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Friday, September 26, 2008
white rabbit candies.
this here that everybody in my study abroad program has been enjoying during discussion sessions, nightly dorm room movie viewings, drinking games, walking to classes and dinner, while reading, showering
blah blah blah
was not only recently banned in countries abroad like canada but has been officially pulled off store shelves in china
you k n o w when china bans it, it is bad.
apparently many milk products here have been containing significant--"high"--amounts of melamine, causing mostly infants and young children to extreme sickness of kidneys and the bladder. melamine is commonly used in paper, resin, and plastic, and the chemical was illegally used to artificially raise protein content in milk foods.
really weird. i have eaten probably about twenty-five in the past three weeks. ¶ 9/26/2008 01:49:00 PM 0 Comments
this here that everybody in my study abroad program has been enjoying during discussion sessions, nightly dorm room movie viewings, drinking games, walking to classes and dinner, while reading, showering
blah blah blah
was not only recently banned in countries abroad like canada but has been officially pulled off store shelves in china
you k n o w when china bans it, it is bad.
apparently many milk products here have been containing significant--"high"--amounts of melamine, causing mostly infants and young children to extreme sickness of kidneys and the bladder. melamine is commonly used in paper, resin, and plastic, and the chemical was illegally used to artificially raise protein content in milk foods.
really weird. i have eaten probably about twenty-five in the past three weeks. ¶ 9/26/2008 01:49:00 PM 0 Comments
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
十块钱
the nails on viewer's left, the ones painted tricolor with a differnt picture on each, costed a mere $1.20
against chinese custom we each tipped about 60 cents, making each pair of hands worth $1.80
¶ 9/23/2008 06:08:00 PM 0 Comments
against chinese custom we each tipped about 60 cents, making each pair of hands worth $1.80
¶ 9/23/2008 06:08:00 PM 0 Comments
Saturday, September 13, 2008
post lacking chinese content
my front yard in olympia, washington. my roommate too and almost every other summer day. ¶ 9/13/2008 04:10:00 PM 1 Comments
my front yard in olympia, washington. my roommate too and almost every other summer day. ¶ 9/13/2008 04:10:00 PM 1 Comments
Friday, September 12, 2008
welcome to blog
hello everybody.
so this will be used for updating the fam (you) since i'm not too swell at emailing, calling, or other forms of correspondence.
and, after i returned home last time i wasn't able at giving a full account of my travels. so i'd like to make amends.
for those of you reading this i will try to update at l e a s t once every two weeks, so mark it, and check accordingly until i lose my wind like my mother (abudhabinewbi).
kara.nomadlife.org
(with the http:// too, of course)
oh, and p.s. since i grew up in the Internet generation, i would like to point out that we are not accustomed to dealing with capitalization, grammar, and we're very violent--watch too much tv --eat potato chips all day--potentially psychic and the savior generation for 2011
enough.
okay. onto blog.
let's see. traditional schooling is beginning to again render me neurotic. i now remember what it was like. at evergreen being stress-free about school, my inner-being and my involvements was always. so i began to enjoy an idea that i was becoming stronger, more intelligent, and self-aware; that i overcame some enigma that was hindering my progress in junior high, highschool, and pacific lutheran.
but no, it's just a traditional education system. it's counterintuitive. it isn't soothing. it's like bullets. how many can you pack in a person before somebody else can withstand, surpass, and be declared winner. i don't think learning should be competitive.
i've always been either hard-headed or very competitive--well, instead of 'competitive,' "hard on myself" may be more apt. either way in this kind of educational system i automatically assume a large amount of stress from the cut-throat atmosphere around me. i get caught in the frenzy of working to achieve something, whether it be a certain letter or number, a pat on the back, a certain distinguishment, etc...i'm just there to get to a certain level. when one goes through life purely for the point of leveling, like christopher in computer games, one becomes a zombie. straight from the wisdom of World of Warcraft: one can never s t o p leveling! i enjoy the process but subjected to this type of learning system i'm not able to enjoy the material, structure of the class and the teaching style because they are all in it together! i'm completely overloaded. my brain becomes hyperfocused on the situation; the competition, the bogusness, the hurdles i must leap through to l e a r n. i like to learn how I want to learn, not in a way that is feasible with the moral/social and economic values and constraints of our country.
anyways, i hate to focus on the negative. the good part is that i'm probably going to be learning lots of chinese. i'm living on the minorities university in Kunming, Yunnan province.
we're the only foreigners learning here full of many english, english tour guide, and business english majors, so our friendship is a hot commodity. really gross that i just said that. in fact, our consortium program paired us up with chinese students. but it's difficult to pair people up. i mean, people who are going to be friends naturally just gravitate towards making and keeping a friendship. you can't pair people up as such. i'm not motivated to be in a relationship based on a mutual need. at least not right now. i want the parasitic ones. abuse. neglect. yup. anyways, just by hanging out on campus i have some great chinese friends. i met them by the stairs of my dorm. i saw two giggling pointing chinese girls huddled near me, moving to keep up as i briskly started up the stairs to my dorm. because i noticed their back and forth attempts at kindling the courage to speak to me i pretended to drop a piece of paper. this was the right thing to do. and scrounging around in my bag for thirty more seconds was the necessary step too.
they are very excitable and i can connect with them in ways i cannot older chinese students--they're all freshmen. they are super cute and happy. we have a lot of fun and enjoy frantically trying to communicate, to understand new words and sayings which lead to more tangents of the previous in the process. in fact, just got back from playing badmitton with them. we switch off on english and chinese. one usually comes complete with english-chinese electronic pocket dictionary so we're never without misunderstanding even if it takes a minute or two and some "chinglish" (e.g. wo qu toilet. wo de stomach si le.) well, if i must brag, my chinglish is much more advanced than this. this is only an example and far from my personal (supreme) hand-gesture and chinglish skills.
acutally the mid autumn festival is coming up on sunday (zhang jie) and previous to the festival all chinese buy tons and tons of mooncakes (yue bing). anyways, i visited my friends the other day in their dorm room where they asked me if i knew mooncakes and the festival. i made the mistake of saying that i did wherein six hands sprouted bags of six cakes each. that's thirty-six mooncakes. anyways, mooncakes are oily, dense, very slightly sweet pastry dough with cured meats, lotus, red-bean paste, or other undistinguishable things inside them. in short, they are disgusting. i regifted them to everybody in my program, sometimes pawning off two to one person in the name of "zhang joe kuai le" and my own personal kindheartedness; "this is for ME? t h a n k - y o u." ooohhhh, don't mention it.
unfortunately we only have thirteen students in our program. i have like twenty left. gross.
whelp tonight is my first night of downtime so i'll be damned if i'll spend the entire time blogging.
¶ 9/12/2008 05:00:00 PM 0 Comments
so this will be used for updating the fam (you) since i'm not too swell at emailing, calling, or other forms of correspondence.
and, after i returned home last time i wasn't able at giving a full account of my travels. so i'd like to make amends.
for those of you reading this i will try to update at l e a s t once every two weeks, so mark it, and check accordingly until i lose my wind like my mother (abudhabinewbi).
(with the http:// too, of course)
oh, and p.s. since i grew up in the Internet generation, i would like to point out that we are not accustomed to dealing with capitalization, grammar, and we're very violent--watch too much tv --eat potato chips all day--potentially psychic and the savior generation for 2011
enough.
okay. onto blog.
let's see. traditional schooling is beginning to again render me neurotic. i now remember what it was like. at evergreen being stress-free about school, my inner-being and my involvements was always. so i began to enjoy an idea that i was becoming stronger, more intelligent, and self-aware; that i overcame some enigma that was hindering my progress in junior high, highschool, and pacific lutheran.
but no, it's just a traditional education system. it's counterintuitive. it isn't soothing. it's like bullets. how many can you pack in a person before somebody else can withstand, surpass, and be declared winner. i don't think learning should be competitive.
i've always been either hard-headed or very competitive--well, instead of 'competitive,' "hard on myself" may be more apt. either way in this kind of educational system i automatically assume a large amount of stress from the cut-throat atmosphere around me. i get caught in the frenzy of working to achieve something, whether it be a certain letter or number, a pat on the back, a certain distinguishment, etc...i'm just there to get to a certain level. when one goes through life purely for the point of leveling, like christopher in computer games, one becomes a zombie. straight from the wisdom of World of Warcraft: one can never s t o p leveling! i enjoy the process but subjected to this type of learning system i'm not able to enjoy the material, structure of the class and the teaching style because they are all in it together! i'm completely overloaded. my brain becomes hyperfocused on the situation; the competition, the bogusness, the hurdles i must leap through to l e a r n. i like to learn how I want to learn, not in a way that is feasible with the moral/social and economic values and constraints of our country.
anyways, i hate to focus on the negative. the good part is that i'm probably going to be learning lots of chinese. i'm living on the minorities university in Kunming, Yunnan province.
we're the only foreigners learning here full of many english, english tour guide, and business english majors, so our friendship is a hot commodity. really gross that i just said that. in fact, our consortium program paired us up with chinese students. but it's difficult to pair people up. i mean, people who are going to be friends naturally just gravitate towards making and keeping a friendship. you can't pair people up as such. i'm not motivated to be in a relationship based on a mutual need. at least not right now. i want the parasitic ones. abuse. neglect. yup. anyways, just by hanging out on campus i have some great chinese friends. i met them by the stairs of my dorm. i saw two giggling pointing chinese girls huddled near me, moving to keep up as i briskly started up the stairs to my dorm. because i noticed their back and forth attempts at kindling the courage to speak to me i pretended to drop a piece of paper. this was the right thing to do. and scrounging around in my bag for thirty more seconds was the necessary step too.
they are very excitable and i can connect with them in ways i cannot older chinese students--they're all freshmen. they are super cute and happy. we have a lot of fun and enjoy frantically trying to communicate, to understand new words and sayings which lead to more tangents of the previous in the process. in fact, just got back from playing badmitton with them. we switch off on english and chinese. one usually comes complete with english-chinese electronic pocket dictionary so we're never without misunderstanding even if it takes a minute or two and some "chinglish" (e.g. wo qu toilet. wo de stomach si le.) well, if i must brag, my chinglish is much more advanced than this. this is only an example and far from my personal (supreme) hand-gesture and chinglish skills.
acutally the mid autumn festival is coming up on sunday (zhang jie) and previous to the festival all chinese buy tons and tons of mooncakes (yue bing). anyways, i visited my friends the other day in their dorm room where they asked me if i knew mooncakes and the festival. i made the mistake of saying that i did wherein six hands sprouted bags of six cakes each. that's thirty-six mooncakes. anyways, mooncakes are oily, dense, very slightly sweet pastry dough with cured meats, lotus, red-bean paste, or other undistinguishable things inside them. in short, they are disgusting. i regifted them to everybody in my program, sometimes pawning off two to one person in the name of "zhang joe kuai le" and my own personal kindheartedness; "this is for ME? t h a n k - y o u." ooohhhh, don't mention it.
unfortunately we only have thirteen students in our program. i have like twenty left. gross.
whelp tonight is my first night of downtime so i'll be damned if i'll spend the entire time blogging.
