A Dali-ance

For Mid-Autumn Festival, we had a bonus day off! In order to best take advantage of our Friday - Tuesday holiday, a few of us decided to go back to Dali. Dali - only 5 hours away and good for most holidays. See:

The Linden Centre hosted a dinner for guests and friends. We're friends.

I ate this meat moon cake.

Sometimes pens you find in China are AWESOME

Looking back on these, I should have bought the box.

It's a poophead pen. It says. "LOVES CRAZY SHIT. We love crazy shit. So we have it!!"

Look at how many poopie pens there were! Location found: Dali.

YOU get an egg. YOU get an egg. YOU get an egg.

Thanks to new Yunxian law, every child at my school is required by law to receive an egg to consume for breakfast. What does that mean? I'm not exactly sure but I'm the early morning teacher tomorrow and will get to see the eggs in egg-tion. (action). We had a long impromptu meeting with principals today discussing the handing out of eggs. It was Egg-asperating! All I know is that if a child is absent, I am not allowed to consume their egg. Which sadly, could have been awesome. I know someone (Lucas Myerson!) is surely sad to hear about this.

a meta-photo of me and the egg-cessive egg eater!

Speaking of egg-cessive egg consumption, I'd like to take a poll - 9 eggs consumed in one day is totally too many right?

Not enough kids. Never enough kids.

51 not enough? Here's my fifth grade class. 55 more for you to see. All English nameless! Match a name with the number! Please click to enlarge!

Class 62: HELP WANTED

I just realized that about 3 posts back, I talked a lot of teaching and ended up posting a picture of my shoes. Well, here is something a little more relevant to teaching! My 7th grade students!

I have 51 but somehow in my rush to take pictures, I did not take a picture of student number 4. Until I learn their names, I've given them numbers to enhance my grading and homework collecting experiences.

Obviously you'll need to click to enlarge! None of them have English names yet. If  you would like to help name my students, please feel free to highlight by identifying the number of the student and the suggested name. Stay classy, my friends.
Match a name to the number! Comments wanted!

Birthday countdown: 18 days. Here is my address.

In 18 days, I will age another year.

If you would like to send you condolences in the form of cards or packages of love:

As instructed by my supervisor!
1.      Use United States Postal Service (not FedEx, UPS, etc.)
2.      on the USPS customs declaration form, under quantity and detailed description of contents, write – Gifts 礼物3.      on the USPS customs declaration form, under Total Value, very important, keep it under - $100 (if it is over $100, the recipient – you have to pay a lot of taxes)
4.      print out the address label (see below for your county) that you will provide to them and paste it on the box –

Christine Yuan 袁恢琪 

中国云南省临沧市云县茂兰镇哨街村哨街学校 

(675806），P.R. China 

Christine Yuan 

Shaojie School, Shaojie Village, Maolan Town, 

Yunxian County, Lincang Prefecture, Yunnan Province, 

(675806) P.R. China

It's my favorite time of year for Luna bars, Autumn scented candles, cheese products. I'm not begging, but I will soon!

  

This kitten is being squished by a giant hand!

Possible captions:

Dis humanzz trying to hard to squeeze the milk out of me.

SQEEEEAAAAKK.

Meh! RAWRRRRR.

This is Lucas trying to feed one of the smallest baby kittens ever that we found with its two siblings in a box. I suspect it may be the one that Tom is currently taking care of here, in Dazhai.

Meet my mouse.

My real computer is on the fritz so I'm on a series of netbooks for all my computing needs. I hate the mouse on my netbook so I bought something to keep me working... and now blogging. I passed it once and immediately wanted to buy it. I thought perhaps it would be a bad idea.. but 24 hours later, I still wanted it so I stopped in the store and bought it for 20 kuai.

It's the pinkest, most feminine, slightly disgusting Hello Kitty mouse the store owned. I LOVE IT. I have never stopped loving HK and I never will. Loyalty is my middle name. Ha! The oxymoronic mouse with a cat on it has not escaped me, nor should it escape you. HA HA!

Toiletries that I use that I suspect you can only buy in Asia

When I was in Kunming, I went to Watson's, my favorite neighborhood drugstore in Asia. Here, I bought a Bourjois blush, hand and foot moisturizer, two things of olive oil for my body, a thing of roll on deodorant, a bottle of Korean soda water that tastes like Calpis and this:

denti...what?

Watson's brand Whitening Dentifrice. I did not misspell. When I first looked at it, I wondered if it was whitening gum, which I'm always totally down for. I asked the attendant and she was like... no, it's a powder for your teeth. I asked for more clarification. I'm supposed to dip my toothbrush and brush.

Hmm, SOLD. I bought it, I dipped my toothbrush in it and started brushing. Powder toothpaste. Interesting idea... that if I'm not mistaken, people in the Victorian Era brushed their teeth using this method. So, is this cool because

a) it's different
b) it looks like it should have been gum
c) I've never used anything like it before because anything of its kind has been extinct for at least 50 years
d) I want whiter teeth.
e) I can totally imagine George Washington brushing his wooden dentures with this stuff.

Answer: ALL OF THE ABOVE.

If you want to read about what it's like being a teacher....

read about some new teacher's experiences here:

http://wyattinasia.com/
http://bamboochute.wordpress.com/
http://caitlindoestfc.wordpress.com/

What is like for me? Well, today was the second day of school. I have been strict. I have been clear in telling my students what I want and together, this year, we are going to be the best English students that Shaojie has EVER seen.

Since coming back to school, I realized that my entire bed was covered in mold. I stripped off my beautiful sheets and has since begun an intimate new relationship with the dry cleaners an hour away. She was embarrassed to wash my red bra. But she now knows I have three sets of sheets, 2 duvets, and 4 pillow cases. I know now that I don't ever have to wash my clothes if I'm willing to bus my clothes an hour each way, and pay for it. ( I will be considering this idea strongly this winter!)

I've attended a ton of meetings with local teachers and Phoebe and I have two new Chinese fellows working with us! (Pictures to come very soon!) They're awesome. One is named Wang Jingxin, the other Tangyufei. Tangyufei has moved into my old room and I'm just amazed at how much larger it looks now that all my things have been moved out of it... incredible. Less things.. more room. BREAKTHROUGH.

I bought a shoe rack the other day and I can proudly say that most of shoes fit on this rack with the exception of cowboy boots, Uggs, and my flips. Here is random picture of it that I just took while sitting in my bed. I hope you are enjoying my stream on consciousness!

One post in one month?

I'm rather embarrassed. I'm still eating wasabi peas. I finally cleaned my room to as clean as it's ever going to be and... I am so behind on this blog that I don't know where to begin. You see, there's so much to say!

1. I got promoted. I teach, but I also work with recruiting.
2. Because of this, I'm super busy, but I love talking to people... so now I'm paid to talk to people.
3. I have a room that's 20% bigger and I brought back 100 lbs of stuff back from America so... I need it.
4. I woke up yesterday to three pieces of bread that had be gnawed on by a mouse. NOT a friend.
5. It's Mid-Autumn Festival next weekend and I'm not going anywhere :(

But here, have a picture of curly fries which are now served at McDonalds. The closest McD: 8 hours away. I'm going back as soon as I can.

NOM NOM NOMMY