NYC Update

I've been absent lately, but have recently found myself with extra time on my hands since NYC public schools are closed this week due to the monster called Hurricane Sandy.  I have survived my first hurricane and am one of the few lucky ones: no evacuation, no flooding, no loss of power or heat.  I am less than ten miles from people who have lost their homes and loved ones, and it feels unreal to be so untouched by this storm that took so much from so many.

But enough about Sandy (I've been taking in non-stop news coverage for the past five days).  Here are some pre-Sandy bright spots.

Monteverde Visit
Beth and Melody were in NYC for the week and I was lucky enough to get to hang out with them twice.  So refreshing!  We strolled thru Central Park, where we came across this...thing.  

 On this Tuesday afternoon the light was perfect.  I wonder how many of these trees have been downed by Sandy.  I'd love to do a walking tour of the parks, but they are closed for another few days.

 And then it got to be nighttime in Manhattan. 

The following Saturday we went to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and just happened to get there during the free admission hours.  We saw a sculpture by Patrick Dougherty.  From the inside I felt like I was in a brain, surrounded by firing synapses. 

I love urban parks. 

Argh.  I'm having a little trouble with the formatting.  Why must they go change everything?  Sorry for the wonkyness of this post.

Sunday Walk With Pops

If Dad had asked me if I wanted to spend my Sunday two weeks ago walking around Brooklyn and Manhattan for 7.5 hours (12 miles) I would have said no thanks.  But that's what we ended up doing, and it was a lot of fun.  

We found these black and whites.  This dessert changed my life.  I could not finish it though, because we had just had deli sandwiches that we ate on a park bench, in the sun, next to the East River. 

 

And we saw these guys.  I was terrified and amazed.  I took a ton of video (see below).  And thanks to Dad, who stood there with me as I took picture after picture and shot minute after minute of video.  These men are amazing.

Just joking.  My videos won't upload.  Well, just imagine how amazing these men were, flying through the air, working quickly and non-stop.  

As we walked back to Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge, Dad noticed this view and commented how he liked the mix of old New York in the foreground and more modern New York in the background.  I took this picture for him and love it!

I love rooftops and I love hanging laundry and I love graffiti.  What a perfect combination.  I like to imagine some guy tagging the wall, taking a break to fold his laundry, then going back to his graffiti.  I'm know I'm not supposed to think it's pretty, but I do.

That's it, for now.  Future adventures that may make it into a post: ninjabread men cookies, blood donation, 5k. 

Gender

Yesterday's lesson was on pronouns.  Step one: use correct gender pronouns.  I told my kids that gender means male or female.  I had them write that on their papers.  I wrote it on my paper in red pen. 

I feel like I lied to them.

I love teaching writing

which is what I'm doing for a few weeks this summer.  Reading student work can be a pain, but you find gems like these:

"If I discovered a time machine I would touch it."

and

"A great day usually starts with a dream of you being a hero."

Sometimes you find yourself reading this: "I never liked Hitler and what he did, so I would time travel back into his home and put a cap in his face.  Hitler's army will fall."

Good compound sentence!  This student has also shown his mastery of the possessive apostrophe, and maybe even some empathy?

Revelations

A lot has happened in the last few months that has not been shared here. Big things like getting a job and loving it, getting an apartment and loving it, living in NYC again and loving it. But for today, this is what I feel a need to record, although I'm a little shy that it's taken me three decades of life to get here:

1. Work, once you just sit down and do it, is never really that bad.
2. When you are focused and work hard all day, you get to go home early, and that feels good.
3. Exercise makes me feel happy.

The last of it!

Ok, let's finish this up. I'm skipping photos and video of really cool birds at the Hong Kong aviary. For no real reason.

But I will throw in some shots of Hong Kong at night:





And shots of taking shots of Hong Kong taxis at night:


And then we flew from Honk Kong to Bangkok and took a cab to the train station.


And then we got on the train and looked out the window for a bit.


And then we climbed up into our bunks, across the aisle from each other, and slept the night away. I slept like a baby but Ji-Soo hardly slept at all because he was right next to the AC vent.




After the 12 hours on the train we got off and hopped on a bus. We saw a lot of flooding.






And then we got on the ferry. We were too tired/cranky/hungry/dirty at this point to enjoy too much, but I did get mesmerized by the movement of the water.



We then hopped a cab to the hotel where we stayed for about 5 night to celebrate the wedding of one of Ji-Soo's good college friends. There are not a lot of pictures from this point on out, since I spent most of the days eating, napping and lounging. It was beautiful and the rain cleared up the day after we arrived. A few highlights:

We found a giant snail.

Ji-Soo is fun to hang out with because I saw the snail and wanted to pick it up but paused, not knowing if that would gross him out but he just said, "Want to pick it up?" And so we did.



And we took a bunch of pictures.


And some video.




And then we spent the rest of our days doing this:


Fly back to Bangkok, and spend the night. This is the house I want to live in if I ever live in Bangkok:


Then a flight to Hong Kong and eventually, we had to leave Asia and head back to the United States and our real lives. Here is one last shot of the hazy, beautiful Hong Kong airport.

Must. Finish. Vacation. Blogging.

Oops. So, I was surprised to realize that I never finished sharing about our fantastic trip to Asia over Christmas break. Most of the good stuff you can see in Ji's video, but I'll finish up with some favorites here.

There was one afternoon near the end of our Shenzhen visit that Ji's mom and sister went to get massages (turns out it was a blind masseuse clinic, which makes me think of this hilarious news mishap), Eric was catching up on some work and Ji and I hung with his dad in the apartment. We sat around and watched TV and Ji practiced with the Amazing Calligraphy Water Mat.




Our time in Shenzhen could not last forever. Our next flight would take us from Hong Kong to Bangkok, where we would travel further south in Thailand for a wedding. Our flight left early in the a.m. and Hong Kong is three hours from the campus in Shenzhen so we traveled to Honk Kong a day early. This gave us an afternoon to bop around. Ji-Soo and I set out with about 3 hours to explore the city. After about 30 min we were both in love and thinking about moving there. My three hours of experience in Hong Kong tells me that it is interesting, diverse and sci-fi futuristic. Some highlights:

It is hilly and this steep, densely vegetated park is right in the center of downtown, next to all the financial buildings, right across the street from the HSBC building (more on that later). It was an exciting and refreshing mix of development and nature. It seems much wilder than parks in NYC and other cities I've visited, probably because it is less planned. What can they do with a giant rocky peak in the middle of the city besides let it be? It was most like Fort Tryon Park in upper Manhattan if it is like anything, although the contrast is not as great in NYC. You get the sense that in some cases, nature wins and we just build around it.



This is the Citibank building. I read in a guide book that people were upset by the use of triangles in the design because it goes against many principals of Feng Shui. I tried to imagine what it would be like to work on one of those upper levels and all I could come up with was: scary.

And here is the amazing HSBC building. I love it. Does it not look like a space station? This building and its designer are on my list of Things to Learn More About. As we walked around downtown we kept seeing this building from different angles. Each of them was exciting and a little shocking. What? Someone actually designed that and built it? All things are possible.


More ridiculous architecture: the Lippo buildings. I read somewhere that these building were designed to look like koalas hugging trees, which is exactly what it looks like. Again, crazy. I can't imagine that in the real world someone would think up this building and that it would get built. I thought ideas like this were saved for Disney World. I love it.


I want to go back to Hong Kong and get an architectural tour of the city. I want to know everything about these buildings and I want to go inside of them and up to the top. Must add to Bucket List.

Here is a view of Hong Kong park from across the street.

This picture captures so many of the things that I loved about Hong Kong (after only 3 hours). You can see the raised walkway over the expressway to get to the park. There are elevated walkways all over the city and unlike the ugly, crappy ones you find in NYC, they are clean and curvy and, well, futuristic looking. I felt like we were in the future. I guess if I had to boil down my love for Hong Kong to one aspect, that would be it: it made me feel like I was in the future.

Oops, I got sidetracked. I also love this photo because you can see the mix of developed land and more rugged looking landscape. In the foreground is the multi-lane highway, then the park, then apartment highrises, then mountain peaks. Ah! Such diversity of land use in such a small area! I love it. I'd also love to learn about the city planning history of Hong Kong. I want to know the history of this city. There is another item to go on the bucket list. Maybe it can be a sub-category under Live in Hong Kong.

You can also see in this picture a cylindrical tower with a cone top rising above the trees of the park. This was a six-story observation tower. Ji-Soo is scared of heights but we climbed up anyway and took a gajillion photos. Fret not, I have them here in line, waiting to be uploaded.


Hong Kong park from the inside. Lippo buildings, pond and Ji-Soo, who was also obsessed with Hong Kong and took a gajillion photos also. We're pretty dorky, but at least we can dork out together.


Hong Kong park is built on a a big hill. We took a lot of steps. It was great.


View from the observation tower. Old buildings, new buildings, steeps hills, lovelovelove. It's funny the things you never knew you love until you actually see them and come to love them and then you wonder why you didn't start loving them earlier.


This is the Tai Chi garden next to the observation tower as seen from the observation tower (duh). There was not a lot of Tai Chi going on.


This was a tribute in the Tai Chi garden to the nurses and doctors that lost their lives treating people during the SARS epidemic. After returning to NYC Ji and I watched Contagion and spent a few days obsessively disinfecting everything and stocking up on non-perishables.

Still in Hong Kong park. So many things to love in this picture.


Ok, still not finished but it's time to go get pancakes. I leave you with one last video of the highway in Hong Kong, taken from the futuristic walkway on the way back from Hong Kong Park.

Shenzhen Day 4: Art Village

Art Neighborhood

This day we were together as a pack of six and headed to an area of Shenzhen known for inexpensive art. And by art I mean mostly copies, but some originals also. Before we got started I had to use the restroom so we stopped in a free art museum, which lead to us wandering around the entire museum before doing anything else.

Some crummy photos of some cool art:













And then we went into the art village, which is shop after shop after shop of very inexpensive hand painted...well...copies. There was some original art. I was more into the artist work stations than the actual art.









On our way back to the train we passed by this calligraphy shop. This is not where Ji and I got our own calligraphy water mats, but it was one like this. There was a huge variety of brushes of all sizes.





Here is a picture and a video I took on our way home from the art village. It doesn't quite show how dense and beautiful the area was, but I loved it.






And, if you'd like to see some REAL video, check out the editing project Ji-Soo made (it blows my videos out of the water): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjQqy1r2svE

Real time update, Sunday January 22, 2012: We made scallion pancakes and pork dumplings for Lunar New Year. Well...we wanted to make the food and then realized afterwards that it was Chinese New Year so it worked out great!



We baked some pig skin also. Ji's comment: "I can't believe I'm going to say this, but I think it's too fatty." My comment: There was none, I was too busy eating.




Dumplings boiling, boiled and to boil, with sauce. Ji's comment: "Wow, they actually taste like what you get at a Chinese restaurant!" Success!

Shenzhen Continued

Shenzhen: Day 2

We went shopping. Ji's sister is a super star haggler. I got a necklace and some super cute shoes. I'm too lazy to take a picture of them and put the picture here, but they are cute.

Shenzhen: Day 3
Eunnie had to work so Eric and the rest of us went to this combined exhibit thingie called "Splendid China and China Folk Culture Village". Splendid China = mini-exhibits of famous places in China. First reaction: How is this going to be cool? Final reaction: I want to go back and spend more time there. See below.

This is a mini-version of someplace in China where there are tens of thousands of these little shrines carved into the rock. Really, they are life-sized.


This is a mini-version of the Yellow Mountain in China. This version has bathrooms in the back. The cool thing about this exhibit is that Ji's dad has actually climbed this mountain! It took three days to go up and down. If you look closely at the picture, you can see the stairs in the mountain that he climbed. In this exhibit, each stair is about 1 cm tall.


A monk burial ground.


The Great Wall of China.

And then we saw this, which was the craziest, most wonderful, random thing ever: a sign that said, "Trees Planted by the Most Famous People in the World". And here they are:

Most of the people I did not recognize - the leader of the Nigeria in 1995? No idea. But...

this tree was planted by Fidel Castro! Pretty cool, huh? So, I touched a tree that Fidel Castro also touched. So close to greatness, so close.

We didn't get as much time to hang out at the Great Wall as we wanted because we had to hightail it to the "China Folk Culture Village" section of the park for The Best Show Ever. They re-enacted a attempted castle take over from back in the day. I know nothing about Chinese history so I will not embarrass myself by trying to guess what the time period was, but I do know that they were fighting while galloping on horses and throwing things off the wall. It was pretty exciting.
There was even one guy who could hop off his horse and then back on again, while it was galloping! Ji got a video of it, not me, so you'll have to talk to him if you want to see it.


These guys would lean over to pick things up off the ground while their horse was at full gallop.



Shooting a bow and arrow on a running horse. No hands! He didn't even come close to hitting the target, but I don't care. I still think it's amazing.

And to give you a little sense of how amazing and intense it all was, here is a short video. During the entire show there was dramatic music and Chinese narration. The video below is when the raider was killed and they took his body away. He didn't actually die, but he looks dead, right?



Then we saw some other shows, ate dinner and went to bed. It was a great day.