Hangzhou Lovin’

dude I think I’m gonna hate on living in china, cause like I got blogger and I don’t have an aggragtor thingy so like the I am saying c u l8er to those fools.

(no more posting late at night after procrastinating and eating bomb ass peanuts (mmmmm those peanuts are so fucking good! (but they make my belly hurt)))

mmmm, I got the hippest mp3 collection ever!!!!

check it out if you got soulseek me ming zi a2dafu

oh heres my address, inever knew it before but then i saw carl posted it on his blog

Carl Lorimer
B603/601 Teacher’s Residence
Zhejiang University City College
East Zhou Shan Road
Hangzhou, Zhejiang 310015
People’s Republic of China

but my name is Alf, not carl, but you can still send carl money and pornagraphy if you want. ** oh and my room is 708

A couple articles in the NYtimes got me thinking about free trade. The first one is about the effects of nafta ten years after it was put into place ten years ago. Though it trys to strike an even handed note, it’s pretty clear from the article that the only people being helped by NAFTA are the corporations.

Now I understand the argument for free trade. In theory poorer countries should be able to get higher wages and more jobs and rich countires should see the benifits of cheaper goods. This is what happens but only in a very broad sense. If you look at the GDP’s of mexico and the U.S. they have probably gone up because of NAFTA. But you have to break down who get’s the money.

In the U.S. it’s corporations and stock holders (i.e. rich people) who are getting the majorit of the profits. Labor’s share of these new profits is nill.

On the other side of the border the situation is much murkier. It is a race to the bottom as far as wages are concerned, countries like mexico losing jobs to countries like China. On the other hand you can see the definite benifits of free trade while living in China. Peole in China have real chances for advancement. At the school I taught at last year, the majority of my students came from farming or other low class families and they will improve their lot in life. This wouln’t happen without free trade.

On the other hand, there are still a shitload of sweatshops in China,* and conditions there are not very good, the workers rights always bending to the wihes of the overseas investor. China has almost infinite reserve of cheap labor, meaning that if labor continues to have no rights they will hav no bargining power to bring up wages. People in the big cites will continue to have their lives improved while the countryside festers.

I have no idea how to fix this, as far as the U.S. is concerned, it plays into who ever can effectivly play a populist platform. Unfortunatly I think this favors GW because he can play the nationilist card and the american population is pathetically uninformed (not because they are stupid, because they are over worked) (note that GW is focusing his campaign on AM talk radio).

*i wish there was a way i could see the effects of sweatshops more easily, but in the cities you are rather shielded from the general effects of them. You see migrant workers doing construction or landscaping and there are a lot of beggars, but on the whole chinese people i know have comfortable lives. I proabbly don’t see the sweat shop workers cause they are working all day…

yahoo is messing up and I havn’t been able to get at my email this weekend, so If you emailed me (and I know all of you did…) just put a message on me blog, cause i can’t read me mail.

Xiao Mei hooked me up with SoulSeek, a kick ass file sharing program, so I am now addicted to stealing music…

One of the hottest things i found is Cody ChestnuTT, this crazy ass soul singer (he is on the roots track - the seed) his album The Headphone Masterpiece, it’s a kick ass sly stone-esque brick of a record, but with songs like “bitch I’m broke” and “batman vs. blackman” you know it’s a winner…

My friend fee wrote me this great email about his crazy adventure in germany about monkeys and fox’s and stasi (oh my!), this is all I could come up ith in return, but i wrote it so here it is.

here is something that happened last night, I was watching a dvd (dvd’s being less than a buck here I tend to do that a lot) and some of my students called me (me being an english teacher…) and wished me merry christmas, (at least I think it was my students because all the said was “merry christmas” followed by some thunderous giggles and me hanging up the phone.) When you give your mobile number out in china you have to expect random calls.

Then they call again and I don’t really feel like talking to them (seeing as I avoid social contract with them like i would a SARS ladeen bangkok brothel!). So I give my phone to my friend and he talks to them, which is basically just him telling them that he is not mee and them cackling.

After that I think it is all over but then, the student messages me and says sorry, she thought it was her teacher alf’s phone. She thought she had the wrong number. So I sms here back and inform her of the circumstances. She then gets it in her head that my friend is my gay love toy (at least that’s what I think she said) and starts asking me questions about what it is like to be gay. these messages are all in chinese, A great chance for me to practice! also there is the thrill of sending communicating with someone when you are not really sure what the hell is going on.

So we go back and forth and i tell her that gay people can be in commited relationships and the joys of male sexual bonding. In the end I had to let her down by informing her that I am not gay, though some of my closest friends are(c). I kind of wish I had told her I was gay it would be hilarious to start that rumor at our school. But in the end at least i helped add a little understanding to the world.

As you can see I have changed the site to reflect the change in the color of The Warning Level. I hope that this will be useful to everyone. We should support our goverment in giving incredably vague warnings about terrorist threats, represented by incomprehnsible changes in a disembodied color state. We all have to do our part to fight the al Saddam “frenchy” bin Laden.

My house is alive. really, I went on a biological buying spree lately, adding to my beatiful try i bought a little flowery bonzai kinda thing called mei hua in chinese. It’s supposed to be rare and cool and is is the best of it’s type, it only flowers after the spring festival so I ave to be patient. I also got an ornamental orange tree and a four foot bamboo grovr in a pot. Amanda bought me some weird bulbs that we cut in strange shapes I guess they will grow into flowers.

To top it all off i bought a lizard. i think it is an austrialian two lined lizard, but I’m not sure, it’s coloration is different from the picture. When I bought it the guy first said “from austrialia” in chinese, then when he decided I couldn’t understand him he strated saying “china long” (long means dragon) and laughing, so I wasn’t sure if it was from china or down under. i finally found him something to eat, (which is tasty meal worms!) this was after two days of him not eating so I am pretty excited. He hates people now, because the gf was torturing him, but she will soon grow to love him, he is very cute.

I will get pictures up soon as I get off my lazy ass.

Well this was probably a boring ass post, but I am rather proud to be the caretaker of so mny living things. Hopefully only a few of them will die….

In other news I had a visit by my siter nora and her two good friends meridel and gina. They all stayed in my place which made it rather cramped but they were fun to hang out with. I hope I was a good host despite being sick for most of their visit here. I got to practice a lot of Chinese taking them around. It really made me remember how hopless I was when i first got here. I have made strides in at least being able to get around fairly easily. I also got to see Hang Zhou from a tourists perspective and frankly as far as western tourists go, there isn’t that much here. Sure west lake is nice, ling yin temple is one of the better temmples around (why do all chinese temples have to look the same?) and the tea villages are fun, but I don’t really understand why it is the number 1 tourist spot in the country.

Oh yeah, that reminds me. The other day I had one those “why is china so stupid” moments, th first one I’ve had in a long time. It was around 6 and me and the women were trying to find a taxi. But in Hangzhou, the taxis all change there shifts right around 6. This means that you see lots of empty taxis that you try to flag down, but just don’t stop, or they stop, but only take you if you are going in the right direction (thy also change shift about 6-7 in the morning, i.e when you need to catch a train).

This is fucking stupid. First of all it is an idiotic business practice. Rush hour is the busiest time of the day, it is the time that taxis can make the most money. By having empty cars waisting time changing shifts during this time is like throwing money away. Move the shift change to 3-4 or 8-9 and you will make a shit load more money and you won’t have a lot of pissed off custumers.

Which brings me to my second point if hangzhou wants to present itself as a world class tourist destination it hasto get rid of idiotic shit like this. It is very frustrating to be trying to catch a cab and see open cabs drive past you without even a glance in your direction. Worse yet is when a cab stops for you tell the driver your destination and he refuses to take you there. In fact this happened to my sister and her friends and they had no idea what was going on. they thought that maybe the drivers didn’t want the trouble of picking up white girls. Seeing as how Hang zhou highly values it’s image, it needs to change shit like this.

Pictures coming soon.

Maybe The american people deserve George W. Bush if they are going to keep being bigoted fucks.

Strong Support Is Found for Ban on Gay Marriage

I would hope that the democrats would try to turn this around and show how bush is a slave to ultra right wing social conservatives, but my faith in the american people being able to look beyond “the bible says it’s wrong” is very low.

Just trying to help a brother out

Stupid Dems shouldn’t be shooting themsleves in the foot. Dean goes and says something that might not have been very politically smart, but that is true none the less.

“the capture of Saddam Hussein has not made America safer”

Then the other democrts get strat attacking dean on this statement and are saying that it shows his inexperience in foriegn policy, of course “Bush, but jewish!” Joe Lieberman is the worst saying

“If he truly believes the capture of this evil man has not made America safer, then Howard Dean has put himself in his own spider hole of denial,”

Don’t the democrats realise that these attacks on dean only help Bush. The democratic nominee is going to have to attack bush’s policy in Iraq. They aren’t going to win if the run as bush light. Running to the right of Bush on foriegn policy would probably be the best thing, criticising bush for not being tough enough in A-stan, Iraq and the fight on terror. Dean did excatly the right thing, the democrats should be pounding home the fact that we are not safer because of bush’s policies.