Inconvenience strikes

This week has had a string of inconveniences. None of them rise to the level of disaster, they are just inconveniences.

The first inconvenience of the week was just that I was still having a problem finding a place for a haircut. Part of the reason that I went on my ride last week was that I was looking for a barber; I never did find one.

Pictures of my lunch being prepared in Diagon Alley, this doesn't really fit the narrative. However, I decided to throw them in.

On Monday Collin was struck by, what he considered, a great inconvenience. His bicycle was stolen. There is a fence between our apartment complex of eight buildings, and the main campus. The gate, which is nearest to us, is a bicycle, and motorcycle, blocking gate. Most of us have gotten in the habit, in order to avoid riding to the main gate or lifting our bicycles over the pedestrian gate, of leaving our bicycles in a parking lot on the campus side of the gate. This parking area is the one that I have already shown in the domino effect picture. This is the parking area that Colin had his bicycle stolen from one night.

The single thing that makes bicycle theft reasonably easy is the locking system in use here. There is nothing solid to lock the bicycles to. The most common type of lock is a wheel clamp that puts a bar through the back tire, making the bicycle impossible to ride. All of the other bicycle locking schemes also involve some method of immobilization of the bike. However, there are no bicycle racks that would provide solid attachment points. As such, it is possible for a person to pick up the bicycle and walk off with it and work on removing the lock in his or her own privacy and leisure.

As a result of this, I (really, Zeneta) offered to sell Collin my bicycle, the single speed, because I was looking for a bicycle with gears. Wednesday I arranged to meet up with Susan, the Chinese teacher who went with me last time when I got my previous bike, Michelle, Dez, and Lynn. We then left for town on the bus at noon. That is one good thing to say about the long lunch breaks, it makes it possible to do things during the day.

After arriving at the bike shop, we looked at what they have to offer. I think that everyone that is familiar with bikes is disappointed with the bikes here. The best that they seem to have is what we would consider to be department store grade bikes. They are, simply, not of the quality that we have come to expect in the west.

Pictures of the bike shop

We went to about three shops; they are all in the same district and within sight of each other. The first shop had what we wanted. However, being the shoppers that we are, and wanting to make an afternoon of it, Michelle and I went to all of the shops to comparison shop. We ended up returning to the first place and purchasing the bikes there.

As we waited for the bikes to be prepared for us to pick them up, Michelle, Susan and I went to a nearby café for lunch. By the time we were finished the bikes appeared to be ready; except, it turned out that they had prepared the wrong bike for Michelle. So, we ended up waiting a while longer.

After, finally picking up the bikes; the right ones, we headed off to a place that had some better quality locks. Collin and Brawnie had requested that we pick up some locks for them while we were out.

At that point, Susan had to leave us so that she could get back to the University on time for her classes. She had classes at 14:30, while my first classes were at 16:20. Susan gave us some general directions for getting back to the University and she then caught a bus. In china, the busses do not have bicycle racks like they do in the US; So, Michelle and I started riding back.

We tried to follow the directions that Susan had given us and had a very good time. We both knew that we were going in the wrong direction, we had agreed not to use the, "lost," word. However, we had plenty of time and were enjoying the ride. When we finally reached a point that construction blocked us from continuing in the direction that we wanted to go, not necessarily the right direction mind you, we asked a couple of police offices and they pointed us in the correct direction, it happened that they pointed us in the direction that we had just come. So, when we reached the next intersection, one we had ridden through a few minutes earlier, we asked the traffic officer there and he pointed us in the direction of the local Army base. We did not need to ask at the base, as we know where the Campus is in relation to the base.

The other inconvenience oft eh week related to the movies that I show. We, finally, finished Lord of the Rings last week and I wanted to do something very different. One of the other teachers, Michelle, recommended that I show Footloose. However, the theme and message of that film is just too far from what I am comfortable with. I did not want to play a film that was similar, in any way, to Lord of the Rings. In order to give the students a break fro the dark epics that I enjoy, I borrowed Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles from the other teachers.

I put this in the player in the projection room at the college and the region four of that disk refused to play. I would up telling the students that I would not be able to show a movie that night. To say that they left disappointed is a bit of an understatement. That was also the day that Collin had his bicycle stolen and he had come to sit back, watch a movie, and forget about how his day had gone.

Wednesday was my next day to show a movie. I had decided to show A Beautiful Mind. It is a hard movie with a lot of concepts, culture, and vocabulary in it. However, I felt that it was a good one to do, for just those reasons (you have no idea how odd it feels to be standing in P.R. China teaching about the Cold War and the concept of The Red Scare).

I went to the room that I had been showing movies a bit early in order to test the equipment and insure that the DVD would play. I discovered that the reader would no longer read region one discs. I then ran around looking for a player that would work and found one. When I returned in the evening, with over two-hundred anxious students, I discovered that the computer was now broken and would do nothing but constantly reboot. I then went, frantically running around looking for a projection room that would play the region one DVDs. I finally found one; however, by that time, most of my students had wandered away disappointed.

More pictures of me with the students.