Photos 4

 The Abstruse Temple in Jingzhou, China, taken on a snowy day in December 2010.

 My favorite shot of the Abstruse Temple in Jingzhou...I don't know how a vertical picture will work in the slideshow, but we'll see.  Also December 2010. 

 The Kuang Si Waterfall near Luang Prabang, Laos...this waterfall hidden in the depths of the jungle was absolutely breathtaking.  This was in August 2010. 

A temple in Luang Prabang, Laos, taken in August 2010. 

Photos 3

 Looking over Naples from the Castello Sant'Elmo...that's Vesuvius in the background.  This was taken in May of 2009. 

 The pier on Tybee Island, on the coast of Georgia.  This was taken not long after sunrise, in late August 2009. 

 Meandering through The Burren, in western Ireland, on a nice day in October of 2008.

 The Cliffs of Moher, on the western coast of Ireland, in October of 2008. 

Beautiful old gate near the Sunshine Temple on the outskirts of Jingzhou, China, taken in November or December of 2010; I'm too lazy to go look for sure right now. 

Photos 2

 The sun setting over the rooftops of Budapest...taken in July 2009. 

 Hiking along a ridge in the Tatra Mountains, near Zakopane, Poland, in July 2009. 

 World War II memorial in Bologna, Italy, taken in February 2009. 

The most ancient and interesting church in Milan, Sant'Ambrogio.  This was taken in April of 2009.

Photos 1

 This one is in the Swiss Alps, from the Bernina Express train.  The train wound through the mountains from Locarno, or thereabouts, I think, to St. Moritz.  I took Mom on a day trip here on her first trip to Europe, in July of 2007.   

 I love the amazing colors of the Ligurian coast.  Mom and I were hiking through the Cinque Terre in July of 2007 when I took this and the next photo. 

 Also a view while hiking along the Cinque Terre in Liguria, Italy...

One of my favorite views in Milan...This was taken from the top of Monte Stella.  There are no natural hills in Milan, but after World War II all the rubble and debris was carted to two parks, one on each side of the city.  The larger pile, on the west side of town, was named Monte Stella and is now an amazing vantage point of the Alps in the distance and the city below. 

Another Continent, Again

Hello, anyone who might see this even though I know my regular readers long ago gave up and quit checking this blog.  Sorry for the abrupt end to the blog in October; due to the internet restrictions in China I had a hard time getting this blog to work; I had to use various proxies and such just to see it--and then in October, even the proxies quit working.  And anyhow, November and December were incredibly busy, so I probably wouldn't have kept up too well anyways. 

Anyhow, I moved back to Tennessee, arriving on December 24.  I only signed a one-year contract when I moved to Jingzhou, and although I could have, I chose not to renew it.  If I was still single and unattached, I would have stayed in a heart beat.  I had a almost-too-good-to-be-true job, great friends, a fulfilling and challenging ministry, frequent access to Hot Pot, and great travel opportunities (and those of you who are also "vagabonds" who will go anywhere armed with only a backpack and walking shoes will understand what that means to me).  But I was 7735 miles away from BW.

If you've never had a long distance relationship, let me tell you that ten months on different continents is not easy on a relationship.  I think we did great all things considered: Skype is a blessing from God, even though the slightest problem with it could send me into an irrational meltdown.  We talked almost every day, for hours when we could.  We set our personal phone-call-duration record back in August: ten hours, forty-five minutes.  Impressed?  We were a bit impressed with ourselves.  Or maybe we're just nuts.  I'm pretty sure the proprietors of the bookstore/postcard stand/internet cafe I spent the day in thought we were.  I showed up about five minutes after they opened the doors in the morning (I stayed at a hotel just across the way) and sweet talked them into selling me a banana from their fruit smoothie stand.  It was a sunny morning in the quiet little capital city of Vientiane, Laos, for me, and at that time BW was working third shift, so he was used to being up all night.  So well talked all my day and all his night--and it's a good thing they caved on the banana, because that was all the food I had.  We held on to our electronic connection that day until they finally started giving me pointed looks as the minutes hand ticked on towards closing time. 

The point is, no matter how hard you work to keep a relationship good even over the miles, it will never quite replace sitting in the same car (or truck, as it may be) and looking each other in the eye as we talk.   It certainly can be difficult sometimes: imagine you need to point out something negative to your spouse/significant other.  If you are in the same room, you can temper what you say by touching their hand, or doing something nice for them, or showing through your body language how you feel.  When all you have is a phone connection, you can only be blunt.  Even more so, in fact, that in person, since the other person can't see how hurt or upset your are from your body language or expression.  Everything has to be put into words, words that sometimes hurt. So many things would would be better if you could just have a hug when you need it.  Maybe I'll write more some time on the ins and outs of loving someone from that kind of distance.

I don't regret having the experience of a long-distance relationship, though: I think we have surely learned not to take each other for granted.  I hope we don't forget that lesson too quickly.  So I moved back here to Tennessee.  My life in Jingzhou was good, but however long I stayed, it would never be anything more that a relatively short-term stop on my life journey.  BW, on the other hand, could well be part of my life forever, and it was time to come back here and spend time face to face while we figure out our future together. 

So I am here.  Funny, I just might end up the one place I never imagined I would: here in middle Tennessee, the place I put so much effort into leaving behind. 

Internet Issues

Alright, so I'm working hard to update the blog.  I have so many things I want to go back and fill in! However, now that I'm working on it, my internet decides to disagree.  I'm having trouble with both proxies (most blogs are blocked here), so I wasn't able to post pictures on my last couple of entries.  Next time that I get the proxy to stay running for more than three minutes, I'll finish them and add the pictures.  Thanks for your patience!

October 12th: Walmart Weirdness 4 or 5 (at least)

Aaaaand I'm back, with another installment of your favorite blog feature, Wal-mart Weirdness!

I know that some may think that if we have a Wal-mart here, things can't be all that different. And yet I think you can see from the following pictures that that's not quite the case...I never go to Wal-mart without a camera, because there's always some new oddity to enjoy.

First of all, the Chinese people have a slightly different sense of what produce would make a good juice than we do...today I found both corn juice and pumpkin juice. Now, I've seen corn juice around before--they also have corn candy and such; they seem to treat it as a fruit quite frequently. Pumpkin juice was a new one, though. It was relatively expensive, so that's my excuse for not buying some to try.

Another totally normal food here that we Americans never quite get used to is Chicken feet. I just don't see the big deal, as there's not much meat to eat, but they're as hot as chicken wings around here. They are added to soups, spiced and packaged as snacks, and available at every corner market.

This trip to Wal-mart was on a rainy Tuesday night; Season, Rebecca, Janice, and I had went out for supper and stopped by Wal-mart on our way home. Oddities in Wal-mart are even more fun when you have a friend along to point them out to.

Wal-mart is still Wal-mart, though. There's the same old neighborly announcement by the register with a picture and phone number for the manager. I find it interesting that they use his English name, Johnny, since 99% of the people shopping there are Chinese. Seriously, there's maybe twenty foreigners who even know that Wal-mart exists.

October 12th: Hot Pot Heaven

China is a big place (very close in size to the United States; some sources say one is bigger, some the other, depending on if you count the surface area of the Great Lakes or not), and so, like the U.S., different regions have different traditions and different tastes in food. Up north around Beijing, they eat a lot of breads and noodles and dumplings. Along the coast and south-east, seafood is naturally a bigger part of the diet. Hubei Province, where I live, fits in the Central-Southwest culturally and gastronomically. The locals aren't shy about putting the red chili peppers into anything and everything; one phrase we foreigners learn fast is "Bu la!" Not hot! Every one of us has had that moment when we realize we accidentally got a piece of pepper. First your mouth goes numb, and then you find yourself shoveling in rice and scrambling for whatever drinks are available (which often isn't too much, as the Chinese people don't tend to drink with food).

As hot as the local food can get if you aren't careful, the real center for spicy is Sichuan Province. The capital, Chongqing, is Hot Pot central. Sichuanese food may make most people sweat, but if you avoid the pepper flakes it's great. 

Janice, a Chinese friend and one of our FAO 'overseers', had introduced Season and Rebecca to a great hot pot place down by Walmart. They were dying to go again and I'd never been, so on a miserably rainy and muddy Tuesday night we took the bus down for supper. We ducked into a nondescript store front that in fact was under construction and picked our way around the buckets of dry wall mud to the elevator. When we stepped out onto the third floor I knew we were in a special kind of place: the inner wall of the restaurant is a cave with undulating stalactites and stalagmites. We walked by a maple tree with brilliant orange leaves and then under and around eight-foot-tall orange mushrooms to get to our table.

In this place, there is a burner in the middle of the table. On this is placed a divided bowl with two different kinds of soup bubbling away; the white soup is fairly mild while the red soup is full of spices. Then, there is a whole paper full of options; Janice check-marked all the possibilities we were interested in. It sounded like way too much food to me--she must have checked twenty things--but the others assured me that the plates were small.

They brought all of the plates to our table on a huge tray and arranged them on a shelf at the end of the table. One by one, Janice would dump the ingredients off into the soup to cook. Some were ready immediately and some needed to bubble a bit. She would add two or three things at a time and we would all share them before dumping in fresh plates of other things. We had all sorts of things: chicken, beef, tofu, two or three types of mushrooms (Rebecca's favorite), carrots, sweet potato, regular potato, bean sprouts, twisted hard cracker like things, cabbage, greens, seaweed, dumplings, a type of noodle, and plenty of other things. We all ate until were were stuffed--we probably could have done without the last couple of dishes. It wasn't unbearably hot, but we did finish off a two-liter of Pepsi during the meal.

Actually, for me, I ate slowly rather because the food was temperature-hot (fresh out of the boiling soup) rather than spicy-hot. The steam coming off of the soup filled the air like fog; Janice and Season teased each other by blowing it into the other's face. Anyhow, the point is that I understood Rebecca and Season's immediate obsession with the place.  My mouth is starting to water sitting here writing about the meal; I can't wait to be there again. Janice is supposed to translate the menu for us so we can go without the help of a Chinese friend sometimes.

October 11th: Psychological Monsters

I just counted it up...we're now in week 8 (out of 17) of the semester.  It seems like we just got started--I'm starting to get overwhelmed with all of the stuff I have to do!  I'm going to have to buckle down and stay organized and try to beat my personal besetting sin--procrastination.  Besides teaching my four writing classes every week (and all the piles of grading that come from them! This is a major area where procrastination can be deadly), I also have women's study group meetings Monday and Wednesday. On Wednesday, I am the teacher, so there's quite a bit of preparation there, as well as house cleaning and fixing a meal for twenty.  Friday nights I've been taking turns attending "religious discussions" on the east (my) campus and the west campus with Lee.  Sundays are an all-day time of great fellowship--meeting at Ron and Evelyn's on the south campus (although sometimes I visit Dale and Lisa on the central campus), then lunch with whoever can stay (often ten to twelve people), a couple of hours to crash in an unavoidable Sunday afternoon nap, then meeting at Colonel and Kelly's at five, then back to the south campus to Ron and Evelyn's for dinner (she usually makes some sort of soup and sandwiches--last night was beef and noodle soup, yum!) and one or two intense rounds of Settlers of Catan. 

And now I've accepted teaching one more class a week, an evening course in oral English for local middle school teachers that should last for ten weeks (the rest of the semester).  It does mean an increase in pay for the overtime hours, which was one motivation, but also it sounds like an interesting opportunity to teach a totally new demographic--teachers instead of students, who I would likely otherwise never meet.  I'm looking forward to using many of the oral English lesson plans I've come across but never been able to use in my writing classes, so it's a fun professional challenge as well.  I've always been a teacher, and it's a bit hard to imagine myself not doing something related to teaching or education; I've tried to steer away from teaching at a few points in my life but I keep coming back to it.  Being a teacher is just part of who I am.  And then, there's also the summer vacations...that doesn't hurt my love for the teaching profession at all, either.

The last two weeks we've been discussing descriptive writing in class, which I find is a lot of fun to teach. Today we began with talking about vocabulary for describing people and personalities--I introduced them to terms such as introvert/extrovert and open-minded/close-minded. Those of you who know me well know my fascination with psychology and psychological testing (I have a minor in psychology), so I took the opportunity to use a simple personality test with my students. There are ten horizontal rows of four adjectives, and you must choose which of the four words describes you the best. Afterwards, you tally up how many you chose in the A, B, C, and D column. A majority of A's mean that the person is a Controller, for B's, a Motivator, for C's, a Developer, and for D's a Stabilizer. Here are the descriptions:

Then, for their in-class journal assignment, the students answered the following questions:
1. According to the Personality Survey, are you a controller, a motivator, a developer, or a stabilizer?

2. Do you agree with your results from the survey? Why or why not? If not, which personality type do you think best describes you?

3. What do you think the world would be like if everyone was a controller? How about if everyone was a motivator? What if everyone was a developer? And what if everyone was a stabilizer?

4. How do you think you and your classmates can benefit from the variety of personality types in your class?

I've used others personality surveys before that I like much better and that I feel are more accurate (but then again, how much accuracy do you expect in ten questions?), but I had worksheets for this one and it fit the time constraints of the class perfectly. I may see if I can make some modifications or find a similar test that I like better before class tomorrow. I need to make more copies, anyhow. By the way, I was a controller. This assessment does fit my in-class personality as a teacher, but not my personality as a whole, as I am definitely an introvert. I'm not too concerned if the survey isn't terribly accurate; probably all the better, as it gives the students more fuel for thought to write about if they don't agree with it and go on to explain how they really are. 

After I gave them time to think over these questions and write in their journals, I got the chance to try a description activity that I've never had the chance to use before: monster art! I gave each students two pieces of paper. First, they had five minutes (okay, closer to ten...I have a lot of perfectionists) to draw a monster. Monsters work well for open-ended activities because there is no one way to draw a monster--it could be something with fur, or feathers, or scales; it could have two eyes or three ears or five feet or seven antennae; it could have wings or paws or hands or flippers. A monster could be a cute fuzzy thing from Sesame Street, or could be a shadow with flashing teeth from a Halloween thriller. After everyone had drawn a monster, I took them up, shuffled them, and then passed them back out face-down. Now, the students had to work in pairs. One partner would look at their monster, but keep it hidden from the other. Then they would describe it while the partner followed the description to draw it on the second sheet of paper. After they finished, then they could compare the original and the copy to see how well their description had enabled the partner to draw it. It was a good way to illustrate through experience how we can give someone else a mental picture through our descriptions. There were some very cute and creative monsters! I think the activity went well, and I think I'll keep it in my repertoire.

October 3rd: Fish for Sunday Dinner

 The long-awaited fall cool-down came to us over a week ago, but we haven't been able to enjoy it too much as it brought with it a solid week of drippy drizzling.  Today, however, was one of those crisp, clear, brilliantly sunny perfect fall days.  I wished I was hiking in the woods; the urge to be outdoors was nearly irresistible.

It was a good Sunday, following the normal pattern: in the morning, Rebecca, Season, and I headed over to Ron and Evelyn's house on the south campus for a morning meeting.  After the meeting, most weeks we all go out to eat together.  Eleven people gathered around two pushed-together tables in the small back room of a restaurant across from the south campus.  It was crowded, but the more the merrier when we can share good food with good friends.  The main dish was grilled fish.  We Americans tend to have quite a disconnect between animals and food--we buy our meat clean and packaged in plastic from Kroger's; it's easy to disassociate it from the animal it used to be a part of.  No such thing  here.  Just inside the doorway of the restaurant there was a tub of water with a board over top of it.  Jordan, one of the Chinese brothers, translated Ron's request for fish.  The restaurant owner lifted up the piece of plywood and plunged his hands into the murky tub, and came up with a squirming ten-pound fish.  "Bigger!"  So he dropped the first fish unceremoniously back into the water and scrambled for another.  The third pick met the requirements, so he tossed it over his shoulder onto the sidewalk by the door.  It gasped in the sun as we filed past to find a table.  The owner's daughter squeezed past us with a meat cleaver in hand.  Twenty minutes later, we had a perfectly grilled fish, with a marinade of onions and spices, in the center of our table. 

As everyone else settled in at the tables, Ron, Jordan, and I held a conference in the kitchen with the owner.  Jordan is Chinese, so he could write our order down for us--here, generally you write your own order on the pad of paper instead of the waitress doing it.  Ron has the idea that I'm good at ordering food, so I have now been promoted to the ordering committee at most meals.  My Chinese is still on a just-getting-by level, but I have learned how to say several of the normal dishes.  Today was a wonderful meal: besides the fish, we had a plate of sweet and sour pork, two plates each of eggplant and cabbage, potatoes and onions, scrambled eggs and tomatoes, lotus root, and a super-spicy version of chicken and peanuts.

Another Sunday dinner, a couple of weeks later than the one I'm talking about.  Of course, I should have got the shot before we ate all the food...

I spent the afternoon doing some stuff for BW's birthday, and then we had a meeting at Colonel and Kelly's at five.  The singing seemed especially wonderful today--several of my favorite songs.