Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Lost in the dark

I'm going to start this post off by reassuring you that I was not lost in the dark. We just started having yoga classes at my school. The yoga classes are for anyone in the community, but they are held in my school building (actually starting tomorrow they will meet in my classroom). It's a small community )not counting the 230 or so boarding students, it's a town of less than 500 people, accessible only by bush plane) and so like any small community (at least in rural Alaska) the school is the lifeblood of the community. I had only done yoga once before, a little more than 13 years ago and it was in Chinese. I'm not the biggest fan of yoga (although actually I did rather enjoy it last night), but this is the only group exercise class here in Galena (we do have a swimming pool though so I do lap swims Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings and now Yoga Tuesday and Thursday evenings).
By the time yoga ended we were approaching dark (next week when we are no longer on daylight saving time it will definitely be dark before yoga ends at 6 pm) and I needed to talk to the custodian and gather up my things before starting home on my four-wheeler. I put on my winter gear (coat and rain paints - because it isn't cold enough for my snow pants yet) since the temperature was somewhere in the teens and then went outside to start my four-wheeler and get it warming up while I finished putting on my gear (hat, gloves, scarves). I then drove about 2-3 miles home.
When I got home I reached in my pocket for my keys and they weren't there. Panic set in. I raced back to school thinking I had probably dropped them in the parking lot when I pulled my gloves out of my pocket. Unfortunately, it was mostly dark by the time I got back to school. I looked through the parking lot, but couldn't find them. I went back into the building (which was still open because there was middle school basketball practice going on in the gym). The custodian had closed my door when he finished so I couldn't get into my classroom, but I share a back porch with two other classrooms. One has the entrance directly across from mine and was clearly locked so I went to the other on. That teacher had a post-it note on the door which said not to disturb him unless you were his wife. Obviously, I'm not his wife, but I walked in anyway. He was apparently taking part in a webinar or something. I simply told him, "I know I'm not your wife, but I can't find my keys" as I walked though his classroom, through the porch and then into my classroom. I checked my desk (hoping I'd simply forgotten to pick them up) and the drawer where my four-wheeler key had been (hoping I'd dropped them when I picked it up, but no luck.
I then started driving slowly back toward home checking for my keys. Part-way there I had some other thoughts of where they might be at school (I really couldn't figure out how they could have fallen out mid-route). I went back to school, looking once more in the parking lot before going back into my classroom (I had left the door cracked open just in case) and checked on the floor around my desk. I thought, "maybe I missed my pocket altogether." Still, no keys. I pulled the door shut and drove home at 10 mph searching the ground the whole way. The further I got the larger the pit in my stomach grew. I got home and knew I had to find our how to get a new key because I couldn't get into my apartment. I live in a building that use to be the officers' quarters when it was an air force base and the students from the boarding school live in the next building in what used to be the enlisted mens' quarters. I walked over the student dorms and explained what happened to the front desk and asked the lady working there if she knew who I needed to talk to. She did and his office was just down the hall (the answer was the director of residence life). By this point it has been more than an hour since I left school the first time. I'm cold, hungry (it's 7:20 pm), frustrated and depressed. Luckily, the director was able to find another set of keys (both front door and my suite), but he did have to walk over there with me (not that he complained a bit).
After I got into my apartment, I sent my principal a text message telling him that I had lost my keys. My heart was in my stomach. He never answered and I don't think I slept too well last night. This morning while I was swimming I could feel the tension in my shoulders. After getting to work I went to talk to my principal. He was really cool about it and really calmed me down. He asked me what keys they were and what they looked like and then told me we'd try to find my keys and if we didn't we'd get me some more keys. I still wasn't happy about losing my keys, but at least the panic subsided.
My principal asked me where I thought I had lost them and I told him that I thought they had probably fallen out of my pocket in the parking lot when I took my gloves off, but in the dark I couldn't find them. He said what I'd been thinking which was to check the parking lot once it got light again. Unfortunately, school starts at 9 am (I start work at 8 am) and this time of year it isn't light yet by 9 am. However, partway through first period he came into my classroom and tossed me my keys. I started to ask where he found them, but then I realized there was still snow and water on them.
I was so happy to have my keys back! What had started as a rough day became a good day. We had an early dismissal (at 2 pm) and then a community Halloween Carnival (in the school gym) from 3-5. I don't live in an area where people can go trick-or-treating, but apparently all the local kids go. One of my friends had invited me over to pass out candy at her place, but after yesterday I was too tired and so I didn't go (plus I'm presenting about China tomorrow night and so I will have a really long day tomorrow and still have to finish preparing my presentation).

Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Sometimes you just have to be flexible

This morning I went into work and was expecting it to be business as usual. I had my mind on what we were going to do in my chemistry class, but when I walked into my classroom I saw a couple of test papers sitting on my desk. The tests were for a World Geography class and one of my academic support students had taken them yesterday. I decided I should immediately get them into the interdepartmental mail (World Geography is taught on our other campus) and so I went to the office to do that. I'd never sent anything via interdepartmental mail before so I asked the principal how to do so. He was speaking with the assistant principal, but that isn't an unusual thing so I didn't think anything of it. He told me the drop box was in the district office so after I filled out the envelope (I did know how to do that it was more that I didn't know where the envelopes or the drop box were), I headed to the district office. I asked the ladies there where the box was a popped it into the bin. Then my day began to change.
One of the ladies, C, told me that we had no water and wouldn't for at least six hours. I replied that I'd been at the doctor's office one time when they lost water and had to shut down. Surely, as a school we couldn't, by law, have school without water. I, then told me that in the past when we were notified in advance school was canceled. C and I told me that they would still have to work, but they thought school would probably be canceled. I went back to my classroom to work because no matter what happened, I had plenty of work to do.
As I was working I got an alert of my watch. It was through my app for the local radio station and it said, "No school at SHS in Galena today due to water issues." At first this excited me because I could really use an extra day off. Then I went to talk to my coworker, K. We hadn't heard anything official yet, but she suspected we would have to go over to the other campus and hold classes there. That didn't seem possible to me, but I started think we might still have to do something on the other side (that's how the campuses are always referred to as this side and the other side, depending on where you are when you say it).
I went back to my classroom to continue working and then a few minutes later the principal came in to officially tell me the plan. We would go over to the other campus and basically babysit the kids when they didn't have classes for the other side. He asked me if I had any educational movies that would still hold the students' interest and I said I had The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. So I was going to head over there soon and pick up the movie on the way (I actually live in an apartment on "that" side).
Now you might be wondering, "didn't she post about a message saying school was canceled?" Well, I did, but it isn't that simple. The elementary school (prek-8)was canceled. The high school is actually two schools run sort of like they are two schools, but at the same time run like they are one school. Officially in Galena we have two schools (the Galena City School District also runs a boarding school and some of those kids live in Galena as well): Sidney Huntington School (the aforementioned SHS) and Galena Interior Learning Academy, better known as GILA. SHS is a prek-12 school for kids who live in Galena. GILA is a public boarding high school for students from anywhere in the state of Alaska. While the campus in town gets called SHS and the campus that was made from an old Air Force base gets called GILA the reality is the high school students enrolled in SHS and the high school students enrolled in GILA attend classes together and on both campuses. Thus, there are two issues with canceling the high school classes: 1) Only part of their classes are without water and 2) 230 of our 265 students live in a dorm. When they are not in class they have resident advisors and dorm aides who look after them. However, since this was a scheduled school day they are almost all off duty (there's one who runs the wellness room for sick kids and someone who runs the front desk, but otherwise it's an empty building during the school day). There's nowhere we can send them "home" to if we cancel school.
Thus, I took my papers and my computer to the other campus. I had just arrived and was about to head to my apartment to get my DVD when my principal stopped me. Change in plan. He'd had students asking about where I was because they wanted to ask questions on how to do academic things. He decided he was going to set me up in the dining hall and have me help students during the periods that they had me. Unfortunately, I had brought no books nor whiteboards (I have individual whiteboards that I use a lot during academic support since in academic support I am helping individual kids with whatever they need help on, mostly math). The dining hall director had a big easel pad of paper (because the GILA side is an old Air Force base the buildings are all separate buildings so the dining hall isn't next to any classrooms) and the art teacher was going to be working in the dining hall as well having the kids were on some art projects. She had some markers.
As the day progressed it eventually morphed into the kids attending their regularly scheduled classes in a variety of different locations. For the classes we made due with what we had available (Which was sometimes difficult because often the kids don't carry books around. For example the have a copy of their math textbook in their dorm room and then use another copy in class. I have additional copies in my classroom that they use when they come to academic support). Sometimes we had to get creative. For example, I had a student who needed to work on Algebra II. He didn't have a book, but one student had a book. So he used his phone and took pictures of the problems that he needed so he could work (actually several students did this). In another case a student needed to study for a trigonometry quiz (I was helping her). We started with practicing the problems on a worksheet she had previously done, but had with her and then I googled worksheets on the material she was studying and we used those problems to help her study.
Lunch was a bit challenging. Normally only about half of the students eat lunch on each side. Today all the students and staff ate lunch in the GILA dining hall. We started lunch ten minutes early serving the kids who were already in the dining hall first. Then the kids were dismissed to lunch by building to stagger their arrival in the dining hall. The food was a wider variety of items because more people had to be fed then were planned on. The dining hall manager kept encouraging people to leave the dining hall as soon as they finished eating. Before long we ran out of trays and people had to just balance their food in their hands (they were served in disposable serving dishes, but the individual items had to be balanced). Then, we ran out of seats and people were told to take plastic cutlery and eat outside in the grass (thankfully it was a sunny warm day, although warm is relative. The high today was about 55 F which for Alaska in October is quite warm). After a while she was kicking everyone out because they had to get the tables cleaned off to turn the dining hall back into classrooms (there were three classes, including mine, using the dining hall as their classrooms).
By the end of the day I had filled pages and pages (front and back) of the easel pad with lots of math and a decent amount of chemistry. Sometimes I had two or more students working simultaneously on different parts of the page (and on different subjects), but overall it worked.
After school was over I had a student asking me if first period academic support would be in the dining hall tomorrow morning. I told him the water was supposed to be back on by 2 pm (school ends at 3:55) so hopefully everything would be back to normal tomorrow. When I went to the SHS campus at 4:30, there it was still without water. I do hope everything will be back to normal tomorrow, but if not, I now know what I need to make the day more successful. I think everyone has learned enough that tomorrow will be an educational day even if we still have no water.

Friday, September 7, 2018

So many boxes

I received a box with a six-month supply of contacts (I wear daily lenses so this is 320 lenses), but when I went to put the away in the bathroom I ran into a problem. When I got home, I opened the box while sitting at the table. However, the first box I found on the table contained light bulbs. The next box contained garbage bags and a third box contained canned lychees. I finally found the contacts on the floor beside the table. However on the floor was also a box of picture frames. By this point you are probably wondering, "what in the world? Why does she have so many boxes and why hasn't she put anything away?" Let me explain. First of all, as my fellow Bush residing friends can attest I can't just go out to the store and buy things.  Here in Galena we have two general stores and hardware store. The stores do a really good job trying to keep things stocked, but it's neither easy nor cheap. For examples eggs cost $10 for 18 (I think it's $8 for 12). Milk is somewhere around $10-12 a gallon (I don't drink milk so I don't know) and a loaf of bread is $10. Additionally, one store sells gasoline for $6.95 a gallon while the other is $7.50 per gallon. Thus, while I buy gas and some other things, I try to buy as much as possible when I'm in Anchorage (or if I go to Fairbanks, Fairbanks; it's closer to here) and otherwise I order things.
 I order a box of veggies every other week that arrives on Friday or Saturday depending on when the cargo plane gets here (its supposed to be Friday, but it often isn't). When I lived in Kobuk I used Full Circle Farms which is out of Seattle, but now I'm using the Alaska Food Network (AFN) which is based in Anchorage. I like AFN better because not only can I customize the size of each box I can include things like eggs, tortillas, and other things (depending on what they have available that week) as part of my standard order (with Full Circle Farms I could only add it on top of my order, thus adding to the cost). I also like the fact that AFN has (at least this time of year) Alaska Grown produce. I'm still shipping my vegetables a long way, but not all of them are coming from out of state. 
Most of the rest of the items I buy I order online. Walmart charges a HUGE shipping fee to Alaska and a lot of staples of Amazon only ship prime pantry which doesn't ship to Alaska. Thus, I order things as a combination of Amazon and Target (who does ship free to Alaska, even rural Alaska). However, each of these choices comes with some trade-offs. Target often has better prices, but they only ship UPS. You might be wondering, "how is that a negative?" The problem is UPS only goes as far as Fairbanks. Once it gets to Fairbanks it is transferred to Ravn (a bush airline) and marked as delivered. However, it's not really delivered. Now it is simply sitting in Fairbanks. Ravn throws everything in a pile and they carry out the UPS delivery at the lowest priority (their own cargo shipping and all postal service shipping are higher priority). This means that your boxes may sit in Fairbanks for weeks. Ravn is also the airline that transports all 260 of our boarding school students so when the students arrived in town a few weeks ago that backed all the cargo up and I have a pile of boxes that say they've been delivered, but as far as I know they are sitting in Fairbanks. I say "as far as I know", because Target doesn't always put a phone number on the box and so I won't necessarily get notification (although last week they tracked me down through the school to let me know). Unfortunately, once the package arrives in Galena, I still don't have it. I have to go to Ravn and pick it up, but Ravn is open 10 am - 4 pm. I work a couple miles away from Ravn and I work 8-4. This means I can only pick packages up on Saturdays and Sundays (if it was really important I sure I could go during my planning, but I only have one every other day).
Thus, if Amazon will ship the item to a P.O. box in Alaska, that's the best choice (some things only ship to physical addresses which means it come UPS), but we're still not home-free. Best case scenario, the post office is open Monday-Friday 2-5 pm. Last week however, the post office was closed Tuesday-Friday. Monday was Labor Day so it was closed Monday as well. By the time it opened on Tuesday I had a HUGE pile of boxes (which I have then been too busy to entirely unpack and put away). Next week the post office will be open on Monday (and I think Friday), but then it will closed until the following Friday. There's a part-time opening at the post office. If anyone wants to move to Galena and work part-time at the post office many of us would be eternally grateful.
Now before you think, "she's crazy for living there," I should say there are a lot of positives including a really great community. On Monday we had an awesome Ag Fair which I hope to write a post about soon and on Sundays we have a potluck lunch after the church service each week. Also people share with each other. Many people have gardens and they share their bounty and others share their fish and hunted meat. Despite all the negative things mentioned it does seem to be a really nice place to live.

Friday, August 10, 2018

A hilarious series of errors

So if you read my last post you probably realize that by now I have arrived in Galena. I haven't made any posts on Galena itself and I will later, but I want to share a hilarious series of events that had me in stitches today.
On Wednesday we started new teacher in-service and this afternoon while I was in the meetings one of the administrators came and told me that the business office didn't have my direct deposit information which is super important because we get our first paycheck (plus our signing bonuses on the 15th). It's also super important because Galena doesn't have any banks (although remote deposit on my phone does make that a lot better than when I lived in a village prior to remote deposit and mobile banking apps). We called the business office and it was discovered that they did have my direct deposit form, but I had made a mistake on my health insurance form and needed to fix that. One of my colleagues was in fact missing her direct deposit form and so our supervisor wanted us to go to the business office to correct these issues right away. The only problem was that our school is on two campuses that are about three miles apart (for a town of less than 500 people Galena is incredibly spread out) and the business office was of course located on the opposite campus from where our training was being held. Neither my colleague nor I have had our vehicles arrive and so since we didn't have our own transportation our supervisor pointed out the window and said, "see that Toyota? Why don't you two take that and go together. The keys are in the car." Our supervisor went back into the training, we picked up some things from our seats and then headed out to the car. When we got out there we realized there were two Toyotas side by side and we each thought he had been pointing to a different car. I said, "well, he said the keys were in the car..." and proceeded to look for keys hanging from the ignition. The left car had keys in the ignition and the right one didn't. So we got into the left car. My co-worker just didn't feel it looked right and we were a bit afraid we were going to take off in the wrong car so we looked around and I found a piece of mail laying face down on the console. I picked it up, turned it over and discovered it was addressed to another district employee (at least it was one we knew). We laughed and climbed out of the car. At this point my coworker wanted me to drive (originally she had wanted to drive) and I replied, "no way, I'm not driving now." We went back to the car on the right and I discovered there was a set of keys in the cupholder. We started toward the new part of town where the other school is located, but I still felt a bit nervous. I looked through the glove compartment and breathed a sigh of relief when I discovered the insurance car which said that the car was insured by the Galena City School District.
We got to the new part of town and discovered another problem. Neither of us had done any driving and we didn't actually know how to get to the school. I thought we should turn right on the road that went past one of the local stores that I recognized, but after we turned I thought we were wrong so we went back the other way. After a while we're both going, "I've never seen this before" and decide we've gone the wrong way. We go back to the original road and in fact find the school.
We take care of our business and head back to the car. I don't know what was going through our minds, but I suspect it was my fault. In the district office we had picked up a medium sized flat rate box (not a very big box if you're not familiar with U.S. priority mail boxes) that I had shipped. The box weighs a very surprising 47 pounds 6.2 ounces and is not easy to carry. I think because I was struggling with the box I walked to the first car, put the box in the back seat and climbed in the passenger seat. My coworker followed (if this isn't how it actually transpired, I'll still accept the responsibility). We started driving back to the GILA campus and my coworker is like, "is this the right car?" Then the seat belt alarms started chiming (no one in Galena wears a seat belt) and my coworker said, "It didn't do this on the way." I look in the glove compartment and don't see the insurance card where I left it. Finally I found it, but it was buried under other documents. I was starting to worry we were in the wrong car, but after finding an insurance card registered again to the Galena City School District I reassured myself. Right after I finished reassuring myself, my coworker tells me she had to move the seat when she got in. At that point, I exclaim, "We are in the wrong car!" I remembered that we got into a car parked near the stairs leading into the school, but when we had arrived two other employees and been parked over there in a truck and I had watched them get out. The view was wrong to have been parked anywhere near where we grabbed this car from. My coworker also pointed out that the keychain was bit different. We drive back to school and I'm dying from laughter and embarrassment, park the car where we found it and walk over to the correct car. As we approach I notice the window is rolled down and remember I that I had left the window rolled down. My coworker found jacket on the seat. Laughing all the way we drove the correct car back to campus stopping at my apartment to drop off the really heavy box. We got back just after the training session wrapped up for the day.

Thursday, August 2, 2018

Final countdown

Tonight at dinner my aunt asked me if I was packed [for Galena]. I just looked at her. She then said, "What am I talking about you still have..." "3 days I replied." She counted them out and determined I had three more days and four more nights before I depart. My flight is on Monday at 6:00 am.
I have actually achieved quite a lot, but it feels like a never-ending list. I have had a physical, filled out a million new-hire documents, ordered transcripts, and requested a new copy of my teacher certification (I have to give the district an original copy and my previous district kept my original district copy of my certification). Last Saturday I shipped nine Rubbermaid Roughneck totes and this week on bought a Yamaha Kodiak 450. I pretty excited about the machine. I arranged shipping through the Yamaha dealer. They have a contract with Everets Air Cargo which supposedly gives me a better rate and they will deliver the four-wheeler to Everets, fill out the Hazmat form as well as the waybill. I was pleased with the shipping rate. The total to ship (by air) was $766.79. I was figuring it would be somewhere well over a $1000 so this was a nice surprise (The total to ship my totes was about $285; a decent price in my opinion as well). I still have a number of things to do, including, but not limited to: shopping for groceries, packing said groceries and changing my cell phone provider. When I lived in the bush before (if you go to my earliest blog posts they are about living in the village of Kobuk in the Northwest Arctic Borough) I had GCI as my cell phone provider. GCI is by far the best provider for Bush Alaska (matter of fact in many villages it is the only provider), but it's an Alaskan cell phone (and cable and Internet) provider and so when I was living in Los Angeles I switched to AT&T. From what I've been told AT&T has voice service in Galena, but not data. GCI has 3G.
 For those of you who are accustomed to always having 4G or LTE this probably doesn't sound good, but it makes me quite happy. When I lived in Kobuk the service was only GPRS. I would click on a page and then go brush my teeth or do other chores before coming back to check and see if the page had loaded. Internet service in Kobuk was also really slow (and rather expensive) so I didn't bother to get Internet (I just used the school's Internet - the school was about 40 yards from my house) and my GPRS connection. When I moved to Nome the wireless and Internet service both improved, but neither was what you would consider good. When I arrived in Nome GCI wireless has Edge service. I also paid $70 a month for 1 Mbps Internet with a data cap of 10 GB per month. While I was in Nome the Internet improved. I still paid $70/month, but my speed increased to 3 Mbps. My data connection also improved. Nome upgraded to 3G (at the time AT&T still only had Edge so it was nice to be able to access the Internet better than my friends on AT&T). I'll have to see what I can get for Internet, but it seems that the possibilities are better in Galena today then they were in Nome a few years ago. Data is without a doubt better (and cheaper) so I'm not worried about that. Also, I should be able to port my number since it was originally a GCI number, if I can't things will be tough because my phone number is on so many things...
The other big thing I need to do is go grocery shopping. One of the things everyone who lives in the Bush does when they come into town is go grocery shopping (matter of fact it isn't unusual for high school students coming for sports and other reasons to shop for their families). I will stock up on meat, veggies and other perishable items which will undoubtedly be really expensive. Here is a link to my blog on prices in Kotzebue (back in 2011). I will pack the items into Rubbermaid totes because among other things they weigh only three pounds, much less than a suitcase. They are also easier to handle and tend to fit better on bush planes as well. I meant to take a picture of my totes as we took them to the airport last Saturday, but I forgot. Nonetheless, you can read about (and see pictures) of when I shipped to Kobuk. Looking back on my shipping to Kobuk post I see that 1) I packed things other than totes 2) it was raining when we went to the airport and 3) there were lots of people. I must say this year I shipped only totes (I've learned they are much, much better) and the day I shipped my totes this year was a sunny day. Also, I guess since it was still July at the time the post office wasn't crowded at all. Anchorage requires you to take shipments of boxes greater than two to the airport post office. The airport post office has a hand truck customers can use, but it can also get really busy. We went shortly after the post office opened and there was no one there. It was easy and quick to ship everything.
I'll get to Galena on Monday and start settling in. Hopefully, by the end of next week, I will be more settled and can start focusing on the start of the school year.

Isn't she beautiful?

Here are a few other pictures from this summer...


Anchorage is home to Lake Hood the world's largest seaplane base.


This picture was taken at 11:17 pm.


Friday, June 29, 2018

Kristin goes to Disneyland (Chinese style)

Just over two years ago I went to Disneyland for the first and so far only time (I mean specifically Disneyland, I had been to Disney World several times). Right after I went to Disneyland I learned that there was a new Disney park opening in Shanghai. I knew I was moving to Beijing and really hoped I’d be able to visit Disneyland in Shanghai. Then I found out a friend of mine was moving to Wuxi. The first thing I said to her after learning that Wuxi was only an hour from Shanghai was, “We could go to Disneyland together.” Well, things didn’t work out and I ended up leaving Beijing earlier than I expected and so I thought the Disneyland Shanghai dream was crushed. Guess what, it wasn’t. This week I got the chance to go to Disneyland Shangai with the aforementioned friend, L.
Late June in Shanghai is not exactly a cool season and so L and I had to manage our day very carefully. When we arrived at the park it was 98 or 99 degrees Fahrenheit (while I don’t remember which, at that point does it matter?) and the heat index was 118 degrees! The first part of our experience was a bit of a downer and little contradictory. We spent an hour sweltering in a security line while the PA system repeated the announcements over and over again. Each announcement ended with “have a magical day.” Needless to say I wasn’t feeling too magical. When we got to the front of the line we discovered the main thing they were checking for was outside food. In typical Chinese fashion, many people had brought food into the park (I can’t blame them, we’d considered the same thing. After all the prices are high!). There were so many packages of instant noodles as well as many other things. Two people just a bit in front of us appeared to have brought enough food to feed 10 or 15 people. The food just kept coming out of their bags like they belonged to Mary Poppins. L and I had small bags that were only given a cursory glance and then we were finished with security.

After an hour in an extremely hot line we sought out the air conditioning of the shops. Shanghai Disney Resort (the official name of the park) doesn’t have a Main Street, instead it has a Mickey Avenue. After walking into one of the stores we not only noticed the blessedly cool air conditioning, but we also discovered that the shops were actually all connected together on the inside. We decided to buy matching Mickey t-shirts which not only said Shanghai Disney Resort on the side, but also had a picture of the Shanghai Disney castle. They had fitting rooms and seeing as Chinese sizes are not the same as American sizes it was necessary to try shirts on, but I must tell you there isn’t much that is more disgusting than putting on a shirt that is drenched in sweat (don’t misunderstand me, I mean the shirt I wore into the park).

I thought it would be cool to wear our new shirts in our picture in the park so after we purchased them, we found a restroom (which also had refreshingly cool air conditioning) and changed. I’m so glad we did because the next thing we came across was the meet Mickey experience. (Which was thankfully also inside where it was air conditioned - are you starting to see an important theme to surviving an amusement park with a 118 heat index?) We got some awesome photos with Mickey Mouse! We were pleased that they didn’t rush you. They actually encourage a variety of poses with Mickey and took pictures of each person separately as well as both of us together. It was a pretty great start (plus since we were wearing fresh shirts we didn’t look bedraggled and overheated - well we weren’t overheated because we had a 40 minute wait inside the air conditioned building).

We spent the late morning and early afternoon seeking out the indoor options. We “became”Iron Man and fought off aliens, we toured the castle and saw the story of Sleeping Beauty come to life in a combination of video and animatronics, and we went to two life-action shows. The first show we went to was L’s favorite ( I think it may have been her favorite activity of the entire day). It was called the Frozen Sing-a-long, but it was actually so much more. When they opened the gate we found ourselves entering a giant theater that we estimated held over 1000 people. At the front was a stage where they performed a combination of life-action of video sequences. The really cool part though were the sides of the theater. The walls were incorporated into the action. They had a forest scene on them which was then enhanced with video projections. The best part was when Elsa was singing (don’t ask me what, I’ve never seen Frozen) and she would wave her hands and the ice would spread out along the wall of the theater. L really enjoyed singing along with them. I didn’t know the songs, but was pretty happy with how well I understood them (while L sang in English, everything was presented in Chinese).


The other show we went to was the one I really wanted to see. It was the Captain Jack Sparrow Stunt Show. While we enjoyed it and felt it was worth attending we did find ourselves off to a rough start. First, when they opened the outside gates we found ourselves not in a theater, but a large room with a balcony set and queues that you stood in a watched the program from. The acoustics in the room were pretty bad and as a result I could hardly understand one word. The action couldn’t been seen well because some of it was too low and some was simply at angles that couldn’t be observed from where we stood. Additionally, from what we could understand it was pretty cheesy, slapstick humor (not my favorite). Matter of fact there was one part where they even pulled one of the pirate’s britches down (he was wearing boxer-length tighty-whities that looked like the British Union Jack. Shortly after that they opened the doors to the theater and let everyone in. Unfortunately, this happened in a very Chinese fashion with a lot of mad scrambling and total lack of order or manners. Nonetheless we, and everyone else, quickly found seats and the show continued. Inside it continued with some more slapstick humor, but then the action began. This was the part L and I really enjoyed. They had some great stunts including a fight scene that was done in one of the indoor sky diving air tunnels (not really the right word, because the air blows upward). The actors would fight in the air and then jump up onto the ships mast and then dive back into the air (that was of course then pushing them up so they didn’t plummet). It was like nothing I had ever seen and I really enjoyed it.


At about 3:30 we started riding rides. The rides in Disneyland Shanghai are pretty cool and mostly very hi-tech. The first ride we rode was amazing! It was a Pirates of the Caribbean ride that started out like the ones in the states and then in turned you around backwards so that you were surprised as you entered this underwater scene. The boat moved into an area with a giant screen all around you and above you. You felt like you were under the water. Then it continued on it’s course and blended video, static props and animatronics in a seamless manner. Even though we rode the ride twice I struggle to describe it. My favorite part was a totally disorienting sensation of riding up out of the ocean and to the top of the sea. You feel like you’re really rising, and maybe you are, everything was a bit disconcerting. There was sound a vibrations in the seat of the boat and the second time we took the ride we both felt water droplets falling on us as we “rose out of the sea.” I took pictures and some video the first time we took the ride, but not only did they not capture the real essence all that well, but they didn’t even turn out very well. I guess you’ll just have to visit Shanghai and experience it for yourself. (If you ever get the opportunity, I highly recommend it. Our tickets were only 399 RMB which is about USD 63.)
One of the challenges with Shanghai Disney is that they don’t have all that many rides. Since the park is only two years old L thinks they simply opened with enough and will add more over time. She’s probably right because the park is huge! They definitely have enough space to add a lot more. As a result of them having only a few rides the lines grow very long and the fast passes are all distributed very quickly. By the time we got into the park and got our tickets (we had purchased them online, but you didn’t get the actual ticket until you redeemed the voucher along with your ID at turnstile) the Fast passes for the most popular rides were already completely distributed (you linked your ticket to the Disneyland App and then requested fast passes in the app - only 1 ever 2 hours). We were able to get a Fast pass for Peter Pan’s flight which meant our wait was only 5 minutes (maybe less), but the waits for rides were often 80-120 minutes or longer! The longest I saw (you could check wait times in the app, at the guest service centers or in front of the rides themselves) was 165 minutes. There was no way we were waiting in line for 2 hours and 45 minutes! My personal cut-off was one hour, but since L’s was 40 minutes we never waited longer than 40 minutes in line. This meant we had to not only watch the times, but be smart about our choices. I really wanted to ride Tron (there’s no Space Mountain here. The premiere roller coaster is Tron), but the line was usually 90 minutes of longer (I saw it get as long as 150 minutes). We decided that the evening show was at 8:30 and Tron was open until the park closed at 10 so we would watch the show from the Tomorrowland side of the castle and then hurry to Tron. We were clearly not the only people with this idea as there was a mob of people hurrying that way. We took a bit of a wrong turn, but quickly corrected and managed to wait in line for Tron for less than 25 minutes (I timed all our waits).
Tron was so cool and seemingly futuristic. You had to put your bag in a cart (that part was a little scary) and then the roller coaster “cars” were motorcycles. You leaned down over the handrails and the attendants pushed a harness over your back. It also clamped down on the back of your legs. There was a compartment that opened where you put your glasses (I’m glad I was wearing my contacts because I got to see everything) and then the ride started off. It went relatively slowly to a “launching area” where you then took off like a shot. The ride was incredibly smooth, but you were going so fast you couldn’t even perceive the fact that you were sometimes looking down onto the crowds below. It was awesome and absolutely my favorite ride (or activity) of the day. 
When the park closed at 10 pm we made our way to the metro (Disneyland has it’s own stop on a line that was built for the purpose of reaching the Disney Resort). We made it back to our hotel at about 11:30 pm. We’d left at 7:15 am, but so it was an exhausting, but excellent day.



The evening show included all kinds of graphics displayed on the castle along with music and fireworks. 

Wednesday, June 27, 2018

A week in a small fishing village

Greetings from Sanya Phoenix International Airport. My flight is supposed to begin boarding in about 20 minutes, but I have a sinking suspicion it won’t depart on time. There were thunderstorms this afternoon and everything seems to be be backed up. Nonetheless, I fulfilled a more than decade-long dream of visiting Hainan Island (which is also Hainan Province). One of the things that I like to do is take advantage of all the interesting places my friends live (although I go to places where I don’t know anyone too).
Shortly before I departed the U.S. for China I messaged my friend A to tell her I was coming to visit. She replied that she wasn’t in Beijing like I thought she was, but was instead working in Sanya and I could visit her there. I was able to find some time in my travel schedule and this past Sunday evening I flew to Sanya. It turns out A was working in a small fishing village on the island of 西岛 (which means West Island) and I got to spend the week staying in this really cool renovated house. The old houses of West Island were built with coral and we stayed in a two-bedroom, two-bathroom house that had been completely renovated, but still retained much of its old-fashioned charm. 
I spent the week relaxing and wandering the village and surrounding areas. Each afternoon and evening we would eat with her employees (my friend is the operations manager for a company that is renovating building and even some boats on West Island). In the evenings A and I would take a walk and explore even more of the island together.
While, I enjoyed the opportunity to have not only authentic Chinese food, but local food, I must admit I struggled with it. While I love salmon (although I won’t touch Atlantic farm raised salmon) and halibut, I don’t care for other types of fish very much. I struggle with all the little bones and I hate getting them in my mouth. Every meal (except the last one today) had at least one type of fish. Some meals had two. Each meal also had a soup and a rather bland tasting rice porridge (a couple of different types). That having been said the meals did have some really good aspects. The cooks were magicians with vegetables. Some of the vegetable dishes had to most amazing taste. Today’s lunch was also exceptionally good. One of the chefs had made a pork dish that was out of this world. The pork was succulent and flavorful. When I arrived at lunch he asked me if I liked pork (I suspect he’d heard about my not liking fish because yesterday we’d had fish and fish balls for lunch. Dinner was only the lunch leftovers and there was only one leftover vegetable dish. It thus became very apparent what I wasn’t eating) and told me he’d made the pork himself. There was also a dish which he called tofu, but it was made with eggs rather than soybeans. He proudly told me he’d made the tofu himself. There is another “tofu” dish I’ve had in China called “Japanese tofu” which is also made with eggs, but he told me that this was different (honestly, I thought it was quite similar). Lunch also consisted of soup, rice porridge and two vegetable dishes. It was a final meal on the island.
I took a lot of pictures and even a short video. I’ll upload those and post this tomorrow from Beijing. I need to go and check the status on my flight to Beijing because we’re supposed to begin boarding any minute. I hope you enjoy the pictures from this week’s adventure.


Update: I didn’t manage to get this uploaded while I was in Beijing and then I stayed in Baotou with a friend of mine that didn’t have Internet. After that I spent three days in Shanghai (Shanghai Disneyland is a lot of fun!) and now I am in Wuxi. Hopefully, I will get posts written on those adventures in the future, but for now I hope you enjoyed reading about my week in a small fishing village.
 The chef.

 Water drops on the leaves of a banana tree 
 The kitchen of the house we stayed in. The wall on the left is the original wall made of coral. 


 These are the front doors (and the view inside of the living room)
 This is jackfruit. There’s a reason it’s sold cut up.
 We hiked up to the lighthouse on top of the only hill on the island (it was a pretty good hike, especially in the heat).

 Fresh coconut water (inside the fresh coconut)
 A banana tree!


This is a zongzi after you remove the coconut leaves it’s wrapped in and two peeled lychees

The Lychees in Sanya are fresh and large

 A zongzi wrapped in coconut leaves beside two lychees. One peeled and one not.
 Hainan is a tropical island in the extreme southern part of China. 

 A coconut that fell from the coconut tree. 
 This is from the fishing boat we took to the island. The people in the front work in the kitchen for the company my friend manages operations for.
These buildings are located on a completely artificial island. Apparently these are luxury condos and extremely expensive.

Tuesday, June 12, 2018

An Odd Amusement Park

I first came to China in 2002. At that time many of the other people who came to China used China as a jumping off point to see other countries in Asia. I had a different idea. I wanted to explore China first. China is such a large country that it seemed like it was not only the most financially prudent choice, but just a good choice for understanding the country that I was living in. Thus, in my first three years in China I visited many parts of the country: Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang (a far western autonomous region inhabited largely by a Muslim people group called the Uighurs), Harbin and more. In those three years I did a pretty good job of seeing a lot of China. In the subsequent years I revisited a number or places and saw many additional places. However, there was one place I had never been that was a bit surprising; Tianjin. Tianjin is a large city very close to Beijing. Matter of fact from the Beijing South Railway station one can get to Beijing is a little over half an hour (the high speed rail didn’t exist back in the day, but as you most likely know, I spent a year and half recently living in Beijing). Thus, I decided to spend a few days in Tianjin last week.
First, let me state that I didn’t miss anything by not going to Tianjin. I must say I found Tianjin rather disappointing a boring. I also found its transportation system a bit frustrating. They have a city card which you can refill and use on buses and the subway. I tend to like these kinds of cards because it is very difficult to have exact change for the bus. Some buses in China have conductors who can make change but these are getting rarer and rarer. Most of the time it is necessary to put exact change into the box beside the driver. Thus, I decided to get a Tianjin city card. Well, that was easier said than done. The ticket seller at the railway station metro station didn’t sell city cards, but I found them at the metro station near my hotel. Later, when I tried to refill it, the station I was at couldn’t add money to my card. If you go to Tianjin I would say don’t bother with the card (in Beijing you can now not only buy the card at any station, but you can also buy it online as an app on your phone).
After a couple of days being disappointed with the sights in Tianjin I decided to go out to the Bianhai Aircraft Carrier. A few years ago I visited the USS Midway in San Diego and had an awesome time. The reviews online said that the Bianhai Aircraft Carrier was a former Soviet aircraft carrier and was definitely worth a visit. They also have a destroyer and a submarine, but fellow travelers had posted that they absolutely would not allow people without a Chinese ID card to visit the destroyer or submarine (when I bought my ticket the rules list was posted in English and it said the same thing). 
Thus, I set out to go to this aircraft carrier. I took the subway to another part of Tianjin and then took a long distance bus. When I got to the bus stop I was confused. There were several Chinese people who got off the bus with me and they were clearly confused as well. We saw an area near the bus stop that sort of looked like it was once an amusement park, but it was really run down an clearly closed. At this point I thought the nearly 2.5 hour trip I had taken had all been for naught. There was a Chinese man who instructed us to go into this vacant lot, but I could tell the others were equally confused. Then several drivers appeared as if from nowhere (actually I thinking they had been resting in the shade) and told us that the park was 4.5 km away and they would take us there for 20 yuan. Now 20 yuan is only about three US dollars, but it is definitely too much for a 4.5 km trip (not to mention the approximately 50 miles I had traveled to get to this point had only cost me 13 yuan). However, the other people agreed and the four of them set out together leaving me behind. I heard them say (in Chinese) that the foreigner didn’t understand. I told them I understood, but there were already four people (the max allowed, excluding the driver) and I felt 20 yuan was too much for one person. I then stood there rather undecided about what to do. I checked with my phone and saw that 4.5 km was 2.8 miles. I thought about walking it, but not only was I wearing flip flops, but it was also really hot out. I started walking and thought better of it and thus I was standing around rather undecided. Another driver told me there was a show starting at noon (it was 11:40) and that the park had a lot of fun things to do. Thus, I decided to pay the 20 yuan to get there. 
When I arrived I found two things 1) There was very little English in the park (and a lot of Russian) and 2) there weren’t very many people there. Matter of fact it turns out that there was much more than just an aircraft carrier. There were multiple shows, dancing and a “little Russia” street. Probably the most surprising discovery was that so many of the people working there were white (and I presume Russia, but it’s dangerous to make assumptions). I saw a signboard outside the park which said there was show called Aircraft Storm at 12, another show at 2 pm and and third show at 3 pm. Inside the park though I couldn’t find the show. All I found was music playing through loud speakers and a lot of empty areas (it was a weekday before school let out though). Finally, I decided to give up and just go visit the aircraft carrier.
As I was approaching the aircraft carrier I saw this tall white woman whom I had seen dancing staring at me. At first I thought she was going to approach me, then I thought she wasn’t, then she in fact did approach me. She said one word that I didn’t understand (I’m guessing it was a Russian word) and then she said, “English?” I nodded. She then asked, “Do you speak English?”
“Yes. I speak English.” She then proceeded to ask me where I was from and tell me that the park usually only got Chinese visitors. She told me there was show over there (pointing beside the aircraft carrier) that had already started at noon, but maybe I could watch from outside the stadium. Then she realized the gates were still open and said since there weren’t many visitors that it looked like I could get in. She informed me that the show involved knives and was really interesting. At 2 pm she told me she and the others would be dancing on board the ship and at 3 there would be a car show. 
I went into the show beside the ship and found the most interesting show I’ve ever seen. The storyline was pretty simple there were bad guys trying to take over this ship and they had taken the admiral hostage (this had already happened by the time I arrived). Good guys were trying to take back the ship. They were performing on the water between the ship and the stage. They had built some stages out in the water and attached to the arena. They also drove every kind of water craft imaginable: jet skis, hover boats, speed boats, etc. The show involved cool explosions, mock fighting (well timed to the sound track), repelling down the side of the ship, fake gun shots and more. It was really awesome and I wish they had had another showing so I could have seen it again, this time from the beginning (I missed about the first 10 minutes).
After the show I toured the aircraft carrier. It was a bit strange. First, it definitely wasn’t as well kept up as the USS Midway. Second, it seemed that they had what must have been fake pieces on board. There was a helicopter that said US Army on the side, but I can’t imagine the Chinese had procured a real US Army helicopter. They also had what looked reminiscent of a F118 Nighthawk (beside the supposedly American helicopter), but it didn’t look real at all. Additionally, I couldn’t find anything that could have been much of a flight-line. One of the issues the USS Midway had had was changing technology had dictated the need for longer and longer flight-lines. The USS Midway added onto the deck to accommodate this need, but eventually that wasn’t enough and she was retired. This ship had a steeply angled bow and just didn’t look like it had enough space to have had much of a flight-line. Then again, since the signs were all written only in Chinese (except for the headings), I’m sure there was a lot of information I missed. 
I finished my self-guided tour of the ship in perfect timing to get a front-row seat to the dance performance. It was not at all what I expected. There were signs advertising it as a cultural experience. I don’t know what kind of culture they were trying to go for; much of the performance made me thing of Vegas (although I’ve never been to Los Vegas and am basing that statement on what I’ve seen on T.V.). However, in between some of the very Vegas-esque performances were performances by two clowns (a male and a female). The show was very interesting, but it was an odd juxtaposition. 
The dancing ended in perfect timing to go to the car show which ended up being my favorite part of the day. The car show was a stunt show and they had all kinds of cool stunt driving plus other special effects including a motorcycle that appeared to flip over (they green-screened a plastic piece used to rotate the car), more shooting and explosions. They also split a car in half and had two cars drive on two wheels each. It was really cool. The guy playing the stunt director was either an American or a really good actor because he had a perfect American accent and the show was done in an interesting blend of English and Chinese.
After the performance, like everything else in the park they had an opportunity for you to pay to to get your picture taken. It appeared they were using the caucasians like animals in a zoo to attract attention and get people to pay for pictures. This was further demonstrated by the last event I attended there: the float parade. Everyone in the parade was Caucasian and they appeared to be the same people I had seen at the different shows throughout the day. The dancers appeared to be happy performing in the parade, but everyone else looked pretty sour. The parade reminded me of a sad, depressing version of a Disneyland (or world) parade.
After the parade it was time to head back to Tianjin. I looked up on my Didi (the Chinese version of Uber) how much it would cost to take a Didi back to Tianjin and saw an estimate of 120 yuan. The estimates are notoriously low so I figured it would be more like 130 (or possibly even more), but decided that that was still a better approach to returning rather than trying to take the bus (which ended service at 6 pm. It was about 4 at this time). I got out to the parking lot and tried to request a Didi. Meanwhile, the drivers are offering to drive me back to the bus. I told them I didn’t want to go to the bus, but wanted to go all the way back to the city. I also told them I was calling a Didi. Well, they told me no Didi would come there and sure enough no one answered my request. By this point, they had all taken other passengers and departed. I looked at my map and it showed me a bus that I could either take to the bus I had taken out there or to a subway station. According to my map it was only 0.8 miles away. I decided I could walk that. Unfortunately, there was construction going on and the walk was much longer (and the real roads didn’t match my map). I finally made it out to the main road and was walking to the bus stop when a really taxi honked at me and stopped beside me. I got in and asked him to take me to the subway station. He asked me if I was going back to the city and I said yes. He asked where and I told him. He said he’d drive me. I told him it would be too expensive. He told me to name my price so I intentionally picked a price I knew was too low: 100 yuan. He of course said that was too low and offered to take me for 150 yuan. I told him that was too high and then he said he’d take me to my hotel for 130 yuan. Based on my Didi inquiry, I decided that was a fair price and accepted.

The man drove like a mad man and kept trying to pick up additional fares at bus stops (if he had succeeded I decided I would only give him 100 yuan and argue with him about it if necessary). As we were driving he got several calls from his daughter. Something was clearly wrong and he kept telling her to go to her mother, but for some reason she couldn’t. Then when were back in Tianjin proper, but not yet at my hotel he suddenly stopped the car! He stopped in a tunnel and told me to get out and take another taxi! I was furious. I’ve heard of things like that happening in China, but never with the driver stopping in a tunnel. I refused to get out. He told me he’d give me cut the bill down to 110 to take another taxi, but I didn’t know how much further it was. I continued to refuse to get out. I also refused to give him 110 yuan. At this point he was mad! He said he’d find me another taxi and he got out and told me to get out. This time I did get out. He flagged down a driver who for some reason refused to take me. He then flagged down another taxi. He gave the man 20 yuan and the man agreed to drive me to my hotel. I then gave him 110 yuan and he yelled at me to give him another 20 because he’d already given the guy 20 yuan. I gave him the money and got into the new taxi. This driver turned on the meter and found my hotel on his cellphone (he didn’t know how to get there). When we got there the meter was at a little over 11 yuan, but he made no motions to give me any change. I decided, “whatever” and told him simply the other driver had already paid him. He concurred and I got out. It was a strange end to a strange day, but I not only got back safely, but it still only cost me 130 yuan (about $20.30) which was reasonable and was a lot faster and more comfortable than taking the bus.
 Me at the park entrance 
Aircraft Storm show


 The dancers and the clowns 


 The park was odd and had random things like this statue of that famous V-E (or was it V-J) day kiss.

 The float parade (their name, not mine)