Bhopal

Jinshitan Storming

Jinshitan Storming  Sunday, November 04, 2012  blogs 2012

We had our storm. Nothing like Sandy visiting the East Coast of the US but the earth had its moments of spitting and farting then the electricity went off. I was doing non-significant stuff at 6:15 am on a Sunday morning; writing up my lesson plans for my broadcast journalism class for the week. Is this nuts or what? Firstly, I should have been sleeping in, or at least playing with my Nikon or sitting on the balcony enjoying a cuppa but no, I was working on my bloody lesson plans. I do enjoy what I am teaching – “Broadcast Journalism” creating in-house twice weekly TV-like shows of announcements and stuff, presented by my class, played in upper school classrooms. This past week we visited the main television station in Dalian; took me a month to get through all the ‘red’-tape to do that one. I made a comment in the main control room of the television station to my students, ‘this is where they would take over if there was a revolution’ and the kids moved away from me, saying; “we have no idea who he is – he is not with us”. But aside of my thinking I was funny it was interesting. A couple of weeks ago we started Skyping with the Canyon School in Bhopal, India and we are working toward creating a documentary in real-time between our classes so that is a bit exciting.

Our neighbours, here in Campus Village, at Dalian American International School, let us know there was no electricity, OK, we are old but we knew that. However, we realized there was power in the hall – some backup generator thingy. We moved our coffee pots, blenders and what-nots out to the hall. We often say where we live is like living in an assisted-living establishment. Me being me moved a table to the hall and set my computer back up. Someone said I was addicted to computers, huh? And on I went with my lesson plans – didn’t need the modem, just the laptop which was already low on battery.

Here we are (well, not me, I was taking the photo) in the hallway this morning – looking for electricity;

The girls (yes, I can call them that as I am 65 and they are all ‘considerably’ younger than me) walked to the beach, which was far from calm, and took these photos:

This first is the road to the beach we ride bikes most morning on though this morning because of the winds and rain and no electricity; not that that has anything to do with not exercising but it is an excuse and any excuse not to exercise at six am is good;

And no, those are not the ‘girls’ picking up stuff along the shore but locals – of course we are locals, but they are extreme-locals. I assume they are collecting some animals that have burrowed into the storm-washed beach. Glad I am a vegetarian and not one who would eat burrowed sea animals.

When they came back the electricity came on – not sure what is with that. And even more strange was that the storm ended. We walked to the main road and hopped the first bus, shelling out our 1 yuan (15 cents) and went to our favourite photo-printing shop. They do such a great job and the price is so cheap – like 5 yuan (80 cents US, 77 cents Australian) for an A3 glossy photo and I am not sure what we paid for a lot of A2 – letter size prints and a dozen 5X7’s but the total bill was 110 yuan ($17.46 US) for a large pile of photos including some 20 pages of Narda’s blog she has been writing with photos and text.

The large A3 photo was of my favourite recent photo – Narda in Jackson Square, New Orleans, last July – home for years of my almost youth – I was a street artists there in the early 1970s – in my early 20’s. I took the photo as a black and white so this is not a Photoshoped job. It has a French look to it.

We thought we were clever enough to take a bus in front of the art store home. It wound all over the place through Jinshitan, past the light rail stop and we figured it would come back to our area but it ended up back at the art store. In our simple senior citizen type of way we thought it was funny. Nevertheless we got our sorry assess back home without much more effort.

Yesterday was a simpler day, we went into Dalian on the school’s shopping bus, got our month’s supply of crap from Metro, put our suitcase full of crap back onto the bus and took the light rail to Kaifaqu where as usual we spent way too much at the local western goods shop, Harbor Deli, buying over inflated-priced cheese and peanut butter, caught the shopping bus back home from Kaifaqu and booked the rest of our trip for winter holidays. We are spending the five-weeks in Viet Nam. We booked the Green Mango Hotel in Hanoi for a few days; we saw it last time in Hanoi but stayed elsewhere, then we are off to HoiAn for a week, one of those great places to be in the world. Then back to Hanoi for Christmas and a few days after. We have a week after we have not planned; leaving it open; maybe to go to Laos or Myanmar – where we still want to live and teach.

Last week was Halloween; something we have managed to escape from for more than a decade but this year the owner of our school asked Narda to judge – probably knowing we were escape artists – we surely hid last year, and for me to take photos. I didn’t mind, but Narda just does not take to this holiday. It is not Australian or Dutch – she sees it as just children begging for lollies.

And I am ending this rather mundane week with what we see many times outside our window – fireworks. I use to like them heaps, and even bought a box when my son, Sacha, came to visit, but it seems a lot of money that goes quickly. For Sacha’s visit I got a box of 36 rockets – which of course was well worth it – I was so happy to have him here – up from Melbourne – but still as often as they set them off – how they afford it?

One last little complaint about my un-interesting life and even less interesting blogs; the storm, Sandy, which left so many without electricity and Internet wiped out half of my reading audience of my blogs. I was having 8 – 10 hits each time I posted a blog then last week’s on neuage.me – https://neuage.me/2012/10/28/rambling-weekends/ I only had three hits. So without sounding pathetic that is it for this week. Just read recently about people getting hundreds of thousands of hits a day for their blogs – I average 8 – 10 a week. Go Neuage!!

rambling weekends

Wednesday, October 24, 2012  More at http://dalian.neuage.us/videos/Boee_Brilliant_Villas_.Hill.html

photo album for this is at http://neuage.us/BLOGS/photos/

Last Sunday we changed our day around – I suppose if it was my classroom we could say it was the flipped classroom model but I am not going to equate a day of leisure with an academic day. Not that every day is anything but learning; life the classroom and all that crap, but a flipped something is not the same as a non-flipped something.

Now that we got that out of the way and yes I do sometimes do the flipped classroom approach when it is suitable which in China is not always possible because students cannot use youtube or participate in western social sites due to the great firewall of China.

Instead of going out in the afternoon; we tend to spend the morning on the Internet doing books, keeping up with family, and Facebook, and other schools – are they offering a better package for next year, is it more interesting than living in the part of China that is more Ikea than historic China; for example, Myanmar (Burma) really has our eye at the moment and of course who would not want to live in and teach in India?

I had my first Skype session with Canyon H.S. School in Bhopal, India doing an ISA (British Council  International School Awards) project “Festivals and Aborigines”  with my Broadcast Publication class last week. It took a bit of effort and time to understand each other, us their accent and them ours (I have Korean, Chinese, Trinidad, and American students), our Skype connection went down as well as the whole Internet a few times but overall it was really successful and students from both schools were really excited. I am starting a unit I am calling “Foreign Correspondent” with the longer term plan of having our students do a collaborative documentary which will really test our technology as well as my planning and implementation skills.

Damn! Talking about work again…

So we headed out on our bikes at 9 AM last Saturday; we were going to do the same today but already it is eleven AM, we are still in our pajamas, on-line, and I want to ride our bikes to the Jinshitan Port – which we have never been to and no doubt is just a small fishing port or kelp port, but I want to go nevertheless. But it is cold and windy outside so no doubt we will take the # 1 bus from the light rail station, if how I am reading the map is correct. Then again we may spend the day indoors which is not my ideal. Yesterday, Saturday, Narda went to an orphanage in Dalian City – all babies and the oldest I think was in the two year old range. She went with a group of teachers. Apparently it was all heart-wrenching. These are children that are left for whatever reason; the one baby policy of China or because they are deformed and etc. Teachers volunteer to go just to hold the babies and have a bit of play because they are stuck in their cribs all the time otherwise. We brought up the ideas of students visiting in our middle school assembly last week asking if any students would want to spend a Saturday morning at the orphanage – and I was extremely surprised when every single student in grades 6 – 8 stood up. My day yesterday was not so altruistic as I spent nine hours at school working on standard based lessons – something everyone at school is so opposed to, but again I am not talking about work now.

Near us is yet another huge apartment development, Boee Brilliant Villas Hill. We tromped in with cameras in hand and viewed the first smaller apartment that they were selling for 7 and a half million RMB, about one and a quarter million dollars US. See our video of this exploration at http://youtu.be/gQ0Noz1pF_c  Or other related blogs at http://neuage.us/BLOGS/

The outside is quite nice –

Boee Brilliant Villas Hill six months from an empty lot to this
The child’s loo – upstairs – spa bath, stone garden – part of what one gets for 20-million RMB

The child’s bedroom – no wonder they have only one child who could afford more?

We saw two apartments the one above on the right was 20 million RMB or about three-million US. Going along with the one child stuff of China it had a spa bath and little glass garden in the child’s room as well as two walk in closets and a study.The picture on the left above is the kid’s bath with spa and stone garden and on the right is the parent’s room – through the window they can see how us lowly teachers live in campus Village off next to the hills straight through the window.

We wandered on to the new city being built down the road – Xiaoyaowan (an earlier video I made of this is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-drgVo45WWs&feature=share&list=UUzGrI_yggI56Gpp2ZyNQAXw) and drove along the three and four lane empty roads leading to huge holes which I suppose will be for a river they are putting in and bridges and skyscrapers. I made a clip of the day and put it on youtube at http://youtu.be/NyME0iqSMhs.

In the distance is the end of the bridge which is not built that will go over the new river.

Narda at the first part of a large bridge to be built over a river that will be put in soon?

The infrastructure is in place – large highways to large holes in the ground.

This is what is happening to the old village to make room for Xiaoyaowan.

The future mega city or a part of Dalian – who knows?

What it will look like they think, in a few years – now just empty holes.Well here it is 8 pm – we ended up going into Dalian and eating at Tapas Spanish restaurant which is a couple of blocks past the Korean Market  which is great – I had ‘berenjenas gratin adas’ (grilled eggplant), and ‘cremade espinacasy esparragos’ (spinach and asparagus cream).

We had a driver – one of Jack’s mates takes us in and wait for us to eat and go to the Korean Market to get a winter coat that Narda wanted me to get – one of those hundreds of dollars coats that one gets cheap. Narda had the coat go from 450 RMB down to 250 meaning about $35 US.  All in all as a last minute thought it was a five hour round-trip including dinner and getting my coat when all I really wanted to do was write some blogs for the day.

A lot more to say but I will ramble on next time…