Thursday, June 29, 2006

Man zao

Well, the mien bao che taking us to the airport arrives in four hours and we're nigh ready to go. Amazing. This week has gone well. Almost too well. One cynically wonders what disasters will strike on the way home. A night spent sleeping on an airport floor? Lost luggage? Lost children? Terrorist hijackers? (We could be lucky and they'd only want the plane diverted to Cuba.)(Remember when the cliché was that the hijackers wanted to go to Cuba? Who would've thought those were the good ol' days?)

As far as my presentation woes--they're history. On Tuesday night we went to dinner at the home of another mei guo family. Not only were we able to successfully test our computer and cable on their TV, but they also let us use their advanced Mac equipment to export the presentation to all sorts of formats. I now have a strong lust to get a copy of Keynote, if for no other reason than it fixes the limitations I endured with Appleworks. Guess I better keep an eye peeled for that leprechaun.

Anyway, the journey begins and by Tuesday night I hope to be at my mother-in-law's place in Tacoma, heading out to catch the fireworks. Unless I'm so jet-lagged that I'm asleep by 7:00....

Monday, June 26, 2006

Graduation

Well, things are winding up here at the ol' Education College. The girls and I started our vacation from homeschooling last Monday. Yau Neih gave her final exams this past week. The seniors have graduated, leaving a few weeks before the lower classes. We were invited to two of the graduation banquets. The last English corner was on Saturday and our neighbor Michael headed for the U.K. yesterday. On Friday, we'll head out to the airport for our three day journey back to the States. Depending on what fast food is available at the San Francisco airport, I may be eating a hamburger by Sunday morning.

So if I haven't been homeschooling for over a week, why haven't I been posting? What have I been doing with all that free time? Heh. Amazing how easy it is to fill up empty time. The girls have been having moments of boredom already. Me, I can always find plenty to do. The biggest task has been putting together a "slide show" of our year here. People are going to want to see what we've been up to, and I have almost 3000 pictures to sort through and try to illustrate our story. It was nice to dust off the old A/V skills, though it has been a bit like work. My first problem was to try and figure out how to get things to work together. I've got most of my pix catalogued in iPhoto, but with so many pictures it moves like a slug. I could have tried using Quark XPress as a virtual slide tray, but I've got an ancient version of the program. In and of itself it works great, but it doesn't recognize the OS X aliases. (My old version of Photoshop has a similar problem.) In the end, I ended up using iPhoto to grab any shot that might be useful and then exporting a web page and editing the html to create a storyboard. Once I got that set I manually copied all of the photos that made the final cut, processed them in Photoshop and then pasted them into Appleworks' presentation module. (There I showed my age, disdaining the variety of wipes offered and lamenting the fact that I can't control the fade rate like a good ol' multi-projector slide show.) In theory, this should allow us to show all the folks at home our "vacation slides". Of course, that's assuming we can hook up our iBook to a TV or projector. Last night when we had it hooked up to our TV set, the screen cut out. We either lost our video cable or the video out port on our laptop. Looks like priority one after arriving in Tacoma may be to fix the computer. Or maybe I should just buy a new one. Yeah, assuming I run into a leprechaun who gives me a pot of gold.

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

The conquest of Qi Shan


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Originally uploaded by Yuek Hahn.
For months it had been tantalizing me, sitting outside my window with its peak seeming so close. Qi Shan--Flag Mountain--stands apart from the other hills around here. It has become a landmark for us, much as Mt. Rainier draws our attention back home. Surely there was a trail to the top, I thought. As the weeks passed, the possibility of climbing it seemed very real. We began taking weekly hikes with other teachers and students. We hiked on Qi Shan, but we always explored the lower trails. Then, one Saturday in October, the opportunity arrived. The group decided to see how high we could go. Unfortunately, our family had a luncheon engagement at noon. We set foot on that upward path but once 9:30 rolled around, the four of us turned back so we could get showered and changed for our important engagement. It was all worth it of course--we got to eat ants after all--but I told myself that the next time I was going to the top.

Well, that was the theory, anyway. In the subsequent months we only came close to hiking to the peak once--and that was the time we again turned back early and got lost. Over time it seems like our hikes have gotten shorter, a bit easier and better catered. Nobody has suggested the big climb. Anyhoo, as our homeschooling schedule started it's final approach into summer vacation, I got the notion to give myself a treat. I had two weeks without school before we returned to the States, so I figured I would take a chunk of one of those days and do some exploring. I had a number of options, but the conquest of Qi Shan was the one that grew on me. I mentioned my idea to Yau Neih and she offered to join me. The kids weren't interested. So since Yau Neih had no classes on Monday, we decided to pack a lunch and make the climb.

The hike itself was pretty uneventful. We set out at 9:45. The weather was nice, partly cloudy with very little haze in the air. Perfect for a hike. We headed up through the village and trod up the path we had traversed before. We had a fairly clear trail all the way up and nice views of the city. The trail was steep, but we stopped for a breather every now and then and managed just fine. At 11:05 we reached the peak. It was a big circle of grass, with a couple of dead tree trunks in the center. There were three cows up there, who seemed rather nervous. They stopped grazing and walked to the edge of the woods where they stared at us. We gave them their space and had a look around. We had been told that there was a flag at the peak, but we saw no evidence of such. Instead we found:

We had been expecting that.

Anyway, since it was only a bit after eleven, we decided to have our picnic on the trip down. The clouds had moved in as we neared the top, so we didn't spend much time basking in our triumph. We rested for a bit and then unpacked our umbrellas and headed down. We got a good dousing for about five minutes, but then the rain let up. Soon after we plopped down and had lunch. It must have been a divine lunch break because we had no more finished eating that the rain started up again. This time it really came down and at one point we stopped and stood under our umbrellas, watching the drops fall from the pine needles and the little rivers marking our trail down. But eventually we moved on again, slowly and carefully making our way downhill. By 2:15 we were home and taking our clothes off. So I could do laundry. A rather mundane end to such a great feat, but such is my life. Which peak shall I conquer next?

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Tagalong

I suppose I should write about my little venture up the mountain. Two weeks ago, the girls and I were invited to tag along with some of the other Americans here in town. They do development work and had been invited to visit a local school for International Children's Day. I jumped at the chance, Ga Dai declined and Siu Wan--without much enthusiasm--decided to also come along. (Yau Neih had to work, alas.)

So Friday morning, we got up bright and early and presented ourselves for the trip. Our friend, Marty, and his family picked us up and we headed out. The place we were visiting, a village named Nanxin, was rather close. Just outside of town we hung a left to take the road to the village. I don't know what the mileage was, but it wouldn't have been more than a ten minute drive in Illinois. In Yunnan, however, it was up a mountain on a dirt road, so we spent about an hour in transit. It was another example of how sheltered my life has been. I've driven on mountain roads, and I've driven on dirt (well, gravel) roads, but I've never been on such a narrow, rutted stretch of mud. Without guard rails. Thank God for four wheel drive. Anyway, I'm complaining like I had to drive. I didn't. I got to ride in style, enjoying the scenery and trying to snap a few pictures.

When we got to the school, we were warmly welcomed by the school officials. The kids watched us arrive and unload the bags of goodies we brought, and then were hustled back into the school rooms. We had the obligatory cup of tea and discovered that our main course for lunch was going to be fresh goat. (They had not quite finished the butchering process.) After a bit we were ushered over to a play field where the children were assembling. The hauled out some desks and benches for us to sit upon. There was a flag raising ceremony, some songs and a couple of speeches. Then the head honcho came over and started talking to me. Thankfully one of our bilingual companions hurried over and translated. It seems like they wanted me to hand out some awards to the kids. I thought it rather amusing that he had picked the person in our party who the least involved in all the good stuff my friends have been doing for the school. Later I discovered that I was using the wrong logic. I was selected because I was the oldest male in the group. Anyway, I smiled and handed out the awards. After a few of the students had saluted me, I lamely tried to salute back. I dearly hope I hadn't insulted anybody. Oh, well.

After the ceremonies, we handed out some toys and snacks. The kids were then released to have fun. They put the new balls through their paces, and later in the day we saw at least one of them had been deflated and converted into a couple of skullcaps. Our kids went off to play as well, though there wasn't much interaction between the locals and the foreigners. After an hour or so, it was time for lunch. The goat was quite delicious, as were the taters and veggies. Over lunch, my friends were discussing how to determine when it would be the polite time to leave. It turns out that the polite time was right after lunch. The children had been given the best of all Children's Day presents--a half day of school. So we trucked on down the hill back home. All in all it was a pleasant outing.

Sunday, June 11, 2006

You say it's your birthday


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Originally uploaded by Yuek Hahn.
On a lighter note, Yau Neih had a birthday party this week. We hadn't planned on a party, mind you. She was all set to do the simple, traditional celebration of dinner out at the restaurant of her choice. She got that, but things got a bit complicated.


I love the idea of giving people a special surprise for special occasions, but I usually either a) think of something too late or b) am too lazy to pull of an idea that I get. Well this year I managed to think of an idea and actually pull it off. (Must have been since I didn't buy her a present.) Yau Neih had a ten o'clock class that morning--the class that she's bonded with the most. The plan was that the girls and I would let her go off to class as normal. Then, after the ten o'clock bell, we'd sneak over to her classroom, burst in, sing happy birthday to her, and then dash out. It was a nigh perfect plan: we'd have some fun, Yau Neih would get embarrassed, about 60 people would find out about her birthday and could wish her well, and we would have a minimal disruption of the students' education. And the nigh perfect plan came off, well, nigh perfectly. We burst in and started singing "Happy Birthday". The class caught on quickly and, roaring with laughter, started applauding. That was the one flaw in the execution of the plan. Three voices can't compete with 60 pairs of hands. But as we dashed away, we could hear the class pick up the tune. Our work was done.

Well, sort of. There was one thing that had made me hesitate to pull my little joke. I did not want the students to feel in any way obligated to buy Yau Neih a present or otherwise spend money on her. I thought I had dodged that bullet, since Yau Neih came home with class with a single "card"--a nice little note on a piece of paper folded origamily. (Is that a word? Probably not.) But then I found out that the family had been invited to a class party. That particular class has a required "study hall" on Thursday nights, and during their mid class break they got together and decided to turn it into a "birthday hall". The Chinese system of classes may be odd by our standards, but it certainly has its strengths. Anyway, the whole family was invited, the only catch being that we would be asked to perform. No problem. Ga Dai had been keeping up practice on a fiddle piece for such an eventuality, and we Hamburgers are always willing to sing a tune. Since it was her birthday, I didn't balk when Yau Neih pushed to sing Cat Stevens' "Morning Has Broken". I would have preferred a verse or two of "Get Up and Go" myself, but I suppose I can choose that when my class throws me a party.

Anyway, the day continued on. We went out for the birthday dinner and then had a very un-birthday Chinese lesson. We then hurried over to the designated classroom. I somehow think that there was not much studying done in the half hour that they had been waiting for us. There was tinsel hanging from the ceiling and colored acetate taped to the lighting fixtures. A beautiful "Happy Birthday" was written in colored chalk on the board. Anyway, the class broke out in applause as Yau Neih arrived. We were escorted to the "seats of honor" and Yau Neih was given a paper "birthday crown". (I would have got her one, but I've never been able to find a Burger King around here.) Once seated, a couple of students started doling out peaches and plums and a handful of soybeans to everyone. It was much like the Moon Festival party we had attended back in October. A number of students performed for us. There were two dances--one hip-hop, one traditional Tibetan--a couple of songs and a few jokes. We did our turns and Yau Neih also led the kids in a game. Yau Neih was given a number of cards and a couple of presents. I'm pretty sure that everything done was voluntary. Then came the cake. As if the fruit and beans weren't enough, they had to go out and get a good sized cake. The ringleaders of the party insisted that we put on 43 candles--tall, thin little ones that burned way too quick. By the time we lit them all, some of them had burnt down and started char-broiling the fruit slices on top. Actually, I had one and it tasted pretty good. But I digress. Yau Neih made the initial cuts and then the cake was divvied up amongst the crowd. We were given pieces that were way too big and frosting laden. I didn't know if I could finish my piece by the end of study hall.

I needn't have worried. As the pieces of cake were passed around, some rascals started taking fingerfuls of frosting and adorning their friends. When the bell rang to end study hall, the class turned into Animal House. Yau Neih and the girls became the target of many adornments, and since we were the ones being decorated, it seemed only fair that the kids used our pieces of cake. Anyway, it was all quite amusing. By that time, about two-thirds of the class had left and the other third started cleaning up. A number of students also wanted their pictures taken with the birthday girl. I started snapping away, only to discover that the college cuts the power to the classrooms at 9:45. It's a rather efficient way to clear the room. But rank hath its privilege, and Yau Neih retired to the still lit English office to finish the photo shoot. So we headed back to our flat, laden with cards and gifts and a nice warm feeling of being loved.

Of course, now we've got to meet with the class again to take picture orders. I suppose that will be good experience if I ever need to get a job at the Sears photo studio....

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Out of the loop

Yau Neih had a bit of a shocker yesterday. She called on a student from her class list and was told that she wasn't there. After class, a couple of students came up to Yau Neih and told her that their classmate was dead! She had died "back in May." Ironically, a week or so ago, one of the other teachers had told Yau Neih that a student had died--she just never mentioned that the student was one of Yau Neih's. Typical lack of communication here, though I'm sure it's as much our fault for not being fluent in putonghua. Can't follow the scuttlebut if you don't speak the language.

Of course, the girl's death left us feeling rather glum. I don't think that I had ever talked with her, nor had she been close to Yau Neih. In a class of 60 or so, there's only a few that one gets to know well. But it still is a shock to see a young person go like that. It made me think back to my high school days when a graduate who was a few years ahead of me was killed by a truck. It was the first time I experienced the death of a peer. My friends and I went to the funeral and all that, and we had our own version of a wake when we sat around and were sad together. But looking back, I can see that I had no clue how much life Kathy had really missed by dying when she did. (I know, I know, she went to Heaven and we survivors are the ones who need to be mourned. I'm talking under the sun here.) As a forty something geezer, hearing about a mere child of nineteen passing away is a greater tragedy.

I hate death...

Sunday, June 04, 2006

Beware the dark side

I'm talking about the dark side of the TV screen here. We just ended a weeks long attempt to finish viewing the original Star Wars trilogy. You may recall that I had shown the kids Star Wars (I can't bring myself to call it "Episode IV".) back in February. That was just after we got our college supplied DVD player fixed. The kids loved it and showing them the subsequent films seemed like an obvious treat. However, Yau Neih thought that The Empire Strikes Back might be too intense for Ga Dai, so we planned on just letting her read the novelization when we got back to the States. However, I started to get a hankering to watch Empire and Return of the Jedi myself. After a limited amount of soul searching, I broke down and bought those two DVDs. The children of course, were quite anxious to watch them. Little did we know how challenging that would be.

The first glitch came when I tried to preview Empire to note the intense scenes. I popped the disk into my laptop, but the movie didn't even get off the planet Hoth before it started having spasms. It wasn't the first time I've had problems with a DVD in my machine, so I shrugged and moved over to the TV and DVD player. (I would have gone for that option first, but there's no place to plug in my headphones) The movie played fine and over time I was able to preview Empire and the first act of Jedi. So finally the big night came. The girls and I sat down, popped the DVD in the machine and let it roll. We enjoyed everyone's adventures on Hoth, but we no sooner got to Dagobah when the screen froze. In futility, I started punching buttons on the remote. I couldn't back up, jump forward or even access a menu. The only button that worked was the "Eject" button. The DVD tray obediently slid out of the machine. I then sent it back to it's place, but the machine merely thought a moment and then displayed the dreaded "ndisk" message on it's LED. The same message that it had been displaying back in February before we got it fixed. We tried to reload the disk a few more times, as well as trying other DVDs and CDs. No dice. Movie night was cancelled.

The first chance we got, we sent the DVD player back to the shop. Two students took it in for us. They had taken it in the last time--alone, since they thought that our presence would result in an automatic inflation in the repair costs. They left and later that afternoon they returned with a working DVD player. It didn't cost us anything since the repair guy couldn't find a problem. He had plugged the machine in and loaded up a DVD with nary a problem. I plugged it in myself and, sure enough, Empire loaded up just fine. I apologized to the students, thanked them, and then returned to the day's schooling. That evening the girls and I sat down, fired up the machine and watched the blasted "ndisk" message come up again. I ejected and reloaded the disk and this time it worked. We went to the scene where we had left off and gratefully watched the movie... for about ten minutes or so. Then the picture froze and I repeated my actions from the previous movie night. We all went to bed disappointed.

The machine went back to the shop the third time and this time they did something to it. We were getting impatient, so rather than relying overmuch on the students, we had them convey the problem to the tech and we picked the machine up ourselves. We brought it home and were able to sit down and enjoy the rest of the movie. There was great rejoicing.

The next Wednesday, we fired up the machine again and started watching Return of the Jedi. I didn't want the kids up overly late, so we just watched the action on Tatooine. We planned to watch the rest on Saturday, complete with snacks. Saturday afternoon soon came around and we got ready for the matinee. Yau Neih fried up some chau ze (or however you spell it) (I have no idea if it has an American equivalent--it's vaguely reminiscent of Fritos) and poured out some glasses of Pepsi. We popped in the DVD and watched... the flurshugginer "ndisk" message. I started poking at the machine and started using a technique which I nicknamed "voodoo". In this case "voodoo" is attempting to change random parameters in the hope that you might accidentally fix the problem. Something must have worked, because I was finally able to get it to accept the disk and start playing. This time I think we got almost an hour out of it. But then, as the rebel fleet came out of hyperspace and all heck broke loose on the planet below, the DVD player must have had too much Ewok action and once again froze up on us.

Further voodoo failed to work. I turned to my laptop, but it, too, let me down, refusing to play and freezing up on Tatooine. (Now there's a mixture of metaphors for you.) We gave up. Turned off our electronics. Started doing dishes. (Is there anything more calming than doing dishes.) Yau Neih suggested that we should attempt to borrow our neighbors DVD player and finish watching the film. That was a great idea, however, they had taken a weekend road trip and wouldn't be back until Sunday night. Still, it was a viable plan and we stuck to it until I remembered the computer in the English Department office. It's a brand new machine and I thought it just might have a DVD drive. By this point we were a mixture of desperation and pessimism. We decided to give the computer a try, but just in case someone else was using the machine, only Yau Neih went over. We didn't all want to venture over there only to get disappointed. So off Yau Neih went and a few minutes later we got a call. The computer was free!

When I got over to the office, I fired up the machine and popped in the disk. It asked if I wanted to install some such software. I initially tried to avoid it, but it's a Chinese machine and so I was limited when I tried to find an alternative. Whatever I installed, it worked fine and the screen was soon filled with the FBI warning that I had seen so many times in the past couple of weeks. Unfortunately, when the opening titles started, the audio didn't. I spent over an hour poking about trying to find sound settings. We even asked some students for help. I suspect that the DVD drive was never hooked into the sound card, but I wasn't about to pop the machine open to check. Finally, as dinner time descended upon us, we gave up and called it a day.

We drowned our sorrows in homemade french fries. The DVD itself worked fine on the school computer, so we held out hope that we could finish watching it on our neighbor's machine. After dinner and dishes, we ventured over to English corner. As we came to the apartment complex where the corner is held, we met up with Roxie and her kids. Roxie's another expatriate in town whose family had recently returned from the States. Her kids and ours have gotten into the habit of playing together while Ga Dai and I go to the neighborhood English corner. Anyway, Roxie asked us if we would mind if the kids went over to their flat to play indoors. Her husband was out of town and she couldn't both supervise her older kids playing outside and get her youngest one in bed. We, of course, said we had no problem with her proposal. But then the proverbial light bulb went off over Yau Neih's head. "Would your kids be interested in watching the last half hour or so of Return of the Jedi?" she asked. Well, it turned out that since her kids had seen Jedi long ago, they were quite amenable to the idea. So we went off to English corner while Ga Dai went chasing home to fetch the DVD.

To end the tale, the DVD worked fine in Roxie's DVD player and my kids had the joy of finally seeing the end of the longest trilogy on Earth. And there was great rejoicing.... then again, I never got to see those added scenes at the end of the film....