Skype

Skype is a wonderful thing. Last night we had a wonderful video chat with several former coworkers who are in various parts of America. This is a screen shot that our friend Syrena took while we were talking and catching up with one another.

From top left, clockwise: Beijing, China -Chicago, Illinois - Los Angeles, California, - Lancaster, Pennsylvania - Brookings, South Dakota - Portland, Oregon.

We were able to talk to all of these people at the same time for free. (Although it does require a trial version of an upgrade which will charge in the future.) When you can do stuff like this, you have to realize that at some point, we stopped living in the present and entered the future.

train tickets

We have an extra long break coming up for the observance of Spring Festival, a major holiday time. (think Christmas season) So a few of us decided to go to the ancient city of Xi'an for a while and take in the sights. Normally you can go and book your train tickets and then go. They don't have online booking or expedia for trains, so you have to physically go and book them. It's not usually bad....but apparently right before Spring Festival, it is.

My coworker Pip and I got to the train station ticket counter at 7, believing it to open at 8. At 7 the line was already about twenty yards and the temperature was a balmy 24 degrees. So we waited...and stood. And waited.

And stood.

And froze.

And waited some more

Around 9, I went back to the campus to grab some warmer clothes and clear some things up with the Chinese AA who told us to go there and I grabbed a thermos of hot water for Pip and headed back.

And then waited.

And stood.

And waited.

At 1120, we finally reached the front and merging both of our Chinese and gestures asked for hard sleeper tickets to Xian on the 30th of January.

The conducter told us that there were no more sleeper berths available but he could offer us Zhan tickets.

Pip: "zhan? zhan? what is zhan?"

Me: I don't know either....let me look it up. ah here we go zhan, third tone,...."to stand."

Wait....he's trying to sell us tickets to STAND the whole way there?

Apparently so....

I hate taking the subway across Beijing when its crowded for 20 minutes, and this guy wants us to stand for 12 hours across China?

So we left empty handed. We'll try again after Spring Fesitival, hopefully the lines will be shorter and the (good) tickets more plentiful.

next month

February is the biggest holiday month on the Chinese calendar, so as such I was expecting few (if any) students next month a more relaxed session. Wrong. Turns out it will be our biggest session in several months with around 300 students.

Update

Finally back from Europe. It was a great trip all around. I spent most of my time in Zilina, Slovakia with Darya, and then her and I took side trips to Bratislava and Trencin, as well as Ostrava in the Czech Republic. The scenery was absolutely fantastic. Castles, museums, art galleries and gorgeous snow covered countryside. I have a few pictures below, however over a hundred more can be found here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2012848&id=91300146&l=3a99725150

I came back to Beijing to find that we have a very small session, only a few dozen students, so I will be working along with others, to develop a Mandarin TIP. We had one last year but I missed it when I went back to PA, so this will also be a new experience for me as well.

Darya and I outside of a castle in Zilina

Trencin Castle

Vacation

For those who don't know, I am on vacation in eastern Europe. Normal posting, as well as pictures, shall resume when I return on January 7th.

Humbled by Henges

Every college or university has one. The ultimate cool guy. Girls want to be with him, guys want to be him, even professors love him. At my alma mater, Central, it was it was no different. His name was Josh Henges. He could have been an All-American at any state university, he had the Abercrombie model looks and the charm and personality that just gravitated everyone towards him, and yet he chose to come to Central to pursue a life of missions.
To me this was a huge deal. Here's a guy who looks like he just stepped out of a magazine and whenever he went around without a shirt, you were very conscious of just how much of a gut you were getting. You would need higher math to calculate the number of sit-ups you would need to do get a flawless torso like he sported effortlessly. By coincidence, I happened to wear the same cologne that he wore, and girls would tell me "you smell like Josh Henges." I used to double up on the cologne in hopes of attracting more female attention for just that very reason. He had all this and yet chose to come to Central, to devote his life to what God wanted for him. This blew me away at first as I could not comprehend why Apollo was choosing to come here, a 400 student Bible college rather than becoming the type of legend teen movies are based off at a state university.
He was very humble, always having a great sense of humor - and never believing he was any better than any of the rest of us. As time went on, we found out he was good at judo.
Very good.
My senior year at Central, he traveled to Australia to compete in some international competition. This made a lot of newspapers as a guy from Moberly was finally making news without it involving a police spokesman. As we graduated, I ended up in China and he ended up breaking hundreds of hearts as he got married and we gradually lost touch, keeping in contact sporadically through Facebook.
So this brings us up to tonight. Out of the blue he happens to randomly message me on Facebook and we talk for a bit. I find out he just won a world championship in judo at a competition in Ireland, after having won another competition in Germany. He is now a serious contender for the Team USA judo team in the London Olympics in 2016. To say that I'm honored to know the man is an understatement.
Then the conversation turns like this...(reposted here with his permission)

Dan: If you make the team, I'll be there. I don't care if i have to sell a kidney to get to London.
Josh: If I make it, I'll go halfsies to get you there. Out of all the people from Central, I'm most proud of you for what you're doing.
Dan: Thanks man, that's awesome. Why do you feel that way though?
Josh: You kept quiet, kept to yourself, got your stuff together and are kicking butt in the PRC.

Yeah, a guy from my tiny college who was the most popular guy to ever attend and is a world judo champion and quite possibly competing in the 2016 Olympics is proud of me.....I don't think I have been so thoroughly humbled and exhilarated in a long, long while.

Wild Swans

I just finished reading Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang.

It is quite simply, the best book I have ever read on modern Chinese history.

When I sat down with Wild Swans, I had no expectations but to be informed and entertained by what I hoped would be a good book. I read to gain a personal understanding of the world in which we live through accounts and examples given by others of things of past events. Never have I read a book that drew me in so powerfully and personally as Chang's Wild Swans. Wild Swans is epic in its historical backdrop moving untirelessly through the last century of China, roughly between the years 1911 and 1976, but this is no textbook. It's the story of the author Jung Chang, her mother, and her grandmother. It is through their lives that history unfolds and is exposed. From the end of Imperial China, through Japanese occupation, the Nationalist movement, the Civil War between the Kuomintang and the Communists, Communist takeover, Mao's Great Leap Forward starving tens of millions to death, the Cultural Revolution turning a national identity upon its head and breaking its collective spirit in the process, to Mao Zedong's death,I was constantly amazed at what I learned in this book about the capacity of the heart to perservere and triumph. I couldn't help but to feel ashamed at the provincial life we are handed in our land of freedom, and at once be thankful that we are so endowed. Jung Chang explores her family so deeply that her subjects, such as her stoic father, a true beliver in the Communist cause, and her grandmother, a veritable symbol through her bound feet of a time and place long gone, become indelibly etched upon the mind of the reader.

I would highly recommend this book to you. By the end of Wild Swans, you will feel you know China and Ms. Chang and her family intimately. If you have never been afraid to crack a book, let this fall into your hands, enter your heart, and enrich your life and in the end, thank Jung Chang for sharing her history (and the collective history of hundreds of millions just like her) with you.