Off the Calendar...Connected and Disconnected

Soooo....apparently it's Easter weekend. I don't know what to say...I guess I didn't see it coming.

Honestly--I remembered St. Patrick's Day, I remembered my mom's birthday, I remembered the first day of Spring...but Good Friday and Easter...EASTER...I somehow missed. ...Easter!

It wasn't until a good friend here called yesterday to make sure I could make it to an Easter dinner this Sunday--and like an idiot, I had to clarify..."this weekend, you mean? Easter is this Sunday???"

It bespeaks a certain disconnection with the world, my former life, the Ch-ch Calendar, Lent, all of it...this ignorance of the upcoming Easter. Usually this is a sacred season for me--the rebirth present at Spring, the fasting and discipline of Lent, the solemnity of Good Friday and the feast of Easter. I love it--it's so much better than Christmas--because with this season we can actually be fairly certain of the date and the time frame of everything that we're celebrating--plus, Easter is what it's all about. Easter is the light that we bask in luxuriously as we reach and stretch out of our falleness towards the Kingdom. Easter is the source of our Hope. EASTER.

And I forgot it.

So, what, you may wonder, have I been doing...that so consumed my time, thought, energy, memory...so as to sever my connection with the roots of my heritage???

Well...uhhhh....I've been gorging myself on YouTube clips of Conan O'Brien, Letterman and Ellen; downloading way too many random songs from iTunes; catching up on the routines of my favorite stand-up comedians, reading the New York Times critics' reviews of my favorite movies and tv shows (it's what I do to relax), reading the commentary on the primaries, watching clips of Obama, subscribing to The Daily Show via iTunes (around 8 p.m., the previous days' episode is ready for downloading), pursuing random "how to" searches on Google (how to: begin running when you hate running, defrost frozen meat, dye my hair blue, prevent osteoporosis, make italian red sauce, register for an absentee ballot, make oatmeal from scratch, make a bed with hospital corners, choose quality pearls, speak with a british accent....the list goes on and on...), and even going old school with some quality time on homestarrunner.com.

In short, I've been connected to high-speed internet.

For two weeks (...or has it been three???) I've been connected to a brand new, personally installed, DSL line that I paid to have put up in my apartment. Our contract requires that the school provide us with internet access--but what they provided was essentially slower than dial-up and was shared with the computers in all of the students' dorms--so that during hi-volume hours, it slowed to such a crawl that I was spending 30-40 minutes just to open one email. I couldn't use Skype and was dependent on calls from the States made with others' Skype credit or with phone cards (Tim is a saint for all the phone cards he's bought over the past 7 months). It finally became much more time and cost efficient for me to pay personally to have my own private line installed from the internet company.

It really has been sooo much fun to be so reconnected to the web-world--and for a while I allowed myself some glutton/binge-level abuse of my new line. Now I have to reenter CHINA and start regulating my time a bit more--which is helped by the fact that with the protests happening a few provinces over, YouTube and several other of my favorite websites have been completely shut down by the Great Wall--so that limits my access to some things as it is.

So as I try to return to life as usual in China--I thought I'd share a few pics of what I've been up to while NOT surfing the wonderful web. Happy Easter to you all!

Around Wuhan:
The trees are all blossoming

The Motel in this picture says "Smile Motel." When I saw that hot pink looming above the filth and destruction--I just had to jump out of my cab and get a picture of it!

Sara Foster, Me and Danny Bateman on a night out in Wuhan.

Hi! I'm Sally Homemaker! Ingredients for my homemade Italian red sauce (...but not the brocolli--that's for my honey-glazed, sesame sauteed brocolli).

The results of my 2nd attempt at making my homemade sauce--it turned out pretty good this time!


National Tree-Planting Day: similar to our Arbor Day--except that in the US, we don't systematically round up all the foreigners and bus them out of town to camps...er...uhhh...I mean..."Friendship Forests" and force them to do the manual labor of planting trees on an eroded hillside. This was one PR stunt that I didn't so much enjoy...had to wake up at 7 on my day off and go join other foreigners to plant trees so that the news stations and papers could have something to present for the day. This is me and Yana--one of my coteachers--with shovels in hand.

Notice the forced smile as I hold up one of my trees.

One of my many lovely classes! They're so cute!