the cell phone

When I was in Xian I had to carry a cell phone.  That was the first time I had ever had one in my pocket every day.  If a student needed something, they had to be able to contact us.  I also sent my first text message in China.  It took forever but I got it done.   I remember our last day in China sending text messages as we killed time at the airport.  I was texting as we walked to the airplane because the phone would not work outside of China.  I have not used a cell phone since.  I have done a few video chats on QQ.  Some day I will get back in the swing and use a cell phone again, but not now.

visitors from Xian

Rob Rogers, his wife Ang and son, Min, stopped by Peoria last night to visit us before they drove up to Milwaukee to visit some other friends.  We when out for Bar-B-Que and this morning had waffles with real maple syrup, bacon, omelets, melon and cherries.  It was really nice to see them again and to have JoAnne meet them.  I do hope to see them again sometime in Xian.

You don't get a breakfast like this very often in  Xian but then you don't get a breakfast like this very often in Peoria. I am so glad they stopped by and spent the night with us.

hot day in central Illinois

A hot day like today makes me long for retirement even more than I already do.  To top things off our air conditioning quit working on Sunday.  The one problem I have about returning to Peoria and returning to work is that I miss being the English teacher in China so much.  But the English teacher could not have fixed the air conditioning and done it for 16 dollars.  I guess there is some advantage to being a "gong ren", or working person instead of the English teacher.
I have been in contact with one of the students that I met at the Wednesday English Corner in Xian.  The difficult thing about communication with the Chinese students is that I met so many people and was not able to learn enough names or you learn an English name and then do not know who they really are.  I have been emailing Ellen since I left.  She wrote me today that she was afraid to speak out even though she liked me.  I have told many of my students to practice a few sentences and get good at saying them and then you just have to force yourself to talk to foreign visitors.  I have always told my students that every day I walked in the classroom I was nervous.  I enjoyed teaching but I was always nervous that it would not go well and I could not help them learn.  But you just have to suck it up and try and try and try.  If I can get students to practice saying things like can I help you find something, or is this the first time you have been to China, etc.  If they would practice 10 sentences that would be "ice breakers" I think they would develop the confidence to then continue to talk with the foreign person.  They just have to force themselves to not be so shy.  I know how they feel because I have missed several opportunities to talk or do something for just that reason.  Something does not go well, you lose some confidence, and then you put your hands in your pockets and shuffle off.  It happens.
One good thing about being back here is the Guatemala coffee bean dryer project.  It is starting to develop and we are starting to get some more people involved.  I think we will have a good team of students and faculty to work on this and I hope we can develop something that will work or set the ground work for something that will work in the very near future.  Sometimes you have to get something built to see how to do it better.  Right now I need to get something built.  But that is going to make my days before retirement a little bit more interesting.
I am just glad the house is starting to cool off.  In Xian, in the classrooms you did not have air conditioning.  The last day I taught it was 98 and we had two over head fans and two windows opened.  Students were trying to give a speech and we had construction noise and the hallways are loud.   I felt bad because I was leaving and this one girl said to me, "smell", and I taught, "Of course I smell, it is hot, I am nervous and sad, I know I smell.  And then see told me one more time, "smell" and she did smell from ear to ear.  :-) , with a great big grin.  I will always remember my Life in Xian, and I will do it with a smell on my face and a tear in my eye.

The world is a lot smaller now

This horse on a flying bird is the symbol of tourism in China.  When I went to Wuwei, with Zhang Kai, I visited this park in his town that plays tribute to this horse being selected as the symbol of Chinese tourism.  My first week back at the ICC East Peoria campus I saw a small copy of the horse in the lobby of PAC.  I looked at it and smiled and said to myself, "I know what that is and I have been to the place where they found it."  To be from a small town in Illinois and to have the opportunity to travel to China has been a dream come true.  When you travel you get to see things and do things that you will always remember.  You get to meet people that you will never forget.

This lady is someone I will not forget.  See cleaned my room and she could read and write English and could speak some.  I could read and write some Chinese and could speak some.  If we both worked at it we could communicate.  I always enjoyed the days went she came it to clean my room.  Some days we would be on the computer on QQ or looked at facebook and working very hard to communicate with each other.  I do realize that if I could have just spoke a little more Chinese my time in Xian would have been so much better.  Hopefully next time I go to China I can speak, read and write better than I do now.  I just have to keep practicing.  I have her QQ number so I need to email her and practice my writing.  Even though some of the students were not great at keeping their rooms neat the staff did seem to like having us around.  When Dr. Murphy was in the hospital everyone wanted to know how he was doing and many of the them went to visit him.  They were really and nice group of people to be around.

yard work on a hot day

I will be doing some yard work today.  The only yard work I did in Xian was to play Rugby on the Astro Turf sports field.  I do need to do somethings around the house because it needs to look it's best if we are going to put it on the market in the future.  The experience in China was a good one and it has both Jo and I thinking about the next phase of our lives, retirement.  I thought about what Jo and I would do after the daily routine of clocking in and going to work was over.  I thought about that a lot in China, how nice it would be to return to China and teach a semester with JoAnne.  We could enjoy the culture, relax, met new people, and afford to eat out every meal if we wanted.  It is nice to only have to go to work and then have the time to do what ever you want.  No yard work, no house, no car, you don't have to cook if you don't want.  For a little while you are just free to enjoy your life and the people around you.  You can stay very busy, rugby practice, English Corner, sights to see, new lesson plans to develop, doing things with students, you can find more to do than you will have time for.
So this next phase of life, the retirement years, should be interesting.  We do plan to move to Silver City, New Mexico.  A little town of around 12,000 people that has everything you need in it.  It is right by a 3.3 million acre national wilderness area.   It is high enough up in the mountains to not be too hot in the summer or too cold in the winter.  I can start playing tennis again, and Jo can hang out with the artist folk.  That will be or base for future travels and adventures.  There are places we want to go and things we want to do and we do not have to plan those trips around a vacation for work.
The whole time I was in Xian people would ask what I missed most about being away from the USA.  I would say, "morning coffee," and the evening meal with my wife.  I really did not miss any of the food but I did miss drinking morning coffee, good coffee, not the instant stuff I did drink.  But I really did miss eating with JoAnne and talking with her in the evening.  That I did miss.  It was strange to be in Xian, around people that you develop a close relationship with and yet you realize that you have not touched any one for four months.  I have faculty friends in China that I miss dearly, students that I care about and still communicate with, staff members at the hotel that I saw every day, a whole lot of people that I was very sad to have to leave and yet for four months I longed to be with my wife and wondered what it would be like to return.  Of course I know that when I am away from my wife that I am not supposed to touch any one but it is strange go and do things and always end up at an empty house and to always wake up at an empty house.  It is good to be home now.  It is good to look at the calendar and be able to mark off the days until I can start life all over again.  I would hate to think I have to work another 10 years until I can retire.  If that was the case then I should have never went to China, because it would drive me crazy.  I need to get on some work clothes, pour a cup of coffee, and get some water and start on the brick wall.  One thing we are going to do in Silver City, is to fix things the way we want them and then live there and enjoy them.  It seems like we fix things to sell and then do not enjoy them long enough ourselves.
Guatemala, Mongolia, China, Guatemala, Mongolia, China.  Oh I forgot about Antarctica. Hmmmm.

My life is now back to normal.

I have been in the USA for almost 3 weeks and today marked the second full week of work, at my old job. A few weeks ago I was in Xian, China and I was an English teacher and now I do heating and ventilation. It is not too difficult to guess which job I like better.  It was so much fun to walk in to the classroom and try and help the students to improve their speaking skills.  At Xian everyone knows you are a westerner and that probably means you are a teacher, so you are special.  The students would smile at you and come up to you to talk or ask to sit with you at the cafeteria.  I enjoyed that interaction so much.
That does not happen at work now.  No one has asked to have a picture taken with me.  Imagine that.  I also notice how empty to campus is.  At Xian you had 16,000 students on the campus and they all were there.  They lived there with no cars to take them away.  The bells would ring and the students would empty out of the buildings and head to the cafeteria to eat and the place was just packed full of people.  You would walk up the last few steps to the upstairs dining area and the hazy and smoke of the food vendors would hit up in the face and make you cough just a little.  By the time you walked a few more steps you were OK and ready to eat.  I notice just how empty everything is here.  Where are all the people.
I also notice just how green everything is, how blue the sky is, and how fresh the air is.  In Xian it is dusty and it is polluted.  The trees are not as green and that is because of the dust and pollution.  In Xian you could look at the horizon and it would fade to gray, but not here.  You can see for miles here.  The sky is so blue.  I never really noticed just how blue the sky is until now.
Here people in cars only run the yellow lights.  Motorcycles are not all over the place and they are not on the sidewalks.  It is different here.  No food vendors on every corner.  Nothing to eat that costs 35 cents and tastes good.
I was thinking today that a few weeks ago I could say, "yesterday I was in China."  Soon I will be saying two months ago I was in China and then six months ago I was in China and then it will be last year at this time I was in China, only when I say that I hope to be saying it to someone in Silver City, New Mexico.   I have worked long enough to be able to retire and I do have other things to do that should be more interesting than work.  I have applied for an opportunity to travel to Mongolia and help evaluate their vocational school system.  That may happen but I will have to wait and see.  I am also working on a solar coffee dryer for Guatemala.  That project is in the works and we just need to build a system or two and then see how well they work and what improvements we need to make.  We also need to see about how to design simple hot water systems for the people.  So I have lots of things to do once I quit working and start retiring.  I would still like to return to China and teach.  I really liked doing that.  I enjoyed the students and the faculty that I met.  The Chinese people are so interested in the USA,  they are so polite, and just darn nice to be around.  The food is great and it is cheap.  China is so different from the USA.  We have nothing that is the same.  We talk different, write different, look different, eat different,  and yet we all seem to get along just fine.
 I want to travel as much as I can in the short time I have left but I do not want to be a tourist and just ride on the bus and then see the sights.  I want to live in the areas I visit, get to know the people, live like they do,  and I hope to be able to help them so that their lives are better because I was there.  I would like to think that my time in Xian did help some students to improve their English skills.  I know they have the information they need and can improve their speaking skills if they will do the important stuff, study and practice.  With a language you need to practice if you are going to improve.  I need to get the Chinese language on my netbook so I can written in characters and improve my Chinese language skills.  I also need to load pictures on my QQ zone so my students in China can see what I did in China and more important they can see what I do here.  I got QQ for one reason, to stay in contact with my students in Xian.  I also want to show them what life is like in the USA.  I know they watch TV and movies but the USA is not really like the movies.  No one is going to make a movie about the Eureka Fourth of July Parade.  But things like that are what America is.  So much of this country is small towns and farms and just common people.  That is what I want to share with my students, just how boring our country really is.  So come July 4th, don't disappoint me.
Actually I have had some culture shock the last few weeks.  I did not have a lot of trouble with culture shock when I got to China.  I knew it would be dirty, crowded and very different from here but I welcomed that difference and expected it.  It has been difficult to transition from being an English teacher to going back to punching the time clock.  Today was difficult because it was very hot, in the 90's, and you are in a work uniform,  up on the roof, in the heat working to find a leak in the air conditioning system.  I thought if I was in Xian, I would be inside a classroom with students, trying to figure out how to get them to talk,  and it would be in the 90's, because it is hot in Xian and they don't have air conditioning.  No one complains.  Just for fun in my best Chinese I would say,  comfortable, and smile.  I always was comfortable in the classroom, even when I was very nervous.