Halfway Point

Peter and I keep this list of things we should or want to blog about. The list is getting long and we never seem to have the free time to compose the witty detailed accounts of our life in China that I know you have come to expect from us. So, for now, we will have to settle on an update. If we wait until we have time to write 10 polished articles to post, you will never hear from us.

So, we are halfway through our time in China. We have a nice long semester break for Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year, and while we are enjoying our time off of school, we still manage to be incredibly busy. Many of our friends were only here for one semester so we have said goodbye to four friends in the last week and while a week's worth of going away parties has kept our social calendar packed, it has also put us in a bit of a funk--that all good things must come to an end sort of feeling--and we can't help but look ahead and wonder what on earth we will do when we leave China in five or so months. Peter will be teaching English at my university next semester. He wants to continue to expand his resume and the extra income will help us stock up for whatever comes next. This will be the first time we will be colleagues and I hope our working relationship will be as good as our personal one.

Speaking of work, Peter recently spent a full day working as an extra on a Chinese film set. He was a a member of a 1930s New York audience enjoying a Beijing opera performance. He was in the second row of the auditorium so we are sure to be able to spot him when the movie come out. Many of our friends and my brother went along as well, and while the entire experience was somewhat of a fiasco, they came away with many laughs, some fake facial hair, and a couple hundred RMB. The highlights were the Chinese men wearing women's blond wigs to make up for the fact that they couldn't get six hundred foreigners to show up to the shoot and when the make-up crew tried to take away Peter's real beard, convinced that they had given it to him (he lost his expensive mustache wig in the lunch buffet stampede). Pictures were forbidden, but Peter managed to snag this one of our adorable Colombian friends looking quite dashing (note blond Chinese man on the right).

I am enjoying my time off of teaching and am putting in a few extra hours at my travel job. I was recently commissioned to write a travel feature for a local English-language city living magazine due out next month, so now I can add a Chinese publication to my very short list. Peter and I will head to the Philippines next week for 10 days of beaches and jungles. We are very much looking forward to getting away from cold, soggy Shanghai. It's definitely time for a change of pace and I plan on eating my weight in mangos and getting back my tan which has been on vacation for years now.