integrating technology
grades K - 12 tofu
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What
we did on the weekend Dalian integrating technology blog at DAIS
integrating technology
grades K - 12 tofu
When the television is off for a week and there is nothing to do but nothing to do the world is really an OK place. It was not really our own choice but the choice was good. A few things this past week have not been our choice but then again we have been making do with 'outside' and 'others' choices for a lot this year. The first few days we stayed at the Warriors Apartment in Xi'an. In the Bajiaxian Xihuanmen hood to be specific. There were no television stations in any of the many languages that we speak/understand: Australian English, American English (Narda questions whether that is really English – 'just a dialectic of the Queen's English badly butchered'), New Zealand English, Canadian and of course Narda speaks the language of her birthplace up there in Utrecht (The Netherlands) but anything else we have to turn the telly off for and anything else was all there was on the television in the Warriors Apartment in Xi'an. The rest of the week in the apartment we were in we were not ever able to sort out how to turn the television on. We tried every button and every combination of every button and just saw characters on the screen that seemed to be laughing at us in our ignorance of how to put meaning to them. I have a Ph.D in communication (constructed all in Australian English – 155,000 words, 550 pages with diagrams and images - http://neuage.org/ODAM) which is all about the construction of meaning – see image below – but in that whole seven years of research and of course the masters and other degrees leading to that, I never learned how to put meaning to the images we were seeing on the telly so we could figure how to get the bloody thing to go to an actual television station. Of course we no doubt would not have found a station in any language that we understood if we did so we would not have known what was going on in the world after all, especially the first few days of our stay at the Warriors Apartment in Xi'an where we did not get Internet either.
I will attempt to
stay on task of our trip to Xi'an; though, as I have not written
since returning from summer break and our little journey to the
States, Australia and Malaysia and we have had a very busy month
since returning to work and the weekend before going to Xi'an we were
on the North Korea border staying in Dandong I probably will have
moments of drifting to other
thoughts/insights/visions/illuminations/realizations/memories and the
like.
Speaking of drifting
– I write for myself – if no one reads anything I write
ever that is fine. I have had comments that my spelling infuriates
some (I switch from Australian to whatever it is the Yanks speak –
being a duel citizen and all) so my excuse is color is colour and
sometimes a 'z' is an 'a' and some words are slang and some no doubt
I have made up and that is my writing that I do for myself because I
enjoy writing and I do it for myself and I do a lot of writing to
remember what we have done. I wrote a 170,000 word book called
'Leaving Australia' and made two bound copies of it; one for my son
and one sits on my shelf and I like to read it sometimes as it helps
me remember stuff. I don't even have portions of it on-line. Anymore.
I did for awhile but some characters that I have met along the way
who were in my narrative were really upset to find their portrayals
on-line; true that it was but of course we all have those sections of
life we pretend never happened and hope that no one will ever divulge
either. But my story is also the story of interactions with people in
specific situations at a certain time and space that we shared and to
change or even delete those moments makes the continuum of my story
choppy and invested with deep holes – so that is why I only
printed two books.
On
the way to Xi'an the funnest of funnies... because of the upcoming
national holiday the stewardess gave everyone China flags to wave -
which they did. Following that people went up to the front and sang
stuff. A stewardess came and asked me to sing. I said Narda was not
only a professional singer but also a music teacher of course Narda
did not hear all of this and the next thing she knew I was pushing
her up the aisle. And even though I could not get a video of her
singing because of all the people standing in front of me I did
listen as everyone on the plane did. She of course could not sing a
Chinese patriotic song but she did make up a song using happy
birthday. Some words about 'I wish you well China and on and on...'
we all cheered and my only disappointment is that I did not get it
recorded.
Warriors Apartment in Xi'an. I will start with that. Because the place had a top listing for places to stay in Xi'an (Ranked #1 of 86 Xi'an B&B and Inns by Trip Advisory) and it looked as funky as could be we booked it some six weeks ago, August 24th to be precise, it was the place for us. We spent a lot of time trying to find the owner of the place. All the web searches for it lead to Expedia, Agoda, travelpod, booking.com and all the rest are just to rent the place. We did find the actual telephone number eventually and rang the owner who had his wife meet us at the airport bus stop. It was fortunate that we did as the place is almost impossible to find. It is located down an alley after a few other side streets. It is not a building dedicated to the Warriors Apartment but in actual fact three apartments, one located on the 7th floor where there is no Internet and two on the second floor. The building is about 25 stories high and is amongst many other tall buildings all several decades old. We booked a one-bedroom apartment for a week and were happy to be given a two-bedroom apartment. Inside is so much our style. Who would not want to have a home with warriors all over the place? In every room including the kitchen and about 40 holding up the bed (no comments please) as well as four holding up the sink in the bathroom.
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We were only about five minutes walk to Beiyuanmen Muslim Street which is the in place to hang out. Because we went during the Chinese National Day holiday week (celebrating the foundation of the People's Republic of China, in 1949) the place was so packed that there were times we could not move in any direction.
See http://goo.gl/S2dh8L or click on the QR code.
We got out to see the Terracotta Warriors in the morning. Bus lines were enormous with a couple of hours wait for the tourist bus that is mentioned in Lonely Planet. We gave up and found a more of a local bus on the other side of the car park – bus 615, which got us there in an hour and we waited only about 20 minutes. We came back on bus 614 which took two hours but that was because of traffic. The pits were will worth seeing once in a life time. (lines were much longer than appears here – they wrap around and go out past the train station and through a large car park out to the main bus station across the road.)
In pit one, the largest of the diggings, they have gotten the furthest since starting back in 1974.
I could never have
been one of the people digging these things up. It is all quite
painstaking and required endless amounts of time using small brushes
and files to scrape off thousands of years of muck. In pit two and
one which are smaller – there is still digging and crap going
on to expose all this. We have a book written by the owner of the
Warriors Apartments which is quite good and of course there is heaps
on the Internet.
I
wanted to go to the
top of the mountains across the road but we did not have the time. We
were an hour from Xi'an and still the pollution was so thick that
even at noon the mountains looked too hazy to get a good glimpse of.
To divert a bit. We got home yesterday afternoon and as always had a Jack-driver meet us at the airport and we did our shopping for the month on the way home. In the afternoon we were just chilling and after dinner I was in the kitchen and without warning I blacked out and ended on the floor. I only say this now as I will probably forget somewhere in the future – like next week – and I want to record what happened. As a person who has never fainted or passed out before it was a unique experience. One minute I was putting something in the microwave and the next I was gaining consciousness on the floor. I did not feel light headed or any signs of anything even a second before. I did not even recall going down. Narda said I looked in shock when I came to. The whole event lasted seconds but I did get some aches and pains such as a twisted knee from crashing to the floor. What is slightly interesting in all of this is that things just happen maybe even for no reason. I felt fine after and we went and used the large massage chair on the second floor, coming home feeling great. So today I went to the S.O.S clinic on the first floor and Dr. Wilhelm looked after me. He took some blood, did an EKG which he sent to Hong Kong for a specialist to look at (oh boy maybe we get to fly to Hong Kong next week) and spent more than an hour doing all kinds of tests and at this point we do not know why I kissed the floor. Being a holiday week and the staff mostly out of town I pretty much had the clinic to myself. I only mention all this because nothing like this has ever happened before. In Xi'an the traffic was brutal. Cars, buses, scooters, trucks and people all going in all directions often in total disregard of any laws that would be in place if anyone was around to enforce them. (Travel operators in China have a huge new set of rules to follow now that the country's first tourism law is in place. The 112-article law came into effect October 1 But I do not think it applies to people trying to get through an intersection) All manner of vehicles go through red lights so they are not a deterrent from disaster. Narda and I surely mingled with the masses and crossed in-between buses and carts and all the rest. Our tactic is usually to use others as a human shield and cross in the midst hoping others will protect us. Luckily for any reason I did not have a black out – my one and only of my life – in one of those crossing the street situations. And luckily we were not riding bikes in our dangerous fashion alongside main roads and darting across roads in front of traffic that would not be aware of a red light or anything else that could possibly slow down their forward motion.
We did ride bikes in Xi'an, capital of Shaanxi province on the wall that surrounds the city. It is one of the oldest cities in China and the largest city in the world in 582 according to people in the know. There is all kind of historical crap to look at. We rode up on the wall that surround the city. It is some 14 kilometers and we rode three-fourths of it. Because we rented bikes for only 100 minutes and we are old and slow and take way too many photos and videos and there are four bike rental areas at the four main turns of the wall: yes, the North and the South and the West and the East gates we only got to the third gate by the time we peeled our sorry asses off of the bike seat.
After the first days
in the Warriors Apartment we had a bit of a shock. At the door was
standing three people and the owner's wife. She said they too were
booked into our apartment. It did not register at first and when I
saw it was three teachers from our school – that we live on the
same floor as – I welcomed them in thinking they were in the
second floor apartment. We knew they were staying at the same place
so this was not a totally unreasonable thought to have. It was not
like waking up on the kitchen floor wondering how I suddenly passed
out. Low and behold they had their bags with them and were told they
could stay in our second bedroom. Now we realise that there is a
difference in customs and how people interact. Perhaps in the local
Chinese world having three people in a bedroom and another couple in
the other is not uncommon. But these three women had already paid for
the apartment we were in and not only that but more than Narda and I
had. So of course everyone, except the owner, was upset. I just sort
of drifted out of the picture knowing that four pissed off middle age
women would figure stuff out a lot more efficiently than a 66 year
old ex-hippie. The owners blamed Agoda saying they stuffed up the
booking. The women called Agoda and Agoda rang the owner who said
everything was fine and that he was taking care of it. What a
balls-up – never seen such a situation. Right up there with
fainting for the first time in my life. I suppose that is why life is
mildly interesting to me it is so incredibly unpredictable.
We were told to wait until six pm, but it was about 7.30 when Clarence showed up to sort out the dilemma. In the meantime everyone was a bit agro. His initial 'idea' was for us all to stay together and he would refund some money. Well that was a stupid idea so he said he would go off and look for something to move someone into. As we had booked a single room apartment it was obvious that we were going to get the boot and we did. Clarence, his wife and son all showed up and with Narda and I were taken out of the old quarter that we were really getting to like and into some crappy new city area quite the distance. The apartment we were given was terrible. Clarence said that it would be very difficult to find a place because of the holiday. The apartment was dirty, there was left over food in the small kitchen and the bathroom was just dirty. We were quite upset but that is where we were left. Whose fault it was, whether it was Agoda not passing on the booking or Clarence's it was handled very badly. He had no problem with taking the money – which incidentally was on the same day – we independently rented the same apartment in the same city on the same day - 24th of August. Clarence saw them as the same booking but of course anyone would see that there were two lots of money. We were exhausted by the time we got to the apartment and did not put up enough of a fight.
As always is the case we made the best of our new surroundings. We found our way to the subway and took Line 1 which began operation on September 15, 2013, like a couple of weeks ago. I love subways and always ride one in a city comparing them to New York City and Paris which not as old as London are great subway lines. I have never been on a subway line that is less than a month old. OK there was nothing special and it was so crowded because of the holiday that we barely could get on. But it did get us back into the old quarters. We were also near the Big Wild Goose Pagoda (Dayan Pagoda) which was begun in 652 and though another pagoda is not so exciting we did go to the fountain light show in the evening. I have some good footage in youtube but my still photos of the fountain light show are a bit average as you can see but I did get this fairly OK shot of the pagoda thingy.
Again there were so many people it was difficult getting around. Outside of spending a couple of more days tromping around Xi'an, riding the metro and looking at huge shopping malls that were fancy from the outside but just like every other shopping mall inside were the same old we just looked around at another polluted over crowded city.
However in one mall was this huge screen on the ceiling,
This
ceiling LED display of more than 3000 square meters (168 meters long
and 17.92 meters wide) located in Qin Han Tang Emporium which is next
to the Goose Pagoda was impressive. I will have a clip on my youtube
site at http://youtube.com/neuage09
any moment now. At the same time
as writing this I am editing clips in Adobe Premier Pro Creative
Cloud – my new favourite subscription software in a suite of
lots of groovy creative projects. I am loving After Effects and
Photoshop along with some 20 plus other programs but Premier
definitely does for me at the moment. Having hundreds of video clips
and a thousand photos I will have enough to do, along with an actual
job, and being a caring/listening/nurturing husband (will there be
time for that?) to keep me off the streets for awhile or hopefully
off of the kitchen floor.
Thankfully I was not hanging onto the side of a tuk tuk as it found its way through traffic. These things are off-putting to me but as Narda likes them we do ride them in various countries.
I
started a new series here at Dalian American International School –
the DAIS Cooking Show. Well, I have had one show which was with meat
eating Patrick. He showed how to make meat burgers – good
grief, and in front of me too; I showed my tofu burger making skills
refining one of my recipes from http://neuage.us/tofu/
where I showcase experiences/recipes/stories garnished from seven
years as a tofu manufacturer in Adelaide, South Australia. We filmed
it all with two cameras; a Nike and our new school semi-professional
JVC. I now have several hours of banter, silliness, cooking, eating
and live audience (Narda, Sean, Jean, JoeFred – not a big
audience) to edit. I have several other shows getting lined up and
soon the next in the series will be up and hopefully by the end of
the school year some mega China television broadcasting networking
system will offer me a huge contract to show what to do with tofu on
live television... oh wait! This is China – home of tofu. Well
I am giving it a shot that is for sure.
I did like the street we were on, it had art all along it much like we saw in Mexico City.
Here are just a couple of the pieces – there were probably a hundred:
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At the end of it all after walking 8 – 10 hours a day for five days in a very polluted Chinese city I think we would have been better off on one of the other holidays teachers took this week such as to Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam, inner Mongolia and lots of better holidays than we took. Not to worry we are off to Thailand for three weeks at Christmas and lots of other great destinations for the next holidays.
The weekend before we left on our Warrior-less Apartment we went the three hour drive up to Dandong with about 55 people from our school. Dandong is across a narrow river divide of North Korea.
Walking out on Friendship bridge we could see the fake amusement park on the North Korea side. The Ferris wheel is just a cut-out thingy. We did hear children playing and actually saw them playing along the river. Online stories say this part of North Korea has been tarted up for tourist to look across and see that everything is quite normal.
The
boat trip is well worth it and I even got up close to some North
Korean soldiers,
Maybe
I could get them interested in my tofu cooking class.
At the Museum Commemorating the War to Resist American Aggression and Aid Korea there is lots of anti-Western stuff to look at. I photographed several of their write-ups but not having been in this part of the world and only having an American view I can not comment on what the beef was all about.
But Dandong is not
just about North Koreans and their possibly tainted view of us –
I mean Kim Jong Un is friends with Dennis Rodman, they are BFFs, how
could they be anything but sympathetic toward others?
The best thing to do is go along the wall where it starts. Of course this was before I blacked out in my kitchen and twisted my knee (there goes my softball career – every Sunday we play against a team from Taiwan here at school and this was going to be the game that I actually hit the ball far enough to get on base – saying all that, everyone is much younger than me) so I was able to climb and climb and climb. We were a bit worse for wear when we got to the top but the view was fantastic. We could see straight into North Korea but I did not see Kim Jong Un though he may have seen me.
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