spinninghead

It's been quite a while since I've updated in here, and I've just been procrastinating cos it always seems like so much is going on.

Well, now I have big exciting news so I figured I really do need to update! I am officially going to stay in Shanghai for one more year, decided as of today, because I got a job offer at a kindergarten that's in my apartment compound, and it will be a really good job. :) I think I'll just copy/paste the email I sent to my parents about it, with all the details, if you're curious to know more:
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So, there you have it. I went in to do a demo this morning and it went great - they provided me with a book to read to the kids, and caught me up on what the kids are meant to be learning, so I was given plenty of information to go on, unlike what happened at a demo I did at another kindergarten (where I wasn't offered the job), so it seems really good. Right after the demo this morning, a teacher who had been watching (the one who has been at the school the longest) said that he thought I was a shoo-in, which felt REALLY good, and then this afternoon I received a phone call from the Director of Studies saying that they were going to offer me a contract!

Have you ever walked into a place that was a potential employer, and just had it feel *right*? That's how this felt the first time I walked in. It just felt right. I couldn't put my finger on it, but I found myself thinking, "I am going to work here." And it's happening. :)

Okay, job news aside. I have still been dating here and there through okcupid, and it's going all right. Dave ended up deciding he didn't want to keep dating me after 5 dates, and I'm not really sure why, but whatever. In the past couple of weeks I've seen two different guys from the States. One guy seems nice and like we have fun together, but less like he really cares to get to know me that well or see me often (we have seen each other about once a week so far). The other guy I just met this past Tuesday, I've already seen twice and he seems to be very interested in getting to know me and we've been having a lot of interesting and thought-provoking conversations, which is awesome. He definitely seems like he's the type to look for a relationship rather than just dating, though I might not mind that as long as we take time. He's my age and he's pretty cute, and he's been in Shanghai for five years(!) working as a success coach. Pretty cool, I say.

Other excitement lies ahead as well, if the new job and dating wasn't already enough! This Tuesday (in THREE days!) I'll be leaving Shanghai to visit Yangshuo and Guilin!! It's just starting to sink in that I'll be going so soon. I'll be there for a whole week so I'll have plenty of time to relax and take everything in, and figure out what I'm doing, since I'm going there alone! Should be amazing and I'm definitely going to take lots of photos. :D

Anywho, I believe that's about all my news for now! I will try to update more regularly again, though I am busy so I can't promise. But I hope you're still reading if you're still my friend on here. I am still reading your posts!

I'm feeling a bit better! I made it through the weekend actually rather well. :) Just one minor coughing fit during my first class of the weekend, and it was fine. I'm still coughing more than I should be, and still pretty congested, but my energy level has been okay and I feel like I can still do everything I need to do. :)

My weekend actually went by rather quickly. Tonight, I went out with some of the other teachers for dinner to send off one of our staff who is leaving our school to work elsewhere for EF. We went to this nice restaurant that has these women who come around and do Chinese handkerchief dancing:
http://youtu.be/gE5V-8r6fdQ

It was really cool to watch. :) Sorry for the crap quality of the video - I think maybe my memory card didn't have enough space on it for a higher quality video? I don't know.

When I got home tonight, I set up my new mosquito net. I bought one because I know that in the warmer weather, mosquitoes will come out again and start wanting to feast on my blood. And in China, there aren't any screens on windows. So, I looked on taobao.com for a mosquito net, and pretty much all the ones I found were very princess-looking, so I went with this purple one that looks quite pretty-pretty-princess:

It feels like I'm camping in a princess tent. :P It was either get a tent kind of mosquito net, or one that hangs from the ceiling, and I didn't know how I'd attach one to my ceiling, so I went with this one. It actually seems like it will be rather annoying to get in and out of my bed, but I'll have to get used to it or risk being eaten alive in the warmer months ahead. At least the purple color matches my bedding. :P

This week I will have no classes after tomorrow. I'm happy about this, but also annoyed that we still have to go in to work on Thursday and Friday. There's really no point in us going in to work those days. It pisses me off, tbh - if they let us have those days off, I could actually go to Taiwan with Cinnamon. But no. *sigh* However, during Saturday and Sunday, hopefully I'll be getting some friends together to do something fun. Perhaps go to the zoo, see a water village, or both. I'd like to do both. We'll see.

No such luck. I should have known not to get my hopes up. With EF, there will always be the stupid "light days" bullshit when the school is being renovated, even though there really won't be any real work to do.

Basically, I'll be working a regular day on Monday the 26th, I'll have Tuesday and Wednesday off as usual, and then Thursday and Friday will be "light days," where we won't have any classes but we still have to go in to work. Then I'll have Saturday and Sunday off work, but then I have to work Monday and Tuesday following, even though usually I'd have Tuesday off. China has a national holiday April 2-4, the Tomb Sweeping Festival, which means the kids have to go to their public school on Saturday and Sunday to make up for the days they get off for Tomb Sweeping Festival. Messed up, I think. They should just get days off, period, and not have to make up for them on a weekend. So that screws with our schedule since it means we can't have our regular weekend classes... so yeah. Basically I get these annoying 2 day periods of time off that are split up by a few days of work, and I can't really do any real travelling or anything during these days off.

The nice thing is that I will actually have a Saturday and Sunday off next week, which means I'll have the same days off as Cinnamon. There are some one-day tour type things we could do outside of Shanghai, so I'll see what she and I can find and maybe we can at least still do something fun.

On top of this not-so-great news, I also fear I'm getting sick again. Today I got up at 10:30, talked with Rudy, and then not long afterwards just felt extremely tired again and went back to sleep for about an hour and a half. I still feel quite tired and it's only 11 PM, and my head hurts a little. I've been coughing more than usual again lately and dealing with more congestion. :/ Hopefully I can get enough rest these next couple days (as they're my days off) so I don't get any worse.

At least the weather seems to be slowly improving, though at the same time that also means it'll be mosquito season again soon! I'm having Cinnamon help me buy a mosquito net online to go around my bed, so hopefully I won't be eaten alive again like I was back in September when I first got here!

EDIT: It looks like Cinnamon might have to work on Saturday or Sunday next weekend, because of China's make-up-for-holidays silliness. :( So I might be on my own to figure out plans for that weekend. But hopefully I'll figure out something fun to do, maybe with Rachel.

I ran into a couple of my coworkers at my bus stop tonight after work, and one of them told me that she heard that we're going to get March 26th through the 31st off work for the school to be redecorated. I hadn't heard of this at all, but she's a pretty trustworthy person and she said that Kent told her, and Kent is one of the main bosses at our school.

I just really, really hope that this is true, and I also really hope that my boss doesn't still make us come in during some of those days for "light days" busy work bullshit. If we do get these days off, then Cinnamon and I will probably go on a trip to Taiwan together. :) She can show me her hometown and she can see her family as well. Plane tickets to Taiwan are really cheap right now, and I just got my tax return, which would cover it completely.

I've been wishing and hoping I might somehow get more time off during my year here, so now it might actually happen! Crossing my fingers, saying a prayer... I'll bug my boss about it tomorrow and find out for sure. I could really use a trip to Taiwan right about now.

Holy crap. I just added up all my receipts from the hospital from when I was so horribly sick last month, and my health insurance is going to owe me 3812 RMB, which equates to about $604.00. That makes me feel better about buying those boots now, and it also motivates me to deal with this claim more quickly, especially when I have bills to pay. I think I'll have my school fax over the claim and the receipts tomorrow... and hopefully I'll get the money in the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime, I still have $298.00 in USD sitting in my Chinese bank account, which is from the last insurance claim that I was awarded. But it's in USD in my Chinese bank account, and is labelled as "remit." I don't know what this means other than the fact that I can't spend the money as it is right now. Anyone know how to deal with this? I'll probably try going to the bank and talking to someone about it to see if they can help me change the money into yuan, but I just hope it doesn't also cost me money. I don't know why my health insurance decided to send me USD, when I live in China and I clearly gave them my Chinese bank account information. I think I'm going to call them tonight to ask them about this and ask if this next claim can be awarded to me in yuan, cos this is just too much of a pain.

In much more exciting news, Rudy will be here in only two days!!! And tomorrow and the next day will be easy work days - the winter courses I'm teaching are super easy and I just have two girls as students in my class (yes, a class size of 2 - heavenly!) who are both really talkative and have strong English skills, so that's been great so far, and it's likely that any or all of the other three classes I have to teach between now and when Rudy gets here (especially the VIP class) will be cancelled because of students spending time with their families for Chinese New Year. I already only have just the one VIP class on Friday, and if she cancels, I have no classes on Friday, so that day I'll only need to plan my classes for Saturday the 28th (the one day I'll be working while Rudy is here.) Yay! I can already feel the holiday spirit. Chinese New Year is pretty sweet, by the way. I kinda wish we celebrated it in the US.

I just found out that round-trip flights to Manila in April are around 2500 RMB. That's just under $400. This is maddeningly tempting. The problem is, I will want to take some of my vacation days to go there if I decide to go there. I have three days off work at the beginning of April and three days off at the end of April (apart from my vacation days), so these would be ideal times to travel, but the problem is, I only have 10 vacation days total for the entire 365 days I'm living in China. That's not very much. And I'm already using one of them to extend my time with Rudy by one day when he visits me this month. That leaves me with 9 days.

My original plan had been to use my vacation days in two chunks. I was going to use five sandwiched between two weekends, so I would have 9 days off total in a row. This would be ideal for making a trip back home to visit Rudy and my parents. The problem is that now I only have four days left after that, and four days doesn't sandwich itself completely between two weekends, unless I find a time where I will have a 3-day weekend already.

And I feel like I should use both of these chunks to spend time with Rudy... but I want to travel, too. The only way I can think of having my cake and eating it too is possibly having Rudy fly to Manila and vacation with me in Manila in April. It doesn't even have to be Manila... I just happened to look and see that Manila is cheap to travel to. But I'd like to see more than just Shanghai, and more than just China while I'm over here. I just wish it weren't so tough. It is nice that at least Rudy and I are going to visit Beijing for four days while he's in China.

Sigh. If I had to do this over again, I'd definitely look for a job that gave me more vacation days.

I finally got the exact dates that I'll have off for Chinese New Year! My boss emailed everyone tonight telling us we'll have January 22-28 off! These are the exact dates I thought I would have off, so this is good because they are the dates Rudy and I have been looking up when we look at air fare prices online... so hopefully the fares haven't gone up too much, and we won't have any surprises. I am hoping he and I can book his ticket very soon now. :D And then I can look forward to him coming to visit in January! Yay!

So, while I only get ten days of leave as well as the public holidays off work within the entire year I'm here, there should be a few days here and there that I get off work for random reasons, such as the fact that the school is supposed to be installing interactive white boards in all the classrooms sometime soon. I've heard rumors that it will be the first week in January, and that would be kind of awesome, given the fact that that's right by the new year, which is what I celebrate more than Chinese New Year.

Rudy and I were talking today and he got me thinking about making a trip to Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, or any of the places around China during this short break I potentially have. I looked up ticket prices and they range from like $300 to $400, which is really decent considering it's a round trip ticket to another country. Also, I just don't spend very much money on regular basis living in China, so splurging on a trip like this seems quite reasonable, and I'm only going to be in China for a year, so I might as well see some more of Asia while I'm over here.

Now I'm just really impatient to find out when I will have time off. My boss' boss emailed me this cryptic email supposedly explaining when I should get time off for Chinese New Year (because he knows that Rudy and I are trying to plan a trip for him to visit me), but I can't understand it:
Hi Rosanne



I’ve been told that winter course will start Saturday, January 14th and continue through to Sunday, February 13th, this means no doubt that there will be a week of Chinese New Year Holidays in between a two weeks of courses.



At this point it is tentative and I am providing you with this information upon your request due to your planning needs. Please assist me by holding back on sharing this information at this stage until all is confirmed.

Does this make sense to anyone? I'm confused because there are four weeks between January 14th and February 13th, so if he is saying I would get a week off in between two 2-week courses, that doesn't work. There would have to be five weeks total for the two 2-week courses and our holiday. I emailed him back with my confusion and hopefully I'll hear back in the next day or so, and Rudy and I can finally book his plane ticket.

As for the random time off I'll get for the IWBs to be installed, I'm pretty sure I won't find out about that very far in advance, so I'm just hoping the plane tickets to travel to Japan, South Korea or Taiwan stay cheap and I'm also hopeful given the fact that there are at least three countries I'd like to go see, so I could just pick the cheapest of them and go to that one. :)

It's a rainy day today and it's my Sunday (Wednesday is my 2nd weekend day), so it kinda sucks cos even though I didn't have much planned today, it makes it not so easy to go out. It also sucks if I wanted to do laundry (which I do need to do) because my clothes won't really dry when it's raining outside. I think I'm going to get some hairy crab and try it out tonight, though, and I'm kind of excited about this. It's a Shanghainese delicacy at this time of year every year. :)

I may also try to go get my hair done. I absolutely cannot find any red hair color anywhere, because Chinese people pretty much only buy black or brown hair dye... so that's all the stores sell. I'll have to go to a salon for red hair color, and I would like to since my hair continually lightens with the sun and I don't want blond hair. I could also use a trim to keep my ends of my hair healthy. I'm just nervous and don't know where a good salon would be or how I could communicate with them what I want. I might just wait for another day, so I can ask Cinnamon beforehand to write out instructions for me to give them or something.

On the bright side, I have everything I need now to bake things, except for measuring spoons and cups. These seem impossible to find anywhere but on taobao, where I found American imported ones for pretty expensive. I might just get Cinnamon to help me buy them (I don't really know how to use taobao) and give her the money for them. Once I get them, though, I plan on baking cookies, banana bread and brownies! :D It will be great for rainy days or cold days that we have coming up. I'm kind of sad about how much it cost to buy chocolate chips though - it was around $10 USD for one regular sized bag of Nestle Toll House chocolate chips. I bought three bags and one bag of butterscotch chips, so it was an expensive trip, but I know I will use all of them, and I didn't want to have to make another trip to City Shop anytime soon because EVERYTHING in that store is pretty expensive (it's an import grocery store.)

Anywho, I think I will make myself some more tea and maybe go check out the huge wet market nearby to get some hairy crab. Make sure to check out the "day in my life" video I posted if you haven't yet - it shows what an average day is like here in Shanghai for me. Miss you all and hope you're doing well!

EDIT: I ended up just trimming my own hair, since this was something I felt relatively confident in doing on my own, and more confident in my own capabilities than in the ability of a Chinese person to understand that I only want a little bit trimmed off. I'm pleased with the results, and now all I need to get done at the salon is to darken my red again. :)

I'm pretty excited for Spring 2009... it looks like my classes will all fit between the times of 3:00 PM and 8:50 PM. This will free up my mornings and most of the daytime for me to possibly work at a school or something awesome like that again. :D I really prefer having late afternoon/evening classes. I feel more awake and creative later in the day.

So far, I'm thinking of taking: Dance Improvisation (yes, contact improv :D), Shakespeare - Early Plays, Traditional Grammar + Standard Usage, Persuasive Public Speaking (a requirement for my pre-credential work... blah), and Hispanic Literature. I still need to meet with my advisors, but I think I'm pretty well on-track to graduate in May 2010. Feels kind of far-off, but at least now there is an end in sight. :D And my last year should be pretty easy, since I have paced myself and shouldn't need to take more than 12 units each semester. Yay!

I'm also really excited about contact improv. If you don't know what that is, check out the Wikipedia entry, and look at this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HkgzG7JKVQ It kind of breaks it down for you, and you see some examples of it. I think it will not only be a lot of fun, but will help me immensely in my connection during lindy and blues.

All of that said, I must be off to my Second Language Learning + Teaching class... I think I'll skip World Lit today, as the reading was actually really boring for once, and I have only missed once so far this semester... and I am willing to guess many people will miss classes today, due to tomorrow being a holiday! YAY for Veteran's Day. :)

Happy Monday, all!

P.S. I made a new mood theme for myself! It's ballerinas. :D

I have tomorrow and Tuesday completely off! YAY! No work for two days. I haven't had that in awhile. Sure, I had some days off to go to Sacramento, but those were stressful days in which I didn't sleep much or rest much. And I had days off to go to Washington last month, and those were wonderful, but of course still a bit stressful since it was a vacation and alas, they are over. It will be nice to finally sleep in (catch up on sleep!) and just have a day to kick it at home.

I have an in-service training day on Wednesday for summer school training, and then summer school starts on Thursday. Kinda weird, since summer school runs Monday through Thursday... so the kids will have one day of school this week and then a 3-day weekend. Oh well, I'm not complaining. :) I'm looking forward to having Fridays off work! I'll get to go to the Grad and stay out late and not have to worry about getting up early in the morning! Sooooo nice.

At the moment I'm trying to research different universities I may study abroad at, and pick the best one for my interests. I'm wanting to go to either Mexico or Spain, and looking at the following universities:
-Universidad de Valladolid in Spain
-Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico
-Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico
-Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara in Mexico
I'm gonna try to get my passport soon so I have that out of the way when I apply to study abroad. My GPA is a tiny bit of an issue - the minimum GPA you are supposed to have to do the Study Abroad Program at CSUS is 2.75, and I have a 2.7. I'm not too worried, though - not only can you apply again if you don't get into the program the first time, but also they have made exceptions in the past, and my GPA is only .05 off from where it needs to be. Also, by the time I would be going to Mexico or Spain, hopefully my GPA would have come up a notch or two, since I will have taken more units. I'm excited, though... I really want to go somewhere and get serious about being fluent in Spanish. :)