T-shirts booth in Stanley

See you in One Week

For our middle school Week Without Walls program, Annika and I are going on a service project to Yangshou, China. We will be volunteering in a Chinese elementary school in the morning and doing recreational activities in the afternoon.

We will be traveling by sleper train with a group of nineteen students and three teachers from our middle school. We leave Sunday and will be gone a week.

You can read bout YangShuo at http://www.travelchinaguide.com/cityguides/guangxi/yangshuo/

I will not be posting while we are in China. See you in a week.

Thanks for reading.

-Jack

And the Winner is . . .

This Sunday, Annika and I are going on a one-week missions trip to China with other students and staff from our school. We have been looking for ways to raise money to bring supplies to the school that we will be serving. Due to all the other groups that are also trying to raise money for their trips, our school is a little saturated with bake sales at the moment.

Earlier this month Annika and I were brainstorming and trying to figure out what is it that we have that is unique, and that other students want to have or want to see. As newly arrived Americans, there must be something that we have or know that the kids around here would be willing to pay for.

Because we are first year teachers, we live on the seventh floor of our school building. The seventh floor is the one place that students are absolutely, positively forbidden to go. A rumor persists among the students that there are actually teachers who live in the building. But no one has been able to confirm that myth.

That was it. We had our idea. We would sell lottery tickets –oops, sorry; Christian School- make that lucky draw tickets and the winner would win a tour of the seventh floor. We sold tickets for HK$5 each (about 65 cents). We didn’t sell too many among the eighth graders in part because Annika has been sneaking a steady stream of her friends up to our apartment for the last couple of months. But tickets sold like hotcakes among the sixth and seventh graders.

Wednesday, we had our lucky draw and the winner was sixth-grader Bokhin Chan. Thursday, he and three of his friends were invited upstairs for a tour and ice cream sundaes.

They could not have been more excited. They were standing outside of my classroom door at 3:15 sharp. I told them I had to finish up with a couple of my student for a few minutes. They kept popping their heads in to check on my progress.

As a bonus, they got to ride the lift (also a big student no-no). As the elevator doors prepared to open, I could sense their excitement. Before we came to our apartment, there is walkway with glass walls that allows you to look down on the two art rooms. “Mr. VanNoord can we knock on the glass and wave at our friends.” Yeah, go ahead. Question: What’s better than being on the forbidden seventh floor? Answer: Having a bunch of your sixth-grade buddies see you on the forbidden seventh floor.

When we walked in, they were impressed. “So naiiice!” “So big.” “So pro!” (“So pro” Is that a Hong Kong thing or is that a eleven-year-old thing?) They were very gracious guests and thoroughly excited to be there. After the tour –which took all of eight minutes- we had ice cream sundaes. None of them had had Hersey’s chocolate syrup before. A couple of the boys had equal parts ice cream and chocolate. We each had two of Julie's peanut butter cookies. Some of us crumbled them onto our sundaes. Some of us ate our cookies straight. Some of us did one of each.

As I escorted the boys back downstairs, I overheard Bokhin say to his buddies “That was the best $20 I ever spent.

That’s about US$2.50.

-Jack

Hello, Friend

We’ve had our first visitor from home. Our friend from church, David Breyette was in Hong Kong last weekend on his way to China for business.

It was really good seeing somebody from home and getting caught up on news from church.

Sunday, David was able to join us for church on the island. Afterward we headed to a touristy area of Hong Kong, took in a few sites, and had lunch. After a full day, we headed back to David’s hotel because he said he had something in his hotel room he needed to give us.

We waited in the lobby wondering what it could be. A few minutes later, David re-emerged with a full grocery bag. First there were some cards, letters, and a few small gifts for the girls from their friends back at church. Then there was some make-up that Julie had asked a friend to send along with David.

But for me the most exciting item in the bag was the last item to be pulled from the bag. David had brought not one, not two, not three, but six boxes of Trader Joe’s peppermint-filled JoJo cookies. They are only available in the weeks before the holidays. Some little birdie –I have no idea whom- must have whispered in his wife Melissa’s ear.

Late last winter, as the Hong Kong opportunity was coming together, the girls said that one of the things they would miss would be Trader Joe’s peppermint-filled JoJo cookies at the holidays. Christmas without snow we can handle. But it just wouldn’t seem like the holidays without peppermint JoJos.

Thank you Melissa.

Anybody planning on coming to Hong Kong in the near future because I am really jonesing for some corn fritters from the Texan Bar-B-Q on Main Street in Algonquin two block from the river.

-Jack

The Naming of Floors

In China, four is an unlucky number. So just like western builders of high rises who sometimes leave out the 13th floor, Chinese developers will often leave out the fourth floor. In fact, some developers will skip over any number that ends in four.

Recently, some developers in Hong Kong have taken even greater liberties in the naming of floors. It has gotten a little out-of-hand to the point that it has caused a minor backlash from the public, specifically the buyers of high-rise flats.

In one new building on the island, apartment dwellers can rent a flat on the 88th floor, which is pretty amazing since the building is only 35 stories tall. When it came to naming floors, the developer not only left out any number that ended in four, when they got to the top floor, they skipped from the mid-forties and named the top floor eighty-eight. Eight of course is a very auspicious number.

As silly and even irksome as the practice is getting, the Hong Kong legislature –to their credit- refuses to step in and use the power of law to force developers to stop this little bit of chicanery.

If nothing else, this gives people who write letters to the editor something to rant about.

-Jack

Mental Note: In Hong Kong, the floor at ground level is called “G.” The floor above that is called “1.”

Samurai Burger

Julie is quite the trip organizer. When we go out, she is usually armed with maps, bus numbers, and print-outs of assorted web pages. She even knows which exit to take out of the train station. She is very organized.

Me?

Not so much.

We have –how shall I say it?- different variable allowance thresholds. Read: Jack is willing to wing it.

Last Friday, the girls and I participated in the International Shoreline Clean-up. A big group of us from ICS spent two hours cleaning up trash on a beach thirty minutes from school. After she got off of work, Julie met us at the nearest train station so that the four of us could go out to dinner and have a look around.

A colleague had tipped me off to a cool little village with some great Chinese restaurants that was a ten-minute walk (or did she say twenty-minute?) from the train station.

She told me the name of the village –Sai’ O- and said that all we had to do was walk out of the station in a northerly direction. (Actually, she said it was more like north-west-ish.) Not much to go on –I admit- but I had it all written down on a scrap of paper.

. . . which was at home on my desk.

I’m going to skip over the next fifteen minutes. But here’s the short version: Julie and Jack are still married, and the four of us are walking toward the McDonalds across from the train station.

Ah, such is life. Sometimes things work out the way you hoped; sometimes, not so much.

Out of pure stubbornness, I order the most Chinese-y thing I can find on the menu: the samurai burger. (I know, I know. Samurai is Japanese. Tell that to McDonalds HQ.)

The samurai burger is a beef (or was it pork?) patty smothered in teriyaki sauce, lettuce, a sesame seed bun, and . . . wait for it . . . an egg sunny side up.

A burger with an egg on top. Never would have thought of that.

But actually, it was pretty good.

Next time my plans for the evening crash and burn for lack of an actually plan, and we end up at McDonalds, I think I’ll have another.

-Jack

Hong Kong’s Baby Boom-let

This past Friday night and Saturday morning, we had parent-teachers conferences. (They went very well, thanks for asking.)

During the course of my conversation with one set of parents, it came out that their 5th grade son has been attending ICS for three years, but their eighth-grade daughter just started this year. When I asked why, they said there is a particularly long waiting list for the graduating class of 2014 because there is an abnormally large number of thirteen-year-olds in Hong Kong.

Do the math. Thirteen years ago, it was 1996. Hong Kong was scheduled to be handed over to China on July 1, 1997. Children born before then would be issued a British Hong Kong passport. Nobody was quite sure what was going to happen after the handover. Hence the pressure to get those babies birthed in 96 and early 97.

In a similar vein, there is also a larger-than-average number of nine year olds. Nine years ago was the millennium, and the year 2000 happened to be the year of the dragon, a very good sign indeed. Thus boom-let number two.

The word “auspicious” was never a part of my active vocabulary. But I have found myself using it more in the last four months than I have in the last four decades.

Auspicious means inclined toward success or having a propensity to bring about good fortune. It is –I believe- more accurate than the word than “lucky” when talking about traditional Chinese ideas.

-Jack