Life Adventures

A lot happened in these two days, but I want to focus on three things:
1. My cousin
2. the dogs
3. Cliff, the talkative Australian

Day 5 began with me getting to my cousin Ash that I haven’t seen in FOREVER! Literally. All thanks to the power of facebook, we were able to find eachother after about 8 or so years of not seeing each other. In the mean time, he’d gotten married and moved to Japan and his in-laws are living in Malaysia for business right now. We met for lunch, and it seemed a bit awkward at first, but I guess blood is thicker than water, because soon we fell into step with each other and began talking away in English at paces suprising to his wife and mother-in-law. His in-laws were extremely gracious and hospitable to me and really treated me well considering they didn’t know me from Adam. Really had a great time reconnecting with Ash–unfortunately, though he’s a photographer, and I always had my camera, we never took a picture of us! Duh! I’m not really bright sometimes.

That night I headed to bed for a nice sleep . . . at least I thought it would be . . . when I was awakened sometime around 2 a.m. with a barking outside my hotel. Now, I have a dog–a beautiful dog that I love and miss–so I am definitely not anti-dog, but this dog had an agenda, and that agenda was to keep me awake. So he (yes, I’m sure it must’ve been a he) barked the entire rest of the evening without stopping to take even one breath, no, not one. The next night, hoping the dog would be too weary for a repeat performance, I headed to bed again. Alas, Malaysia produces a special night-barking breed of dog that never tires of keeping hotel guests awake at all hours. Yeah! Another night of tossing and turning in an attempt to somehow drown out the noise.

Lastly, the talkative Australian, Cliff. I signed up for a tour through my hotel and in the morning proceeded to the lobby where I met Cliff, a sixty-year-old Australian. He was extremely eager to begin the questioning process and proceeded to question me the ENTIRE tour (8 a.m.-4 p.m.) on everything China. Imagine this in an Australian accent: “So, Marianne, do they have temples like this in China? Do you know what these characters mean? How do the girls dress in China? Do you like the food there? I don’t suppose your mum and dad are happy about you being in China? Do they have vans like this is China, Marianne?” INCESSANTLY, for the entire tour. The good part about Cliff is that he was also eager to help me take a picture wherever and whenever: “Marianne, would you like a picture over here? What about over here, Marianne, that’d make a nice picture. My wife says if I don’t come back with pictures of me, she’ll kill me.” Cliff, oh, the memories.

And thus, I headed back to Singapore–another adventure chronicled.

So, it’s been a while since I’ve written an update, but my life’s certainly not been without adventure; it’s just been without time. In just a few days, I’ll be starting out on a real adventure. I’m planning to visit a host of countries during my Chinese New Year holiday–Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Australia, and the Philippines and then I’ll stop for a few days in Shanghai on my way back. It’s going to be a blast, and I’m going to do my best to chronicle the adventure through the blog. I’m sure they’ll be many stories to tell and things to see.

I’ve realized something about myself: I tell stories in my head. As I look around at everything, I often see stories unfolding and often store them away to tell later. Yesterday, a small story unfolded before me . . .
Yesterday was our first big snow. As we stood outside waiting for our school van to pick us up, we marvelled at how nice the snow makes winter look. Instead of the dull browns of the grass and trees, we had a bright white landscape. In China, snow shoveling is a community effort–or maybe I should say task. After a good snow at our college, students will be assigned to shovel the campus roads and sidewalks during their lunch break. There are no snow plows in China. I walked out of the building after teaching my oral class and saw the shoveling had begun and chuckled to myself as I noticed that most of the boys were doing the shoveling while the girls just stood idly by “participating.” I got into the van and headed home–another campus–and noticed that in front of my dorm the same community effort was transpiring. As I walked toward my dorm, I noticed that here girls were actually participating in the shoveling effort. I watched two girls scrape their snow shovels across the road and toss the accumulating snow into the grass. They both moved back to start another shovel run, and as one of the girls put her shovel to the ground to do her duty, her shovel just fell apart, broke in two, the shovel snapped from the handle. She stopped with that look of incredulity. I could see the thoughts in her head, “This did not just happen!” She turned to her friend with the defective handle raised in demonstration of its utter inadequacy for the task. Her friend laughed and then caught my eye to see that I was laughing wholeheartedly as well. I continued giggling as I went into the warmth of the dorm grateful for stories that are always unfolding around me.

In China, I’ve affectionately been given the monicre of “The Crazy One.”  Over the years, I’ve come to realize that this means different things to different people.  In China, crazy is often viewed as a negative word, so when I went up to my student, commented that I liked her earrings since they were a little crazy, she was slightly disturbed.  Having now clarified to most of my students that being crazy doesn’t mean clinically insane but, in fact, just out of the ordinary, most of them are perfectly happy to call me crazy.

Last night we had an adventure in craziness as my friend invited several of our students to join us in a night of craziness.  Here were some of the results:

So my friend Justin set me up with my very own blog . . . . I don’t know exactly everything I’m supposed to be able to do on this blog, but I do know I’ll be explaining some of life’s adventures that I’ve experienced along the way–past and present.  I’m ready for lots of great adventures, and I know the best Adventure giver is always preparing more for me.  So enjoy the ride with me!