Life in Qingdao in 25 Pictures

So here is what my schedule today looked like.

• Before 1st period: Make a to do list for: Grading homework for 8th grade and 10th grade. Grade 10th grade’s tests. Grade 8th grade’s tests. Enter test grades in. And like 5 other things.
• 1st period: Teach 8th grade
• 2nd period: Grade papers and try to track down a birthday package that was sent to me by my mom. You might remember the fiasco that happened last year
• 3rd period: Direct a student-written play. This is a lot harder than it sounds
• 4th period: Teach 8th grade again
• 5th period: Eat lunch and go to Chinese class (I’m now on the second book! Wahoo!)
• 6th period: Teach 10th grade
• 7th period: Finish like 2 things on my list
• 8th period: Go to the English Talent show
• 4:45: Go home and think about writing this blog for 2 hours.

Yeah, that was my Monday. I’ve been busy. And when I haven’t been busy, I’ve been busy not being busy. And actually, during the entire month of November I sat down at my computer each night and wrote like 1700 words and became a National Novel Writing Month winner for the second year in a row. Go me.

So, it isn’t for lack of love of you folks, or lack of things to write about, or even lack of time. Sometimes writing this blog is the last thing on my mind. It’s kind of like a luxury for people back home, and a cool way to stay in touch, but it’s hard sometimes.

I lied to you last post…where I said I was going to write a short post more often. Ha! What I meant was that I would write one short post because that’s all I wanted to do at that time.

Instead of going into mega detail about every event that has happened to me over the past 2 months or so, I’m just going to show you a bunch of pictures, and then I’ll write a little about that picture. If pictures are worth a thousand words you’re about to read a small novel. These should be in chronological order, so if you’re wondering why people are in T-shirts, then you can infer that the picture was taken a while ago, oops! I’ve also edited all the photos to make them artsy and cool, if you’re into that. So, without further ado, here are 25 pictures that can let you know what’s been up with me.

Here is my 8th grade class A. I won’t tell you all of their names, but you should know, none of the students in my previous post are in this picture! They will be later, though. This class has been really great, 100x better than last year’s 8th graders in their English levels, attitudes and personalities. I like these kids!

This is Paul. Paul is silly. He always likes to raise his hand, even if he doesn’t know the answer.

This was the day formally known as color day, where the school is divided into different colors for team building. The administration wanted to make it “Career Day”, and with good intention. It was actually Halloween without the candy. After this disorganized mess we were all better teammates…I think. This boy is in full US (Marine?) military garb, complete with the Camelbak. I have know idea where he got it from.

More students on Halloween Career day. Oh yeah, it was totally fine to bring toy guns—especially ones that looked real. There were about 50 kids with guns. If you didn’t know, China has mega-strict gun control laws, which is one reason why this is okay. The chances of a student bringing a gun to school is probably next to 0. There was also a kid with a real cigarette and an airsoft pistol. I thought how, if we were in America, that kid would have gotten suspended…twice, and there would have been an article or two on Yahoo! news.

More kids who want to grow up to shoot people.

This is a trip I took with our school during the October Holiday. It was all expense paid, so that was good. I ate a meal worm type thing at lunch one day. Oh yeah, we had that lunch at like 10am because we would beat the lunch rush at 1pm. Huge facepalm.

This is a picture of us in “Rainbow Valley”. I put this in quotes because the concept is that you walk through a valley surrounded by huge sprinklers that douse everything with water (hence the umbrellas). The reason for this is because a lot of people have never seen a real rainbow, since a lot of places in China are so polluted that it just doesn’t happen. I was glad I wore my hiking boots, because everyone else in my group had soggy feet for the rest of the day. This was probably the most anticlimactic thing we did (we waited in line for like 1 hour to walk through the valley)

Enjoy the read. This was for a grass slide type thing, kind of like a burlap sack on a slide, except the burlap is on the slide and you ride a snow-sled type thing down it.

This sign made me feel wheel happy.

A cool waterwheel outside of a cave we went into: The Underground Gallery.

Even though this part was 100% man made it was still cool.

This picture is stalac-tight!

These stalactites seemed to be growing a kind of moss, which was cool.

This was at the base of Mt. Meng, where we went hiking that day. Hiking in China, I have learned, really means walking up steps that laborers have no doubt painstakingly hiked up a mountain. The steps are standardly wide and people are going up and down them in droves. It wasn’t really “hiking” like I’m used to, but it was good exercise. I talked to one of our Chinese teachers that I had previously not met. Her name is Shanna and she gave me a Snickers bar. She’s apparently really sick now and had to leave our school, so if you feel led, you can ‘remember’ her.

This was part of a really long trail (like 3 miles) made completely of chopped up wood. It was the most annoying thing to walk on. Splinterville 2.0! Was interesting though.

We took our students on a day trip to a mountain and a beach. Unfortunately it was rainy and cold—two great combinations for an outdoor activity. We climbed the mountain (once again, more steps) and came to a cave with shady ladders and steps carved into the stone. Some parts were even pitch black. Of course we all went in.

At the top I took a photo of two students I was walking with. Jane is on the left and Susie is on the right. Can you guess which one is afraid of heights?

Here is one of the 8th grade classes at the bottom of the mountain. Melanie, of the squatty 8th graders, is in the center, crouching and wearing the white coat. I call her honest Melanie because sometimes in class she starts doing squats and when I look over at her she says: “Sorry, I spoke Chinese.” Nice!

This is a walrus-sized spider in our laundry room, much like one that had terrorized me in our office previously this year. The worst part about these guys is how fast they are. I took a video in which you can hear me squealing like a girl. But, I bet you would too!

This is Walt. Walt reminds me to think about my friend, Chad. Chad and Walt look alike, but Chad has a better job.

I walked outside one day to take some pictures of leaves and such. This is what I found!

And one of these!

And this cool spirally guy.

And some fallen fall leaves.

I hope you just judged me when you saw this picture. This is something you might see a masculine grown man would try to capture, right? Well, I was walking into our dorm one day when I saw these little guys sun bathing. Something you need to know about our campus is that there’s like 50 cats. Okay, maybe not 50, but there are several litters. I snuck up on them with my telephoto lens and snapped these candid shots. As soon as I crouched down to get a cool picture they all freaked out and ran away. They’re all super scared of humans.

And this is the obligatory long exposure shot. I got some LED Christmas lights (orange and white, I know) and took some cool shots.

Well, that seems to be all my pictures. I hope you enjoyed them. I’ll try to keep posting things in the near future. Speaking of the near future, here’s what it looks like. In 4 days is my birthday. I will be a quarter of a century old. On December 21 is our high school talent show, where my 12th grade students will be performing a play that they have written by themselves (with guidance from me). They’re really excited about it and proud of it and I look forward to seeing it. Then there’s Christmas. I’ll have 2 days off, plus the weekend and am still not sure exactly what I’ll do.

I really like reading comments you read, and when you leave comments it lets me know you’ve actually read this—which might motivate me to write more often in the future.

Until we meet again.

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Me and 50 of My Closest Friends

It’s honestly been like 2 months since I’ve actually written anything for my blog. I’ll let you in on a little secret, the last post I made was actually written several months ago, and I was saving it for when I needed to make a post but didn’t really feel like writing anything. Sorry about that.

I’ve been “busy.” And by that I mean that posting on this blog is like doing the laundry. You know you should probably do the laundry like once a week and just have a small load, easy to fold. But you wait a few days, and then a few more, and a few more. Pretty soon you’re either out of underwear or socks and you have to carry about 50 pounds of laundry to the machines and wash like 6 loads, and it takes like 6 hours. That’s no fun. Well, I haven’t actually done that with my laundry since I’ve been here, but I have done that with these posts.

So I should let you in on what I’ve been up to for these past months I guess. February kicked off our second semester. I started out with only 3 students in 12th grade, and for like 4 weeks one of them was always absent, so I was teaching only two students. It’s kind of hard to get excited about that. The semester has slowly moved along, but I find myself surprised that we are in the 8th week already, and midterms are right around the corner.

Last week I had my first open class. For those of you unfamiliar, it’s when any teachers or administration can come and observe you teach a class. I had about 12 people in the back of the room watching me, including the principal of our school. And amazingly, I wasn’t really nervous. I made a pretty good plan, and I’d talked it over with a few people in the days previous. My lesson was about semantic gradient scales. And for those of you who aren’t teachers and have no idea what that is, it’s ok. It’s basically a scale of words you can use to describe something. I decided to teach them some different words to describe different levels of intelligence. So they learned: brilliant, brainy, clever, smart, slow, dumb, stupid, and brain-dead. I know it sounds a bit risky to do that in a class where I’m getting observed, but I thought it would be something that would hold the kids’ interest while at the same time arming them with words they could use to describe intelligences, something they might need to do often. Did I mention that they didn’t know what the word intelligence was? Anyway, I made a cool poster and this neat word scale I can use to have students measure two words against one another to see what words means something is taller, smarter, fatter etc.

Check out all those people observing me. Lots of detection.

Elsewhere on the teaching front, this week we have to teach 7 days in a row, Monday through Sunday, in preparation for the tomb-sweeping holiday. It’s interesting that the government makes you work 2 days you would normally have off to get 2 other days off, but that’s how they do that here and it’s one of those cultural differences you have to accept or its going to poo on your week. So, I look forward to charging through this week, having some time off, and then having an easy peasy 2 day week after that, so it isn’t all bad.

Two weeks ago Kim, another foreign teacher here (and remember that foreign teacher means they are not Chinese, Kim is from Oregon), invited some students from Qingdao University of Science and Technology over for St. Patrick’s day. We played some games, ate some food, and Kim showed the students a Power Point telling some of the history of St. Patty’s day.

Brief aside: Did you know that in Ireland back in the day the houses had thatched roofing and that sometimes wild animals would live in the thatching? Well, I didn’t and Kim told us that when a big storm would blow in the animals would fall out onto the floor of the house. It would literally be raining cats and dogs. My mind was blown.

Anyhow, I met this Chinese student named Alex. He introduced himself to me and I promptly said “Oh my brother’s name is Alex.” to which he replied “Oh, I am so sorry, I can change it if you want me to.” He seemed genuinely worried and apologetic which threw me for a loop, but I assured him that that wasn’t going to be necessary, overlooking my missed opportunity to name someone after an American Gladiator. I gave him my number when he asked, like I have many times before to other Chinese university students. It’s really common for them to want a foreigners number to either invite them to something or to randomly send me texts it seems like. Anyhow, like most of the university students I’ve given my number to, I didn’t really expect him to call me or anything like that for like a month.

But he called me the next Friday inviting me to climb a mountain with him. Reflecting on my previous criticism of these Chinese kids never inviting me to stuff (because what would I invite them to do, this isn’t my town and I still barely know where anything is) I said yes. After about 7 phone calls in the next 24 hours of Alex making sure I knew what bus to get on “The 104, at the bus station jiang shi.” (and by bus station he means bus stop…British English). Just to let you know, there is only 1 bus stop in front of my school and the only 2 busses that run on it are the 104 and the 380, and I ride both of them at least every week, so I was minorly insulted that A: he thought I didn’t know what the 104 was and B: that he needed to tell me the name of my own bus stop. But I knew that was my Western pride getting in the way of a concerned friend wanting to make sure that his new American buddy makes it to the bus stop okay.

I got on the bus at 7:30 in the morning heading for the bus stop he drilled into my mind “Da hi dong.” As I stepped off the bus he greeted me excitedly and said “Hello Clay, lets go to the others.”

“Others?”

Oh yes, others. There were about 50 other Chinese students from his university who were also coming on the hike with us. They rented a bus. I didn’t really mind, I actually thought it was cool that students would take it upon themselves and want to get out into nature without the requirements of some course or something. So me and 50 of my closest friends went on an 8 hour 8ish mile hike up and down a mountain. And it was not without it’s little surprises.

On Friday it had rained massively. The dirt road in front of our school was mush and everything was wet. I was honestly thinking that Saturday, the day of the hike, was going to be a washout. But I was wrong. It was a beautiful sunny day. It was a little chilly with a nipping wind, but not so much that it warranted more than a sweatshirt. As we climbed the mountain we must have passed a temperature threshold of some kind because suddenly the entire mountain was covered in snow. The rain must have snowed at the top of the mountain. It was really beautiful. I felt like I was in Bambi or something like that. The path ended up being mushy, cold, slippery mud. I love it. I sloshed through it in my hiking boots, my toasty feet not feeling the difference. But if I can say one thing about the Chinese people here in Qingdao is that sometimes they don’t make the wisest footwear decisions. Now, none of the girls were wearing heels, but most of them were wearing dinky little flats with no support and I’d bet they weren’t waterproof. I even saw one girl fully dunk her foot into a freezing stream on accident while crossing. And I didn’t hear any of them complain. Now, most of them were speaking Chinese the whole time, so they totally could have been and I would have had no clue. But I like to think that they were totally hard core.

Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of this excursion, so enjoy the random banana hanger I made above. I am, however, saved on the memory cards of at least 13 different Chinese students, so I wonder if I can somehow get a hold of those pictures. I just didn’t feel like toting along my DSLR for 8 miles, and I’m suuuuuuper glad I didn’t because I was pretty tired and I wouldn’t want to be carrying an extra five pounds banging against my leg. I also wanted to just spend some time in nature not having to worry about taking pictures or capturing things. I just wanted to do it the old fashioned way and enjoy nature in the now. And I think I did that. Without being preoccupied with a camera I was able to see where I was going and I got the opportunity to meet a lot of cool people along the way. I got to practice some of my Chinese(check out the picture below, those are some of the characters I’m learning to read and write!), which is in its infancy in the most literal sense of the phrase, and the students got to practice their English.

This brings me to my last little story, a cultural phenomenon that I’d not experienced until this past Sunday when I was on my way to fellowship. I got reverse hitchhikered. I was walking down towards the bus stop, like I do every week (see) when I heard a car behind me. I was listening to my ipod, so I instinctively turned around to make sure I was adequately out of the way of the car. However, instead of driving by me the car slowed to a stop and the woman inside the gold Mazda rolled down the passenger window. I was thinking “I know she’s not about to ask ME for directions. No way, no how.” But she asked me in perfect English where I was going and if I wanted a ride. I did was any skeptical person would do and asked her “Uhh, who are you?” With a slightly embarrassed response she explained that she knows the principal of my school and some of the other teachers. That was good enough for me, I mean, sometimes you gotta jump in head first. As I got into the car she asked me “Who are you, by the way?” Touche. I told her I was a teacher at Baishan and told her where I was headed. It turns out she is the host family that hosts one of the women at my fellowship. Crazy huh? So I totally got rolled up on by someone and got a ride to my fellowship. Let’s not talk about how I was 40 minutes early though.

Now can you see what would happen if I wrote every day or every week? This is just what has happened in the immediate past. I’ll try to be more diligent in my updates though. Feel free to comment to say hi or to ask any questions. I love to know I’m keeping you in touch.

Here is a bonus video of Chinese New Year. My connection was finally good enough to upload it in stunning HD! You might have to go to the tube for the 720p version.

And a final addendum. If you, or someone you know, knows anything about DSLR cameras then I have a question for you. If you don’t then you can stop reading. This past January the screen on my DSLR camera stopped working. The rest of the camera functions, and I can even navigate the menu by memory, but I can’t take video without the screen working. But no matter what I do the screen won’t turn on. I took the battery out, reset it, turned it on and off a bunch of times. Everything. Now here is the strangest part. I lied to you. Every time I turn it on (I probably do once a week) the screen always works. I can look at all the menus, see the live feed if I click the right button, everything. But, when the screen goes to sleep after the default 30s, or whatever, the screen goes black and won’t turn back on for love nor money. It’s like it’s teasing me or something. It’s a Canon Rebel T3 and when the screen first started acting up I was taking pictures while it was really cold outside with fireworks (vibrations). Maybe some condensation did something, but I don’t know. I called Canon and they can’t do anything unless I send the camera to the US (fat chance) or I have to wait until the summer. If you or any friends has any ideas leave a comment here or send me an e-mail. I’m not above taking it apart with the right instructions.

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Middle Grades Field Trip, Groceries and a Video

I promised in my last blog post that I would answer some questions. I will do that at the end of this post ☺.

One of the benefits of teaching both middle school and high school (yes there are some) is that I get to go on field trips for both grades. So this past Friday me, 7th, 8th and 9th grade students, as well as their homeroom teachers, all set out to go to the Laoshan mountains (which is quite redundant, since shan means mountain).

There we had a chance to hike around a beautiful lake that is created by a manmade dam. To be honest, I don’t really know what the point of it was, but it made me and at least half of the kids pretty tired. And when I say hike, I mean we walked around, not really much up or down.

In this picture is Owen, Tom, Vickie, Yumi, Andy, Carl and Sam. They are all 8th graders. And Owen is just about the finniest kid alive. I literally laughed right in his face once when he made some ridiculous noise. It was amazing.

But after that we scuttled our way over to this…building…factory? where we could make mantou, which is a type of Chinese bread. I would say it is pretty similar to sourdough, without the sour part. So yeah, it just pretty much tastes like dough (I don’t really like it dough, I mean though).

So all 100 or so of us crowded though a narrow hallway into a big open room that had in it only a few stainless steel tables. And in one corner was a worker that had a whole lot of dough. Each student got to run over and grab some and get to work making mantou creations. The bread “making” wasn’t really as much baking as it was playing with Playdough that we got to eat and not get in trouble for my our mommy. So what this turned into was each student, and teacher, trying to out-creative the person next to them. In this picture I have a few of the student’s creations. They also mixed in some dried berries and nuts with their dough.

While our creations were cooking (and mine was a snake, which doesn’t warrant a picture) we went outside to do some cooking of our own. Students were given huge bags of shredded potatoes, bean sprouts, a whole lot of raw meat cubes and skewers, and a bowl in which to fry it in over a fire they had to create and tend. The 8th grade class I ate with decided to cook all of the bean sprouts, and then eat them, cook all of the potatoes, and eat them, and then struggle with cooking the meat, and kind of eat that.

The meat was probably the hardest part, because you can’t really hold a tiny skewer over an open flam without getting your hand annihilated, so there is this special box which you are supposed to line with ceramic coals to cook your meat sticks. Well, my class probably spent at least an hour trying to get this right. And let me tell you, nothing says trust like eating a skewer of meat that a student cooked and shoved in your face saying: “Teacher! Eat!” Sometimes it involved spitting out a piece that was probably raw.

Our cooking adventure came to the end while the adventure to grind soybeans and soymilk to make tofu (pronounced “dofu”) began. And that’s pretty much all it is, you mix the beans in with some milk in this mill stone and you turn it and turn it until what is coming out is a pasty consistency. The perfect word to describe dofu.

Now I would like to share with you a video. Yes, a video. This is a short video of me at the tail end of my grocery shopping today. In this I give you a brief tour of the fish and meat section (which actually lacks a lot of variety) as well as me trying to ask an employee where I can find a 6 pack of coke. I would HIGHLY suggest going full screen because I was a noob and shot a vertical video. Enjoy.

And finally, the answers to both of my questions.

To Chad. Yes, I have been visited by the “pizza fairy” as I like to call it. I like to call it this because it happened the first time I went to a Chinese friends house (I only barely knew him) and ate way too much Papa Johns pizza. I got lucky and had the fairy visit me like 5 times while we were trying to play ping pong. Yes I am over it. The best way to avoid this is by not ingesting large quantities of food while simultaneously ingesting large amounts of carbonated beverages. This, in my mind, attaches a gas bubble to each particle of food and the result is like when you drop a Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke.

To kidwithgreatambition: I teach in a high school and middle school, not university, so I’m not really sure what that is like. But as far as my school goes, in high school, grades 10, 11, and 12 we prepare kids to go overseas to English speaking countries to attend university, so as they progress through our program, they take more and more English intensive courses. As for the government, they have a pretty indirect impact on my daily living. The only things that are different are that I had to register with the PSB when I entered the country (which I’m sure is the same in the US for foreigners) and get a health check. There is also a law that says there must be guards posted 24-7 at any schools, so we have to have guards let us in to our campus if we leave and want to come back, but the guards are really friendly. So, overall, I would say the government has been pretty normal for a foreign person entering their country. I hope this answers your question.

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A Week Among the Mongols

This past week China had its national holiday. That equated to me getting 7 days off of work to do whatever I desired. It turned out to be going to Mongolia with some of my fellow teachers, Mayu and Robin. Here are their stories (DUN DUN). Sorry, I just thought that sounded like a really cool intro from law and order.

Anyhow, since Qingdao didn’t have any flights to Mongolia we had to take the train to Beijing and fly out from there. During this trip I had many many “firsts.” One of them was riding in a train in China, which is a lot like riding on a plane that never quite gets the hang of that taking off thing. Train ride aside that first night we were slated to stay in a hostel. Now, when I think of the word hostel I think of that little chain of movies that came out where the tourists got savagely murdered by the staff and people around the hostel. I mean, the word sounds like “hostile” for Pete’s sake.

But the hostel in Beijing, called Fly By Knight, was really nice. They had soft beds and the owner, David, who is probably in his late twenties invited us to have some dinner with him and his staff. So we settled in that night ready to wake up at 5:30am to catch our flight to Mongolia.

Let me tell you, the Beijing airport is BIG. Now I bet you have been in an airport, and maybe even a “big” airport, but unless you’ve been to the Beijing airport you might not realize how much you’re overselling the word big. Maybe more so than that was how impressive it was with how open and tall it is.

As I stepped off the plane into the airport in Ulaanbaatar I remarked at how small the airport was. I think there was only one or two places to dock a plane, and definitely not more than one terminal. In fact, along the runway were scattered and tattered bi-planes, with holes through their wings and rust eroding at their metal frames.

We got in a taxi, that wasn’t really a taxi, but some random guy, trusting that he wouldn’t abduct us, and made our way to the UB Guesthouse. Hostel number 2. This one was…okay. Alright, it was nice, but compared to Fly By Knight it was kind of a downgrade. We weren’t going to be staying there long though. When we got there we booked a tour through the hostel where we would travel around Mongolia for four days and three nights. We grabbed a bite to eat at a local bakery and walked around UB for a while.

The owner of the hostel, Bobby (who is a woman), told us about the local Black Market. She assured us that the word “black” came from when the marked was established during communist rule and since it wasn’t “allowed” to sell the goods it was selling it was dubbed the black market. Well, this pretty much fits the definition of what I thought a black market should be. So I stuffed some Tögrög (Mongolian currency) into my pocket and made my way to the market.

It was packed. With people. With things. With animals. There were literally about 30 isles of leather boots. There might have been more, but my fellow teachers got bored after a few isles. We perused the goods there which ranged from garbage collected from dumps like random pieces of metal, plastic, shoes, cell phone covers and then there was some food stands. This was on the outskirts of the market. On the inside where the higher quality items were you could buy home appliances, furniture, clothes, shoes, fabric, strings and various odds and ends. It was like an Ikea on crack, and the crack was laced with a few thousand Mongolians. I ended up buying a camel hair hat, which I didn’t know existed. I also bought this knitted jacket thing (there is a picture of me later wearing it) just because I wanted something warm and semi-authentic from the black market. They had a lot of really good knock offs too, like North face and other European outfitter brands that I didn’t recognize. I didn’t want anything like that, so I went for the super hoodie for only ₮30,000, which is like $23. Not a bad price considering in the states that will sometimes barely buy you a t-shirt from the mall.

Below is a picture of these seeds that everyone in UB ate. All the time. There were shells all over the ground. Everywhere.

Victorious from our purchases we hopped on the slow bus back to the hostel.

I’ll get back to the slow bus comment in a minute, but I want to take a brief minute and give you some quick facts about UB and Mongolia. Mongolia’s population is only about 2.75 million people, and a million of them live in UB. I think just about every person has a car, most of them are Toyota Land Cruisers, so the traffic is really bad. I mean really bad. They seem to follow most traffic laws, but running red lights is very common and we did almost see an accident between a bus and a super tiny compact car. The pollution in UB is also really bad, I heard someone say it was one of the worst in the world. Since it sits in a basin surrounded by mountains the smog is trapped, and since there is scarcely rain the yellow haze just sits. Now you know why the bus was slow…kind of.

The next morning we arose and took a ride in a 4 door Hyundai to Terelj National park where we were to do some hiking, horseback riding and were going to stay in a ger (pronounced gee-air or gyare). The car ride was a bit bumpy, but we got to know one of our ger-mates, Matthew, who is from France. We talked and got to know each other on the way into the park. I think one of the things that amazed me most about Mongolia was the landscape. I have never really ever seen anything like it. It’s just so…treeless. In the park, however, trees and rocky mountains seemed to be more prevalent as compared to the rolling grassy hills in the western parts of Mongolia.

A tour group met us there to take the same car back to the hostel. They suggested that we take a hike over some hills (which are quite steep at times) to see this huge rock formation that looks like a turtle. He said it was called “Turtle Rock.” Well, I’ve seen turtles and I’ve seen rocks, but I haven’t ever seen one that looked like the other. And apparently neither had any us, or our newly acquired Argentinian friends, Cecilia and Santiago. So we struck out on our mini-adventure at around 10am, well before our 2pm lunch curfew.

After about half an hour we crested the hill told to us by our tipster. The one where we would be able to see this turtle shaped rock. Well, we all saw it, but I can testify that it did not look like a turtle. And I have several pictures as proof, see for yourself, does it look like a turtle? Does it?

Well, me, Matthew, and Santiago weren’t convinced so we decided to hike all the way to the turtle to have a closer look. The girls stayed behind on the hill to have girl time.

The journey there took about an hour and was full of good conversation and the sharing of cultures. I can say now that besides the beauty and experience of being in Mongolia that the people we met contributed equally to the quality of our trip.

Guess what? It still didn’t look like a turtle from up close. But we got to have a cool experience combined with a few cool pictures.

After we had lunch we got settled up for our horseback riding trip. We were led by…Khangis…or something like that. I really can’t remember the kids name. But he is 15 and basically takes care of the horses and the other animals on the property. After an hour of trotting around the countryside we got back to his property where we were allowed to take a horse and just ride around. It was pretty cool, but for some reason, after I had just gotten the hang of having my horse gallop he made me switch horses. After the second switch we heard some quick galloping coming from where Matthew had just been riding when all of the sudden we saw his horse come tearing around this bend, riderless, with the saddle hanging off to the side and things flying off the horse. I started running toward where the horse came from, fearing that Matthew was badly hurt. As it turns out the worst of his injuries was a minorly bit lip and some dirt from head to toe. Needless to say, none of us were keen on getting back on the horses for a quick gallop.

Before dinner Matthew and I decided that we would hike to the top of this small mountain to watch the sunset. It was a tough hike because I think I’m a bit out of shape as well as the fact that it was at a higher altitude. It really beautiful though, being up in these foreign mountains and watching the sun set on a part of the world I’ve never been to before. We made the steep, and kind of dark, hike down and headed to our ger for my first cold night in a hut.

Here is the small mountain we climbed to catch a view at a beautiful sunset.

And that was just the first day.

Day two consisted mostly of a van ride out to the western part of Mongolia. I think we were in the car for a total of about 8 hours. And it was bumpy. But it was good to watch a different landscape speed by. Someone told me that Mongolia looks a lot like Wyoming. Well, I’ve never been to Wyoming so the landscape was very new for me and it held my attention for a long while as I watched the treeless hills roll by. We made it to our next destination just in time for dinner. One unfortunate thing about this day was that it was mostly spent traveling down bumpy roads in a cramped van.

I learned my lesson from the ger the night before and stayed up a bit later than the other people with me so that I could keep adding wood to the fire. I think one problem we had the previous night is that it got dark at like 7 so we all went to bed at around 9, and from 9 until 7 the next morning is a long time to not be putting wood in the fire. So this night I loaded up the stove and went to bed smothered in the 80ish degree air. It was nice while it lasted.

This is me with my fellow teachers, Robin (middle), and Mayu.

Day three marked our trip to Erdenezuu, which was the ancient capital of Mongolia. At KK there is a large enclosed Buddhist temple area with many different buildings and shrines to their many different gods and protectors. One thing I found interesting was that there seemed to be a different diety for each problem people seemed to have. Man, wouldn’t it just be easier to have just one person to be in charge of all that? But it was interesting to see their different culture and how Buddhists worship.

On the way out of the temple we saw this guy with an eagle. Apparently in a few places around Mongolia people have eagles and other birds that they will let you hold for about a dollar. I thought, why not? So I have the guy my ₮1000 bill and put on this huge oven mitt thing and donned my eagle. The scary thing was that they would make you shake your arm up and down trying to make the eagle put out his wings for a good picture. But when you did that he would sometimes try to fly away, which was a little scary considering the size of his talons and beak.

After that little adventure we headed out to lunch and then to the miniature version of the Gobi desert, which was about three hours away. So we took another bumpy ride to an area of Mongolia where it looked like someone had spent a lot of money to import playground sand where it shouldn’t be in order to make a tourist trap. But that wasn’t really it at all. I guess I never thought about the fact that deserts are formed, that they don’t just exist or don’t exists. There has to be somewhere in the world where the landscape is in between making a full blown desert. And I think that’s where we were, because there were a lot of little formations that I saw and thought to myself: “That is totally how a sand dune could form.”

At this destination we got to ride camels out into the dune area of the desert. I have never ridden a camel before, but with the saddle set up they had there I can say that it is equally as comfortable as riding a horse, or equally uncomfortable depending on your comfortability threshold.

We were able to dismount (which was it’s own unique process) and walk up the biggest sand dune there. I’ve never walked up a steep slope made completely of sand before, but it was pretty awesome. And to top it off, I didn’t even get any in my shoes ☺. At the top we could see around and it was pretty beautiful. My fellow riders decided they wanted to take one of those stereotypical jumping pictures. So here it is.

After our camel ride we headed back to ger number three to watch the sunset before dinner started. In my opinion this was one of the cooler sunsets, because there were these dark clouds hovering above the mountains which gave a really cool contrast to the brightness of the sunset. I took a bunch of pictures of it as well as trying to take a panorama of the sunset.

[Here is a brief aside to anyone wanting to take a panorama and stitch it together manually. Make sure all of your camera settings are on manual, or at least the same. In one of my pictures I had to mess around with the colors afterward because it didn’t look the same, and still kind of doesn’t]

But here is that picture anyway.

After watching the sunset we headed into our ger for our last dinner together as a group. We got to eat this one by candlelight since it was already so dark. About two hours of cards followed this picture, and then bedtime. In the morning we headed back to UB in our van. We were a bit closer that we had been in Erdenezuu, so it didn’t take as long to get back to the hostel.

Once we were back in UB we went back to the bakery, which also served western food, where I got a philly cheese steak, Mongolian style. It was surprisingly good. It gave me enough nourishment to make it all the way through the many exhibits at the National History Museum of Mongolia that we went to after our early dinner. I haven’t been to a museum in a long time so I think going in this one gave me a sensory and information overload. After the 15th room or so I had taken in way too much information, so it was time to go back to the hostel for the night and just chill.

That last night I met some people from different parts of the world on different journeys for different reasons. It’s pretty safe to say that I am probably never going to see any of them again. There is something unique about that fact when you talk to someone. After getting pretty late I headed back to my room to read before waking up for our flight the next day.

And I made it back to Qingdao safely.

I think that overall I had a really great experience on this trip. I know I already said this, but I think that part of what made this trip great was meeting cool people like Santiago, Cecilia, Matthew, and Nina. People I would have never gotten the chance to meet had I not decided to go on this adventure. I love nature, and I love seeing different parts of the world to see just how different nature can be, but I don’t think I am cut out for the whole living out of a backpack thing. Well, at least not on the level where I feel like every day I have to do like 12 different activities to get the most out of my trip. I have told several people this before, but I think my personality is more suited for landing in one place for a week or two and just hanging out, preferably with people I like ☺. Seeing the sights was good, but I’m going to be looking forward to my weekends in QD for a while.

Thanks for reading this little novella. I hope you enjoyed the pictures and my experiences in Mongolia.

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Fall Camp and Weddings on the Beach

Fall camp and weddings on the beach.

So this past weekend, well, Thursday and Friday, we had our fall camp with our high school students. This is where all of my planning came to a head. Or more like fell on its head. But that’s okay, I knew some things wouldn’t go 100% as planned, and we all ended up having a great time.

We set up camp on the beach next to some mountains and I started them out with a game that I like to call “pass the can.” We were going to play “touch the can” where everyone has to touch a Coke can that’s held between two people’s noses but also, no one can touch one another. They did that in about two minutes so I quick made up this passing game. My only rule was that each person had to pass the can but they weren’t allowed to use their arms. Let me tell you, I got some interesting pictures from that game, but I can’t post all of them so you will just have to enjoy the one I do post. I think they thoroughly enjoyed that game, and it definitely helped some of them get out of their comfort zones.

After that we drove to the village where we gave each person 10 RMB (about $1.55) and with that they had to buy enough food for themselves and the teachers, who wouldn’t be spending money. There were only 16 of them, so we had to feed 20 people with only about $25. Not a lot considering at most sit down restaurants in the US you can spend like $20 for one person. So the students were divided into 4 groups of four and amongst themselves they decided that each group would buy their own food plus some food for one teacher, in total they would feed five people.

So as our students rushed into convenience stores and restaurants us teachers had to cross our fingers that we would get a semi-decent meal. I got elected into a group where we had a 2-liter of Sprite (score!), some peanut bread (which was kind of a semi-score, but I ate like 4 pieces) and a thing of sausage (this was the least score, but I ate one and a half). Some groups got a hot eggplant dish from a lady for helping her clean up her kitchen. I thought that was especially ingenious, what with making their money go a longer distance by putting in a bit of their own work.

After we sat at the campfire and told scary stories. One of the goals for this little retreat was to speak only English, so students could get some good practice. So some of their stories were…lacking when they told him in English, either that or riddled with questions like: “What’s the word for when everyone goes to a place when someone dies?”

Free time followed the fire and some of us went off to hunt down some crab. I didn’t get any pictures because I wanted to be a participant and not just an observer. As we scoured the rocks with our flashlights I was becoming doubtful of whether or not these mythical crabs existed. Then I saw one, and then another, and then another. All in all we caught like eight or nine. We let them all go, but it was fun catching them.

I had four of my students write their names in Chinese for me with lights ☺

One of the ways my planning didn’t pan out was with the hike for the following day. I had budgeted only four hours in the morning for the hike, when really I found out that it was going to be more like six hours, and that we would have to wake up at 5. Ugh. I am not a morning person at all. So as I was laying in my tent, on the lumpy sand, wondering about whether or not I would ever fall asleep, I was dreading the fateful 5am wake up call.

Well, that time rolled around, and as I got out of my tent I saw a kind of “meh” sunrise. I’ve never really seen a sunrise before since I am not a morning person, so I when I saw this I was kind of underwhelmed with all the talk and obsession of sunrises. I was not impresses.

And then the sun rose. Apparently what I was seeing earlier is what I would like to call the “pre-sunrise” where you get some nice color gradients on the horizon. But when the sun actually rose, it was awesome. I took 78 pictures of it and don’t regret any of them. A sunrise is a pretty cool way to start the day.

And start it we did with our 3 hour hike up a super vertical mountain. It was like walking up stairs that were each 20 inches high. Halfway through half of our group decided that they didn’t want to continue, so they headed down the mountain while 7 students and three teachers climbed to the top. Along the way we were running out of water, but were assured by our guide that there was a spring at the top.

I guess now is a good time to explain that we were climbing the Laoshan mountains. And that if you buy bottled water in Qing Dao that it’s going to be Laoshan water. So, as a reference, this would be like hiking in Deer Park and getting the legendary water from the source (kind of).

So we got there and just straight up dipped our water bottles into this pool of crystal clear water (there were only a few floaters, but hey, that’s good for you, right?) and drank straight from the stream. It was quite refreshing. We hiked for another 40 minutes or so until we got to the top, and the view was spectacular.

After our hike we made our way over to a beach for a sandcastle-building contest. But that’s not what I am about to talk about. I am going to talk about Chinese weddings. Don’t worry, this will all make sense when you see my picture. But, anyway, in China, or at least Qing Dao, it is super popular to get your wedding photos taken on the beach. I mean, super popular. Every time I have gone to or passed by the beach (on nice days) I have seen, without fail, at least one bride and groom striking funny poses in the sand. Now, this could be true in the states for places that are close to the beach, Cincinnati and Atlanta were not for that matter, so I haven’t experienced this beachside wedding photography before. So, how many brides do you see?

Overall the trip was a success and I think the kids enjoyed themselves and hopeful learned some things. If nothing else I think they all grew a little closer as people and friends, which for only 28 hours of being together is a striking success.

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Scouting, Russian Ballet, and Teacher’s Day

Scouting, Russian Ballet, and Teacher’s Day

One of the events that we have planned for this fall for secondary school is a camping trip. It sounds really adventurous and intense, but there is really less camping and more team building type events. And I, since I like backpacking and worked at a summer camp am charged with some of the responsibilities of organizing this one-night trip for our 10th, 11th and 12th grade classes. Don’t worry, that’s only about 18 students.

All that to say that me and one of the Chinese teachers went out on a trip with the schools driver in our awesome school van, pictured below.

We first went to a mountain venue where we were told that we couldn’t really set up camp in the woods because the grass was long and that there would be snakes (psh, who’s afraid of snakes anyhow). So we would have to camp in a parking lot and only be able to hike into the woods for a few hours. I didn’t really like that idea so we travelled on to our next destination. Here is the parking lot.

As we pulled up to our next location I noticed that we were smack on the coast of the Yellow Sea. We talked with a lady that owned a restaurant right where we were thinking about setting up camp: on the beach! Now, it isn’t Cancun or Destin with wispy white sand everywhere, but it is definitely a cool spot. The lady then told us that we could pay a few bucks each to row out to this island that is maybe a mile or two from the beach. Besides that being a cool thing for a group of kids who have probably never rowed a boat, I think in general that it will just be awesome. And once we are on the island we can have a few hours to hike around and maybe grab a bite to eat. Fresh sea food anyone?

While we still haven’t figured out exactly where we are going to go, I’m thinking that my fellow teachers are leaning towards the beach idea.

If you think that ends the events of my day, you might just be mistaken. After we got back to school, I split off from the other teacher to get ready to go out to eat at a place down in the local market (which I need to get some pictures of, because it’s awesome). In this market people sell a bit of everything: fruit, veggies, fish, clams, crabs, pig, pork, and things I can’t recognize, or don’t want to. But me and the group of other foreign teachers I was with first stopped at this place where you could get the tudosa (the shredded and fried potatoes, kind of like hash browns) in this yummy flaky wrap for only 2 RMB, which is like $0.30 in the US. Yeah, you can pretty much get only a gumball or 10 skittles for that much back home. After getting our bag of wraps we headed over to the noodle lady.

Now let me take a moment to make an aside. When you go out to eat at a restaurant in Qingdao and you don’t eat all of your food you don’t get a to go box. You get a to go bag. For everything. It could be clams, veggies, or even soup. They put it in a bag, and that’s that.

Back to the noodle lady. We got there and squatted down on the short stools and sat around the table to eat our enormous bowl of noodles and meat, which only cost 6 RMB or about $1. After eating to full I strolled across the street (which was bout 7 feet) and grabbed an orange Fanta from a small grocery store. I met the rest of the group as I left the store and we all headed back to school, where our apartments are to get ready for the Russian Ballet we were all going to see that evening.

In China they have Teacher’s Day, where all the students give teachers gifts, or in my case, and most of secondary, some nice cards. But the local venue, The Grand Theatre, was providing very cheap tickets to their evenings performance of a Russian Ballet. I got to sit in the 6th row for only 10 RMB or about $1.50. But getting to the theatre was the real adventure. As the other foreign teachers and I strolled up to the front gate we saw several of our Chinese staff crowding in to the back of a pick up truck. We found out that they were going to the ballet to, and we all got invited for the free ride.

So we took it, we had about 21 people in the back of that truck, which we smelled out later was used for garbage, and the sidewalls weren’t safe to lean against, which is no big deal when you’re going 45 down the middle of the road. Anyhow, it was an adventure, and I think everyone is going to remember the night we crowded in the back of a semi-shady pick up truck and went to the nice ballet.

And the ballet was really good. I would have totally taken pictures, but I figured you wouldn’t be allowed to, and I was right. But the amount of coordination between having as many as like 20 dancers on the floor at the same time and the difficulty of what they were doing was pretty mesmerizing to watch. There is just something really cool about watching people do things that you know you’d never be able to do. Not to mention that some of the acts were really weird and some dances had really stereotypical Russian dancing music where the guy always does that thing where he crosses his arms and kicks his feet out and back. And then a guy did that and it was awesome. So, if you can see a ballet for $1.50 go do it. Or maybe spend some more money, it’s really up to you.

Oh, by the way, I enabled the comments so if any of you would like to leave feedback of things you’d like to hear about or see pictures of let me know. Or if you just want to say hi :).

p.s. WordPress got blocked so this has been sitting in a word doc for about 2 weeks. I have some more to post but haven’t since I couldn’t get WP to work. Now that it does I’ll have some other stuff ready to go soon. Stay tuned.

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