Wednesday, May 11, 2011

In which I celebrate Labor Day and go shopping!

For some reason Blogspot has been a little wonky.  Everything loads except for the text box here... kind of the important part.  Ah well, we're up and running now!

First of all, I have to say that the kids I tutor (not the ones at the university, the younger ones) are weird.  I entered the building last week and saw that all of the white boards were filled with pictures of a super buff Pikachu.

I'd be impressed if I wasn't so confused

Clearly I missed out on something important.

Two Mondays ago it was Labor Day, so no school!  That same week was Children's Day (no afternoon school for the kids) and Youth Day (no afternoon school for 15-23 year olds).  Since we had three breaks, everybody was out partying, playing music in front of the dorms, I'm pretty sure all of the Russians in the building (of which there are a lot) went out to the clubs for the ENTIRE week.

I guess you could say that it was a week... *puts on sunglasses* without class.  YEEEEAAAAAAAHH *cues CSI music*

Man, I need to get off the internet.  Anyways, one of the girls I tutor invited me on a Labor Day picnic with her family.  We went to a park and the weather was absolutely beautiful.  The park is called "The Shenyang Exhibition Garden" which is super fancy talk for "Look, man, we got flowers and not much else to justify spending 35 yuan per ticket".  Although, to their credit, the flowers were beautiful.

There was also a theme park in the middle of the garden.  Rollercoasters, haunted house, games where you pay money to shoot at something and never win a prize... the whole shebang.  It was really cool, but of course they have some little things that prove that either Chinese people don't research American culture or they just REALLY don't give a crap.

There was a 'Pirates of the Caribbean' themed ride.  Innocent enough, right?  Well, they had posters from the movies hanging up all over the ride and then they had this little gem.

Also, I'm pretty sure there were no licensing fees paid to Disney for usage here

If you don't know, after the success of the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' movie, some people decided to make a porno that was sexy-pirate themed.  The poster with all the girls wearing not much but corsets and a smile?  That's a pornographic film.  There are posters advertising American pornography at a children's theme park.  Classy.

They also have a space ride where you can climb inside a fake spaceship and it'll pretend to launch into space... pretty cool, if you think about it.  They had one in Disneyworld that was ABSOLUTELY the bomb and I would go on it again in a heartbeat. (More like an hour and a heartbeat...the lines at Disney were pretty damn long)  However something about this Spaceship just didn't seem right.

Sorry about the Shaky-Cam, I was practicing for a career as a Hollywood Filmographer 

I know it's a little difficult to read, but they name they gave that ride is "The Challenger".  I was laughing and trying to take this picture, so the family I was with asked if I was interested in trying the ride.  I told them, "No way, I'm a teacher.  I know how this story ends."  They didn't get it.

Later that day I went out with a student to get my shopping on at the Night Market.  It was really sweet, we spent much money and came back with much loot.  I can't remember if I talked about fashion here or not, but it's this great mix of military-chic and gothic-lolita.  Friggen perfect.  Clothes are cheap, food was cheap (1 yuan for whatever you want barbecued on a stick) and it was a beautiful night for shopping.

Something that's greatly disappointed me in the school here is the plagiarism.  Apparently plagiarism is common in the University here and it's totally accepted.  Teachers know the students do it and they just do nothing. I'm appalled!  I had to grade about 400 papers on my student's favorite movies (write 5 or more sentences about absolutely anything about any movie) and over half of them are stolen right off of the internet. I gave my classes the talk about how it's unacceptable to do this in my class and if I catch anybody copying another paper again, I'll fail them out.  Of course that's a bluff, I can't take any action against them because the university doesn't have a plagiarism policy.  But I think I got them scared!

Now it's back to work, back to correcting papers and in a few hours, back to class.  I've started falling into a pretty stable routine so the past couple of weeks have totally flown by.  Can't believe it's almost my birthday ALREADY!

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