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What
we did on the weekend Dalian integrating technology blog at DAIS
integrating technology
grades K - 12 tofu
Where we are always seems to be not as interesting as where someone else is though why we say that I am not quite sure when wherever we are is where we are because that is the totality of all we have done so far in life and the final destination at this moment. One turn anywhere in life and most likely we would be somewhere else more or less interesting than where we are now.
Think I will come back to that thought in a bit.
Two weekends ago we where in Hong Kong or was it the weekend before two weekends ago? I stop and think for a moment what did we do yesterday – or even worse – what did we do earlier in the day. Not because at 66 I am slowing down in memory – I did that back in the year 1966 – go figure – what I did in 1966 and of course those interesting years later – effects the way I think now.
Whenever 23 – 26 November was compared to today 7th of December is how long since we were tromping around Hong Kong. I went to see my doctor – who I think is quite kool though why a doctor is kool I have no idea but he just seems kool. Dr. King. I believe his name is TIAN LUNG but thankfully for me he goes by Dr. Peter King; Chief of Cardiology, who speaks English, Mandarin, Shanghainese, and Cantonese. I know I have been in China for three years and this may sound quite stupid but saying one speaks Mandarin, Shanghainese and Cantonese to me sounds like me saying I speak New Zealand, British, Candian, Australian and American. Nevertheless Dr. King speaks great English. They did their slew of tests on me from lots of tins of blood to scans of various sorts. After a couple of days meeting again with Dr. King he said I may need to have some laser treatment on my heart. A month earlier he slipped four stents into my arteries. I could use some laser treatment to get rid of some wrinkles here and there but shooting at my heart?
To
celebrate something – most moments of a day should be
celebrating something though what we were celebrating at the time I
do not currently recall; anything from we did not have to get to
morning meeting at 7.30 AM at school or stay after school for
meetings until five PM or that even though we just spent two-thousand
dollars for three days of Hong Kong – it is as expensive as
Australia, or it could even have been something to do with my stents
still being in place though I am still not sure if I needed them
anyway... for whatever reason, as it should be, we felt like
celebrating a bit. We only had one day when it was not full of
hospital tests and doctors visits as the other two days takes us most
of the day to get to and fro. We leave home at ten in the morning to
get a one PM flights to get to Hong Kong at 4.30 then an hour train
into Hong Kong and another half hour to our hotel. Coming back we
leave our hotel at noon and get home at midnight then back to work
Wednesday morning. Not really a fun way two spend two-thousand
dollars (that is US not Hong Kong dollars) but nevertheless we did
have a day and making the best of any day is good.
And since this is China there were a few people out for the day. In fact there were moments when we could not move forward or backward and this was just the foot traffic. Getting a taxi around Macau is even more fun and more up close. We watched the movie 'World War Z' last night - believe me not worth watching except for the graphics and being a film teacher 'but I am watching this for my film class to teach about stuff'' I use chroma screening with my kids though we are not quite to the level of 'Games of Thrones' or 'World War Z'. Whilst watching 'World War Z' which is about a virus attacking the world and everyone becoming zombies as Brad Pitt runs around looking like your typical everyday hero I could not help but associate the crowds we get stuck in here in China with the crowds going nuts and everyone biting each other and becoming zombies. In a way that has already happened. There are always crowds of zillions of people all in a shopping frenzied madding way. 'the shopping zombie-virus'
We
took the fast ferry over to Macau. I wanted to see the old Portuguese
section someone else wanted to see the casinos. We spent about two
hours being historical tourists seeing old shit then we were off to
the casino across the causeway. We took the Macau-Taipa Bridge over
to Taipa (Governor Nobre de Carvalho Bridge) to the Cotai casinos.
See my youtube video - http://youtu.be/AzaiYZU3zZk
These are supposed to be some of the great casinos of the world. Not sure. Firstly, they are quite a distance apart but there are buses going to the next casino at each one. Unlike Las Vegas where a lot are within walking distance or that groovy monorail, Macau is like being in individual cities for each place. But of course China has to overdo everything.
As soon as we got to Macau Narda got a lot of text messages as one does when they arrive in a new town – at least that is what happens here in China. We figured they were advertisements to casinos, especially the first one which said 'City of Dreams' with lots of foreign stuff following. So after being dutiful tourists and seeing a bunch of old shit for a couple of hours we got into a taxi and Narda showed the first text message on her phone, without us having a clue what it said. That is when we got on to the Macau-Taipa Bridge. After awhile we began doubting our choice of communication but then we saw The Venetian (the largest casino in the world ~ the sixth-largest building in the world by floor area) followed by the 'City of Dreams' a huge hotel-casino complex which looks bigger than The Venetian. We spent almost twenty minutes in there. I tried taking video and photos but every time I took out the camera I was stopped. But I did get a shot of their ceiling.
And
a shot of Narda kissing a gold bear so that we could have heaps of
good luck whilst playing in the casino. It didn't work we invested
$20 Honk Kong dollars = a couple of bucks US, and lost it all. So we
decided from that to just tour several casinos and keep our money for
useful stuff like a fridge magnet.
We
had lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe which would be an easy place to give
a miss to. We waited for more than two hours to be served. I don't
think it was because we are old and ugly but they were understaffed
and everyone seemed upset. The food was good but for people in a
hurry to tour every casino in Macau in a few hours it was a time
waster.
The Venetian Casino, being the biggest casino in the world, though not having been to every casino in the world I can not verify that - just read this fact in several places including their own propaganda. Casinos really are all the same. Huge noise making flashing lights places to give people the illusion they are having fun and that of course giving their money away to strangers who own the casino is really a worthwhile thing to do. I lost my interest in all forms of slot machines back in the 1980s. About mid-1980. I was a single parent living in South Australia. Up until about 1985 the pubs in Adelaide were a good place to go to hear live music and pick up chicks (did I really say that?). Then in came the pokies. All the good pubs took out their areas of dance and frivolity. There were no live bands on weekends just stupid sounding machines with people hunched over them. It was difficult if not impossible to meet people and my life of a would-be wild single parent transitioned to a stay home parent writing children stories hunched over a computer. Of course back then we did not have the Internet and my computer had a green screen and I could do little else than type but I suppose staying home and being on a computer heaps was just as non-social as going to a pub and sitting in front of a slot machine. I never got money for my stories except for once I got a story published by Scholastic Magazine; 'Vegy Fighters' http://neuage.indiko.com/vegi_fighters.htm which I got two hundred dollars for. 'Vegy Fighters' was about a kid who would not eat his veggies because he thought there were flying saucers and etc. in them. I just looked at it - a couple of decades later - a bit of a lame story but I made more off of it than I have in all my casino gambling triads of my life which probably amount to an expenditure of less than fifty dollars if I add up my world-wide gambling investments. I realised back in my twenties that I was not lucky and with a Saturn conjunct my Venus I could see I would never do well economically and with Saturn squaring my Jupiter it is obvious that I will never be lucky. I am really happy that I do not believe in astrology or I would be really really spooked by my chart. Especially these months with transit Saturn squaring my Venus, Saturn, Pluto and Sun whilst sitting exactly on my Jupiter and bloody Uranus stirring up my heart by being in Aries trine my Venus in Leo home of the heart. This is such a bad astrological period for me that if I believed in any of this I would go hide under the bed.
The Venetian of course has that Italian look to with its gondola ride. We did not do the gondola ride because of the time factor and in fact we spent less than half an hour at The Venetian which was spent walking quickly through it to find the bus stop to get back to the ferry to get back to Hong Kong. This photo below I took after dark (this being winter that was about six pm) but they do quite well with the illusion that it is day.
We
went to The Galaxy and a few other casinos but after awhile they all
blend and blur and we had more fun hopping buses from casino to
casino. From the last casino we got a bus back to the ferry port.
Here is a tip; plan on going on a ferry hours after you plan on going
on one. Those zillion shopping-zombies we saw back in the Portuguese
section of Macau as well as the zillion slot-playing-casino zombies
were all back at the ferry ten seconds before us. How did they do
that? We had planned to take a seven o'clock ferry back to Hong Kong
but discovered that the next one with any seats was going to be at
10.45. Our bed time is nine pm so of course this troubled our aging
brain. There was a ferry to Kowloon at 8.30 so we grabbed that and
got a subway close to home and home, Happy Valley, by eleven, well
past our bed time.
As is the way in China, everyone surges forward. The concept of a line is as foreign in China as it is to a Dutch person (they are not good at forming lines either - go to the Netherlands and get in a line and you will know what I mean. Or watch a group of Dutch people at an airport or train station - easy to spot they do not get in line). At the ferry terminal everyone, like they do at the train station - especially in Dalian, when the doors open everyone just pushes forward. We were actually in a line that had been started more than an hour earlier and when the doors opened people all came running in from the side. Narda scolded a lady for trying to push in front and when she got teary eye Narda put her arm around her and let her in front but told her that she was a naughty girl which was translated to her by others around us. The woman was our age but clearly had not been taught about social lines. The people from Hong Kong were worse. They went on about how the Chinese from the mainland have no class and do not know how to act. It all got quite political whilst being pushed through two doors with hundreds behind us all trying to get through the same door. We had assigned seats on the ferry so I am not sure why they panic. It is always good though because Narda and I are usually bigger than everyone else. But little ladies can be quite aggressive. I suppose they have had a lot of decades of trying to get anything in the midst of so many people.
The next day, Tuesday, we flew back to Dalian in the afternoon but before that we did another loop of downtown somewhere. All of Hong Kong seems like downtown but I think we were near Victoria Square. I was fascinated, as always, by the bamboo scaffolding that builders construct even on the tallest buildings. out of the videos and multiple photos I think these two show the jest of the work...
Hans,
my relative through Narda, in Holland, wrote to my image in Facebook
that no doubt they will be growing buildings out of bamboo like this
and not just using bamboo for scaffolding. I did take a ten-week
Chinese painting course recently, every Wednesday after school, and
learned how to paint bamboo but in reality that is not related and I
am fortunate that I could find a way to say I did a Chinese painting
course. Of course I was the worse in the class and never did get the
hang of painting bamboo though my ambition at the start of the class
was to paint those galloping horses one sees in Chinese paintings.
Again it is no doubt that I have Saturn sitting on top of my Venus in
Leo that my artist talents are held back. And having that conjunction
in my tenth house makes it obvious to the public.
I liked this sculpture - construction - hopefully not art that was in downtown. It was two days before the American Thanksgiving holiday. When we got back to school there was the Thanksgiving lunch and dinner in the evening. Thanksgiving is not big in Narda and my world. Narda because she is not American and me because the thought of eating turkey does not fit into my vegetarian world. When we lived in New York we use to drive up to Canada to avoid Thanksgiving and the invitations from people who would invited us to their home feeling sorry for us because we had no one to spend Thanksgiving with.
A
friend from awhile back; maybe 40 years since I saw him last, was
saying he was stuck in Maryland about 20 miles NW of DC. I remember
that area from the 1970s. It is easy to see someone else as being in
a more interesting location. I look around where we are now and think
I would much rather be 20 miles from DC. I liked that area but of
course the me of the 1970s found interesting what I probably would
not. I liked Hong Kong but that was just a passing just as everywhere
I have lived has been. Sometimes I think it would be great just to
stay in one place, though not here. Here is difficult do interesting
stuff. The good part about living at Campus Village is that there is
a medical clinic two floors down, so as far as assisted living type
of life goes that is easy and there is a restaurant on the first
floor though the food is crap and there is nothing I can eat that
they serve but they have good fresh bread. And the gym is a two
minute walk away and of course work is three minutes walk which is
better than years I sat in traffic getting to work in various cities
of the past. But that is it. To go shopping is such an ordeal. We
have to get a driver into Dalian an hour away or Kaifqu half an hour
away. We can ride our bike to a real local shopping and that only
takes ten minutes and is good for fruit and vegetables but that is
about it. I use to have a rule that I would never live more than half
an hour from an airport but our airport is an hour away. So much for
rules.
This weekend we went to the Winter Charity Ball at the Shangri-La in Dalian. It was Friday night so we stayed overnight. I am not big into dress-up balls but it is one of those things one should do once. It was a yearly fund raiser for helping local schools and the tickets (given to us or we would have had a quiet week at home) were 500 RMB ($81 US) each and for that we got a meal. I mentioned that I was a vegetarian from the start and it worked out OK. I got some veggies that were not fully cooked. Narda being a meat eater was a bit looking forward to the Australian Rib-Eye Steak that was on her menu. She got four very small thin pieces primarily fat. OK so we didn't pay and the entertainment was interesting.
My
fellow tech teacher played guitar and sang too so that made the
evening almost personable. I got credit on his
latest youtube video for video creator so there is my claim to
fame if he ever gets any. That is not him in the image above she just
seemed more attractive.
Dalian is just another dirty Asian city but after three years we are use to it. Here is a new moon night photo –
actually after our charity ball we didn’t get back to our room until midnight – we are getting young like again.
And so here we are in the Best Place to be which is where we are at and everything we have done in life has gotten us to here.
Transit Jupiter is exactly conjunct my Jupiter today and trine transit Saturn so I can be thankful for that though I am not thrilled about Saturn giving me all these stupid life lessons I could do without and I will feel better I hope in a month when Saturn moves on a few degrees. Also, I am really really relieved that I no longer believe in astrology or I would be freaked about my upcoming aspects.
In two weeks we will be in Thailand for a month holiday (hey Thailand stop all your in-fighting and get along we will be there in two weeks) then back to work for a week then to Burma for a week to visit Frank and Kay who write that there are cobras falling from the trees where they live. Oh boy.