Wo bu shi laowai, Ich bin ein Ausländer! (I am not a foreigner, I am a foreigner!)

Good morning and greetings from Munich, Germany!

That's right, I made the big move and have relocated to Deutschland.

More to follow. Here's a shot of yours truly in the Marieplatz in front of the Neues Rathaus with the Virgin Mary in the background. (No, not the girl with the backpack--the gold statue sitting by my right ear.)

More to come!

Man sieht sich später!

Links Update

I’ve been doing some housecleaning since I decided to make more of an effort to keep the blog going, and one of the first things I did was to update the “Links” over there on the right.

First up, I’ve added a link to my Facebook page. Now, you may be thinking, what’s a middle-aged dorky white guy doing with all the cool kids on Facebook, but to tell you the truth, it’s a pretty neat site. A lot of my Ningbo pals started adding their pages last summer, and I’ve found it’s a good way to stay in touch with them and keep up with what’s happening in my second hometown. I’ve got a lot of pics posted there, too.

Speaking of pics, the second link is yahoo’s new site for posting photos. I’ve been a yahoo user since way back and, inertia being one of my favorite forces, haven’t changed my ways. (Although gmail isn’t bad). Right now I’ve got pics from my trips to the Badaling and Jinshaling-Simatai sections of the Great Wall up there, but I’ll be posting more of the sights of Beijing taken this fall.

Just to show you I am sooo 21st Century, there’s also a new link to all my YouTube videos.

If you’ve tried to access Chuck’s website lately, you may have run into a little trouble. He’s told me that he’s working on setting it up on another server, so I’m not sure if it’s alive or not. I’ll get the 411 on that and make the necessary adjustments.

I also reset the link to the photos of Denny’s trip to China in 2006. The new link should take you directly to the album set up on Snapfish.

The remaining links will take you to individual videos posted on YouTube. The first six are mine, including the newest one of Cathy’s first day of rollerblading. The last two were made by my buddy JP showing, like the title says, the faces of Ningbo. If you look at the second one, around the 1:10 mark, you’ll see two of Akron’s favorite native sons. BTW, head over to YouTube and check out the rest of JP’s vids. He’s got some talent and made some creative stuff. Plus he’s a fellow CWRU alum.

Hope you enjoy them all.

P.S. Check out that groovy portrait in the upper right-hand corner.

Cathy Learns to Rollerblade

Sorry about the lag time between posts here. Don't know which of you have heard the news, but Cathy and I moved to Beijing last September. I'm teaching at the Beijing University of Chemical Technology on the northeast side of town. We've seen a lot and done a lot here, and I'll fill you in on that later. For today though, I just had to show you Cathy's latest project.

She's been wanting to try rollerblading for a long time. Last year, I promised her a set of skates, but never got around to actually buying them for her. So yesterday, she surprised me by picking up a pair herself and then taking a lesson. She was so proud of herself, as am I. Here she is showing off for me for the first time.

Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

I promise to write more often. Stay posted.

Remember John

Strawberry Fields, Copyright 2003, 2007 Curtis P. Stranathan

It is Sunday, December 9 here, but back home it is still Saturday, December 8, 2007, 27 years since John Lennon was slaughtered outside his home in NYC.

I remember the moment I heard the news that day, but I had not encountered any tape of the announcement being made by Howard Cosell during a Monday Night Football game. Until today. Here is a video that starts with the announcement:

Warning: it may bring back painful memories in an unexpected way. At least it did for me.

And so it goes.

I probably should be doing more of this thing, writing about topical items that occur that catch my attention, and I’m a bit sorry that I’m doing so on the occasion of someone’s death, but I was touched by the death of Kurt Vonnegut. (Here’s the NY Times obit which I highly recommend.) I was touched by his books, his writing, his thoughts too, as I’m sure most of you reading were. I once had the opportunity to see hear him speak, and to be honest, I can’t remember a damn thing he said. (I also had the chance to hear Jorge Luis Borges speak and can’t remember a damn thing he said, either.) But he (and Borges, come to think of it) was just like his picture and his writing. A lot of times you see someone famous in person and think “Hmm, he doesn’t look like he does in his picture,” but Vonnegut did, with his hair and his cigarettes and his glasses and rumpled clothes and his crankiness. I always wanted to write like him, he seemed to be able to do it with ease and to make it natural and true. Living through the firebombing of Dresden will do that to a guy, I guess.

The other person whose death touched me recently was Molly Ivins. I loved her wit and charm and ability to turn a phrase and her sexy-smokey Texas voice. The fact that she was so often right about what she said was a bonus.

I will miss them both.

Do me a favor, go read a book (or two) by either one of them and have a beer and think a good thought of me. Here’s a little advice from Vonnegut for you from "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine":

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ "

So, have a beer, read a book.

And be kind.