D.I.Y.

Today I had a totally lazy day.  I slept in until about 11, as I like to do on Saturdays, and then got up and went for a waffle with Beth.  By the time I ate it and ran a few errands it was 2pm.  Was going to pick up my packages from the post office on the way in to school (yes, I had to go to school for a couple hours to print some stuff off. )  Realized too late that the post office closes at 1pm on Saturday.  Sorry Mom, I'm guessing those are from you.  I hope they're not too perishable.  I'll have to get them Tuesday instead.

Went for dinner with Carol and Karen at a place near our house.  Fun to sit outside - the evenings are lovely here.
 

Beth recently noticed this doggy public toilet, which was near the restaurant.  Good idea, huh?

I thought it was funny how they just had all the veggies stacked up out front.  Pretty chaotic.  Can you see how these people have a wok on their table?  Some people were eating hotpot style, but we just ordered pre-cooked dishes.  

We had some good stuff, lots of veggies too, cause Carol knows Beth and I like them.  Had some bok choy with garlic, roasted spicy tofu, roasted chicken, some noodles - all tasty.  Then we went to another place for dessert.  I got tofu-fa.  Yum!

Angie has noticed my propensity for wanting to do things without help (Do It Yourself) and takes everyone opportunity to tease me about it.   In fact we've added a letter, now it's D.I.Y., F. - which means Do It Yourself, Fool.  Tonight was my first attempt at dying my hair myself.  I started dying the underside red with henna about 6 years ago and up until today I always had Jay do it for me.  (Mom and Cat also helped on a couple occasions.)  I underestimated how messy and difficult it would be, and Angie did help me by holding the mirror so I could see the back.  But I think it's ok.  We'll find out in the morning.  Here's a shot of the henna mix (looks like goose poo) and the gloves I used.  See how quickly they get stained?  My neck and ears may well look like that tomorrow.

I'm so tired...My mind is on the blink...

 

Well today my schedule caught up with me.  Normally I set two alarms - one on my crappy Nokia phone and one on my very loud cheapo alarm clock.  Most days I wake up and turn off the loud one right away.  Then sometimes when I'm being lazy I hit the snooze on my phone a few more times so I can do the gradual wake-up.  This was my plan today.  Phone alarm rang, I hit snooze and turned off the other alarm.  Then I awoke again to the sound of drilling.  This caused instant panic, because the construction guys have been drilling in our building for at least two months now and they never start until at least 9.  It was 9:30.  I have a class at 10.  It's about a 40 minute commute.  Even I can tell there's something very wrong with that math. 

Yeah, awesome way to start the day.  So I threw on some clothes, put in a ponytail and took off.  I called Beth on the way to the bus and luckily she was able to cover for me.  (Please, everyone, send a little happy thought out to Beth on my behalf.)  Turned out fine - I was 20 minutes late and still had time for the most important parts of the lesson I had planned.  Could have been much worse and it gave the students a good excuse to taunt me in their journals.  (I have one question which asks if they were on time and prepared for class each day.  Some of them took the opportunity to say "I was on time, but you were late! HAHA!")  I'm glad someone thinks it's funny.  Still don't know what happened with the phone.  When I woke up for real, the little bell icon was moving around as though it were ringing, but there was no sound.  It wasn't on Silent either.  Stupid phone.

The rest of the day was fairly pleasant except for the fact that I felt like a total grungebucket.  Couldn't concentrate worth a darn either, so eventually I just gave up and started catching up on personal things.  I hope it's better tomorrow because I have a lot of work to do.

Beth suggested we walk home from school.  We've been contemplating this idea for some time, but since it means walking across the bridge that the buses take and the sidewalk is only about two feet wide, we were a little hesitant.  But she'd decided today was the day and we even talked Angie into coming with us.  It was a lovely evening to walk and we made it home in good time.  I think we could have done it easily in an hour, but we stopped a lot to shop.  There's a gala dinner next weekend to celebrate the 30th anniversary of UMAC and Beth and Angie are both looking for things to wear.  Luckily I brought my little black dress, so all I had to get was a shawl. 

But let me back up.  Before we even got across the bridge, we walked past one of the many junkyard/jungle compounds you see in Macau.  I think homeless people may live there.  But I stopped because we noticed bananas growing.  I'm not sure why this impressed me so much, I guess I just never expected to live anywhere that bananas could grow.  Cool huh?

Here we are starting off across the bridge. That's Macau Tower on the left and some of the bigger casino-hotels on the right.

This is looking back toward our school.  The buildings on the left side are UMAC, and the ones on the right side are another crappy casino and an apartment complex.

The beach right next to the road is always full of trash.  Kind of sad and seems unnecessary since there are workers constantly patrolling the streets and picking up trash.  You could send them down here for a couple hours and it would be taken care of.

I just thought this shot midway across looked cool.  Kind of reminds me of something out of Star Wars.

After our long walk home we heated up some dinner and then Beth and I went to get pedicures.  Angie met another friend for dinner - she's not into the pedicure scene.  At least not yet - I'm workin' on her.  Then I came home and tried to clean up the disaster I'd left my room in from this morning.  Amazing how quickly I can turn it inside out when I'm in a hurry.  Then I still couldn't bring myself to work, so I made chocolate chip oatmeal cookies.  Yum.

We got access to the photos from the English Festival this week.  Here are a few shots of my talks. 

I dressed casually to illustrate the preferred fashion of MN - jeans and t-shirts.  I'm also wearing my new red docs - nice huh?

Last slide - showin' off the fam.  This came under the "Nice People" heading of MN.

And here's one of my talks the next day in the computer lab.  This is what my normal teacher attire looks like.  

Ok, back to bed, and this time I'm going sans alarm on purpose.  :)  The drillers won't let me sleep too late.

CUHK

As I mentioned previously, I went to a conference in Hong Kong on Wednesday, and just got back a few hours ago.  It was at Chinese University of Hong Kong - arguably the best university in HK.  The purpose of the meeting was the General Education program that was implemented this year at the University of Macau.  CUHK has been doing a GE curriculum for ages and so they invited some teachers from our school to come over and learn about their methods. 

It was interesting, especially since I knew almost nothing about the GE program before the meeting.  I realized while I was there that many of the teachers in the English Centre feel that it doesn't make sense to include our courses in the GE program, since we obviously teach a specific skill and the whole idea of a GE curriculum is to promote critical thinking and interdisciplinary cooperation and get away from a specific skills-type focus.  So, the point is, their program sounded great, but I have to agree that our classes shouldn't really be included.  In other words, it was interesting to learn about, but not very applicable to my daily life. 

However, the accomodations and food were excellent, and it gave me a good opportunity to hang out and chat with some of my colleagues, which is always nice.  Usually we're all running around doing a million things and never have time for a real conversation.

So first, the hotel.  We stayed at the Hyatt Regency, definitely one of the nicest hotels I've ever stayed at.  I had a little trouble initially, because you have to put your room keycard in this little slot to make the lights come on in the room.  This would probably be obvious to most people but it took me a minute to realize what to do and then another couple minutes to realize that I had to leave the key in there or the lights would turn off again in two minutes.

Isn't it swanky?  I LOVE this bathroom setup. Every bathtub should have a window on the other side.  (Or be in an open space.)

I took a nice long bubblebath and read magazines before bed.  There are very few things I enjoy more than reading in the tub.  I read the latest about Occupy Wallstreet and also about The Rum Diary - Johnny Depp's new movie based on the play by Hunter S. Thompson, who was a good friend of his.  That was in Newsweek.  I also perused a photo homage to Ansel Adams in National Geographic.  Definitely the best hour I've spent doing anything in quite some time.

The food was also incredibly good.  I opted for the vegetarian meal, since there is a dearth of veggies in most of my meals here. Doesn't this salad look fantastic?  It was!

The main course was eggplant with a delicious sauce, mashed potatoes and the other perfectly steamed veggies you see.  Asparagus is so good, isn't it?  They brought me a fruit plate for dessert, which was delish, but my coworkers felt sorry for me and insisted I try a bit of their tiramisu as well.  It was amazingly good.  I have tried tiramisu in many different places and most of the time I am disappointed by it.  Not this one.  I was enjoying it too much to get a photo - so sorry.

This was the view out of my window.  It turned out kinda cool because of the reflection, eh?

I slept well and went down to meet Kim and Teresa and Janice for breakfast.  It was one of those big fancy buffets.  YUM!!!  Again, I was enjoying it so much I forgot to document until I was leaving, so this is admittedly not the best photo.  Sorry!  I had bread and cheese and fruit and a chocolate croissant and juice and tea.  They also had the omelet station, the congee station, the coldcuts station, tons of pastries....  Needless to say, I was sad to leave this hotel.

They also treated us very well at CUHK - they drove us all over the enormous campus in a shuttle bus and there were many staff on hand to look after us.  At our first talk of the day we were in a big meeting room and each had a microphone and name placard and an agenda and a cup of hot tea waiting.  Nice!

We had dim sum for lunch and that's always good and there's always too much food and I'm always sad to have to go and leave it behind.   Especially since there were great veggies here!  I was really tempted to wrap some up in my bag.

Above you can see some of our delicious selections, starting on the left and going clockwise, we have roast duck with bok choy and mushrooms; then tea eggs with various meats; then snow peas with sausage; and bok choy in garlic.  Later there was fried rice and noodles and fish cakes - way too much food and all amazingly good with a complex array of flavorings.  They know how to treat their company, I'll say that for sure.  The people you see are Lily (she teaches Portuguese at UMAC) and Janice and Teresa from the ELC.

We went back to the hotel to get our bags before we left and I was admiring the centerpieces on the tables in the lobby.  It's just moss growing on something in a dish.  Cool, huh?  I took this for Mom, and am sure she'll dig it.

After all that good food I was kind of ashamed to do it, but by the time we finished our meetings and picked up our bags and got to the ferry terminal, I was hungry again and wanted something fast so I could get on my way.  I went to KFC and it was actually not bad.  I got these little spicy chicken nugget type things and a honey biscuit and an egg tart.  Hard to go wrong with that combo.  :)

I'm sure if Angie had been there she'd give me her usual line: "Are you eating again?"

Try using a verb that ends in -ly...

Sorry about last night, y'all.  I spent all my blog time on YouTube trying to find some good vids of comparative adverbs.  I know, you totally want my life.   All of you do.

Specifically I wanted ones that will enforce the form we're learning in our books.  For example:

"She finds good videos on YouTube less frequently than she would like."

This is in contrast to the types of examples my students kept coming back to:

"Finding good videos on YouTube is harder than you'd think."

They have a way of going right for the exceptions every time.  (sigh)  All of my teachers and classmates assured me that the best way to learn grammar explicitly is to teach it.  Now I see why -  by the time I figure out how to get it across to them I've been thinking about it for days.  No chance of forgetting now!


Anyway, I came up with bupkis, so I'll have to look some more tomorrow. 

On a brighter note, today is Tuesday, which is the day Carol comes over and listens to me mispronounce Cantonese in exchange for dinner.  Tonight I made caprese salad and veggie pizza.  I tried to get ground sausage to add on her behalf, but it was harder to find than you might expect for such a meat loving country.  Clearly I need to find a Portuguese grocery store. 

I also got a bottle of the Portuguese red wine I like.  I met an older Portuguese gentleman at one of the fireworks parties, (Porfirio is his name); and he was giving me advice on how to buy Portuguese wine since I'm used to buying French or Italian varieties.  He said the good stuff comes from either Alentejo or Douro.  Did you know that's where port comes from?  I didn't.  I've tried and liked wines from both regions, but slightly prefer the Alentejo.  For my convenience, they sell it in half-sized bottles here, as well as the normal ones.  (Not sure if you can tell the scale from my hand - I should have shot that better.)  Anyway, it's nice since I was drinking alone.  Carol likes orange juice with her pizza, despite my assertions that wine is the way to go.  Now I have something to wash down the leftovers.


Carol taught me about food tonight - clearly she has me figured out already.  She was observant enough to notice the foods I order regularly when we go out and made me a powerpoint of them.  She then patiently repeated the pronunciation of each one while I attempted to make my own pronunciation key on each flashcard.  (She says she can tell which ones are my favorites by how well I say them.)

Nice, huh?

I took the shortcut through the junkyard today to buy some basil and other pizza essentials in Downtown Taipa during my lunchbreak.  On my way down I passed this shed and had a sense that something was amiss.  So I looked up and saw this car on the roof!  How'd they get it up there?  I suppose the crushed trunk may be my clue, but it made me laugh to see it from below.  Such a weird place.

So I'll apologize in advance for tomorrow's missing blog.  I'm going to an overnight conference in Hong Kong with some other teachers from school.  It's for teachers who are instructing classes that are part of the General Education curriculum.  Our level 2 classes are piloting their new material this year and so we and a bunch of other teachers from UM are going to chat with the peeps in HK and compare experiences.  (By "we" I mean about 5 or 6 teachers from the ELC.)  Should be fun and a good chance to eat out and stay in a hotel.  I'm praying for a bathtub.  And hopefully it will be a nice chance to socialize with some of my coworkers.  That's always important.

Anyway, I won't have my laptop (a whole day without either of my computers - unheard of) so I doubt I'll be able to blog.  Unless I can do it from my phone - we'll see.

I'll leave you with the text of an email forward that I received yesterday.  Have you seen this?  The study is bogus, and I question the statistics, but for someone that looks at incorrect English all day long, it's pretty amazing that it works as well as it does.  I can read it at pretty much normal speed.  Cool huh?  I guess it doesn't work for everyone though, kind of like magic eye puzzles I guess.


Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh?Yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! If you can raed tihs forwrad it.

Worth a thousand words

I took a ton of photos today, so I'm going to let them do the talking and keep it short, since it's 12:49 and I should be in bed.

So Beth and I got a late start on breakfast, and as a result, we got to McD's just in time to see them flip the menus over to lunch.  Curses!!!  I don't really like anything there besides my usual Number 9 set, so we decided to try the place next door - Cafe Coral.  Or Cafe Corral, as we like to call it.  Outside, they have chickens in the window, as many places do.  Poor things, not only put on display, but in the most uncomfortable of positions.  It's like dead chicken yoga.

We weren't the only ones choosing the Corral over Micky D's.  "Our friend", as we call this gentleman, is usually in the corner seat at the Golden Arches, looking for abandoned foods and beverages to scavenge.  We looked for him there intially and were sad we'd missed him, and then shocked to notice him at the Corral. 

 You order in the front at the Corral, which seemed easy enough because they have a big picture billboard you can point to.  But things went wrong in this pickup line and so I ended up with a bunch of food I didn't order.  Or at least I don't think I did - difficult to know for sure.  I ate what I could and then wanted to give the rest to our friend, because I'm pretty sure he's homeless, but I didn't want to insult him.  So I just left it on a tray nearby.

I told Rach I'd post pictures when I got these hung, so here they are.  Makes the place much less stark - thanks again!

After doing some work in the afternoon, Beth and I decided to try one of the walking trails we'd read about in Coloane.  When we got off the bus there was nothing even remotely resembling a trailhead in sight.  Coloane is kind of like a crazy wilderness filled with little weird pockets of civilization.  So we wandered, looking for clues to our destination.  

This is a shot of the port.  It was the only thing we could clearly recognize on the map when we first looked around.  

After asking some people for directions and getting laughed at, Beth led us to this temple, another landmark on the map.  I never would have found this without her because despite the huge sign on the road, you had to walk down what was essentially someone's driveway, past their house full of open windows, into their overgrown and junk-filled back yard to get to it.  It was cool though.

We saw some of these plants in other spots on the island too.  No idea what the fruits are.

Here's a better shot of the entrance.

And the neighbor's house.  I love how decrepit yet beautiful everything is here.

And their lovely view of this plant.

Finally we found another entrance to the trail.  Good thing Beth has natural direction sense.  I'm only good with maps, bad with intuition.  Together we can usually figure it out.

This one speaks for itself, but I discovered later that this was not actually the trail we'd been trying to get onto, but another one that was only 1.5km, so we did make it all the way around before dark.

These flowers reminded me of Dr. Seuss.

This is a nice little park near the end of the trail with bbq pits.  I'll probably never use them, but it's nice to know they're there.  Eventually we wandered back to catch the bus into Taipa for dinner.  We had a slight moment of anxiety when we thought we'd missed the last bus, and spent about 25 minutes sitting on a busted up bench in the dark, coming up with backup plans, but then it finally came.  First item on the agenda for my next lesson with Carol - figure out how to call a cab.  Luckily, even out in the middle of nowhere in the dark, it's still Macau and is still pretty small and safe, so there's little cause for real worry.  Not like being stranded in West Oakland or something.

It's lovely to walk in Old Taipa Village at night.  It was a warm, lovely evening and we strolled around looking at the decorations for the Lusofonia festival, which celebrates Portuguese language, I believe.  No shortage of festivals in this country.  :)
 

After some incredibly good fish and chips at Old Taipa Tavern we headed home.  A fun day overall, and now we have a better idea of what to plan for next time.

Mouth tateringly good...

Today was a good eating day.  I've been fairly lazy about food lately and am starting to get sick of some of my go-to dishes, so it was a nice change of pace.  Had the Saturday morning (but very close to afternoon) waffle with Beth, did some work and snacked a little midday, then we all went out for dinner with Carol to a restaurant I've been wanting to try since we first arrived here.  It's in our hood and I call it Carol's Mom's place, because when I mentioned it in front of Carol early on, she told us her Mom really likes it.  (I come up with my own names for everything here, since I never know what the real names are.) 

So dinner with Carol was fun as always and we were thrilled to discover that they had an English menu.  The main reason I haven't gone before now was that we thought the menus were all in Cantonese.  And there were a lot of selections!  I turned to the veggie section first, since I never feel like I get enough of those here, and was intrigued by item 72.  Fried orchid?  Really?  So I asked Carol, is that what I think that is?  She wasn't sure, so she asked the waitress.  Turns out, it's cauliflower.  Which makes more sense because I don't think an orchid would survive a trip into the fryer, nor would it probably taste like anything.

I also noticed item 12 and it made me laugh.  I'm guessing that should be a w, but I kind of like tatering better.

We got a lot of good stuff, some of which was a little scary despite it's goodness.  For instance, I requested the hot and sour soup, since I love that in America and haven't had it here yet.  Turns out this place serves it with large blobs of congealed duck blood in it.  Although Carol assured me this was good for my blood, I resisted trying anything larger than a very small bit.  (The Chinese tend to believe that eating something strengthens that part in your body, so eating skin gives you good skin, eating blood helps your blood.  I asked her if I there was anything I could eat for my hair, but honestly I'm probably too chicken to try it even if there is something.  Can't be good.)

We also got some of the best fried rice I've ever had, but it had chunks of sea cucumber in it, which was new for me and not bad.  It also had chunks of stomach, which I left in the discard pile even though I'm sure it would have been good for my - you guessed it.  We also had eel and bean sprouts in a thick sauce; xiaolongbao, which is a kind of dumpling with meat and soup broth inside; creamed cabbage; and drunken chicken, which is the fav of Carol's mom.  It was good, but had the bones and veins and everything inside, and I'm a wuss about that stuff so I struggled a little with it.  Very delicious overall and I'll definitely be back.  Plus Carol used the time to drill me on my Cantonese, so hopefully tomorrow I'll finally manage to order my McDonald's breakfast without using English. 

She even made me ask for boxes in Cantonese.  She's a taskmistress, but I appreciate it.

Even though we were totally full, we got these for dessert.  Dough balls with red bean paste and a little chunk of banana inside and yes, that's a little pile of sugar on the top.  When they set these on our table it was love at first sight.

Beth wanted to get us in the Halloween spirit so she got a few decorations for the house.  She put a glow-in-the-dark design on each of our doors and I got the ghost, which put me in the mood to watch Ghostbusters, so Angie and I did that instead of grading.  :) 

Then we had dessert number 2.  Chris (from work) got a gift certificate to a cake shop and apparently doesn't like cake (WHAT???), so he gave it to Angie to share with us.  She made these fine selections and so I tried a little taste of them all after the movie.  Yum!!!  That bottom right one is chocolate with coconut - it was my fav.  I ended the evening with a nice long talk with my friend Olivia.  She and I were swapping stories about our woes and she mentioned a TED talk she watched recently and recommended I check it out.  I did and it's pretty great, so I'll post it here for anyone who's interested.  It's Brene Brown and she's a researcher/social worker who's been studying vulnerability.  It's like 15 minutes long, but I think she makes some very good points.  Plus when you're a perfectionist you can never really be told enough times that you should let go.  Thanks Brene!