ivman's blague

With the opening of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing a week away, I thought I’d share some pictures of the landscaping that’s been going on around China in preparation for visitors from all around the world. Some articles that I’ve read have called this “greenwashing” - an attempt to purify the image of wide-spread pollution that many have in mind when they think of China. In any case, the results are spectacular and impressive, and the Chinese have shown great ingenuity and creativity in many of the preparations.

Here’s the Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium…

Now on to some of the gardens…

At the end of our time of teaching two years ago, we went to Beijing for a long weekend before returning to the USA. You can read about it by going to http://blog.ivman.com/our-final-days-in-beijing At that time we seriously wondered if Beijing was going to be ready for the Olympics, and we weren’t thinking about the landscaping! Those three days, we ate only in American chain restaurants - restaurants in which we seldom, if ever, eat here at home - McDonald’s, KFC, and Pizza Hut. Our reasons were not because we craved Western food; it was because we could not read Chinese and could not order without assistance in a Chinese restaurant where no one speaks English. What astounded us was that, even in the American restaurants, no workers could speak English! We pointed at pictures on a menu to place our orders! I’m eager to hear how things go this summer when thousands of tourists arrive, unable to speak or read Chinese.

The question is not only if Beijing is ready for the tourists, but also if the tourists are ready for Beijing. If they want some adventures, they could try some Chinese fast food sold by street vendors (not always the safest option available, from what we heard.) Too bad the food won’t be labeled as it is in the pictures.

We ate some interesting stuff in China, but I assure you we ate none of the above - and definitely not from sidewalk vendors! Are any of you game to try any of those delights?

new poll…

I’ve put a new poll in the sidebar - If you could attend the Olympics in Beijing, would you do it?

quotation…

“God’s small group discipleship program is the family.” - Dr. Drew Conley

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Rob

Taste makes waist.

Tags: China, food, gardens, Olympics

We have friends whose daughter in Kindergarten has been giving them fits lately with things she should not even be using. One day recently she painted her legs with nail polish, getting some on the carpet. Today she wrote on the wall of her bedroom with lipstick. As I was looking through my files recently, I ran across something I hadn’t read in years. It came to mind when I heard about our friends’ daughter’s misdeeds. I pass it along for your amusement.

Household Principles For Children - from Lamentations of the Father, by Ian Frazier

LAWS OF FORBIDDEN PLACES

Of the beasts of the field, and of the fishes of the sea, and of all foods that are acceptable in my sight you may eat, but not in the living room.

Of the hoofed animals, broiled or ground into burgers, you may eat, but not in the living room.

Of the cloven-hoofed animal, plain or with cheese, you may eat, but not in the living room.

Of the cereal grains, of the corn and of the wheat and of the oats, and of all the cereals that are of bright color and unknown provenance you may eat, but not in the living room.

Of quiescently frozen dessert and of all frozen after-meal treats you may eat, but absolutely not in the living room.

Of the juices and other beverages, yes, even of those in sippy-cups, you may drink, but not in the living room, neither may you carry such therein.

Indeed, when you reach the place where the living room carpet begins, of any food or beverage there you may not eat, neither may you drink. But if you are sick, and are lying down and watching something, then may you eat in the living room.

LAWS WHEN AT TABLE

And if you are seated in your high chair, or in a chair such as a greater person might use, keep your legs and feet below you as they were. Neither raise up your knees, nor place your feet upon the table, for that is an abomination to me.

Yes, even when you have an interesting bandage to show, your feet upon the table are an abomination, and worthy of rebuke.

Drink your milk as it is given you, neither use on it any utensils, nor fork, nor knife, nor spoon, for that is not what they are for; if you will dip your blocks in the milk, and lick it off, you will be sent away.

When you have drunk, let the empty cup then remain upon the table, and do not bite it upon its edge and by your teeth hold it to your face in order to make noises in it sounding like a duck: for you will be sent away.

When you chew your food, keep your mouth closed until you have swallowed, and do not open it to show your brother or your sister what is within; I say to you, do not so, even if your brother or your sister has done the same to you.

Eat your food only; do not eat that which is not food; neither seize the table between your jaws, nor use the raiment of the table to wipe your lips. I say again to you, do not touch it, but leave it as it is.

And though your stick of carrot does indeed resemble a marker, draw not with it upon the table, even in pretend, for we do not do that, that is why.

And though the pieces of broccoli are very like small trees, do not stand them upright to make a forest, because we do not do that, that is why.

Sit just as I have told you, and do not lean to one side or the other, nor slide down until you are nearly slid away. Heed me; for if you sit like that, your hair will go into the syrup. And now behold, even as I have said, it has come to pass.

LAWS PERTAINING TO DESSERTS

For we judge between the plate that is unclean and the plate that is clean, saying first, if the plate is clean, then you shall have dessert.

But of the unclean plate, the laws are these: If you have eaten most of your meat, and two bites of your peas with each bite consisting of not less than three peas each, or in total six peas, eaten where I can see, and you have also eaten enough of your potatoes to fill two forks, both forkfuls eaten where I can see, then you shall have dessert.

But if you eat a lesser number of peas, and yet you eat the potatoes, still you shall not have dessert; and if you eat the peas, yet leave the potatoes uneaten, you shall not have dessert, no, not even a small portion thereof.

And if you try to deceive by moving the potatoes or peas around with a fork, that it may appear you have eaten what you have not, you will fall into iniquity. And I will know, and you shall have no dessert.

ON SCREAMING

Do not scream; for it is as if you scream all the time. If you are given a plate on which two foods you do not wish to touch each other are touching each other, your voice rises up even to the ceiling, while you point to the offense with the finger of your right hand; but I say to you, scream not, only remonstrate gently with the server, that the server may correct the fault.

Likewise if you receive a portion of fish from which every piece of herbal seasoning has not been scraped off, and the herbal seasoning is loathsome to you and steeped in vileness, again I say, refrain from screaming.

Though the vileness overwhelm you, and cause you a faint unto death, make not that sound from within your throat, neither cover your face, nor press your fingers to your nose. For even I have made the fish as it should be; behold, I eat it myself, yet do not die.

CONCERNING FACE AND HANDS

Cast your countenance upward to the light, and lift your eyes to the hills, that I may more easily wash you off. For the stains are upon you; even to the very back of your head, there is rice thereon.

And in the breast pocket of your garment, and upon the tie of your shoe, rice and other fragments are distributed in a manner wonderful to see.

Only hold yourself still; hold still, I say. Give each finger in its turn for my examination thereof, and also each thumb. Lo, how iniquitous they appear. What I do is as it must be; and you shall not go hence until I have done.

VARIOUS OTHER LAWS, STATUTES, AND ORDINANCES

Bite not, lest you be cast into quiet time.

Neither drink of your own bath water, nor of the bath water of any kind; nor rub your feet on bread, even if it be in the package; nor rub yourself against cars, not against any building; nor eat sand.

Leave the cat alone, for what has the cat done, that you should so afflict it with tape?

And hum not the humming in your nose as I read, nor stand between the light and the book. Indeed, you will drive me to madness.

Nor forget what I said about the tape.

COMPLAINTS AND LAMENTATIONS

O my children, you are disobedient. For when I tell you what you must do, you argue and dispute hotly even to the littlest detail; and when I do not accede, you cry out, and hit and kick. Yes, and even sometime do you spit, and shout and do other blasphemies, and hit and kick the wall and the molding thereof when you are sent to the corner.

And though the law teaches that no one shall be sent to the corner for more minutes than he has years of age, you may be an exception!

quotation…

“My obedience to God is not based on my level of comfort with what God has told me to do.” - Steve Ridge

=^..^= =^..^=
Rob

If we are to better the future, we must disturb the present.

Tags: children, dads, family living, food

A regular contributor to the Greenville Journal is a man named Barry Ray whose column “Barry’s World” reminds us a lot of the style of Dave Barry. One of his recent columns about back-to-school trauma was hilarious. I searched high and low to find it online somewhere, but to no avail. I wanted to put a link on my blog to the column. Finally I decided to write to the e-mail address for Barry Ray to ask him if I could get a copy of his article somewhere so that I could put it on my blog. Within a couple of hours I got a nice reply that stated, “I am planning on putting some older columns online soon. Right now, the Journal likes being the only source and putting them online would hurt subscriptions, I suppose. I have attached a JPEG of the column for you to use on your blog. Keep reading and thanks!”

And so with Barry’s permission I’m placing the picture he sent me below. What you see below is a picture of a printed page, and so the quality of the print is not the best, but it’s definitely worth the extra effort to read this one!

***
A few weeks ago my wife Becka saw a restaurant review in the Greenville News that caught her attention. One of the reasons was that the reviewers all gave the restaurant high marks - a rarity indeed! So our little team who taught in Asia last year went there with our friend Ruth as a farewell before her return to Asia. We all enjoyed our meal very much, proclaiming we’d definitely be eating there again. The food was scrumptious, beautiful and plentiful, and the entrees ranged mainly from only $7 to $10.

Last evening Becka and I returned there for dinner and were dismayed that we were the only customers during our meal. We would hate to see this place close its doors! The restaurant is Vietnamese, and it is as authentic as you can get. It’s a family-run restaurant, and everyone who works there is Vietnamese - unlike some of the local Chinese restaurants with Spanish speakers doing the cooking! With delicious food and a dining area that is clean and pleasant, there’s no reason this place shouldn’t be packing in the people! …except that I don’t think they have much of a notion at all about advertising. As a result, other than the review in the paper, they get customers only by word of mouth or from people happening by and wandering in.

updated 20 Oct. 2007: I’ve learned that the restaurant has closed its doors. Very sad.

Below is their business card. Too bad they didn’t make it. Thanks to all of you locals who tried it out and attempted to give them more business.

quotation…

In reference to teachers … “We are not just data merchants.” - Dr. Dan Olinger

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Rob

If the #2 pencil is the most popular, why is it still #2?

Tags: food, rants, school, shopping, students, teaching

our long weekend in Beijing

After getting settled in at our hotel and freshening up, we went exploring the area around our hotel to find a place to eat dinner. We found a Pizza Hut that looked great to us - a place where we could order for ourselves and get food we recognized! We were amused to see a phenomenon that Ruth had told us she’s seen at other Pizza Huts - people stack melon neatly around the edge of their salad plate to make almost a bowl in which they can have a bigger salad than would ordinarily be possible. I pretended to be taking a picture of my wife to capture the scene below. I wonder if the woman knew I wasn’t really taking a picture of Becka….

Saturday evening we took in an acrobatics show - Cirque du soleil. Incredible! If you ever get to Beijing, this is something you *must* include one evening! The kids looked like they ranged from maybe 9 or 10 years old through the young 20s. They did flips, mounts, juggling, balancing, and all sorts of other feats. Still pictures cannot adequately convey the marvels we saw, but that’s the best I can do until you see a show yourself. Below is a picture of some boys who juggled three hats each. Each hat is a different color or design so that the audience can better see what they’re actually doing as they juggle the hats off and on their heads. After doing flips as they juggled and even juggling from person to person in a line, they did a mount. Each level of boys was juggling the three hats from head to head in one direction and from one boy’s hand to the next boy’s hand in the opposite direction to keep the supply going.

One routine was boys climbing two poles, flipping from one pole to the other, flipping or sliding down the pole and catching themselves just before hitting the floor. Here’s a shot of four boys who were holding themselves in place with their thighs.

The finale of this act was three boys hanging from wires with one or both feet, each one having around his neck a strap from which another boy was hanging and spinning around.

Not all of the acts were fast-moving athletics. One was a girl who could balance umbrellas on feet and hands. I struggled with envy as I considered how much trouble I have sometimes controlling just *one* umbrella with both hands! Below is a picture of the girl on her back, balanced on the feet of the boy on his back on the floor. If you can see the umbrellas well enough to count them, you’ll see five!

Towards the end of the whole program was an amazing group of girls on bicycles. First some girls rode in a fast circle around the stage.

As their act progressed, other girls came out and jumped onto the moving bikes. Then the riders would switch positions while moving. Then the number of bikes diminished as more and more girls jumped onto one bike.

But we learned that that was not enough! They finally ended up with about a dozen girls on one moving bike.

Sunday morning after a sumptuous East-meets-West breakfast in our hotel (we decided that our breakfast would become one of our main meals of the day since it was an all you care to eat buffet included in the price of our rooms), we went back to one of our rooms to listen to an mp3 of one of our favorite speakers from back home. Afterwards we set off by taxi to visit the Temple of Heaven. We had heard that in this place where the emperors worshipped the One, True God. I have not yet studied this place sufficiently to know all the of biblical symbolism that it includes. Some of the parts of the Temple of Heaven that we would have liked to visit were closed for refurbishing, a common activity in Beijing right now with the recent influx of foreign tourists and in anticipation of the 2008 Olympics. What we could see, though, was beautiful - it had already undergone refurbishing. Below is a view of the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests.

We went inside to inspect the Hall of Prayer more closely. Here’s a shot of Yvonne and Jean on the steps on the way up.

Upon closer inspection we saw the great beauty of this temple.

The inside of the Hall of Prayer is equally beautiful.

In addition to the famous ancient cypress trees, we saw some interesting trees that we called “camouflage trees.”

After our visit we went to some shops to the east of the Temple of Heaven. The sign in front of one shop we passed caught my eye with its “Buddhism stuff” advertised. Seemed a bit lacking in reverence….

On Monday we visited a small part of the Great Wall called Badaling. It has been refurbished and was quite impressive. We learned that the Great Wall is 4,000 miles long and that some parts of it are crumbling badly. I’m sure that those parts are not readily accessible to tourists. Since it was raining, the weather was cooler and there were probably fewer visitors. But also the rain made our visit rather unpleasant and climbing the wall more difficult. Below is a picture of my wife and a “hole in the Wall.”

Because of the altitude, rain, and angle of the sidewalk, the three ladies ran out of steam in short order. I climbed a little higher and could have gone on, but from any place I could see little more than from where I’d already been. To continue on would have been selfish of me since the rest of the group would have been just standing in one place under umbrellas. Here’s a picture of the ladies. You can detect the angle from the way they are standing to remain upright.

On Tuesday we flew back to the good ol’ USA. Our flight from Beijing to Chicago took us over Siberia, the Arctic Ocean, and Canada. From my window seat I saw a *lot* of uninhabited (uninhabitable?) land and the cracked ice on the Arctic Ocean. Below is a picture of the ocean below.

The climate below our plane was a stark contrast to the tropics where we had lived and taught for three wonderful weeks!

Tags: arctic, China, entertainment, food, travel

People sometimes ask me how I choose what to send each week. This week’s thought process was really quite complex. For those of you interested in getting into ivman’s pysche a little, here ya go….

Today’s iv is the coming together of three threads of recent life here. The first is that my middle school class just finished watching Princess Bride on Monday of this week. They *loved* it! The boys loved the action and adventure, and the girls were really tuned in to the “true love” theme in the movie. The second inspiration for the sending of this particular iv is that on Monday evening I tried eel at a restaurant. Eating eel reminded me of something in my files that mentions eel. (By the way, the eel was quite tasty, and I would order it again.) Come to think of it, one of the scenes in Princess Bride was waters infested with shrieking eels, so maybe there’s even more cohesion to the inspiration than I had thought! In fact, I’ll treat you to a picture of the eel before I enjoyed it.

The third reason was actually the thing that originally brought the thing in my files to mind. Last week at the apartment building next our ours we saw a blanket hung out to dry that was emblazened with AMORE in huge letters. (For those of you from Rio Linda, “amore” is Italian for “love.”) Today’s iv is a number of variations on the song “That’s Amore.” Some are better than others, but hey, I didn’t write this! I don’t know who did, but several of the variations indicate it could have been a Canadian, eh?

That’s Amore

(the original wording…)
When the moon hits your eye
Like a big pizza pie
That’s amore.

When an eel bites your hand
And that’s not what you planned
That’s a moray.

When our habits are strange
And our customs deranged
That’s our mores.

When your horse munches straw
And the bales total four
That’s some more hay.

When Othello’s poor wife
becomes stabbed with a knife
That’s a Moor, eh?

When a Japanese knight
Used his sword in a fight
That’s Samurai.

When your sheep go to graze
In a damp marshy place,
That’s a moor, eh?

When you ace your last tests
Like you did all the rest
That’s some more “A”s!

When your boat comes home fine
And you tied up her line
That’s to moor, eh?

When on Mt. Cook you see
An aborigine,
That’s a Maori.

Alley Oop’s homeland has
A space gun with pizzazz,
That’s a Moo ray….

A comedian-ham
With the name Amsterdam
That’s a Morey.

When your chocolate graham
Is so full and so crammed
That’s s’more, aye?

When you’ve had quite enough
Of this dumb rhyming stuff
That’s “No more!”, eh?

***
Yet another time of mixed emotions is fast approaching! We’re in our final week of classes here at Hainan University. Our classes have been very enjoyable, and we have grown to love our students. Parting truly is sweet sorrow. This Saturday morning we fly out early for Beijing where we’ll spend several days. While there we hope to visit several places we’ve heard are quite nice in the city, as well as taking a day trip to see the Great Wall. On Tuesday, Jean will fly to Cambodia to spend two weeks with her daughter and her family who live there. The other three of us will fly back to GSP, via Chicago, seeing the Arctic Ocean on the way. It’s weird that, if our plane is on time (and why would we *ever* assume that?!), we will arrive in Chicago timewise slightly before we left Beijing. (Things that make you go, hmmm.)

I will not be going online again after this Friday 6:00 p.m. (Greenville time) until I’m back in my home again. So please do not send anything from July 28-August 1 to which you need an immediate answer, ’cause you won’t get one! I sent a quick email to our kids from Beijing when we arrived, and it ended up being a pretty pricey “service” of our hotel. I’ll forgo that amenity this time around.

quotation…

“What we do shows what our heart desires.” - Dr. Randy Jaeggli

=^..^= =^..^= =^..^=
Rob Loach in Greenville SC

Invertebrates make no bones about it. (After some of our dining adventures here, I’d say that maybe invertebrates merit further consideration.)

Tags: China, food, puns, travel