helped me put the door back on. Then I finished peeing.

Dragon fruit! I love dragon fruit! I made a video of me talking about them and eating one in front of you, but it refused to load.

I wrote a kids book last week. I wrote the text, that is. That's the easy part. It's about some dogs who go on an adventure. Now I'm working on the illustrations. They are tedious and time consuming, but they are fun. It worries me because I tried to set a goal for myself to draw/paint one page per week. It's just the first draft, by the way. I may decide two thirds of the way through the illustrations, that I want to change something, so I should try to do them even faster, just so I can have it all sketched out. I don't know if I mentioned this in one of the earlier posts, but one of my goals for this year is to create something publishable. I've been working on what I want to do for the first page, I've included a sketch. I know it's not dogs, it's horses, but I'll make them dogs later.

Work. Work is difficult. The Chinese teachers beat the little preschool age kids. By the way. I know I said I was coming here to teach kindergarten, but in China the word "kindergarten," encompasses everything before first grade, and includes kids as young as 2 years old. My morning class right now are two year old kids. They don't beat them as much, but my afternoon class are 4 years old, and that teacher beats those kids relentlessly. For example, I was teaching the word "feet" and to illustrate my point I began pounding my feet on the floor as if I was playing a double bass drum pedal. Then I stopped, but the kids kept going. The Chinese teacher approached them. They all started to stop, because they are afraid of her. One kid was the last to stop, only half a second later than everyone else. The Chinese teacher approached this kid, kicked him, then picked him up by one arm, carried him out of the room by one arm, and took him to another room, where she probably beat him some more. Then the Chinese teacher came back. The kid came back later. I was mortified by what I had seen, I'm amazed I didn't cry, but I went into some sort of autopilot mode. I just taught like a robot for a while. When the teacher beats the kids, the kids never cry. That's the part that probably blows my mind the most about it. I don't think they are allowed to express fear in China, or I guess they are strongly discouraged from doing so, but I will tell you one thing, I am afraid of that Chinese teacher.

On a more positive note, I made friends with a Chinese lady. Her English name is Sherilyn. At first I thought I'd been had by her because she sold me some Amway stuff, and I guess she works for them but I didn't know it at the time. I felt like I'd been tricked, but now I think her efforts at establishing friendship are legitimate. I guess the way things work here, is that people keep very close tabs on the checks and balances of relationships. If someone does something nice for someone, they see it as the other party has a debt to the other one. So Sherilyn invited me to her husband's sister's house for dinner. There was she, her husband, her son, her husband's sister, her husband's sister's son, and her husband's sister's husband's mother. Her husband's sister's husband was on a business trip. They served fish, chicken, mutton, pork, cauliflower, spinach, noodles, and rice. It's was like a feast. I also had beer and apple juice. Everything was very good. Sherilyn told me she is originally from Inner Mongolia. She asked me what I was doing for Christmas. I told I don't do Christmas. I told her I was Jewish already, but it took her a while to make the connection between being Jewish and not doing Christmas. I don't think Chinese people are good at making the distinction between Christmas as a Christian holiday and Christmas as an American holiday, but neither are Americans for that matter. When I got through to her that I had no plans for Christmas, she asked me if I wanted to go to Inner Mongolia with her over the winter vacation to see her family. She didn't try to sell me anything. I believe she wants to be my friend. I agreed to go with her to Inner Mongolia for winter vacation. Her nephew taught me a traditional Chinese game. I forgot what it's called. It's sort of like a yoyo, but not exactly. There is a long string tied between two wands. Then there is this hourglass shaped thing that is held horizontally on the string. the string is wraped around the hourglass shaped thing and you use the string to spin the hourglass shaped thing by manipulating the string with the wands. When you get the hourglass shaped thing spinning fast enough, it makes an interesting whistling noise. The nephew was also able to do some tricks with it, such as balancing the spinning hourglass shaped thing on one of the wands as it was spinning. I practiced for maybe half an hour and figured it out and was able to make the thing make the whistling noise. When I did that, Sherilyn was impressed and said I was "smart." The nephew's name is Robert. She asked me to give an English name to her son. I decided to call him Arthur, because it's English. I first suggested Orion, but when I said it was Greek, I think she was not into it. I think she wanted an English English name, so I thought of Arthur. She liked that it was a name of one of the kings of England. I told her that it was also the character of an American children's book and TV show. Hopefully, he will be okay with it. It's not that bad.

The thing about English names in China, most people have them, but they can change it whenever they want. There's nothing official about it. I met a girl during our training who was obsessed with giving Chinese people English names. She spoke decent Chinese, so she would give English names to bar tenders, bus drivers, waiters and waitresses, and pretty much any one she came across who she had a conversation with, and did not yet have an English name.