Better late than never!

Sorry about the delay folks, but this week was filled with me pushing things to the last moment, mostly work-related items, so the blogging had to suffer a little bit. Thanks to Gina's oh so subtle "hint", I've gotten back on track with the whole blogging thing, so everyone thank Gina for being attentive (Thanks Gina) The sun has finally burnt through the fog and rain that dominated last week, and the weather has been beautiful. Lots of blue sky and sunshine coming my way!

This week wasn't too terribly exciting, aside from Friday's event. I had my classes and library hours as usual, and even invigilated an exam on Monday. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, invigilation is a fancy word that they use here to talk about administering an exam. Using invigilate makes me sound like I'm doing something quite complication, and I think that it might be funny to include it on my resume some day. In the middle of the week, we had rehearsal as usual, and I managed to fall down the stairs and possibly sprain my ankle again, for what would be the 7th time. One of my professors thinks I should go see a Chinese bone-setter for my ankle problems. I told her that I would have to get back to her on that one.


I think that Friday was probably the best day this week, mainly because I finally got to see one of my favorite authors, Margaret Atwood, give a lecture at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, but getting there was a bit of an epic journey for Hong Kong, because in order to get from Lingnan to HKUST, which are on completely opposite sides of the New Territories. It takes about 2 hours, because you go by bus, then MTR, and then another bus, and then a short walk across the campus to the lecture hall. I also met up with a few of my colleagues, Preet and Alastair. Preet and I were all sorts of giddy, because for us, this was something akin to meeting one of your favorite movie stars, and then being able to listen to them talk about their creative process and what makes them work. She was a great lecturer, very entertaining, witty, and a little bit feisty. I really didn't know that much about her, so this was a first for me. What else was interesting to me was that the Consul-General of the Canadian Consulate here accompanied her to this lecture, and they arrived in cars with flags, all diplomatic-like. Apparently Canada's biggest exports, next to hockey and beer, are Margaret Atwood visits. She generously sat for more than an hour to sign books, and when it was my turn, I went blank and the only thing that I could manage to say was my name. I'm also sure that I just stared at her for an awkward minute or two before I managed to pull myself together to mumble my name at her. So now I have my own personally autographed copy of one of my favorite novels, The Handmaid's Tale, which I am reading again, for the millionth time.

This weekend revolved around attempting to finish marking my journals, and then moving on to the next stack of journals for Kristina, and scoring exams for the psycholinguistics class. Somewhere in there, I also managed to get all my errands done, and send in my application for my mainland visa. Americans still can't get multiple-entry ones, unless you're a businessman, but they said I could get the double-entry, which turned out to be half the price that it was last year. I guess that we are starting to see the effects of the new president over here! (You can always tell where the relationship between China and the US is by visa prices and availability) I'm also getting excited about planning a trip to Yunnan in April with my friend Megan. Yunnan looks like it is going to be a great trip!

Foggy Weather is Here Again

The weather these past few days has been suspiciously like what I imagine London to be, or at least a Sherlock Holmes novel; wet, dark, cold, and a fog so thick that you can hardly see through. Its the type of weather that makes you want to put on your pajamas, get a mug of hot coco, wrap yourself up in a blanket and watch movies all day. Now, if you substitute the hot coco for coffee, and movies for marking journals, you've got my Sunday. I've really just avoided going outside as much as possible, since the weather has been so miserable and unwelcoming. Serves me right for bragging to everyone else about having warm weather whilst they were stuck in snow. Hopefully the fog and rain and wind will move on this week and we can get the pleasantness back that is spring in Hong Kong. Spring here is the most perfect weather that I have seen, blue skies and warm air before you hit Hong Kong summer, when it gets so hot and humid that you feel like you are melting as soon as you step outside.

Journals can be just as unpredictable as Hong Kong weather, in the sense that you almost never know what you are going to get, even when you think you've got things down. Now, don't get me wrong, I love my students, but sometimes when you have to read the same paragraph 6 times in a row, to try to understand what they are communicating, it can be a bit tedious. On the other hand, they quite often suprise me with how insightful they can be, or unknowingly wise. They find a moral lesson in unsual places, and never cease to entertain me with their ever-changing grammatical collages that they use to convey a complex idea or thought. Seeing what they come up with makes you think twice about how languages can be so descriptive, and at the same time, so restrictive to the thought process. What I take from this is that you never cease to be a student or a teacher, no matter your position in the classroom.

If you want to see some of our student's more creative and artistic work first-hand, one of our classes, Painting and Poetry, now has their own blog where students in the class post their assignments and creative pieces from the class. I will also link the site in my blog log so you can keep up with them if you are so interested. It shows how creative our students can be, and I am very proud of all of them for what they have contributed to the creative universe. Enjoy!

Lazy Sunday.....I Don't Think So

I have been up since 7:30am on a Sunday, and I can hardly believe it. I fear that I might slowly be transforming into a morning person, or some other weird kind of mutant. This day has been filled with getting a lot done that needed to be done, but I don't see this becoming a habit. I need to sleep in for one more hour at least on principle. Aiya!

So today I ran around from yoga to my office, to my apartment, to dinner and beyond! I feel like I haven't sat down all day, but that's not necessarily a bad thing if I'm getting a lot of things accomplished. I've got my workshop all set up for this coming week, my outlines marked and ready to return to the students, and managed to give myself a good head start for the week ahead, because this week, I face a tutor's feared challenge: first-year journals! Don't get me wrong, I adore my students, but reading 25 journals in row is almost as bad as taking a stats class over again. My students have a tendency to all write about the same issues along the same timeline. In the first semester the pattern is usually:

• Getting used to university life
• Missing their families, even though most of them are just a 45 minute bus ride away
• Mid-Autumn Festival
• English Society activities

I could time my watch by the pattern in which my students write their journals about. I'm sure that all these new experiences are exciting and relevant to them, but around journal number 7 or 8, they all start to run together, the lines on the page start to blur, and my students stop becoming individuals- instead, they all form together as one homogeneous blob that needs to learn how to be more introspective and when to use shifts in verb tense! With some poking and prodding, they usually spin off into other topics by the second semester, but there is still a strong pattern among the students. Maybe they get together at secret meetings and plan out what they all are going to write about just to mess with me?



In other news, I am also extremely proud of my group of third-years who just got to the finals of the Shakespeare competition! It's amazing how far they have come since we started rehearsing last semester, and I know that they will do well in the competition, and hopefully win, or at least beat Chinese U. The video that you can see here is about 30 seconds of a rehearsal back in November, with my space heater as a fantastic set piece. Since this filming they have come leaps and bounds. We filmed a 20 minute video in January, and I hope to get my hands on a copy of that so I can share it with all you lovely people. I am so very proud of them. We are also putting on a production at the school as an expansion of what we did with the extract from "Two Gentlmen of Verona" with a bigger cast. All the students involved are extremely talented and I am very excited to see how this will all turn out. Of course, as with the competition, I have had my first try at directing, and I quite like it so far.

This week will be quite hectic, between my workshop, reading a new batch of journals, practice reading tests, and marking outlines. There are some great things coming as well, like the lecture by Margaret Atwood, one of my favorite authors, at HKUST that I have a space reserved for, and the next episode of Lost, to name a few. I still have no idea what is going on with that island!

5 MONTHS?!

Aiya! 5 months have passed by without one post on either of my blogs! People must think that I have fallen off the edge of the planet..........but I haven't. I'll go stand in the corner and hang my head in shame if that will make you feel better?

Lack of posting is due to several factors in my life, including, but not limited to:

• Flexible work schedule that has me running all over this S.A.R. that I call home
• Insufficient amount of pictures to do knitting projects justice
• Earning online certificate for TEFL
• YouTube........it will suck you in and never let you go.

But seriously folks, I have been slacking off in the online posting department, and I'm going to remedy that by re-instituting my Sunday rule; Sunday evenings are for getting caught up with emails and blogging, and other such correspondence. Things work out much better for me if I schedule them into my calender and have a chunk of time blocked off for any activity. I'm also the person that needs to have everything written down, otherwise I probably won't remember. So, starting tomorrow night, things should start to become more regular in the blogging universe for me and for all that read this. Until then, my dearest readers!

2 weeks in

Hello Everyone!

We've just finished up with the second week of fall classes, and things have changed a lot from last fall. I've been given first years again, with some additional responsibility. The tutors are quite literally taking over teaching one section of the first years. Fear me students! Seriously though, its quite exciting for the department to put things right into our hands, and then trusting the tutors to just run with it. Not to mention that this is going to look fabulous on my resume! So not only do I have first years, I've also been helping out with the Drama course and the Asian Voices course, which is turning out to be wonderful. There are a large amount of second years, who were my first years, so now I won't let them get away with not talking, which has been successful so far. They trust me a lot more than they did at this point in time last fall, and I love seeing them grow and change as people. Once again, I'm getting to feel pretty much like a mother hen.
In addition to all these lovely developments at the university, I've been able to find some wonderful outside classes for myself, mainly a yoga studio 20 minutes away, and bellydance classes with my friend Heidi. The new yoga classes have my muscles aching, but the shaking and giggles in the bellydance class even things out. My hostel bought me an oven, so I have been baking up a storm, and I managed to make burritos with Erin the other night, due to our successful search for taco seasoning. All in all, its been a fantastic two weeks!

Welcome Back to Hong Kong: The Typhoon Edition

I have returned, yet again, to my beloved city to spend another year of teaching, good food, crazy adventures, and great times with people I care about. As great as this summer was, its beyond nice to finally feel like I am back to my second home. It was last Friday evening that I landed, so this post marks almost exactly a week that I've been back in Hong Kong. The first day back I slept, and slept, and slept. My life was made up of periods of sleeping for 10 hours, and then waking up for 2, (at the most), and then sleeping again.





Heidi convinced me to come out on my second day, on an attempt to normalize myself, and to meet on of her Aussie friends who was visiting. In addition to eating the fabulous egg tarts in Tai Po, (jealous Mom?), and seeing her great folks, we got to catch up on all those moments that we missed; those moments where you wish your friend was right over your shoulder so you can look at them, and make some joke that only the two of you would understand. We had plenty of those moments that day, and plenty more to come soon enough.





A couple of days later, Harina brought dinner over that she and her mother had made for me, which was the sunshine of my day. How often do people cook for you and then bring it to your place? Thanks Harina! We ate delicious Pakistani food and had Heidi and Ben over. I really need to learn how to cook that fried bread and the curry she made for me. I love curry!





The past few days I've mostly spent with Erin, running around our old haunts like Fu Tai, Gold Coast, and the little communities near town center, earning looks from people that seem to shout "What are you doing here? Are you lost?" Which also culminates in a strange look of respect at points when they see that I clearly know where I am going, and that I am not a overwhelmed tourist. Those are some choice ones, where you really feel at home in a strange place, despite not speaking the language and being functionally illiterate.





Right now, at this very second, the big piece of news occupying my life is the status of typhoon Nuri, which just made landfall. All day the Signal 8 flag has been up, and it's expected that the Signal 10 will be hoisted later tonight, which is the highest one, and it means that the typhoon, is going to pass directly over Hong Kong. So far its just been windy and raining, but maintenance has seen fit to protect our windows by doing this. Seriously though, I think that if a typhoon decides to descend on Hong Kong, its going to take a little more then tape to hold together our windows on the 9th floor. I'm looking at it like mother nature decided to put together a show, or sorts, to welcome me back. I don't expect things to really get bad, like Florida in a hurricane, but it will be interesting to see what happens. And I also love big storms like this. My security guards knocked on my door to make sure that I had food to get through the day because they didn't want me leaving the building. To come upstairs, and attempt to communicate through my 5 words of Cantonese, was very sweet of them. I adore all the staff here.




A big CONGRATULATIONS is also due my fantastic older sister Emily, who was just admitted to grad school at Johns Hopkins!!!!! She's worked so hard for this and she really deserved it. I am so proud of you Emmy! She's going to kick quite a lot of academic ass. Seriously folk, she's that awesome, and she is going to do amazing things.

What a welcome back to Hong Kong......

Going back to Hong Kong

Hello Everyone!


For those of you who haven't been counting down the days, hours, and minutes, (unlike myself), I am flying back to Hong Kong on Thursday morning for another year of teaching and mis-adventure! This summer has been filled with touching back down in my roots with good friends, family, and food. As much fun as surreal weekends in Berkeley Springs are, its high time that I return to Hong Kong and the life that I've had there. I've really missed my students, friends, and the food there. And I'm not ashamed to say that I've missed the lifestyle that I enjoy there as well. Nothing like cheap massages at 10pm after delicious Egyptian food, all for under $40US! Who wouldn't want to go back to that? Come on folks, seriously! So, as of 5pm Friday, US East Coast time, I will be back in Hong Kong for the year. My contact info should stay the same, but in case you need it again, here it is:

HB902
Lingnan University
Tuen Mun
New Territories
Hong Kong

So I am expected a lot of love letters, and maybe some no-so loving letters, but that's ok. I just like getting mail. I am also hoping to have more visitors this year, so I am encouraging that for all of you who are still a little wishy-washy about flying out here. How many times are you going to get this opportunity folks? Everyone will be missed dearly!