I'm Back

I haven't been able to post in a while. We went to Hong Kong for Christmas, partly so we could do some American-style Christmas shopping in some American-style shopping malls. There are also restaurants with real burgers and other food that you can't find here.

We got back from Hong Kong 0n the 26th and had our official Christmas on the 27th, then on the 28th Mom's friend Chris got here. Yesterday (the 29th,) I started feeling sick, so I didn't go with them to the downtown or to the gardens today, even though I really wanted to. I probably have a cold or something, and I could hardly sleep last night. This morning I had a bad headache, so I took a bath and now I feel better.

There are some more things I'd like to say about Hong Kong, but I'm too lazy and I don't feel like it right now.

By the way, please try to comment. Many of you do comment, but I'd appreciate it if you were a little more specific, so, instead of just saying "I like it," tell me specifically what about it you like.

Tree Pictures

Tree Party

We just had our tree party today! We found a good tree (1.8m, about 5 feet) for $12 at one of the western stores, and we also got some good ornaments and lights. We still aren't sure whether the box of our favorite Christmas ornaments that we planned on shipping actually ended up in the shipment and is lost somewhere, or in the rush to get here it got packed in storage. We're hoping for the latter. It's the same with some of the ceramics that Allyne made in school and are completely irreplaceable.

We had some crackers and French cheeses, plus ginger ale, tortilla chips (with salsa and guacamole), potato chips, and various other treats. But we didn't have any smoked oysters...

Dad took a lot of pictures so expect them on his blog sometime soon.

Before we got here we put our favorite Christmas albums on Dad's computer, so we played them using a speaker that he bought. It actually has really good sound quality, considering that it's so tiny. Now Allyne's playing some of her favorite songs on it.

Somethingorother

I changed the colors of my blog now, partly because I was bored of the old ones, and partly because I was just plain bored. I put in a lot of red, because red is a very Chinese color. It symbolizes good luck.

Tomorrow we're going to put up our Christmas tree. We like to make a whole party out of it. Sometimes we call it Tree Party, and sometimes we call it Cheese Party because we have cheese to eat. Along with cheese, we have crackers, olives, smoked oysters, a few different kinds of potato chips, ginger ale, and things like that. We also play Christmas music. I doubt we could find smoked oysters here, and many of the chip flavors here are very strange (cucumber, litchi, and blueberry, just to name a few.) We were happy to find some salt and vinegar chips, but, alas, they were Lay's. (Poore Brothers' rules!!!) I think I saw some ginger ale in one of the western stores, though. (It was even Canada Dry.)

For Christmas I'm hoping to get a really nice violin, because I haven't been able to play in about two years and I'm going crazy. I also want my own iPod, because then I won't have to borrow my mom's and wish that she had a few more of my favorite songs on it.

It's also Allyne's birthday soon. Mom and John and I are going to go shopping for presents today, while she and Dad are at the school for play practice. She has a part in the school production of Oliver Twist, and Dad is in the set-building committee. Allyne is also happy because she gets to miss school on her birthday for dress rehearsals.

Weird

On Friday we got our progress reports. They are printed in small booklets with a page for each subject where it shows our grade, the subject description, and the teacher's comments. On the front of the booklet is our picture, which was taken earlier in the year with our tech class. When mine was taken, I was trying to smile slightly, but it turned into a frown, and I was looking up to avoid blinking from the flash. The result: it looks like a mug shot, minus the number strip on the bottom. It is horrifying. I am NOT showing you the picture; you get to imagine it for yourselves.

I don't know why, but I always look bad in pictures.

Another weird thing that I can't understand is that obviously, in some list somewhere in the school, I am listed as being a boy. We have these "houses," where the school is divided into four groups that have competitions against each other. (This doesn't have anything to do with normal classes.) The house lists were pinned on the bulletin board, and it listed everyone's name and gender. Next to my name there was an "M," so I figured, no big deal, it's just a typo, and crossed the M off with a pen and wrote an "F" next to it. But a few days ago we got our computer usernames, which are put together by taking letter and number codes for our home country, the year we started at the school, our gender, etc. There was no "f," but there was an "m" in it. I figured that this was different. They would have been more careful with the usernames, so it was less likely that this was an accident. It doesn't really matter that my school computer username has the wrong letter in it, I just don't want to be recorded in any of the lists as a boy. That's stupid. I'm frustrating myself over wondering why that would happen...

Life In General

I know that I haven't updated in a few weeks. I keep meaning to, but I never have. I've kinda been working on a post about Chinese gardens, but I need more pictures for it.


I'm going to write a little bit about just life in general, since this blog is mostly to let friends and family back home (and elsewhere) know what's going on here. Anyway, Halloween was pretty recent now, however, seeing as there's so much going on right now, we weren't able to do anything for Halloween. We meant to get things tailored, and I wanted to get a long dark blue dress and a long dark gray cloak so I could be a Viking woman. Oh, well. I can do that next year, I just hate waiting.


This Christmas we're going to Hong Kong, from December 19, when school gets out for Christmas, to the 26th. We're going to go shopping and go to some touristy places like Macau. I'm excited because people tend to speak better English there, so I can actually tell them exactly what I want. It's so frustrating. I'm going to be so happy when we go back home this summer and everybody speaks English!!!


Anyway, we'll have our Christmas celebation on the 27th, I guess. We found some Christmas decorations at a Western market, and bought a good five-foot artificial Christmas tree for 79 RMB, or about twelve dollars. Then my mom's friend is visiting for about nine days and I'm really excited.


I love Christmas. I don't love Christmas just because I get presents, it's just so much fun!!! I like the whole mood of it, where we get to just sit around and talk, open presents, have fun, drink hot chocolate with warm pastries, and everything else fun. I can't wait!


I'm kind of just rambling now. I do that a lot. I hope you don't mind.


School is fine. It's still just school. It's really confusing. As I've mentioned before, we have different schedules for different days of the week, so I have a hard time remembering where I'm supposed to go. This is really frustrating for me because I don't like having to dig out my planner every day and look at the schedule (which, by the way are called "time tables," and the planners are "homework journals." Whatever.) I've had four different schedules over my past three years in middle school, and I remember all of them, even the one that I had for only a week before I switched schedules. Frustrating. I guess it makes sense, though, because at Connolly we had only six classes in a day, two periods of English and one each of math, science, history, and two electives. Here we have two languages, math, history, science, technology, art, and PE, for a total of eight. With a fifty-minute lunch, I think because they want the Middle School and the High School to go with the same schedule and we can't all fit in the cafeteria (canteen) at once, that leaves forty minutes for each period. So this year they switched to a block schedule, which means that you have two periods for each class. It makes sense, but that doesn't mean that it's not annoying.


I hate how there's about three or four different types of English. You say one thing in Britain, another in Australia, and yet another in the US and in Canada. It's very confusing. Also, we Americans like to be different, I guess, because in the US when we write the date with numbers we do month/day/year, but in Europe, Australia, and probably some other parts of the world they use the day/month/year format. This, along with the fact that everyone uses the metric system, is also very confusing. I can estimate about ten meters or five liters, but beyond that I'm hopeless. I hate estimating centimeters, too. I can't estimate a distance in centimeters longer than about thirty cm. I know I'll figure it out eventually, but that's just it. Eventually.

Blue Skies!

The sky is blue! I'm happy!

A lot of the time the sky is covered with clouds. Or smog. I'm not sure which, they all look about the same. But lately the skies have been at least somewhat blue, and today there wasn't very many clouds and it was warm, so it felt like Phoenix when the weather is really nice.

The weather changes very frequently here. Our first week here it was totally rainy, then it was just plain hot and humid, then rainy again, then cool and sunny, just plain cold, and now sunny and warm. And this is over only eight weeks. Since the weather is so crazy, I've gotten used always having an umbrella with me. Weird, being from Phoenix and all.

I was sitting out in the apartments' garden today on the grass with my blanket, and, seeing as I had my camera with me, I figured that I'd take some pictures of the sky and the trees. Notice that some of the leaves have turned red. Isn't that great?

The pictures are all from around Suzhou. Some were taken today, and others were taken two weeks ago when we were taking a Sunday walk.

Blueberries

I love blueberries, in case you don't know, and it seems that the Chinese do, too. Who would have thought it? You can get everything blueberry flavored, even potato chips. (see What the Snack is That? blog post "Even Emma Won't Eat Them.") But anyway at one point I was obsessed about how you could never find blueberry ice cream, and I even made my own blueberry ice cream. Then, when we went to the Coldstone Creamery and they had blueberry ice cream, so I just had to get some. It was calling to me... Anyway, I'm just hoping that they also have an obsession for fresh blueberries.

Added later:
By the way, there's also blueberry gum. It's actually pretty good.

Laptops

We have to buy these Apple laptops from the school because they're starting some new program (but we have to wait until the end of the semester to actually get them) but anyway I'm excited because I love Garage Band. It's fun. Not that I'm any good at actually putting good songs together. I have to figure that one out...

Anyway that's what I'm thinking about right now. But mostly what I want the laptops for is so everyone can use the computer and we don't have to wait for someone else to get off when we need to do homework.

happy

I'm happy.

We went to IKEA the other day and now I'm happy because we got some new furniture and now it feels a little bit more like home. I love IKEA! But anyway the thing I'm the happiest about right now is that it's the mid-Autumn festival and we got a day off of school.

It's weird because whoever furnished our apartment gave us kids a twin bed, a full bed, and a queen bed, and decided to put the queen and full in my and Allyne's bedroom and the twin in John's, so we literally have about ten square feet of floor space. We're going to switch out the beds so John gets the queen, I get the full, and Allyne gets the twin (so we have more floorspace) but I'm going to miss that queen bed because it's really cozy and I can stretch out as much as I want. The full bed is about as hard as a rock, so I tried to get Mom to buy me a nice mattress from IKEA, but she wouldn't. Anyway I got a nice douvee set from IKEA. It's not the one I wanted (there was one nice blue-and green one I saw in Tempe) but we got this other one and I really want to get it out and set up my bed but we have to deal with the bed-switching situation first and I'm really impatient.

To School!

We finally started school on Monday. It feels kind of weird to be going to school, after getting used to three whole months without school. The school is pretty nice. I think that it isn't quite as good as normal high schools on the classes it offers, but the other students are a ton nicer. I mean, they seem to reach out to other students more, or at least accept them. I've already started making some friends (the Asians are really nice.) I can't figure out if I can be in grade eleven math, though...

It's really confuzing since we don't have all of the same classes every day. Like, we have two periods of English three days a week. It's really weird. I like Chinese class, though. It's my favorite.

By the way please comment! pleasepleaseplease!!!

Uniforms

We got our uniforms the other day. They're actually pretty nice. I have to wear dark navy pants or a navy-plaid pleated skirt (which I think is cute but other girls think is hideous) with a "chambray" (some sort of light blue) dress shirt and a little navy-plaid tie (I like the tie, except it's a zip tie and I'm not sure what I could do about getting a real tie.) The P.E. uniforms are a red and navy t-shirt and shorts and a red and navy track suit. (I think it's uncomforable, but I'll probably like it during the winter.) They also gave us this hideous floppy sun hat, which I think would be cute on a kindergartener,but once you hit about fourth grade, and especially when you're a teenager, it's just horrifying. (Except for John. He says it's like a Special Ops hat just because it's sort of the same style. I think he's crazy.)

So, China...

CHINA!!!

I decided to get a blog because I really don't want to have to keep emailing everyone over and over and over again. (I'll still email, it's just that then I wouldn't have to as much.)

Okay so here's the email I sent out to pretty much everyone whose email I knew. (And if you already got the email and are thinking "Emma!!! I don't want to read it for the third/fourth/fifth time already!" then just skip it and wait until I add a new post, because I'm too lazy to come up with something new right now.)

"There's only three bedrooms in our apartment, so I have to share a room with Allyne and it's not fair that John gets his own room just because he's the only boy! Plus the kitchen's tiny, with only four feet of counter space, even though there's a whole empty wall that you could put a counter on! It's not like it gives you any more floor space because there's cabinets on that wall that are too low to stand under, anyway. But I do get an enclosed balcony for my garden. We're going to have a cozy chair in there, plus a wide fish bowl with goldfish (because every Chinese garden needs a fish pond) and, of course, plants. In addition to plants on the floor, we're going to put hanging plants on the rods that you're supposed to hang your wet clothes on to dry, after carrying them across the apartment from the other balcony where the (tiny) washing machine is. The Chinese are so good at making everything way more inconvenient than it needs to be. After we've been here longer and settled in more we'll get everything set up more how we want it.

"The plane ride was pretty uneventful. It was... a plane ride. The food was okay. The pseudo-Chinese food was better, but then we had this lasagna stuff that tasted weird. The best meal was when they gave us Ramen noodles, but, hey, there's not much you can mess up with Ramen, is there? Then they showed weird movies that I had no intention of watching like "Kung Fu Panda," "Made of Honor," and "Nim's Island." What I really wanted was to get some sleep, but you know how hard that is on an airplane.

"Our school is pretty big (I was hoping the library was big, too, but it's tiny) and the school lunches are pretty good (WAY better than Connolly's. Way better.) I'm kind of excited about the uniforms because they're real uniforms (I'm tired of wearing polos) and we get to/have to wear ties. I hope we get real ties, not zip- or clip-on ties, because they're more fun that way. I don't know how to tie one yet, but that's what dads are for."

So, if you have any more questions post them in a comment and I'll try to answer them in my next post.