Thursday, October 30, 2003 :::   While it's time I give my account of the shanghai madness that went down this weekend with Carl and Greg, with soundeffects. So it started out on the train, choo choo choo choo toot toot. I studied chinese and listened to my hip hop music, tick tick bump. The we got to shanghai bustle bustle bustle I called up my friend yo what's up? And I guess we were staying in another guys house... with his parents. While I felt a slight trepidation gulp So off we go to find out where this dude lives, taking subways whoosh and taxicabshonk honk. The taxi finally pulls up in front of the Jin Mao building, the biggest in Shanghai, and we are a little confushed what the fuck. So we meet the fellow we are going to stay with, a cool guy. 'sup y'all. It turns out that we aren't staying in the Jin Mao building, just in a luxuary apartment with a perfect view of the Jin Mao Buliding as well as the pearl tower and the bund, hooked up. We get all prettied up pamper pamper pamper. And then we go out to eat at an all you can eat teppanyaki place for 150 kuai rumble rumble (that's my stomache). we get there and it turns out that my friend zach made reservations at the place across the street. dumbass but it dosn't matter because while we are waiting in line the give us all the beer we can drink ahhh yeah. So we stand out side drinking and making fun of the french people there cheese eating surrender monkeys! until we get to our table. I'm all ready a little tipsy can I have another beer, i lost my first one, but the smell and site of some sashimi wasaaaaabi and the chef getting ready to cook sizzle sizzle wake me up. So the rest of the expats are blabbing away about stupid shanghai expat shit do you know what this coolie said to me the other day... and making stupid jokes the gun shoooow, but I'm too focused on the all you can wat mmmmmm and all you can drink slurp slurp slurp to really care. By the end of the meal I was the I think I was the chefs favorite because he kept piling all the extra food onto my plate crazy laowai and I was buzzing bretty hard where'd all those pretty sake bottles come from?, Somebody made the decision to go to some bar, I don't really remember it's the place to be seen! so off we go and we end up in this wierd park with all these bars around it and expensive cars and people who think they are beautiful o my god!. We go into the first bar and it is sooo dead cricket cricket cricket So I do the only thing that is possible in a situation like that:Hey, I'm gonna go buy some beijiu. I slink off down the nearest busy rood, cross the street screeeeetch, slow down dumbass!, see a store on the other side of the street, go there and buy some bei jiu and a beer jiu kuai wu, xie xie. I stumble my way back to the bar, expertly hiding the bottles in my coat, but when I get there everybody is gone huh? so I think that surely someone will come back looking for me and sit myself down on the nearest park bench and drink my beer is that guy homeless I sit there for awhile, the beer tastes damn good japanese beer is pretty good aaron. but it starts getting a little late and I start to get a little worried guys where are you? So I go into the nearest bar, a large karakee establishment ai ni, aaaaai ni. I wander around there for a while, speaking drunken chinese in an attempt to find my friends laowai zai zhe li ma?. That search proves fruitless, so I go back outside and see to white people getting into a cab, they look vaguelly familiar, I go ask them if they;ve seen my friend, they are seem pissed that they have to talk to me but htey give me some information they are at the bar down there, it is THE bar, where EVERYBODY is They drive away, and I manage to find my way to the bar, someplace with numbers for a name thats pumping out techno (sorry carl) bump bump bump beep. I wonder around the place, it's filled with white people and even the americans look like euro trash.blah blah blah Finally I see somebody I know was at the teppenyaki place, I grab onto her like a lost puppy, where is my ride home? please tell me She directs me to another bar where I finally find my friends who are observing the intricacies of Shang Hai mating how can she be with him?. They are incredably relieved to see me dumbass where where you?, I take some tequila shots hola amigos!! and that was about it. For the first night! ::: posted by Alf at 10:11:16 AM Sunday, October 26, 2003 :::   I was "shanghai'ed" this weekend. It was a lovely outing, stayed with some charming people in one of the hottest pu dong apartment complexes, it had a view of the jin mo building to die for. We went to all the fabulous places, where we could see and be seen I must be gone as I've got to catch up on the happenings in Hangzhou, expect a larger post later this week. In the meantime Check out sinobling's off the wall craziness, he should have an accout of the debauchery in Shang hai. My beautiful and cunning friend aaron has been inspired by me to start up his own blog about teaching in Japan, it's really a gem. ::: posted by Alf at 8:45:59 PM Monday, October 20, 2003 :::   Unblocked swedish google page donations of food are appreciated. ::: posted by Alf at 10:03:34 PM   Damn today was one of those days when I must have been the worst teacher on the planet. First of all I was late for my first class, because I was relieving the drama of last nights Hot pot dinner, from the opposite perspective. I also fucked up my back yesterday playing frisbee and soccer, it was a little sore yesterday but when I woke up today it felt like one leg was shorter than the other and I had a bamboo shaft up my ass. So I amble into class, and I am while I am giving them a quiz I am able to prepare for the second hour of class. But then I have to start talking and my back is hurting, I feel likeI'm getting sick and I just can't concentrate. First one kid asks me the difference between "before" and beforehand," and I muddled through an explanation of the contextual differences between the two which he completly confuses him. Then we come to the word "effect", and I start explaining the relationship of effect and effectual, when the strange feeling that "effect" isn't a word at all and that my whole explanation is bullshit. I bend down to write something on the board and the sharp pain that runs up my spin brings me back to reality: It could be bullshit and it wouldn't matter, my students won't remeber this shit. That class ends and I feel another need to visit the a porcelein thrown of the west, making mye late for my second class. In other news, my bloody computer seem sto have lost it's copy of windows XP, meaning that until I get my as over to johns or call the chinese repair people y'all will have to wait longer for pictures. ::: posted by Alf at 9:46:00 PM Thursday, October 16, 2003 :::   Some Chinese dude amkes cool ninja movies ::: posted by Alf at 8:14:20 PM   China shot a man into space, it seems like people in the U.S. care more than people here. The biggest response from chinese people is that they were proud, but no body seemed particularly excited. Maybe cause they were 50 years too late! hehe stupid commies, take that. we's already been on the moon. My bloody computer won't start, so I will have to wait to post y'all can admire my wonderful photography. Crazy stories, eh you want some crazy stories? Besides ZUCC I teach an extra class of 25-35 year olds from the power company. Keeping in the them of "ideal man/ideal women" I tried to have a little discussion about relationships and what not. For some of the questions they seemed vaguely intersted; What is the largest age differnec between to people who get married? 10 years if the man is older, 2 if it's the women. When will they let their kids start dating? after college, (glad I don't have chinese parents.) but the one that they just wouldn't talk about was; do you think sex before marriage is ok? A few people would talk about it in small groups, but when we got in the big group no one would say anything except "chinese people are more shy than americans." Now I wouldn't have tried this in my callege classes because they are equivilent to middle schoolers, but most of these people were married, they should have been mature enough to have this conversation. eh ::: posted by Alf at 6:54:43 PM Monday, October 13, 2003 :::   mmm, So I'm thinking I gt to post somethin to get the below post off the main page, Since, contray to what I posted below I still think I do have at least a ghst of a chance with the girl I asked to bed me. (dui bu qi ting ting, wo kai wan xiao :)) What t d what t d. If yu havn't noticed the "o" key on my new computer is rather scetchy so, if I miss some o's thats the reason. I guess I can talk abut my life and blather on and what not. I had a fairly interesting class today. I did a class that is always succesful, "what is the ideal man or women." The students are surprisingly hnest, and I was a littl ebit shocked by how the males in one of my classes described their ideal wmen. First of course they had their classic vision of chinese beauty: Slender, long hair, big eyes, small mouth, and a nose like mine. Shwing them to be the adolescents they are they of course added big tits. All that wasn't really so unbexpected, but then they started layin dwn stuff out of a feminsts worste nightmare, she had to be a good cook, she needed t be loyal, she needed t be obediant, she needed to be good at having children, she shouldn't talk to much and she needed to be a virgin. Then when the girls were describin what they thought was their ideal man, one boy piped up to say that he didn't think the girls were being honest, "girls all like strong man, because girls are weak, they like to be protected." I tried to work this into fodder for the girls t have a goo discussion, but all the girls could do was crwd around one electronic dictionary for about five minutes in order to come up with the word "vulgar." While that is a rather accurate descritption, it wasn't quite the lively discussion I had hoped for. In thew end of course they asked me abut my ideal girl, I said I wanted someone pretty but specific looks weren't all that important, I wanted an independant irl who didn't depend on me for things, someone relaxed and funny. I ended it ising one of the surefire ways t get chinese people to laugh at me (along with using the phrase "mamahuhu") I said I wanted my girlfriend to be a good kisser and gave the class to little air kisses.* *any girls fitting the above description can send inquires to the email address on the side, cause baby you know I'm a fine catch just waiting to be snagged by your line** **I apoloise for the pathetic come on, it won't happen again. ::: posted by Alf at 3:03:25 PM Saturday, October 11, 2003 :::   edit: This posts sucks so I have decided to give you the directors cut version in which I add my internal dialog to the story with as much swears as possible... Note to self: Must check my SMSs before I send them!* whatever, I'm way to fucking lazy to ever do that. For those of you not fully into the "texting" age, (as I like to call it), Cell phones can send short messages to each other which are called SMSs. Most phones now have a predictive text input. How this works is you type the word into your phone by pressing on the key with the appropriate letter on it and the phone will guess which word you typed. Since each key has about 3 letters some key combinations have more than wone word, like 6, 6 is "no" and "on." That was boring as shit, all you bitches should buy some cell phones so I don't have to explain this crap to you! On to the story. the other day i had a rendevous down by westlake with a chinese girl I met. The date went pretty smoothly, westlake living up to it's reputation as the romantic spot in China. and I got home about 11. Hell yeah, I finna get laid! The girl I was out with messaged me on the phone and asked me if I had MSN messenger and gave me her screenname. I worte back and i thought I said, "I am getting it soon, I will add you" a fuck this internet crap, why dosn't she just come over and we can "watch a DVD"(John knows what I mean, he taught me that damn trick!) and sent off the message. About 5 minutes later I get a message from her that says, "What does "I will bed you mean?"" Aww shit, this little girl knows what she needs! I'm a little confused, but I assume she is reading some old fashioned chinese english book, or is trying to drop sublimnal messages. I write back and say that, "I will bed is an old fashioned way of saying "to make love, to sleep with." Understand? Who wrote that to you? are you asking me?" hot damn girl, just say it, I know you want me. After this there is a pause of about ten minutes and I get another message, "you are a bad boy, I have my teddy bear to sleep with I don't need you!" What the fuck? girl dosn't even know how bad she does need me I am rather confused at this point because I never asked her to sleep with me, so I ask her "where did you see "i will bed you?""? stop fucking around, for real! She quickly responds with, "you!" Shit I finally realised what happened, I forgot to check my message before I sent it. "bed and add" have the same keystrokes. I tried to write back and explain, but I don't think this girl will ever really trust me. fuck, fuck, fuck, why do I always fuck up? *I apologise that this is the second post about my cell phone in a week. I really am that lame. ::: posted by Alf at 7:42:19 PM Friday, October 10, 2003 :::   So I bought a bike today with car, and rediscovered the perverse joy that is riding a bike way to fast. 150 kuai for a pimped out dark blue one speed roadster. Smething to think about: Chinese people ride bikes slwer than americans, yet drive cars like they are drunk all the time. ::: posted by Alf at 12:17:29 AM Wednesday, October 08, 2003 :::   So I've had my cell phone for awhile, Shit's pretty cool. It's got snake on it, my high score is like 546, but I know can do better. It's also got chinese SMS'ing which means I can send short text messages in Chinese which leads to this weird phenomen in my Chinese learing, I can communicate better in Chinese over my cell phone than by talking. This is because when you SMS a certain delay is expected before you return a message, so I have time to check a dictionary. This is all pretty boring, but I think it's pretty funny when I convince some chinese girl over the phone that my chinese is pretty good, (by discussing the finer points of Meng Zi's dialects say...) only to meet her face to face and have her be seriously disappointed ("Ni duo da le?" (how old are you) and "jintian hen re" (today is very hot) being about the total extent of my spoken chinese ability.) But it's not so bad because at least I'm learning my charecters. it also always me to bug my chinese speaking friends as much as possible, by shoving my cell phone in front of their faces and asking them "What's the charecter for hamburger? "Which one?" "The Bao." "What bao?" it's two different baos? "yeah" "That's retarded." ::: posted by Alf at 9:37:47 PM Tuesday, October 07, 2003 :::   Not surprisingly, Watching FOX news makes you stupider. ::: posted by Alf at 2:50:09 PM Friday, October 03, 2003 :::   Uhh, I guess I might as well give y'all the lowdown on what's up in the HZ. So this week is the national day holiday, which means I get a week off. yeeaaaa! So we kicked off the week with a lao party spectaculrium, that was good cause we drank miranda rights and taitian drips which are the names we came up of drinks cause we are so clever. Then I got kinda drunk and wandered off to this bar that has a cute barmaid, but she wasn't there so i went out and ate some street food it was pretty tasty, I practiced lots of chinese too. Oh yeah before that I bought a computer this John, it was ok but it was super crowded and we couldn't find any taxi so I had to lug the f'ing thing like 50 miles and my arms almost fell off. It sucked, and then I got to setting the damn thing up but they forgot to put the power cable so I can't post anything from my room, so I think my posts will get better when I do that. Then the day after that we got whored out to a private english toturing program "Nova" and they took us to a beer festival run by the local, west lake brand beer. Well one of my weaknesses is free beer so this wasn't an oppurtunity I was gonna miss. We got some some "Bing de" pi jiu and went to town. Then they started playing some rocking chinese dance music and some skinny sluts started dancing. I was buzzing a little so I went over to watch the fun, then out of no where all these Chinese cameramen come and start raping us with there camera's, I've never felt like such a piece of meat before, I still feel dirty. Then some other teachers went to look at a "beautiful waterfall, or some crap, but me and grezeg decided to stay and do what we came to do and drink beer. They brough ought the new "Siwu" black beer. it was actually quite good, a light bock with nice chacalate and coffe notes, but the dumbasses put the beer in a clear bottle and I doubt they are using hops with exclusivily beta acids so the beer will be skunked anytime you buy it in a store. Then we left and went to eat. But there wasn't a cab anywhere in site and we had to get to the other side of west lake, I wanted to take a boat but we ended up walking the whole way. it was all worth it how ever as we went to an ALL YOU CAN EAT SUSHI RESTUARNT! The sushi wasn't that good but it was ALL YOU CAN EAT for 68 rmb, that's less than 10 dollars. So I thourghly gorged myself and I havn't been hungary since... ::: posted by Alf at 1:25:55 PM © A. A. S. H.

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