Happy Holidays! Winter is finally starting to settle in here and as the air gets even drier and days shorter thoughts are turning to the new year and the excitement and possibility that is holds.

Thanksgiving has come and gone since I last posted. Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday and as such I was a little homesick during that time. I was able to find my way to a Thanksgiving dinner at a local western restaurant. the restaurant is called Steak and Eggs and it is run by a Canadian guy. They mostly serve diner food there but the place was packed with patrons being served full Thanksgiving meals. The dinner included your choice of salad or soup along with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, mixed veggies, and a tablespoon of cranberry sauce. The meal was something you'd find in your local freezer section. Terrible. At the end they gave us the choice of pumpkin or apple pie. Now, I really don't like pumpkin pie. I ordered it anyway and I realized something, pumpkin pie is good. I now see what everybody has been talking about my whole life. Pumpkin pie IS good.

The week after Thanksgiving I was enlisted by my employer to give a short speech to some potential students. This speech is a once a week affair where a teacher speaks on any subject for ten minutes. The speech is part of a longer recruitment process. Wall Street advertises in newspapers and magazines throughout China. The adverts come with a coupon for a free 'demo' class. The prospective clients then come to Wall Street and are subjected to my rants for ten minutes. Anyway, that week I was quite busy and couldn't think of anything to talk to the prospective students about. As I walked into the room I decided I would talk to them about fantasy sports. That might seem like an odd topic to present, but my role in the recruitment process is to be friendly and unintelligible. We are directed to speak way over their heads as to humiliate them into studying English with us. I spoke to about 40 potential students about the strategy and scoring in fantasy basketball. It is kind of fun to be able to talk about whatever you want but it is never fun to speak to a group of 40 people who have no idea what you are talking about. As the ten minutes ended I walked out and our center director walked in the room. Before the door was shut he said, in Chinese, "Didn't understand, huh?" I don't know where the sales pitch goes from there but an hour or so later everyone emerges from the room and about 1/3 of them sign up for classes. Oh, the extra incentive here is that teachers who give this sort of speech are given 100 RMB for every student that signs up. This makes me wonder if blowing them away with my English skills is the way to go in recruitment. Next time I'll pick an easier topic and see if there is a difference.

I was also roped into teaching a special class for two weeks while another teacher was on vacation. I have explained English corner in the past, but in case you missed it here is a quick review. English corner is a class where there are about 60 students and one teacher who picks a topic and then creates a list of vocabulary and discussion questions. It is a very open class that is meant to instigate a conversation in English among the Chinese students. As a teacher I just float around and join some conversations. These last two weeks I have been taking over the movie corners. In movie corner, the teacher prepares a movie and makes notes regarding vocabulary, slang, and phrases. The movie is then shown to the students in parts and the plot is explained and narrated by the teacher. Two weeks ago I showed them Blades of Glory and last week I showed them Envy. Envy, for those of you who are unfamiliar with it, is a movie about a man who grows insanely jealous when his friend invents a spray that can make dog crap disappear. Remember that my students area ll adults and most of them are business professionals. My handout for the class included all the words for crap that they use in the movie. I listed shit as a vocabulary word and I had several students thank me afterwards. They told me that this is a word that they have heard thousands of times and in many different scenarios and they could not tell what it meant from context alone. It is essentially like teaching Western culture through movies that center on poop jokes. The poop jokes make them laugh and that keeps them interested. I have to do the movie corner again this week and I need some suggestions. Comedies work best. Dramas are too complicated and not as interesting to them. They like to see white people act silly, that's why they come see me.

As I am writing this, I am watching Mizzou basketball on ESPN. I am so lucky. I have found many different ways to watch American sports and and just in time too. Last week I went to a large sports bar to watch the Missouri Tigers play the Kansas team in a game of American football. I was a little alarmed when I walked into the bar (at 9am) and there was an older white man who was totally wasted. I became even more alarmed when they told me the game wasn't on TV. There were about two handfuls of people there to watch the game decked out in Mizzou and KU gear. They were not happy. One many finally piped up that he bought a Slingbox and if the bar had a computer and a projector then we could all watch the game.

Let me tell you about this Slingbox. Slingbox is every expat's dream. Slingbox works over the internet. You hook it up to a cable connection and an internet connection. Then you can go online with a user name and password and though the internet you can watch any TV channel that is part of your cable package. (Hanukkah is coming)

Anyway, this guy had a Slingbox connected to his home TV in Kansas City so we were able to pull the game up on the computer and then project it onto the big screen. It was a moment that the technology was created for. I then was able to exchange barbs with the KU fans and relish the sweet victory. That taste made no appearence this weekend as I returned to the same bar to watch the Big 12 Championship. The good folks at the bar lifted the guy's Slingbox login and, eventhough he was back in America, I was able to watch the game all alone on the big screen.

Tonight I am going out to Tongzhou, where I lived last year. I am going to dinner with some of the teachers I worked with last year. I haven't been out there since I retruned to Beijing in August. Like all things in China, Tongzhou has changed a lot in the course of the last year. Tongzhou lies in the eastern part of Beijing. It serves as a sort of Chinese Levittown. There are no houses, only giant apartment complexes. Most of the residents work in the heart of the city. This has even propted one person to tell me that Beijing sleeps in Tongzhou. I have recently been involved in several conversations with my student's regarding China's past and future. Of course feelings about the past are mixed. Everyone is unequivocally optimistic about how 'great' China will be in the future. Two days ago I went for some drinks with some of my coworkers and students. On our way to the bar we passed the CCTV tower. My student remarked to me that the tower represents the uncertainty and fragility of China's future. I believe this to be true. There is a not so quiet confidence that everyone has in China and its future. Often times negatives and weaknesses are overlooked in favor of the economic potential of China. This is a conversation for another day.

Take care everyone, and happy holidays.