I Don't Know Whether to Laugh or Cry

In London,  this would be some kind of bold street art installation called "The Mopper's Revolt". In China, it is a randomly placed, 5" tall,  bathroom tiled, podium-like structure at the center of a busy intersection. At one point, it may have been used to direct traffic, but has now become a shelter for homeless mops. Mops of all sizes and colours, different mops everyday. This is right outside my house and I have never seen who leaves the mops there or IF they come to claim them. I am setting up a charity for all of these abandoned mops. It's called Adopt-a Mop, because no mop should get left behind.

Decathlon, where people go to sit down. I know these pictures look like I am just creeping! I was actually disappointed that these photos did not properly convey the point I am trying to make. You can only take so many pictures of a cheap, two-man tent before people start wondering what you are doing. People apparently have a distaste for park benches and public seating in this country. They sit on demo furniture for a very, very long time. Longer than you are willing to wait for your turn. Forget about  actually trying out the sofa at IKEA that you would like to purchase, unless you want to evict an entire Chinese family which has moved into one of those little model room/houses and tucked their kids into the beds. On the bright side, if you want to catch a little old lady to bring home and clean your house, you could just unfold a lawn chair on the sidewalk and wait...

You can apparently get anything delivered in this city. ANYTHING.

Oh look, a big pile of rubble on the ground and a humongous digger.That's not too special. Except that this particular pile of rubble and heavy machinery are inside the pre-school complex where I used to work. During lunch, the children were taking turns playing "hop the hole", "climb the digger" and having snowball fights with rocks. So cute!

But don't worry, while all of this was taking place, the workmen were nearby... taking a nap on the grass.

But, just when I think this place is too wacky for me to handle, it suddenly redeems itself the only way a high-speed, developing nation knows how: by  introducing a "new and never before seen" trend to it's consumers a la Backtreet Boys and the Venus Razor. Welcome back Furby, welcome back.

AYI YA YA

Why every relationship needs a slave...I mean, cleaning lady. Not just any type of cleaning lady, an Ayi, a Chinese cleaning lady.

The obvious reason: she will clean your house, for a very reasonable fee. We paid ours $200 a month to come to our apartment 3 hours a day, everyday. She does the dishes, cleans the bathroom, vacuums, washes and irons all of the laundry, and doesn't make a peep while doing it. She is like a delightful little house elf that only speaks Chinese. Tony and I don't argue about who is going to do the dishes, we don't have to be responsible adults sharing the household responsibilities, we don't clear away the garbage after we order take-out, we leave crap everywhere! Then...woosh! It's gone. You are now thinking: in the future, you are  screwed as you have conditioned yourselves to live like total slobs. You are correct. Our Ayi left just before we went to Thailand, and we have been navigating a sea of dirty underwear and unidentifiable junk on floors and tabletops ever since in the vain hope it will all just suddenly go away, like the good ol' days :(  It's still there. But we're getting a new one next week and hopefully she will make it go away. I have not learned any lessons from this brief period of un-Ayi-ness other than...I like other people to clean up my mess.

When stuff goes missing, or anything goes wrong, you don't have to blame each other, just blame the Ayi. Can't find the TV remote? Ayi probably stole it. Didn't see/"recieve" your last gas bill? The Ayi probably threw it away. Ever since the Ayi left, Tony and I having been blaming each other for everything!!
"Where's my watch?"
"I don't know"
"But I put it down here and now it's gone"
"Who was the last person to tidy this?
"Not me, maybe the rabbit took it?"

See? If the Ayi were still working here, we both could have been angry at her together, instead of having nobody to blame but ourselves when stuff goes missing.

She takes care of the stuff we wouldn't think to do, but when they are done, they are awesome. Like, ironing Tony's work shirts. I cannot iron. I might actually have a vacuous hole in my brain that sucks out any instructions or information pertaining to ironing. Ironesia. Everything I have attempted to iron in the past actually looks worse than before I touched it. And Tony just irons on an as-needed-three minutes-before-I leave-for-work basis. She also folded my underwear into tiny little squares before she put them back in the drawers. I miss this small gesture. When I asked Tony to put them back in the drawer, he threw them in like he didn't even care about them. MY UNDERWEAR. I retaliated by chucking his in the drawer with socks unsorted. Sucker. 

It's the little things that show you care, even when the Ayi does them for you.

She will make hilarious mistakes with your home and belongings that will bring you and your partner together in laughter. Such as sorting your naughty drawer into a clinical, IKEA style organizer or putting your sharpest knives face up in the utensil storage. She might run out of space on the laundry line and decide it's a good idea to dry your underwear on every lamp in the room, so that when you come home your living room looks like some kinky sex lair. This was especially funny the time Tony had students coming over, moments after he walked in the door. She might even start muttering ancient gutteral Chinese curses at you every time you've left the blender for her to clean, all chunky with smoothie residue.

I understand that everyone is different and we might not all agree that hired help essential to support the health of your relationship. There was also a time when I might  have agreed. But having a tiny little Chinese lady clean my house everyday has become the equivalent to a can of Pringles. Once you pop....

Oh, and side note, this sandwich tasted so good. Why do I always read the ingredients list AFTER it's in my belly?!

Snakes on a Plane

Happy Year of the Snake! 

I haven't posted in so long (due to Chinese internet restrictions, not because I am lazy) that I had to go back and re-read last post so that I could properly update. So the fish are dead, RIP. Um...also (1.) I quit my old job, (2.) got a new job, (3.) got a house rabbit which is still alive and hopping around on the balcony as we speak, (4.) and have been suffering a horrible spell of bad luck which has caused numerous incidences of bodily harm. If China was a person, I would sue it but since I can't actually pin anything that has happened to me recently on living in Shanghai specifically, and because you can't sue a country no matter how much you resent it, I...digress. 

(1.)So I quit my old job as a kindergarten English teacher. I can't go into the details of the job too much without wanted to bash my own memories out of my brain with a blunt object, but imagine a room. The room has two windows sealed with prison bars. No heating, in December. White washed walls. A chalkboard. back to back desks. The cheesy smell of unwashed thermals hangs heavy in the air. The innocent sound of a giggling 6 year old is replicated until it escalates into screeches, paper throwing, hair pulling, the manic chaos of a group of starving plane crash survivors marooned on an island, each trying explain why shouldn't be eaten that week. The easy solution is to eat the TEACHER. So they do. I am devoured by a group of 36 children, 40 minutes a class, 6 classes a day, 5 days a week. My leftover flesh is taken home and stir-fried with rice, packed into little Hello Kitty containers, and sent back to do it again, until I am completely destroyed, my soul is dead, and I quit. And I've been unemployed for a long, long time. 

(2.)Then, magically and awesomely, I got two jobs at once! The one I accepted was a position as an infant/toddler educator at a lovely international pre-school. No more teaching English, much more doing what I love and what I am good at. Those babies better watch out, because I have some crazy learning lined up that is going to blow their little minds! The position I did not accept was at this beautiful special education school and though I won't be employed there, I have been volunteering there everyday as a teaching assistant in the pre-school classes. In my time there, I have learned so much about the children who attend, their needs, and their unique abilities. They are amazing! There is a little boy who can read and do maths (fractions, long division, multiplying), taught himself to speak English, French and how to read sheet music. He is a brilliant four year old with undiagnosed Aspergers. I have also been introduced the world of early intervention and techniques for managing behaviours.  It's really mind blowing that these techniques and philosophies are not used or taught in mainstream schools when they make perfect sense and apply to ALL KIDS!

(3.)So I also got a rabbit. That's new. He is so cute. Cuter than any of your animals. He is kind of like a great combo between a cat and a dog. He greets you at the door when you come home like a dog and begs for treats all cute with his paws in the air like a dog, but is clean, independent, pees in a litterbox and sleeps all stretched out in the sun like a cat. Unfortunately, he poops like a gumball machine which is neither cat nor dog-like at all. It's just a pain in the ass. His name is Bucky. Here is a picture of him being cute, for your enjoyment. 

(4.) Bad Luck-o-thon. It all started at the beginning of the year when I got cervical ulcers coupled with a bunch of other gyno-issues which have been ongoing. In Feb, I got food poisoning from my long time friend, tofu and electrocuted my hand on a 72 volt battery.  It was all black and crispy. Then, Hello March! This morning I was thrown from the back of Tony's electric bike and sprained my elbow and ass. I don't know if you can sprain your ass, what I do know is that this shit needs to stop so that I can stop living in fear for my next body part to shrivel up and fall off or something *.

Tony says that since I've had all my bad luck at the beginning of 2013, the rest of the year is going to be great. I am trying to be as optimistic, but I am a pessimist by nature, which might be part of the problem. We do have some great things to look forward to. We're going to a ball on the 16th and have a trip to Thailand planned. So I'm going to pretend my bad  luck didn't know we're into March now, and it's time for it to go die.

*Also bad luck, Blogger got rid of my favourite font. :(

 Happy safe, lucky 2013 to ya'll.