Here's a little vid I made to go with my poem: Big Bang aka Just Like You
Showing posts with label china. Show all posts
Showing posts with label china. Show all posts
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Hong Kong International School - good things come to those who wait.
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| An eighth grade class at HKIS |
The hills of Hong Kong would give San Francisco a run for their money. The cab drive from the Cosmopolitan Hotel up to Hong Kong International School should come with a disclaimer for those with heart conditions as the drivers careen through the curves like a video of a waterside ride being played in reverse.
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| The view from the faculty lounge - not too hard to get used to. |
I met Clare P. (a 7 and 8 teacher at HKIS) a couple years back while Sara and I were presenting at the EARCOS conference and we have been corresponding for the last three years conspiring a way for Sara and me to visit HKIS. Well with our trip to Kuala Lumpur everything fell into place for a quick two day stay. This was Sara and my second trip to the city but our first to this school, a couple years back we worked at the Canadian School of Hong Kong which was great and we had heard nothing but good reports on HKIS so we were so happy to finally be connecting.
Well we couldn't be more satisfied with finally getting our ducks in a row. The teachers and students couldn't have been more receptive. All the great reviews we had received about the school were well founded. We managed to see the whole middle school plus wedge in a couple teacher workshops and the enthusiasm and appreciation we felt were unparallelled. It's fun to work hard when one gets such positive reinforcement. (the goodies and coffee in the teachers lounge didn't hurt either.)
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| Even a broken leg didn't stop this customer from writing. |
The only regret we had for this drive by visit was that it seemed too short. Well to our happy surprise that just may be remedied as well. Before we even finished our second day we were working with the curriculum specialists on getting us back THIS school year. I don't want to jinx those machinations - but it's looking pretty good for a February encore - cross your fingers and fasten your seat belt we may be climbing those hills again sooner than expected!
Friday, November 4, 2011
The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round
Okay, I want to take a little aside here, crossing the street is an accomplishment in itself here in Beijing. In retail one may have heard the adage the customer is always right – in Beijing traffic, the motorist is always top dog – no matter what. Zebra crossings, walk signs, crutches, sudden appearances of deities hold no sway with the Beijingalings behind the wheels of their automobiles. A pedestrian might as well be made from a wisp of smoke as far as they are concerned – make eye contact with one of these drivers and you might as well paint a bull's-eye on your chest. just sayin’…
Anyway, we successfully crossed the street three mornings in a row in order to work with the middle-schoolers. We ran workshops on memoir, metaphor and imagery with the 6, 7 and 8th graders in some very well equipped mini auditoriums with embarrassingly large banners announcing our presence in the school outside the doorways. Even though most of the groups consisted of double classes and the students were writing in their laps we couldn’t have asked for a more successful visit.
The best part was in the evening when I was checking my e-mail after our first day at ISB and I began receiving messages from some of the 8th graders I had worked with during the day. Attached were copies of their writings from the workshops and it was obvious that they had been working on the pieces after the workshop was over. Believe it or not this is the first time I have received so many samples from kids I have worked with so quickly – I don’t care if they probably were getting extra credit for sending hem – it really made my day. (I even forgive the one girl who attached her work as a pdf that ate up half my cell data allowance.)
It’s always a leap of faith by the folks who put their neck on the line to bring a couple crackpot poets from thousands of miles away to infiltrate their classrooms and Sara and I so appreciate their willingness to take the risk. Hopefully, we made them look as good as their students made us look.
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Fits like a glove
Oneday left in the residency I am doing in Houston. This has been a good one. The kids in this high school have been great and the teachers pretty top notch. The queen bee of the crew that I am working with is a tall bespectacled young woman with curly hair that looks like it might want to get a bit wild but knows better. There’s a nice confidence about the staff. If I were to be cliché I might say that the crew is big picture people – but since I am never cliché I won’t.
One of the five classes that I have been teaching is an ESL (English as Second Language) group. I’ve gained an affinity for ESL kids. Maybe it’s all the international travel the last couple years – I know all too well what it is like to be a somewhat intelligent and passably articulate person rendered beyond functionally illiterate by circumstance.
There was the time I was momentarily and most disconcertingly lost in Shanghai.
One of the joys of working with international schools is one immediately has an advocate in a new and foreign place. The teachers working there have got all the scoops on restaurants, sightseeing, bargains and local specialties - all that good stuff and they enjoy sharing this hard earned data with visiting authors. Shanghai has an incredible fabric market.
Imagine the biggest farmer’s market you have ever seen. Think of that layout stall after stall after stall. Now instead of fresh vegetables the stalls are packed with fabric – all kinds of material on bolts and spools, half finished jackets, skirts, blouses, boxes of buttons and snaps and men and women with cloth tape measures draped around their necks like sauna towels. Now remember, you were thinking of the biggest farmer’s market you had ever seen? Now multiply the size by at least a factor of twelve, okay now make this entity eight stories tall and recall the feel of the 1982 movie Blade Runner. Now you’re getting the idea. You don’t shop at the Shanghai fabric market, you assimilate with it.
We got turned on to the fabric market by a student’s mother who visibly began to vibrate when I asked her if the story I had heard about the affordability of having clothing tailor made in the city was true. “You want clothes made?” She was beaming – “Sweetie, you asked the right person.” And we had. This mom took us to and safely inside the death star sized Shanghai Fabric Market and introduced me to her husband’s tailor then she and Sara disappeared.
I got measured for and ordered two jackets – both a cashmere tweed material, one darker one lighter, that I picked from spools in the cubicle – then I picked the silky lining material. The tailor promised that the jackets would be ready for a fitting in three days and I think I paid something like fifty bucks apiece for them. Not bad for completely tailored sport jackets. I called Sara and the mom with the cell phone provided by the school and we joined forces again.
Three days later true to promise my jackets were ready. Sara and I were on different schedules and she had already finished her day and was at the fabric market with some other teachers picking up some stuff she had made and enjoying browsing around without me not understanding what the difference was between this hound’s-tooth and that. The plan was for me to take a cab there after school and meet up with them.
So, I ask the guy at the desk where we are staying to write a note for me to give to a cabbie instructing the hack to take me to the fabric market. He says Okie Dokie and fills a half piece of notepaper with Chinese characters and hands it to me with both hands smiling and a little bow. To this day I have absolutely no idea what was written on that paper.
At the time that we were in China one could ride a cab seemingly for hours and the fare would amount to about a buck twenty five. The ride from the hotel near the school to the fabric market was going to be almost an hour. I handed the cabbie the note the concierge had given me and looked at him like – “does this make sense to ya pal?” He gave me an affirmative grunt and I blithely leaned back in my seat and took in the scenery as we whizzed along. For all I know the note included instructions for the minimum amount of miles between the separate bridges my head and torso were to be dropped from.
We ride along for about an hour and a half and I am starting to get a little worried. I’m trying to mime to the rearview mirror anything that might approximate - Are we there yet? The cabbie smiles and nods nonchalantly passing cars via the sidewalk. Twenty minutes later we pull up to a hulking building that I do not recognize. I rationalize that we may be on a different end of the giant market. Had I any sense I would have asked the driver to circle the entity. Instead I made a fatal traveling faux pas; I paid the dollar and a half fare then got out of the safety of my cab without being absolutely certain where I was with nobody I knew in sight.
I wandered into the building and while it did bear a bit of resemblance to the fabric market it just didn’t feel right. There were stalls filled with fabric on the ground floor but there were also floors with electrical goods, window mount air conditioners stacked like firewood. Another floor, the size of the bargain basement at Macy’s was full of live finches sounding like a test facility for doggie toys – I think I would have remembered that floor. So there I was – lost in Shanghai, a city whose population equals that of the entire state of Ohio. I can barely operate the cell phone, pretty much relinquished to dialing one of the three numbers programmed into it and nobody is answering. I wander out onto the street and head to a corner it seemed like the thing to do. I stood around and watched people go by and looked around for maybe a place to grab something to eat. Strangers are always more friendly if you are spending money in their midst.
Then my phone rang!
“Where are you?”
“Lost.”
“Are you in a cab?”
“No.”
“Why’d you get out of the cab?”
“Because I’m an idiot.”
“Hang on.”
I can hear the conversation going on amongst the folks on the other end. He’s lost – Did he get out of the cab – why’d he get out of the cab – he shouldn’ta got out of the cab. A new voice comes over the phone.
“Michael?”
“Yes”
“Michael, get into a cab and hit re-dial on your phone, give the phone to your driver and I’ll have my tailor talk to him.”
“How do you flag a cab?”
“You’re gonna have to figure it out.”
“Okay, bye.”
I scan the streets – there isn’t a cab in sight as far as I can tell. There are whole bunches of slick haired hipster looking young men lounging about on various makes, models and vintage of motorbikes though. In Vietnam there are many entrepreneurial motorbike pilots who operate as gypsy taxis. They are he quickest way around in the over congested streets albeit not for the faint of heart. I walk up to one of the Vespa hepcats pointing at his bike and blurt “Taxi?”
He looks at me, points over my shoulder and replies, “No, that’s a taxi.”
Sure enough over my shoulder is a checker cab that could have been dropped via black hole from Lakeshore Boulevard in Chicago. I jump in the backseat – the driver looks a little startled – I think he was off duty having his lunch. He’s an older guy, bald and liver spotted with wisps of white hair around his incredibly large ears. I dial the phone, hand it to the driver and soon he and the tailor are laughing heartily giving me a good view of his missing and nicotine browned teeth. He talks to the tailor and scopes me in the rear mirror – talks a bit more – laughs one more time – then he clips the phone shut like he was a lobster snipping his claw - hands it back to me followed by a thumbs up.
One learns a bit of humility when one doesn’t speak the language.
One of the five classes that I have been teaching is an ESL (English as Second Language) group. I’ve gained an affinity for ESL kids. Maybe it’s all the international travel the last couple years – I know all too well what it is like to be a somewhat intelligent and passably articulate person rendered beyond functionally illiterate by circumstance.
There was the time I was momentarily and most disconcertingly lost in Shanghai.
One of the joys of working with international schools is one immediately has an advocate in a new and foreign place. The teachers working there have got all the scoops on restaurants, sightseeing, bargains and local specialties - all that good stuff and they enjoy sharing this hard earned data with visiting authors. Shanghai has an incredible fabric market.
Imagine the biggest farmer’s market you have ever seen. Think of that layout stall after stall after stall. Now instead of fresh vegetables the stalls are packed with fabric – all kinds of material on bolts and spools, half finished jackets, skirts, blouses, boxes of buttons and snaps and men and women with cloth tape measures draped around their necks like sauna towels. Now remember, you were thinking of the biggest farmer’s market you had ever seen? Now multiply the size by at least a factor of twelve, okay now make this entity eight stories tall and recall the feel of the 1982 movie Blade Runner. Now you’re getting the idea. You don’t shop at the Shanghai fabric market, you assimilate with it.
We got turned on to the fabric market by a student’s mother who visibly began to vibrate when I asked her if the story I had heard about the affordability of having clothing tailor made in the city was true. “You want clothes made?” She was beaming – “Sweetie, you asked the right person.” And we had. This mom took us to and safely inside the death star sized Shanghai Fabric Market and introduced me to her husband’s tailor then she and Sara disappeared.
I got measured for and ordered two jackets – both a cashmere tweed material, one darker one lighter, that I picked from spools in the cubicle – then I picked the silky lining material. The tailor promised that the jackets would be ready for a fitting in three days and I think I paid something like fifty bucks apiece for them. Not bad for completely tailored sport jackets. I called Sara and the mom with the cell phone provided by the school and we joined forces again.
Three days later true to promise my jackets were ready. Sara and I were on different schedules and she had already finished her day and was at the fabric market with some other teachers picking up some stuff she had made and enjoying browsing around without me not understanding what the difference was between this hound’s-tooth and that. The plan was for me to take a cab there after school and meet up with them.
So, I ask the guy at the desk where we are staying to write a note for me to give to a cabbie instructing the hack to take me to the fabric market. He says Okie Dokie and fills a half piece of notepaper with Chinese characters and hands it to me with both hands smiling and a little bow. To this day I have absolutely no idea what was written on that paper.
At the time that we were in China one could ride a cab seemingly for hours and the fare would amount to about a buck twenty five. The ride from the hotel near the school to the fabric market was going to be almost an hour. I handed the cabbie the note the concierge had given me and looked at him like – “does this make sense to ya pal?” He gave me an affirmative grunt and I blithely leaned back in my seat and took in the scenery as we whizzed along. For all I know the note included instructions for the minimum amount of miles between the separate bridges my head and torso were to be dropped from.
We ride along for about an hour and a half and I am starting to get a little worried. I’m trying to mime to the rearview mirror anything that might approximate - Are we there yet? The cabbie smiles and nods nonchalantly passing cars via the sidewalk. Twenty minutes later we pull up to a hulking building that I do not recognize. I rationalize that we may be on a different end of the giant market. Had I any sense I would have asked the driver to circle the entity. Instead I made a fatal traveling faux pas; I paid the dollar and a half fare then got out of the safety of my cab without being absolutely certain where I was with nobody I knew in sight.
I wandered into the building and while it did bear a bit of resemblance to the fabric market it just didn’t feel right. There were stalls filled with fabric on the ground floor but there were also floors with electrical goods, window mount air conditioners stacked like firewood. Another floor, the size of the bargain basement at Macy’s was full of live finches sounding like a test facility for doggie toys – I think I would have remembered that floor. So there I was – lost in Shanghai, a city whose population equals that of the entire state of Ohio. I can barely operate the cell phone, pretty much relinquished to dialing one of the three numbers programmed into it and nobody is answering. I wander out onto the street and head to a corner it seemed like the thing to do. I stood around and watched people go by and looked around for maybe a place to grab something to eat. Strangers are always more friendly if you are spending money in their midst.
Then my phone rang!
“Where are you?”
“Lost.”
“Are you in a cab?”
“No.”
“Why’d you get out of the cab?”
“Because I’m an idiot.”
“Hang on.”
I can hear the conversation going on amongst the folks on the other end. He’s lost – Did he get out of the cab – why’d he get out of the cab – he shouldn’ta got out of the cab. A new voice comes over the phone.
“Michael?”
“Yes”
“Michael, get into a cab and hit re-dial on your phone, give the phone to your driver and I’ll have my tailor talk to him.”
“How do you flag a cab?”
“You’re gonna have to figure it out.”
“Okay, bye.”
I scan the streets – there isn’t a cab in sight as far as I can tell. There are whole bunches of slick haired hipster looking young men lounging about on various makes, models and vintage of motorbikes though. In Vietnam there are many entrepreneurial motorbike pilots who operate as gypsy taxis. They are he quickest way around in the over congested streets albeit not for the faint of heart. I walk up to one of the Vespa hepcats pointing at his bike and blurt “Taxi?”
He looks at me, points over my shoulder and replies, “No, that’s a taxi.”
Sure enough over my shoulder is a checker cab that could have been dropped via black hole from Lakeshore Boulevard in Chicago. I jump in the backseat – the driver looks a little startled – I think he was off duty having his lunch. He’s an older guy, bald and liver spotted with wisps of white hair around his incredibly large ears. I dial the phone, hand it to the driver and soon he and the tailor are laughing heartily giving me a good view of his missing and nicotine browned teeth. He talks to the tailor and scopes me in the rear mirror – talks a bit more – laughs one more time – then he clips the phone shut like he was a lobster snipping his claw - hands it back to me followed by a thumbs up.
One learns a bit of humility when one doesn’t speak the language.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Dim Sum good dumplings
Flat Stanley putting the moves on Hello Kitty store employees at the Taipei Airport
Back home it is 9 in the morning – I haven't a clue what time it is outside the plane right now as we cruise 35,000 feet above the Pacific ocean, my last adjustment to my watch was for LAX where it is 6am. This leg of the trip is a 13 or 14 hour flight. We're on a great big 777 run by EVA Air. If you ever get a chance to fly on an Asian airline, EVA, Thai Air etc take the opportunity and see what deregulation has done to the US air industry. All thanks to St. Ronnie the great deregulator - patron to the rich - that middle class was such a nuisanse anyway.
On the way over to LA, Continental serves us our "meal". An anemically lukewarm turkey club that looks like it is the love child of a white castle slider and an hot pocket straight from the nearest Kwik-E-Mart microwave and a fun size Milky Way bar. We are wedged three abreast in a space as wide as the back seat of a VW Bug so I am leaning into the aisle a wilted sunflower pinching my spine over like a glow stick right before it pops luminescent. Of course since I am listing into the aisle in order to have enough room to breath I get smacked by everyone trying to pass – flight attendant, running kids, and people in walkers headed to the bathroom. It's not quite as bad as a train in Marrakesh but I'm sure the seating charts were based on one. I'm getting grumpy.
Am reading an interesting book that I heard about from Amy Sparks called What is the What – by Dave Eggers. It is a chronicle of a story of one of the lost boys of the Sudan – their trek across desert, forest, against rebels, government soldiers and wild animals ending up in urban Atlanta, Tucson, Arizona and other diaspora splash downs. It is a good book to be reading on a flight such as this – a reminder that others have made much harder journeys – even so, my disposition is flagging. Flat Stanley naively grins on.
In LAX we switch to EVA Air – it is like going from a golf cart to a Mercedes. The seats are a third bigger reclining enough to actually comfortably nap (without dropping into the lap of the person behind you.) You want some extra Karma points? The next time you are on a plane and you are going to recline your seat – look back and warn the person seated to your rear. One time in my life of traveling has someone actually done this for me – an African American gentleman on a flight to San Francisco – I salute you brother traveler and raise my mini glass of orange juice with ice in your honor.
We get to our seats and are given warm towels to refresh ourselves, we are served a real hot meal, given a blanket that might have been stolen from my grandmothers davenport in Collinwood and offered beverages every 20 minutes or so by an attendant who simply quietly walks down the aisle with a tray of juices and water that you may just take at your leisure.
The cost is no more than an US carrier – the service is seven hundred and fifty three bugzillion times better. Do the math jo jo. Oh yeah – I'm typing this with no fear of my laptop battery running out because there is an out let in my seat.
Okay – next stop Taipei – where I'll roust Stanley for another photo op.
Addendum:
Made it here safe and sound – eating dim sum in the EVA lounge! Next stop Indonesia.
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