Tinted my car today. I went in at 9 and they finished around 12:30, which was really surprising because Erica took her car in at 8am and they didn't finish until 6pm. Tints aren't that dark, but I think 50-35 is not a bad choice. The car isn't totally black but it does help block off some sun and heat which is exactly what I need it to do. Now onto the tires..

Live and learn. If anger was a person, motivation would be his twin.

First reunion with Shanghai friends - success. I was expecting to do a level 4 rapids river rafting but we did a level 1 instead. We just baked in the sun. It was relaxing. Nice to catch up, but didn't go to far on the fun bar.

He studied abroad and kissed a girl. The girl broke up with him and fucked another guy. What the fuck was she thinking? Guess she couldn't wait. Fuck it. He said he's glad it went out that way because now he knows what kind of a person she is.

Laughed, cried, loved - it was a good day.

Life right now

Separation challenges relationships. They say distance sharpens love, but that is only through affirmations and reassurance does that happen. It’s a strenuous balance that if not maintained with contribution from both sides, could fail easily. Couple that with mistrust, betrayal, a feeling of being taken for granted, failure to think clearly and send the right messages, things will come tumbling down. It’s hard to fix and impossible to mend with an ocean in between. It seems that time will tell all. No use dwelling on something not in our control. It’s sad. It’s a sad sad situation that cannot be fixed. Like a train running off its tracks. No use worrying that it’s going to crash, you can only try to minimize the damage and hope for the best.

Orphanage

Today I went to the orphanage. I woke up at 645 and called a bunch of people. I have never had to/gotten so many calls in 5 minutes before in my life. In the end, it came down to 3 people. Alyssa, Eric, and me. At least not everyone flaked on me this time. We grabbed some lunch and met at the meeting spot at 8am. We didn't get moving til like 8:15 because they had to figure out how to arrange the people on the buses (we had 2 buses). We went through the city, then the scenery starting looking less urban, then it became really rural.. murky streams started appearing with stained houses and the roads starting becoming broken pavement. We finally got a bridge where the bus couldn't pass because it was too narrow/small/dangerous so we all got out and walked from there. I felt like I was in the middle of nowhere.

As we rounded the corner and entered the orphanage, we saw a dog that was really rabid. It was snarling like crazy and was quite scary I must say. I later found it that he belonged to the orphanage. The place turned out bigger than I expected. They had a big court area where one side was play structures and basketball courts while the other side had crops and geese and chickens. It was nicer than I expected, that's for sure. The first task we had to do was rearrange the chairs in the hall to create a stage and audience. So we did that and then starting bringing the kids down from the second floor. The kids all had these like "uniforms" on. It was similar to the forearm things that some people wear to avoid getting their clothes dirty, except this one was over their whole front body. The kid I picked up was kind of big so both me and Eric walked him down. His legs weren't working too well, they were wobbling and looked like they had barely any muscle control - as if they just got out of a coma or something. So we took awhile to go down the stairs and when we reached the bottom, the "father" of the orphanage just lifted the kids from under the armpits and placed him in a chair. Me and Eric just stood there looking baffled because we didn't know that they were crippled and couldn't walk. I guess because both of us was taking one arm, we didn't realize that it was actually the other person pushin the kid along and not the kid's legs at work at all. So after that whole fiasco, we got the rest of the kids down and then they started their program. It was basically a big talent show with the kids doing all sorts of things including dancing, singing, sign language + singing, magic tricks, story telling, cup tricks, yo-yo demonstrations, piano playing, etc. It was pretty cool. That took up the whole morning. We had lunch afterwards and then split up after lunch to start the volunteer work. The boys were outside and girls were inside. So Eric and I went to help King. We started by picking up misc. trash behind the building then moved on to cut and resize big branches into little tied-up piles for firewood. We did that for the rest of the afternoon. It was really hard work because the sun wasn't out. So the damp weather made the branches a lot harder to snap. To top it off, we had 2 blunt saws and 1 broken hatchet for the whole group of us (10). The hatchet was a piece of steel with a hole. Then the shaft was made from wood and just jammed into that hole -_-. We didn't even have a hammer. It was pretty sad. But then one of the guys went and got it secured with nails and stuff and it worked after that so that's good. it was a big job. We apparently got these branches by trimming the trees outside the gate so Eric had to stand on the wall, cut the trees, and hold on for dear life. It was definitely an experience to say the least. After cutting trees we took a long break and then went to interact with the children.

The children were in a room and there were volunteers playing with each one of them. Some of them couldn't really understand anything you were saying to them, one was literally having a conversation with his hand. He looked at his hand and talked to it and laughed periodically. It was crazy. A lot of them couldn't even talk and some didn't seem like they understood what people were saying to them.

It was sad. I was sad to see disabled orphans. It was really sad that I couldn't talk to them, or even really interact with them for that matter. I couldn't ask them about their life, I couldn't make any connections with them. I only sat there, stared at them tranced into their worlds, and wondered what is going to happen to these kids when the grow up. Who is going to adopt these kids? I found out that the kids get put into this "fair" when they're 18 and basically it's a fair where different factory reps come recruit these kids for simple labor tasks. That's a really sad life ahead of them and I was just so disappointed that I couldn't even listen to their stories.

On the other hand, I was really happy that even in a city where the standard of living isn't very high, there are good people in the world giving these kids a place to call home.

Church

First of all, my apologies to Chantal for forgetting that I had church today.

It was a really tiring day. Full of ups and down. I felt uplifted, bored, tired, hungry, embarrassed, hopeful, scared, depressed, and cocky. Felt it all today, so let me start to tell you about my day at church and fellowship with my cousin's good friend King Lam.

I woke up around 8:50 and scrambled to get ready to leave for church. I had a schedule to keep, I was supposed to meet up with King at the metro station near the church because he lives near the station and offered me a ride. I was supposed to meet him at 10am and it was already 9:10 when I left my dorm. I had a feeling I was going to be late, but that apparently didn't stop me from getting breakfast at Lilian's (Macau bakery). The doors to Lilian's opened at 9:30, which was about the same time I got to the plaza where the station was so it a quick detour. I had a portugese egg tart and a sponge cake for a total of 6.80 =D awesomeee. I needed to transfer once to get to my destination and it was a pretty long ride. Longer than I expected, I kept looking at my phone for the time. After transferring lines, I realized that I was low on batteries, probably due to the subway, so I gave King a call and turned my phone after. The church has this technology that blocks phone service inside so he went ahead to save me a seat. After arriving, I got scared because I realized that I needed my passport to go to church and I didn't have it. I didn't know what to do because King was already inside and there was no way of contacting him. I panicked, but found out that we didn't need it after all (strange, I really thought Chinese people couldn't practice Christianity? Iono anymore..). I was 8 minutes late and it was a full house so I didn't have time to look for King. I didn't even know what he looked like so I just sat down and went through service for 1 and a half hours. The sermon was delivered first which I thought was interesting. It was a woman and she was LOUD. She was VERY ethusiastic, especially at the parts that praises God for saving us and loving us. She really worked the crowd, they seemed like sheep to me, nodding and muttering Hallelujah. After the sermon we sang songs and did regular church stuff. There was no offerings though, however, which was interesting because this church is definitely not government funded...not my problem I guess. So after service I met up with King. I was wondering what he'd look like up til now and judging that this is a Stanford grad who left the States for Shanghai for 6+ years...I didn't really know what to expect. He turned out to look kinda nerdy. Like...really into academia nerdy lol. Not that it's a bad thing, he wasn't bad looking or anything, it's just an observation. So after exchanging hellos, I hopped in his car and we drove to a cafe. Apparently, he owns part of this cafe and he was ordering take out so we could feast at someone's house and then have bible study. King was really something else because he is super Christian, works in Shanghai, speaks really good Mandarin, owns part of a restaurant and it seems like everyone from church knows him. Pretty crazy stuff. So we got food and went to someone's house (the food is amazing btw, it's all foreign food like Italian and American [they have popcorn chicken lol, pretty awesome to own a restaurant like this in Shanghai I must say]) After getting to this person's house, we set up the food, sat around in a circle, said our prayers, started eating and introducing ourselves. There was a couple from HK, a Korean guy that married this Chinese lady who was 6 months pregnant already, and the rest looked like Mandarin people. So I introduced myself and I was really embarrassed because I was the only one who couldn't speak Mandarin really well. But it's church people, so of course they were really accepting and stuff. I really felt out of place because not only was I the only one who couldn't speak, I was the only one in my age group - a lot of them were married, some adults, and some small children. During introductions, this little girl who was really cute said she was full and pushed her bowl to King and then ran into the bedroom. So then King takes the bowl and pushes everything in it into my bowl and tells me to finish it. I was really shocked because I wasn't expecting that from him haha but the food was pretty good so I wasn't complaining I guess. After lunch we split into guys, girls, and kids and did bible study. I didn't really understand what we were talking about during bible study. The scripture in Mandarin is extremely difficult for me to understand because I have to translate it from Cantonese in my head and even then, bible lingo is hard to understand in Canto. I had to really struggle to pay attention to catch maybe 50% of what they were saying. I got kinda bored here because once my mind starts to wander, it really wanders and I get sleepy because what they're saying sounds so foreign that it just puts me to sleep. After that long session, I got to know the guys a little better and got to practice my conversational Mandarin with them which was great. I really liked that part because no one in that group could speak English that well so I was forced to use Mandarin (King led the little kids group). After bible study we went to play basketball and tennis. The canto dad was taller than me, at least 6'2, and was actually really athletic. I was scared when he drove it to the hole though because he's not that young anymore and he looked like it was straining. The guys we played were part of a team, and they were really short but pretty good shooters and screeners. They used their teammates to creates space between them and their defenders to get some room to shoot and it worked for the whole like hour that we played. I was just like whatever because our guys weren't a team and I wasn't expecting to play well as a team so I just stuck to guarding my man and not helping out with the defense. King was on my team and he wasn't that great but he has the hustle, the drive to win. I got a blister from playing cause I was wearing chucks, sigh. It hurts lol. After basketball a group of us had dinner together and it was "practice English" night since I was there lol. So I spoke mostly English just for them to hear and kind of try to interpret. It was sorta like a game, I would say things and they would consult with each other then ask King if they interpreted it correctly lol. So after we finished eating, King asked me to tell the group "how I found Jesus". I was a little hesistant to answer because this group was super Christian and I was feeling a little uncomfortable telling them about my family. They didn't seem like they were going to budge so I ended up telling them about my story of Cameron House and my parents divorce. I told it and I felt the pity go around, but I didn't know how to alleviate it because King seemed really concerned for me and they wanted to pray for me. So we prayed and it was the longest prayer I ever had. Everyone spoke for like 5-10 minutes. Apparently their church has this service where they text prayer requests to this one person and she texts it to everyone so every member of the church can pray for them and stay connected, I think that's pretty cool. They all also talked about me for a little bit and when I heard King repeat my story, I felt the tears come up. He kind of extracted my reasoning for going to Cameron House, I didn't even tell him why I went. I just told them the story and left out the meaning of things. He said that it was the stable part of my life during high school and some other things and it made me think about my parents a lot. When it got to the 3rd person, I had tears and I didn't know what to do. I've never teared in front of people I met on the same day, I'm sure most people don't either. But I was, and I was really shocked at myself. I guess it's hard to not when everyone keeps talking about me and telling me that I made it through the hard times, and how it has shaped me to be the person I am today.

I wasn't ready for that prayer. I didn't see it coming. I feel uncomfortable being around these super Christians because they pray all the time and seem like they want to convert me. On the other hand, I had a good time, it's a good place to practice my Mandarin, I get to see the other half of Shanghai which is pretty nice actually, and I like the people. I don't want to talk about my family anymore though. I haven't talked about it with anyone since I told you. Even when I have to deal with my parent's shit, I don't think about how I'm actually involved because I'm focused on them and the problem at hand. It's a little depressing to look at it altogether right now. I'm worrying about everything now and the problem is that I don't have a solution for this problem.

Dear Chantal,

I love how you wrapped my cookies in pairs with ceramic-wrap =] It helps me allocate how much I eat and lets me eat it even when my hands are dirty. I'm running out though =\ sadness. At least I have your lotion still. It's one thing to say that it'll remind me of you and another to actually miss you and then put it on.

Today we had a 4 hour orientation for Stepping Stones. It was a pretty fucking long orientation I must say. It was interesting and stuff, but it was just really long and dry.

We were taught how to be a teacher basically - positive reinforcement, getting the kids attention, dealing with behavioral issues, etc. Then we had a French beginners lesson where we learned how to count to 10 and say hello, my name is blah, what is yours? It gave us a little insight on how elementary the lessons should be, how much girth to actually include in a lesson, hand gestures, and different types of punishment and reinforcements. It was pretty informative. The program requires us to go to the migrant school once a week or bi-weekly. So it's not too bad in terms of time commitment, but it's just a little frightening because I never taught academia to children before, I only taught them how to play games and small activities. It reminds me a bit of Cameron house in that sense, but totally different because I don't know the culture and can't use a lot of references that I otherwise would use back home. Seems like I was there the whole day, but I'm glad I went. I want to give this a try, I think it'll be a really rewarding experience.

On a side note, I had dining hall food today and it's really good actually. It's not that expensive either so it's now the number 1 place I eat at. I started to look at my budget and it's starting to get tight.. =\ We have to travel to the migrant schools and because we're volunteers, they don't help subsidize any of the travel expenses. So it's about 80RMB each week for this program in terms of travel costs and that kind adds up. I really want to be able to save a little money to help pay for your ticket Chantal, if you are able to come. I really hope you can come

Well here I am, blogging.

I guess what I want to say first is that I really miss you Chantal. It's really lonely when I'm alone in my room. It's cold inside and outside and it makes everything cold. There was one thing I wanted to tell you but I never got around to it.

I wish I held onto you longer at the airport. I wish I could have etched a more intimate last image of you. I felt my tears swell up inside after hugging my mom and when it got to you, I felt like I was going to break down crying if I thought about it anymore so I didn't let myself. I closed myself off. I had to close my thoughts of you when I was waiting in line, I had to close my thoughts when I was on the plane. I just kept thinking about the things I needed to do and how to take care of myself when I arrived in Shanghai. It wasn't until I got to the room that I thought about everything I left behind, including you. I read your letter and it made me smile. Like you said, letters are something special. It's so personal and I reread it from time to time. It makes me very sad to even write about this so I'm not going to write anymore because I really miss you right now.