summertime and the livin's easy

Hey, nerds. Time is seriously flying by in the bay area...can you believe it's already summer?! It sorta slipped my mind since it's not 159° here like it is in the central valley, but THEN today I was looking at events nearby and saw that the San Mateo County Fair starts this weekend. County Fair season = true beginning of summer.

I've been doing a lot of random whatever recently, including, but not limited to going to Baker Beach with Tater Tot:

Buying myself flowers for my desk at work:

Watching "Movies that Don't Suck":

Getting my Jeep stuck in a hole after trying to pass a car by going over a center divide (2 cops, 1 tow truck, & an hour and a half later...my car was free...all the mud is from the tires spinning when I put it in 4 wheel drive in an attempt to get out of the hole):

Meeting Twin's puppy Marshmellow, (Mel, MM, or my favorite "Buddy" for short):

And, oh, y'know, just graduating from graduate school:

I'M DONE!

WITH MY GRADUATE COURSEWORK!!!

....until February. Still, it feels pretty awesome.

china update

Okay, so my header has proclaimed that this blog is the "mis-adventures of a redhead in China" for over two months, yet all I ever seem to talk about is my dog and baking cupcakes. So, I thought a China update was long overdue.

Currently, I am NOT in China. I'm still in good ol' California. I had two months of summer school to prep me for the coursework I'll be teaching and studying while abroad and then a three week break before my departure to the land of Mao. I have about six days left in the states, my plane takes off from SFO on Sunday August 24th.

For those of you who don't memorize every bit of information I put on this blog (oh, for shame!), I'm a graduate student working towards a Master of Arts in International Studies with a concentration on International Education. Part of the program includes taking part in an internship, for me that internship is a teaching position with an international high school. I will be teaching some type of humanities coursework (won't find out exactly what until I get to China) and it will be in English. I also have to complete a research project as part of my master's thesis while I'm in China.

I will be living in the Pudong area of Shanghai, which is on the east coast of China. The high school where I will be teaching is a boarding school so I will be living on campus with other teachers as well as students. Pudong has a big ex-pat population so I won't feel completely lost and alone, thankfully. Just to give you an idea of how HUGE China is, Shanghai alone has a population of over 20 million people and it is also the largest port in the world.

I know approximately four sentences in Mandarin, including "Hello, my name is ____", "Thank you", "My stomach hurts", and woah...guess I only know three sentences. I did take five weeks of Mandarin language courses, so I have a very basic knowledge of the language and know a handful of words and characters, but I plan on doing most of my language learning overseas.

I'm very anxious about the big move. I've had butterflies in my stomach for the past week just thinking about it, and nearly had a panic attack when I started to pack up all of my clothes. I'm flying over there with two other friends from school which I am SOOOO happy about because I think I would freak out if I landed in the Shanghai airport all alone and had to navigate around China after a 16 hour flight by myself.

superlatives make my stomach hurt

I know "superlatives" isn't exactly a word you see in your every day life, but every time I do see it I always think it says "superlaxatives". Isn't that weird? "Superlaxatives" isn't even something real, so why do I have such a mental block when it comes to that word? Maybe it's because I was co-in charge of my high school yearbook's superlatives my senior year and I have horrible memories tallying up votes for countless hours.

One of the coordinators for my grad program thought it would be a good idea to create a yearbook for this year's cohort, and of course you can't have a yearbook without having superlatives. The categories were mostly inside jokes (our creepy research professor won "biggest flirt") and I ended up winning "most likely to be stalked by a Chinese man". I guess they have a thing for redheads, which is convenient for me. I had my fingers crossed for "most likely to wrestle a panda bear", but a guy won that one.