Love the Dogs

So, one of Rich's coworkers, Dockers, was having a leaving party at the Dog Races in Oxford last night and we decided to go. It's not a bad deal- for 10 pounds you get three bets, some food, and 2 drinks.

The place itself made me feel like I was in an episode of Shameless. Rich reminded me not to say that too loudly while we were there out of fear of someone beating me up. For those of you who haven't seen Shameless, it's a British sitcom based on the lives of a dysfunctional family whose dad is a drunk and whose mother ran off to do her own thing when the kids were young. They live off the government, but somehow manage to find enough money to spend almost every day at the pub.

So, we placed a few bets and lost. Surprise, surprise. For the final race, we thought we'd place a real bet with our own money (two whole pounds... we're very into betting, as you can see) on a dog. We chose the number two dog since the last part of his name sounded Chinese: Acenikai. Right before the race started, we both noticed that the number five dog was owned by "Shananagans" and wished we had placed our money on him. (Don't ask why, but shenanigans is my second favorite word; malarky is my first... ). Sure enough, the Shananagans' dog won. If only we had taken more time to read about the dogs before we had placed our one and only bet. We could have won a whole 9 pounds! Yeehaw.

So, that was our first (and hopefully the last) experience at the dog races. The highlight of the evening for me was watching people spend loads of money on bets and getting really upset when they lost... it's quite scary, really, watching people (many of whom don't seem to have a lot of money to start with) just throw their money away...

Here's the link to the Oxford "Love the Dogs" Races: http://www.lovethedogs.co.uk/oxford/index.php
It starts out with a video where everyone seems to be cheering for the same dog- and from their whooping and hollering at the end, they all appear to have won. A bit different from our experience... but there you go. That's marketing for you!!

Gong Xi Fa Cai 恭喜发财

Happy Spring Festival/Chinese New Year! This year is the year of the pig, so if you are a multiple of 12 this year, be careful... and wear something red to protect yourself from the evil spirits!! The last two years, I spent Spring Festival with Winnie and her family in Beijing, eating far too much food, drinking far too much beer, watching far too much CCTV, and listening to far too many fireworks being set off around her apartment, and having far too much fun. Since that wasn't really possible here, I decided at the very least, Rich and I would order take out from a Chinese restaurant in Oxford for the first time since arriving in September. The picture above is what we ordered: 1 order of Spring Rolls, 1 order of beef with broccoli, 1 order of chicken with nuts, and 1 order of chao mien with mixed vegetables. If we went to one of our local restaurants in Beijing, this would have cost us about 60 rmb (4 pounds/8 dollars), but it cost us almost 14 pounds here. Oh well. Rich thought it was absolutely disgusting (fair enough), but I so wanted to have Chinese food that I didn't really care... but in all honesty, it wasn't very nice. Surprise, surprise!


The good news is that the weather is nice again. I still think it's funny how much chaos a few inches of snow can bring here. Check out how moody this place has been lately.


This is me at a pub two weeks ago. We ate lunch outside on the patio.



This is a picture of the snow storm last week that was so bad (relatively speaking...) that my classes were canceled for the day. Minnesotans: refrain from laughing.



This is a picture that was taken of Rich yesterday, standing on the street where he used to live in Birmingham.

And people say I'm moody. Spring, Winter, Spring, Winter... which season is it? Make up your mind!! (Actually, in all honesty, I don't mind not having to trudge through slush and snow and battle the fierce winds of Beijing or Minnesota!!)

The reason we were in Birmingham yesterday was to check out the venue for our fourth and final wedding party that will take place this summer for Rich's family. It ended up being just a few miles away from Four Oaks, which is where Rich grew up. Coincidence? Hmm... Anyway, Rich thought he'd try to remember how to get to the places he used to go, and I was pretty impressed that he found them all, even though he only lived there until he was 8 or 9. Impressive. Here's the tour:



Rich's grandma lived in the first house on the left with the blue door. Next to it, was the corner store and a house that his uncle used to run and live in.



This is a picture of Rich's elementary school.


Rich's first childhood home (for Americans- this is an attached home; they lived on the right side).

I would bore you with more pictures of the places Rich showed me, but I had to quit taking pictures because every time we took one, the people that lived there gave us looks that said to me, "If you don't leave soon, I'm going to call the police". Maybe that's not what they were thinking, but that's what it looked like to me.

So, anyway, happy new year!! 恭喜发财 Gong xi fa cai! (May you be happy and prosperous!)

Teaching English and Learning How to Juggle

Yesterday I taught three classes at an English school in Oxford. It was great to be in the classroom again (as a teacher). It was also a relief to have mixed classes. In China, I very rarely had students who weren't from China. In my classes yesterday, each class had at least 1 Chinese student, but the rest of the students were from all over- Brazil, Sweden, Iran, Peru, Germany, France, Japan, Korea, Argentina, etc. It was a whole different teaching experience... and one that I really enjoyed. It was refreshing to have students respond to activities with different perspectives. It got to the point in China (from fairly early on, actually), that I could pretty much predict what the students would say. For example, if you're talking about celebrities, my Chinese students often wanted to talk about Michael Jackson, Audrey Hepburn, Madonna, Julia Roberts (or "big mouth" as they often described her).

Yesterday in class, the students had to write down a few sentences to describe a celebrity that they thought the others might know, and then read them outloud for others to guess. I was pleasantly surprised that the students were talking about current celebrities and their recent songs or movies. It might not change the world, but it was refreshing to hear. I understand why it is the way it is in China; just imagine if you took a Chinese class and you were asked to describe a Chinese celebrity- most people in the class would probably choose one of three people: Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, or Zhang Zi Yi.

The other interesting thing was that many of the students were able to guess a word's meaning or come up with an actual word based on their own language, which just can't be done with Chinese, except for the words that they borrowed from us, eg. ke le (for cola), mai dan lao (mc donald's), or beng ji (bungee), etc.

Things haven't been too exciting here; I've been working on a textbook for a Chinese publisher in between going to class and doing my other website, so I've been rather busy. I did find time to learn how to juggle though, which is pretty exciting- and good exercise, too :) (I'm not joking about the exercise- you can really work up a sweat throwing a few balls around!) The longest I've been able to go for so far has been about 30 throws with the three balls, but Rich is a pretty good teacher, so I feel pretty confident that I'll be able to do some fancy stuff with it soon.

Georgie, A Minnesota Christmas, and Oxford's First Snowfall

The last week has been a good one, my final week of relaxing before I hand in my dissertation in September. We went out with Rich's coworkers from Trailfinders and had a good time, I got my first paper back (I got an A!!), Rich went out for curry night with the boys while I went to girls night at Miruna's, I read a fantastic book by Lisa See called Snow Flower and the Secret Fan about a Chinese woman's experience getting her feet bound and learning the secret written language for females (called 'nushu' ) which is now nearly extinct (for more info about the book, go here: http://www.lisasee.com/snowflower.htm), a very large box arrived from Minnesota with plenty of unexpected Christmas gifts (thank you very much!) and we got 2 of the last 10 tickets available for the Jamie T concert on Tuesday. (If you want to watch a few of his music videos, you can go online at: http://www.video-c.co.uk/watchsearchedvideos.asp?vidref=jami014).



This is a pic of some of the women from my MA program: me, Alia, Heather, Miruna, and Marcia.

It also finally snowed. Though it had all pretty much melted by mid-day, it was nice to see. It made it feel a bit more like winter and a bit less like some make-believe world; it really has been such an unusually warm winter for me.

One day, I went for a walk with our camera and took some pictures of unusual things around Oxford.

The first one is of a painting on someone's house near the Tesco's metro on Cowley Street. If you zoom in on the picture, you'll be able to read the words that are in white paint. (Before the last tree has died, the last river has been poisoned, and the last fish has been caught, will we realise that we cannot eat money?)



The second is a of a bicycle that has been hanging in the tree off of Cherwell Street for the past month or so. I do wonder how it got up there and whose bike it is... I'm sure there's an interesting story there somewhere!



The last picture is of Georgie in our apartment.



It's perhaps my favorite picture of her. She likes crawling into small spaces, and I have to say that she looks pretty darn cute doing so... wouldn't you say so?