Hangzhou Lovin’

Went shopping today, and I must say I love shopping! There’s nothing better than buying something for me, and in China everything is so cheap! Today I bought a new pair of “cool guy” shoes and some new brown cordoury pants that hug my ass like a glove. I am going the Al Gore route and dressing all in earth tones now. Muddy browns, sandy tans, slate grays, stormy blues and olivey olives. I like shopping in China because there is a ridicoulous amount of stores in places you wouldn’t expect to find them. You go down some random staircase and through some strange door and there are all these little stalls stretching endlessly selling all kinds of clothes, and they have all the latest fashions! And they have tons of these all over the city, some of them are just for shoes (I’m like oh my god I’m in heaven!) I havn’t bought any flair cut jeans with those nifty prefaded strips down the front, but I’m thinking it’ll probably happen next week.

Does this make me gay?

I’m off to the countryside to visit my students the next couple of days. Hopefully I won’t havew to deal with the notorious Henan white slave traders ring, but you never know..

One cool thing to come out of this being blocked by China is that I have become an anonoumous source. First a little blurb I wrote about the blogspot blocking situation at peekabooty, a cool site, devoted to developing technologies to get around “the great firewall of China.” You may not recognise me because I spelled everything correctly and my grammer is decent.

Then a qoute from that article was the lead qoute in an article at openflows .

I didn’t really mean to be all mysterious and my article at peekabooty wasn’t completly anonymous becasue I linked to my blog, but I like being called “An anonymous blogger in Henan Province.” It’s like I’m james bond…

I actually think that they didn’t link to me because the title of my page is “Xin Xiang sex teacher,” I hope thats the reason why casue that’s really funny.

Well, blogspot still seems to be blocked here, so if anybody knows of another place that will host a free weblog let me know. Since I can still post I want to shame these fucking american comanies that have helped China with their blocking technology. If I ever meet the CEOs of any of these companies I promise you I will punch them in the face.

“So how has China�s Internet lockdown come to be so effective, so fast? �There�s no way they could have done this without Western help,� says Baranowski, back in his Toronto apartment. �Even now, they need Western help to keep up their firewall. They simply don�t have enough people and the technology they need to do this.� In a report issued last month, Amnesty International singled out Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Cisco and Websense as U.S. corporations that are increasingly selling filtering hardware and software, among other products, to Chinese authorities. Eric Gutmann, a visiting fellow at the Project for the New American Century, a conservative Washington, D.C., think tank, claims that Chinese engineers familiar with Cisco�s operations told him that the U.S. company had �gone out of its way� to adapt its routers and firewall technology for China. �Cisco knew exactly what their equipment was going to be used for,� insists Gutmann. Terry Alberstein, Cisco�s head of Asian public relations, denies that the company tailors its products for the China market, adding, �If the government of China wants to monitor the Internet, that�s their business. We are basically politically neutral.�”

fuckers

Fuck is blogspt blocked in China? I can get to the blogger edit page but not my blogspot one. If you read this on my site send me an email and tell me if you are in Chian or not cause I can’t get to my damn site.

this is scary

Damn girl troubles today… Chinese girl troubles. Maybe I’ll tell you more maybe I won’t, I gotta correct some papers today.

I’ve been feeling really out of it the past couple days. Part of it is that I’m sick, but it’s more than just a the cold that I have. I feel like it’s hard to focus on one thing at a time. I want to go to bed all the time but then if I try i just lie there with my eyes open. I think I have found out why i am feeling this way.

A couple days after I got sick I went to the school’s clinic to get some drugs to make me feel better. I knew I had a cold caused by a virus that I caught because I partied to hard on New Years, so I was rather dreading going to the clinic where I would have to listen to everbody there speculate about what was wrong with me and how I should change my lifestyle so that I won’t get sick anymore. I have little patience for Chinese kindness when I am sick, I know they all mean well, but I just want to lie in my bed to be left in my misery. I get to the clinic and the doctor dosn’t really speak any english so, the students translate. It’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be, they figured out what was wrong with me pretty quick and they didn’t give me an IV or tell me to go to the hospital.

But then they start to give me drugs, First the doctor pulls out antibiotics, they give me antibiotics like they do everytime I go there. (It’s nice that I have a big supply of antibiotics. If I ever get anthrax or gonorrhea I’ll be ready, but they are useless against the common cold.) Then she gets anther box of Green and yellow “Quike” pills, I look at the ingriedients list in english and the only one I recognise is caffeine. She throws in some asprin for my slight fever, and last I am happy to see her throw in some chinese medicine Bingdukoufuye, which tastes like flowers (I think I’ll have one right now…… mmm tasty). I point to my mucus filled nose, to see if she will give me some pseudephederine (sudafed) for it, but she just points to the “Quicke” pills.

So I make it home, and take my meds. I decide to go onto the internet and look up what I am taking. I can’t find anything good about the chinese medicine, but I do find that the main ingriedient in the “Quike” pills, amantadine (not to be confused with Anandimide, an endogenous cannabinoid) is a potent anti-viral agent used to fight the flew and hepititis. Another ingredient is supposed to stop my nose from running so I figure it sounds like powerful medicine and might as well see what it does to me.

The strange thing is that the main use for amantadine is for treating the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. In this case the drug is not being used as an antiviral, but instead is being used for it’s effects in the brain. I was a neuroscience major in College so I know a little about Parkinson’s disease(check out the authors on the link). In Parkinson’s neuron’s which secrete dopamine (a neurotransmitter) in a certain part of the brain start to die, and this causes the motor dysfunctions associated with Parkinson’s. At the time I think, “hmm that’s intersting I wonder how the drug can be both anti-viral and relieve parkinsonion symptoms, I wonder how it works in the brain? I’ll just take it, I can’t feel anyworse than I do now”

I keep taking it over the weekend and my condition steadily improves. Yesterday I almost felt normal but today I felt a sore throat coming back, so I popped another “quicke.” Tonight I need to sit down in front of my computer and do some work for an exam later this week. Nothing to hard, but it needs to get done. Instead, I’m flying over the internet like a mad man unable to focus on one thing, at the same time I feel strangley tried and wonder if I shouldn’t just go to bed.

In one of my random jaunts across the internet I decide to see how Amantadine actually works, i.e. it’s pharmacology. So I find this nice little site. It tells me that…

“While the mechanism of action of amantadine in the treatment in Parkinson’s… is unknown, it is believed to release brain dopamine from nerve endings making it more available to activate dopaminergic receptors.

The thing about dopamine is that it’s not just related to Parkinson’s, Every addictive drug is also known “to release brain dopamine from nerve endings making it more available to activate dopaminergic receptors.” If this is true it almost guarentees that Amantadine has abuse potential. It also might mean that it has effects similar to drugs which increase dopamine, such as cocaine. This could explian my rapidly shifting thoughts. But it gets better..

“A small number of suicidal attempts, some of which have been fatal, have been reported in patients treated with amantadine. The incidence of suicidal attempts is not known and the pathophysiologic mechanism is not understood. Suicidal attempts and suicidal ideation have been reported in patients with and without prior history of psychiatric illness. Amantadine can exacerbate mental problems in patients with a history of psychiatric disorders or substance abuse. “[Don't worry, I'm not feeling suicidal, but thanks for your concern]

That’s nice to know, (it should also be noted that this same side effect is found with SSRI’s (e.g. Prozac), but are largerly underreported.) and not that I have been feeling suicidal lately, but I havn’t really felt myself these last couple days. Hell one of the side effects of this drug, was posting this long rambling piece in the first place.

So what’s the point of all this? You can get strange drugs in China (or america), just be prepared for the effects.

Check this out, it’ll read your mind

Someone emailed me asking advice on teaching in China, and I wrote this in response, I think it’s pretty good advice.

If you wan to teach in China there are a lot of options. First you need to decide what grade level you want to teach, you can choose from elementary school to teaching executives at a corporation.

Then you have to decide if you want to teach in a private school or a public one. You can get more money if you teach in a private school, but you will be teaching more hours than at a public one. I have also heard several horror stories of private schools failing to get visa’s for thier teachers and the teachers having to leave at the last minute. I would say public schools are safer and easier to be at than private ones. (I see your email address is at Macau, so maybe you know something about how china works, so you would know what to look out for.)

Then you would have to decide, where you wanted to study. To me Henan definitly seems like the “heartland” of China. What people talk about when they say, “the real china”. The people here are very nice, but I havn’t travelled enough to point out anything besides obvious differences between places, (people in Beijing are more sophisticated, etc.) I would have liked to be around some more natural beauty, mountains or the ocean or something like that.

Another thing, you need to decide is how large a city you want to go to. A larger city will have more foriengers, more people who speak english and more western conviences. Xin Xiang is not really that small, 700,00 in the county, but the city has the feel of a large town. It is easy to get around by bike, and you tend to bump into people you know. It is rather dirty, but the people are very nice and treat you like a celebraty sometime. This is another thing you should consider, In a small city, you will be stared at all the time and people will yell hello at you, this will happen much les in a larger city.

As far as my teaching conditions… they are allright. I dislike my books. One of them I never use. For half my class they never gave me a book and just told me to tell the students about “american culture,” by the end of semester I was running out of ideas. There is a room with a fairly sophistcated listening set up, where we can watch VCDs. I havn’t seen any OHPs.

The only qaulifications you need are a degree. Preferably a bachelours, but I met a 19 yr old teaching here with a two year teaching degree.

I didn’t really follow my advice at all when I came here. I just signed up with a program and went where they sent me. My only complait is that I don’t get enough money, but that is my fault for not shopping around. It is very nice to have an outside orginization, because if the school tries to pull a fast one on you, the people back in the states can threaten to blacklist the school.

I like Xin Xiang because it is easy to make friends here, there is a good amount of foriegners, (not to many and not to few) and I can learn chinese for free here. If you want any information about specific schools I can give it to you, otherwise you can check out http://www.eslcafe.com./ It has a bunch of stuff too. They will try to convince you that you need to pay to take a four week course to learn how to be a teacher, but i don’t buy that.