Not much new recently. I just bought a camera so you can all expect to see more pictures coming from me. I will upload them to the gallery. The link is found on the the side of the page near the top. I will take pictures of all sorts of things just so that you can see what I’m talking about when I try to describe it over here. I uploaded some pictures from the Lantern Festival that was on Wednesday. I ended up having to send a video to regina and the upload was really slow. Since we had to wait for the upload to finish to be able to confirm that someone in regina received it we had to wait. It was going to take 3 hours or so, so Emma said that we could go and enjoy the festival. Lily took us to a really cool restaurant. She said something like it is a “fast food” chain in Taiwan. I thought the food there was really really good. Lily ordered some of the best food I have ate in China so far. There were some different types of dumplings. The one dumplings tasted like peanut butter in the middle and were in a soup type of stuff. I really enjoyed them. There was also some other food that was all really good. I was going to take pictures of everything but didn’t think of it till the food was almost all gone. After we finished eating we went to a big park in the downtown region of Jinan. I think its called Silverplaza or something. I am not quite sure. Its a huge park area. Underneath the ground at the park is a huge shopping mall. Since it is the Lantern Festival there were so many people here. I imagined that there would almost be as many people in this area as there are in all of Saskatchewan. It was that full!! It was also funny, people would be saying “hello” and I would say hello back. One person bumped into Nathan (he thinks for sure on purpose) and said “I’m so sorry”. It was really funny. I wanted to take a picture to show the huge number of people but I wasn’t able to pull my camera out in the crowd to get a good shot. I did end up taking some pictures of some boats in the moat type thing. As well as a picture of a huge statue thing that represents a spring, I believe. After we were done at the festival getting a taxi was really fun as well. It probably took us 15 minutes to get a taxi. Overall it was a really fun night. I also took some videos using the camera but they didn’t turn out that awesome. Since we were in a car moving at night they don’t really show a lot. You can find them at http://www.demyen.ca/china/video/ The AVI files are the better encoded ones so it would probably be better to get those. Just right click on the file and save it to your computer. That usually works best. Well it looks like the end of holidays and festivals for a while now. At least until May, then another long week off work. I’ll keep trying to update often although I prefer to update when I have interesting stuff to say.

Well after a week off of work for the Spring Festival holiday I returned to work on Wednesday. It seems strange to take time off work to celebrate a holiday I don’t normally celebrate. I guess it’ll come back to haunt me though. I doubt they celebrate easter so I imagine I’ll be working on good friday and easter monday. Work has been interesting. I haven’t really done a lot of work so far. Mainly it has been checking over documents to make sure they are good. This task is very reminiscent of proof reading. Something I didn’t do all that much back in school. I haven’t done anything to do with computer science though. That could change though as soon as some projects get started.

The holiday was interesting. On the eve of the holiday I ate supper with some people who work in the kitchen. There was dumplings which I guess are traditional of this holiday. They also taste really good. After we ate we just sat around for a long time. They barely spoke English and I could barely speak mandarin. It was rather interesting. At midnight we went onto the roof of the CVIC building and watched fireworks. I must say I have never seen fireworks like this before. There were fireworks going off in all the directions around you. If I was blind I would probably be thinking it was a warzone and we were getting bombed. I doubt I would ever see anything like this in Canada. It’s also probably the first time a lot of people there saw anything like it as well. Since fireworks have been banned in China for a long while now. I think someone said 20 years but then someone else said over 10 years. (This was tuesday night). The next item up on our holiday was Friday. On Friday Nathan and I went with Barry, David, and Cynthia from work to goto a festival type thing at Daming Lake. It was a lot of fun and I enjoyed it. It reminded me of going to the exhibition but a lot less rides and a lot more of vendors. We went on the bumper cars, the ferris wheel, the flipping thing, and the roller coaster. All of them felt safe and were a lot of fun. Although I think I might have been too big for the rollercoaster because the looping made me hit my face on the side above the padding. It didn’t hurt and I was ok though, so don’t worry. After the rides we went walking along the lake festival. There were a lot of food vendors and people selling all sorts of stuff. Many of them are traditional chinese items. There was a lot of other stuff going on as well. Some magic shows. some performances, some rides in a carriage thing, and some weird games. We missed it but there was cock fighting. I am pretty sure that kind of thing is illegal in most places in the world but I guess its not in China. The only food I ate at this place was some sugar coated fruit on a stick, some cotton candy, and some lamb on a stick. It was all tastey and alright. After we were done walking around we went out for lunch. For lunch we had hotpot. This is where everyone sits around the table and puts the food into the pot in the middle to cook. There was a lot of food and I really liked it. The other time I had hotpot it was each person having their own pot; this time it was one big pot split into two. I ended up sitting on the spicy side of the pot. It was good but after a while my mouth felt like it was burning from the amount of pepper I was eating. After we ate lunch we went to Karaoke. This is quite a bit different from Canada karaoke. Here there are smaller rooms designed from like 10 people. Each group gets the room to sing in. I thought it was a lot of fun but the selection was pretty terrible. We decided to switch locations after about an hour because the service wasn’t very good. So we went to a better location and it was really nice. I didn’t really like singing the songs they had but I thought I better keep singing because they seem to think I’m good. Now, I’m not sure if they are saying that because they have never heard a white person sing in person before or maybe they were being nice. I also pretended to sing the Mandarin songs. I would sing all the characters I knew and it was funny for me. Some songs I might get to sing like 10 words. The only english songs they seemed to have were stupid boybands and celion dion. So I ended up singing some backstreet boys, and my heart will go on. I was trying not to laugh when I sang that last one. I gave it my best celion dion voice. After we finished Karaoke, we went for barbque. This was really really good. It is basically meat on a stick for the whole meal. We ended up eating a lot of lamb and . . maybe called cartildge .. and only 1 stick of beef. The beef is more expensive. For a drink there was beer. It was a different brand than the Tsingtao but it tastes very similar. I would definitely recommend “barbeque” coming to regina. Although, I’m sure the price would be increased dramatically. The next day now, Saturday, Cynthia and Barry are going to take us out for pizza. We went to a small restaurant to get the pizza because it would be cheaper and more convenient thatn Pizza hut. They were really slow and kept making excuses why the food was being delayed. Oh well it was really good tasting and I enjoyed it. After the food we hit the streets and bought ourselves some fireworks. They were really fun to play with. My favorites were the high exploding loud ones. We lit them off on a not so busy side street. Another one of my favorites were the firecrackers. They were extremely loud. I’m sure some people from Canada would be mistaking them for gun fire.

That was pretty much the end of my outings on this holiday though. After that I spent the most of my time sitting around the apartment relaxing, watching tv. For food I ate mostly instant noodles. Although on Tuesday, I went to the cafeteria and got some food. That was really interesting. They had a written menu I got to choose from to pick what to eat. . I wasn’t able to make out anything. I am able to read some characters that are written perfect but this was like reading someones handwriting in English. I ended up going with the one thing I knew, mi fan. So I got some rice and then they made us some other dishes. I think I would like to call them surprise dishes. They ended up being not bad. The one that I remember was tomatoes and eggs. I really liked this one.

On Wednesday I installed the Chinese language thing so I can type the characters on my keyboard. This is really cool. You better watch out though. I might just send you a message on MSN in chinese next time.

I just thought I better give an update. It is actually past the two week mark but its still close enough so this is my Second Week Update. My second week here went very smoothly. I haven’t really done much work at work yet. I will occasionally be helping with the English translation of documents and as well I also have the English training to do with my co-workers. Overall though its isn’t very busy. I am also spending some time trying to learn how to read and speak Mandarin. I’d have to say my progress is going quite well. Mainly in part to the Mandarin I learnt in elementary school. Some people seem surprised when I can partially tell what they are talking about.

Now onto the food. During the last week was what can basically be called the pre-spring festival day. On this day, Tuesday, there was a whole lot of fireworks and firecrackers going off. Also there is some tradition, or something like that, that says you have to eat dumplings. So for supper Barry, and David from the office took us for some dumplings. They were really good and I very muchly enjoyed them. We ordered the dumplings and the other dishes at the company eating hall. On Wednesday for supper, we got invited to supper by Lily. We ate a whole bunch of different things with one of her friends, Carol, from school. They picked out a bunch of really good food. My favorites were the Lotus vegetable things and also the celery. I really like celery. To drink we had TsingTao(sp) beer. It seems to be the most popular brand over here. We got the food in a restaurant a small walk away. Then on Thusday, we got invited by Kevin and Nancy for roast duck. This was again a really really good. I think it tasted somewhere between chicken and turkey. I would definitely recommend this to anyone. Again, we drank the TsingTao beer. This time a little bit more though. I’m going to say around 2 bottles. Nowhere on the bottle does it mention the alcohol percentage, and when I ask anyone who is with us that speaks Chinese they don’t seem to understand what I’m talking about. So I’d have to say its just regular beer. We ate it in a restaurant about 15minutes away by taxi. At all the meals there seems to be a lot more food than all the people could eat. I’m always ending up way overfull after I’m finished eating.