Hey! What’s up cracker?

That’s the phrase I was greeted with by my Chinese teacher from last year in the hallway after I got out of class today. The students that she has right now spent a large chunk of time toward the end of class teaching her that phrase thinking it would be funny if she said it to me and they were very right. Hopefully she understands that you can’t say that to any old foreigner on the street…

In other news what is quickly becoming my favorite day of the year, November 14th, was again a great day this year. That’s right, it’s the day the heat gets turned on! I was pretty excited about it last year and this year even more so. And right now I’m thinking you can’t get too much of a good thing. I want to turn my apartment into a sauna.

In other, other news this last month I’ve attended three different weddings. Pictures are up and hopefully some write-ups will appear on here soonly.

Basketball

Chinese people, at least the 18 – 30 year old guys that I hang out with, are crazy about basketball. The outdoor basketball courts at the universities and sports stadiums are always packed with people, for many young males jerseys and high top shoes are the apparel of choice for going out, class attendance drops considerably whenever the Houston Rockets have a basketball game and even more when the playoffs are going on, during the Olympic opening ceremony some of the biggest cheers of the night came when Kobe Bryant and LeBron James’ faces were put up on the big screen. As a result, basketball vocabulary is probably the strongest area of my Chinese because it’s the topic that I talk about most often. A text I recently received from one of my friends sums up this basketball fervor pretty well.

Election result here. I vote that President: T-Mac, Vice President: Kobe, Secretary of Defense: Kevin Garnett, Speaker of the House: Shaq.

Not a bad lineup if I do say so myself, if only politics were more like basketball.

City Wall Marathon

On Saturday I ran in the Xi’an City Wall International Marathon. The marathon was held on top of the city wall in Xi’an, one of only two surviving city walls in China. Why they called it a marathon is lost on me because the distances available to run were 5km, 13.7km (one lap around the wall) and a half marathon.

I won’t go into the details of the race (who knew training for these types of things was so important?) but will say that I finished and despite not being able to walk normally today still think that it was totally worth it. Now I can check”run a third of a marathon on top of an ancient city wall in China” off my bucket list. If anything, the cool shirts they gave us to run in made it worth it right there.

Pictures here.