Where is Nathan??

Well the world hasn’t come to an end, and there haven’t even been that many fireworks. I must say I’m underwhelmed. Well I was at one of our local bars for the opening ceremonies and I was certainly not underwhelmed by them. I was actually very impressed.

China wisely stuck to its guns and delivered on what they do best. Massive crowds performing in perfect laser accurate synchronization. Acrobats in mind blowing costumes attached to strings and flying through the air. Larger than life calligraphy. And plenty of fireworks. I must say I was very proud of the opening ceremonies, I thought they were the perfect Chinese story. Like I said thousands in perfect harmony is what we’re about over here, and the synchronized lighted drumming made for a very impressive show. And then the hundreds of men and women in boxes rising and falling to form the the character for “peace” (和), in ancient forms and then in simplified told of the transfer from old to new that China has been experiencing in the last 30 years. But what did it for me was the crowd of children dressed as the 55 other ethnic groups of china carrying the national colors of China toward the massive flag posts at the other end of the field. At the very end of the field representatives from the PLA take it from them, hoist it high, and it perfect two step carry it the remaining 20 feet or so to run it up the pole. A sad beautiful poetry in that, but very very fitting.

I have been keeping up with the medal race, and it seems to be a battle between the ol’ USA and the great motherland. I love and respect China, but for my own sanity I hope everyday that ‘Merica will pull ahead and spank the crap out of China. Humility is something the China could always use more of. The only problem is that America could always use more humility also. But I guess I have to go with the lesser of two evils here. I’m not saying America or China are evil. Lets be clear on that. I don’t need this site blocked.

The very first day I started out by watching women’s 10 meter air rifle shooting and 48K women’s clean and jerk where (if you haven’t heard by now, I know I sure have) Chen Xiexia dominated the competition by putting up 117K. Think about that for a second. That girl wieghs 104 lbs and she lifted 257 lbs above her head. That’s like me lifting 435 lbs above my head. Much like Chen Yun, I’ll bet she likes weight lifting.

I’m watching right now as Zhang XiangXiang has just won China’s 4th gold medal in a weightlifting competition and I’m thinking to myself that the stem cells and gene therapy has really paid off for China this year.

We got mad amounts of rain this weekend. I was told it was due to the typhoon that tore through Taiwan and into the mainland. But in the wee hours of Saturday morning the manhole covers were blown off by the amount of water in the drains (I don’t have pictures of that). But we did get to play in it for a while.

So back a while ago my friend Leif had his phone stolen and was telling me about it in Castle bar after he noticed my Motorola L6. He said that he really like my L6 and wanted to know where he could get one. I told him I had bought it two years prior when I first arrived in Hangzhou but I had seen them around for about 500 or 600 yuan. Wanting to upgrade my phone I offered to sell him my phone for 300 yuan and he accepted.

The reason I sold it was because ever since I had seen the L7 I wanted to upgrade. With the mini-SD card for storage moving pictures, ring tones and other kinds of files was much easier. And my friend Jason had recently purchased an L7 for around 700 yuan. So I went to the phone market and found a used L7 in decent condition for 500 yuan, thus purchasing a phone for 200 yuan. As I suspected I was very happy with the L7, it worked just as well as my L6 but creating ring tones, wallpaper pictures and other stuff was much easier.

So when I lost the phone about a month ago I wasn’t very happy. I was on my way to a friends house in the back of a taxi and pulled my phone out to call him when we arrived and I thought I put the phone back into my pocket. About an hour later when I reached into my pocket to check the time I found out it was missing, and when we tried to call my number we got the “phone is powered off” signal. That could only mean one thing, and this is I would never the your phone again.

So over the break I had an important decision to make, do I sink some money and get a good phone or do I buy a crappy phone for $10 and wait until I get back to the US to buy a fancy phone? Well after 2 days without a phone my imagination began to get the best of me and I decided to have no limit and no budget and buy whatever phone I wanted.

I looked at a lot of phones. I won’t take you through the whole thing, but it was terrible. There are a lot of phones out there.

Anyway, I landed on a fantastic phone. The Nokia N82.

Let me just say this, 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss optics and Xenon flash, 802.11b/g wireless card, 3.5 mm audio jack, stereo speakers, Symbian OS v9. Now I suppose you can find that stuff on lots of phones, but what surprises me every day the software. With my L7 I was using Motorola Phone tools and it kind of sucked. And wasn’t free for download. But Nokia PC Suite, Nokia Photos, and Nokia Maps are free from the Nokia site and so far work nearly flawless.

I’m probably going to talk about this later, but I’ve got to prepare for classes in the morning. Guess what? 5 days ’til the Olympics!!

My desk, ready for another year

Well, I haven’t posted in a while. And that mostly has to do with me being lazy and trying to first finish up the last term. Then after it was over I wanted to make sure that I enjoyed my very short vacation as much as possible. And now I’m two weeks into the new year and I still haven’t posted. Or Tweeted. Or … Facebooked. But a lot has happened and I will tell you all about it. Just not right now because I have to go to class in about 20 minutes and I have not idea what I am going to teach. Something in English I think. I hate teaching English.