The Brain Dump

Hello, everyone! Happy New Year! Jesus, has it been that long since I posted? Yeesh. I see on my little blog stats page that you have visited The Brain Dump a total of 364 times. And I, lazy schmuck that I am, have not been posting. For that, I apologize.

At the same time, I must announce that I will be going on hiatus until about the third of February. This is because Christina and I will be traveling to the Yunnan province for the remainder of the month. We leave Tuesday evening, arriving at the provincial capital, Kunming, on the morning of the 15th. Everyone we have mentioned our plans to tells us that Yunnan is one of the most beautiful provinces in China. Christina and I are very excited. We have a loose plan and a few hostel reservations, but we're remaining flexible, as we have come to realize that is the only way to make any plans in China.

I apologize again for not posting. I may post (very) sporadically along the trip at an internet cafe here, an internet cafe there, but don't count on it. The plus side is I bought a brand new spiffy camera to take lots and lots of pictures with. So there will be a payout at the end of this.

As for today, I was walking along one of the back alleys in-between our apartment complex and the school when I happened upon this little scene (also the first picture taken with my new camera). Some sort of Chinese street opera. It was pretty fascinating to watch.

Here's another to give you a proper sense of the scale we're talking here:


More to come!

My New Zealand friend, Robert, told me something interesting on my birthday a couple weeks ago. He said that I'm a year older here in China than I am in the United States--twenty-seven, instead of twenty-six. This is because the Chinese say you are already a year old on the day you are born. In the ol' US of A, you have to live that year before it counts. The Chinese go ahead and give it to you on credit. Or, as Robert put it, "There optimists in that regard." So go fig. I'm a year older (wiser?) just by being here.

I share this along with something else. I recently learned how to say "hair" (tou2fa1, 头发), and, already knowing the word for red, felt confident telling my students (chest puffed out with pride), "我的头发是红色的!" (My hair is red!). But when I did, their spoony little faces did not fill with joy as I had assumed they would, but puzzlement. "红色的?" they said. "不是红色的!" And now we're all confused.

"What color do you think my hair is?" I ask them.

"Yellow!" yell a chorus of giggly doodles.

"Yellow?! You think I'm blond?"

"Yes!" yell some. "黄色的!" yell others. "Yellow!"

Thinking this class silly, I asked my next. The same response. I asked more people and they all said the same thing, culminating with a short but fun discussion of American and Chinese concepts of beauty between myself, Christina, our Mandarin tutor, Cathrine, and her friend, Lucy. The Chinese have spoken: Chris Walsh is blond.

These thoughts have been tickling my brain the past day or so. I share my body with a blond twenty-seven-year-old. I wonder how else this Chinese Chris differs from his American counterpart. I guess I'll have to wait and see.

It's been some time since my last post and for that I apologize. I also have a pretty good excuse:

I blame China.

Firstly, our internet service seems to be a tad shaky. We lost the precious intertubes for about four days. At first we thought it might be a virus of some sort. Anyang Normal University gave us two computers and it seems that, along with the operating system and every bloated, add-on software they could find, they installed at least one virus to one of them. The other seems to work OK . . . except that everything is in the doodley characters and neither Christina nor I can read what they hell is going on on the screen. But we have our laptops.

Unfortunately, that wasn't good enough for the Chinese intertubes. For whatever reason, we weren't getting a connection until, finally, the university sent for a repairman. He showed up, turned our computers on, and--lo, there was a connection! Before he even did anything. So, apparently, sometimes we just lose the internet. Awesome. Makes posting regularly real convenient.

Secondly--that wasn't enough for China, oh no. Secondly, I am unable to see my blog through the oh-so-wonderful firewall China has set up between me and information. I think the whole blogspirit service is blocked, or something. I don't know. All I know is that I can see the website's homepage, I can even log in and post (as illustrated now), but I can't actually see my blog or what I just posted.

I'm told there are ways to get around The Great Firewall, but I don't know them. I'll try googling how, but I'm not optimistic that I'll be able to see the sites that come up. I have a friend here, Adam (another foreign English teacher from Poland), who is very good with computers. He also has a blog and no trouble seeing it, so maybe he can help me out too. All else fails, I may need to create another blog on a different service. Because I can't very well change the look or content of a website I can't see.

Christina is also pissed. She can't even log in to her blog to post. It's all very annoying. Thankfully, mercifully, both the websites for The Daily Show and NPR come through the firewall, so I'm not wholly cut-off from the sites I love. Also, most wikipedia entries come through, they just take a whole long time to load.

Anywho, that's all for this post. Hopefully, I'll find a way around the firewall and upload some pictures soon.

People whine on and on about the existential angst of trying to effectively communicate to another person. They brood and mope about the meaning (they're soul!) that is lost in the empty space that separates each island of a person from the other. But they never talk about the wonderful things that are gained.

That's where this Pic o' the Week comes in (brought to my attention by my wonderful girlfriend, Christina). She and I will be teaching English soon in China and she found an article that gives her a preview of what she has to look forward to:

The photo comes from an article in Gawker, entitled "Chinese OBGYN Will C U Next Tuesday." They get any and all credit for taking it.

Do you have a picture you think is funny or otherwise worthy of note? Email it to me and if I agree it could be the next Pic o' the Week!