Micah Sittig

In 2020 I worked on improving my mental health and it yielded a lot of improvement, but I still struggle with moving forwards sometimes. Inspired by Jason Kottke's list, these are some of the things that made me look forward to each day in 2021:

Podcasts: Marketplace Morning Report, The Water Margin Postcast, Topa Talk, 故事.fm, Out of System.

Youtube channels: Elevate Yourself, TronicsFix, Baumgartner Restoration, Dashner Designs and Restorations, Grian's Minecraft series.

Volleyball: Coaching for OVS and USYVL, playing with and watching Charlotte at Nordhoff and Rise, listening to Out of System podcasts, watching NCAA games on Youtube and in person.

Hiking: Been busy this fall with teaching, sports and being involved in four schools, but the prospect of getting outdoors still makes me wake up excited for the day. Highlights were Condor Trail section 1 with Chris, Pine Mtn → Piedra Blanca with OVS, and a short but epic jaunt through Mono Pass off Little Lakes in the Eastern Sierra with a great group of guy friends.

Teaching: I teach two subjects I love to kids who show me a lot of grace and kindness, with colleagues who support and encourage me.

My daughters: Each one unique, full of curiosity and creativity, deserving of my care and sacrifice.

Jodi: Stands by me at my lowest lows, pushes me to my highest highs. Waking up next to her each day is a privilege.

After many years of silence and spending most of my online time on Youtube, Facebook and Reddit, I'm peeking my head out to say that I've moved back to California, Ojai specifically. I'm married with three daughters, the oldest being in high school now. For work I'm teaching science and math at the Ojai Valley School, where I live with my family in faculty housing.

Also wanted to share that I've been playing a fun little game recently called Wordle. It's an online word puzzle game that you can only play once a day, so it gives me something to look forward to but doesn't take too much of my time. Here is a screenshot of today's (spoiler!) puzzle:

Another game I've been playing quite a bit the last few years is Minecraft. In terms of the user experience it reminds me of playing Lego with my siblings when we were younger; constructive, creative and collaborative. I've been playing less the last couple years because it really is a timesink, but it was fun when I had the time.

I wanted to document the process of getting (or not getting?) train tickets for travelling back to Hunan for the Chinese New Year in 2012. It's something that thousands of people do in Shanghai every year but not something I've heard talked or written about in English. Here's the steps so far, and I'll update as the process moves along:

• A few weeks before tickets actually go on sale, I mention to my coteacher Wendy that we'll both be buying tickets to go "back home" for the holiday. In our office, I am the only overseas teacher married to a Chinese and Wendy is the only local teacher who is not actually a local, but moved to Shanghai for her studies and stayed to work. Wendy and I chat over the details, which have been published in the paper (I get most of my Chinese news through the i时代报 and, now increasingly, through Weibo), of how tickets will be sold this year: for the first time, tickets will be sold online and by phone 12 days in advance. As in previous years, they will also be available fron train station windows and ticketing offices all over the city 10 days in advance. We promise to remind each other when the date comes.
• On Jan 3, two days before the tickets I want go on sale, I access the official ticketing website 12306.cn and create an account for myself with my passport information, which will be needed to buy the ticket. I practice searching for tickets to get familiar with the process because I know that it will be a race to secure tickets once they go on sale Jan 5 at 3pm.
• On Jan 5, I teach class until 3:25. By 3:30 I am sitting in front of my computer using two web browsers to access the website and my phone to call 95105105, desparately trying to book the tickets. It takes many attempts to get a connection with either method. I give up on the website, which is showing that there are no tickets left for the train I want, K137 to Changsha, and work the phone system to confirm that all tickets have been sold for Jan 16 and previous days. Wendy's husband is able to book their tickets through the phone system, probably because there are several trains that pass through her hometown. I call Jodi and we talk about possible alternatives, taking trains to neighboring cities and completing the trip by bus, or going to a "yellow bull", a ticket scalper she knows through a family friend.
  
• That evening, I stop by the South Railway Station for dinner and to check out the options as far as buying tickets from the station. I find that there are several optional lines going to Changsha, but they have not been called into service. I confirm that the station is only selling tickets for 10 days in advance, meaning that tickets for Jan 16 will be available on Jan 7, this coming Saturday.
• The next day at 3pm I'm simultaneously helping a student with homework and logging on to 12306.cn. I read in the newspaper that reserved but unpaid tickets would go back into the system 24 hours later, so I'm testing my luck for Jan 16 and also considering Jan 17. I have even less luck than the previous day, with the system being overloaded and not allowing me to log in. Eventually I get in, but the tickets are all sold. I notice that there are still lots of trains/tickets to Wuhan, which is about a couple of hours from Jodi's hometown by bus. Frustrated, I leave for an all-you-can-eat-Japanese department dinner at 5pm and Wendy asks me about the tickets. No luck.
• Saturday morning I wake up early (for a Saturday!) and head to the train station. I seem to have read that a large portion of tickets were reserved for sale at physical ticketing offices, as opposed to online/phone sales. I say "I seem" because my Chinese is not fluent, so my recall is not great and sometimes I miss subtle differences in the meaning of words. Anyways, I'm crossing my fingers as I arrive at the train station. The main ticketing hall posts a sign outside informing me that the hall is only selling tickets for 9 days in advance, and that the line for 10-day-in-advance tickets is forming on the North side of the square. I had seen this line when I arrived at the station, so I trace my steps back and take my place at the end of a relatively short line with probably 100 people in front of me. The guards that are monitoring the line do a good job of chasing off cutters, spend a lot of time answering questions about where to buy which tickets, but also seem to be carrying a thinly veiled sneer in their hearts for the non-Shanghainese 外地人 that make up the majority of people in line; in fact, I hear many different accents and dialects from the people around me. When I ask the guards where to line up they try to persuade me to go home and buy online, but to spare myself the trouble of having to explain my situation I just smile and thank them and walk to the back of the line. The guard at the end of the line is telling people that tickets will go on sale at 3pm; I glance at my watch: 7:30am. In horror I realize that ⑴ I skipped breakfast and will have to skip lunch, and have only half a book left for entertainment, and ⑵ I've forgotten my passport. I can deal with hunger and boredom, and I decide to try and bluff my way through the process with my California driver's license. Then, I realize why the line is so short: we move forward and are handed a green piece of paper, stamped with a railway stamp and carrying two handwritten numbers: one a window number and one an order number. "Come back at 12:30 and go to the ticketing office," we are told. I run home to get my passport and eat some breakfast.
  
  

To be continued.

Continued:

• I arrive at the extra ticketing area set up specifically for CNY train tickets. I get in line at my assigned window. It turns out that the "12:30" time was meaningless, tickets go on sale at 3pm the same as online/by phone. Also, standing in line is meaningless because at around 2:30 the military police arrive to keep order and people start sorting themselves out by number. I learn that some people lined up the night before and got tickets at midnight, and that my #23 is near the back of line 74. As people finish their transactions and walk away, others in line anxiously peer at their hands to see if they got tickets. Friends in different lines pass each other money to buy tickets for each other, or pull each other away when one finds out earlier that there are none left for their destination. LCDs above the ticketing windows taunt us with 100s of tickets left for tomorrow on countless trains to Beijing, Tianjin, Suzhou, Nanjing... but 0 left for still-huge inland cities like Chengdu or Changsha. That seems really unfair. I make a few last-ditch calls to the phone hotline, but nothing gets through. I finally get to the booth, and the young man behind the window apologizes after I thank him for confirming that there are 0 tickets to Changsha, 0 tickets to Zhuzhou, 0 tickets to Huaihua, the major railway stations in Hunan.
  
• I call Jodi, who says that the scalper can't get tickets either. This year the newly implemented "real name registration" system means that it's basically impossible to resell tickets. I ran into a single scalper at the train station and didn't bother to inquire, and the Hunanese-in-Shanghai BBS has no tickets for sale this year either. At least for previous CNYs if we couldn't get tickets from the train station, we could at least find them at a small premium through other channels. Now we're looking at other possibilities -- I may go to the train station tonight for one more grab at tickets tomorrow afternoon; we're thinking about getting a ticket to Wuhan and taking the bus from there; on sites like Hunanese-in-Shanghai and Baixing.cn there are carpools organized by fellow travelers; and of course there's always the airplane, which is about four times the price of a hard sleeper, ten times the price of a standing-only ticket.

And there's always the option of spending CNY in Shanghai :(

Or not! Here's the exciting conclusion of this post:

• After a long talk with Jodi and seeing train tickets disappear from another website before we can buy one, I make the decision to give up on the train, not risk carpooling with a poor driver, and instead to pursue taking a bus. I try to stay away from sleeper buses so I was happy to see the website of Shanghai's main bus station showing that the daily sleeper bus to Yueyang was sold out, but the bus with seats (still an overnight trip, but on a nicer bus) still had spaces available.
• On Sunday afternoon I take Metro Line 1 to Shanghai Railway Station north square. I love the walk from the Line 1 platform to the north square exit because there are so many accents, skin shades and body/face structures. It's a snapshot of the rest of China here in Shanghai. At the main bus station, a 5 minute walk away, I find many scalpers (no real-name system for bus tickets) who direct me to the line to enter the ticket-selling area, which is fenced off for CNY ticket sales. Even though (or because?) tickets are being sold 15 days in advance, the line is short and I'm let in after about 20 minutes. I spend another 15 minutes in the ticketing line, scanning the LED sign for tickets to Yueyang: the sign lists availability from Jan 8 to Jan 17, and what I see is 无 (none) 无 无 无... As the listing scrolls away I start to make plans to book a bus to Changsha, the capital of Hunan, about two hours away from Yueyang. At the window just to be complete I ask about Yueyang and the women tells me that there are tickets! Not for the sleeper, but for the bus with seats only! I pay RMB 336 (a 30% mark-up for the holiday, about RMB 100 more than a train hard sleeper) for a ticket on the 16th, my target departure date. How could I be so lucky, I think. So I pause on my way out and look at the LED sign, noticing this:

• Aha! After the first few 无s I had given up, not noticing the one 有 on the very date that I wanted. To my credit, the sign was scrolling quickly and I was trying to text Jodi as I watched. So while I was unlucky at train tickets, but the stars aligned perfectly for me this time.
  

And that concludes my 春运 ticket-buying adventure.

Now, as to how I get back to Shanghai...

Today I spent about an hour outside Raffles City, observing the goings on. By this week there is no noticeable gathering besides the usual fringe of retired people looking for a place to take in some sun, along the railing that separates the sidewalk from Tibet Rd. There were still lots of police patrolling the area; I came in from behind Raffles City, along Hankou Rd past the Le Royal Méridien hotel and walked past 3 or 4 large police vans. The Peoples' Square subway Exit 14 was still closed "for construction". The Peace Cinema was also still closed to the public but the KFC next to it was open through the side door; the Hershey's store was open but the only entrance was from the outside sidewalk; and the outer door to Starbucks was still closed and manned by an apologetic green apron.

Besides the uniformed police on patrol, there were about double the number of plainclothes police standing and strolling around the area. I spent most of the time standing by a group of plainclothes policemen who at first I suspected of being "participants"; eventually I came to realize who they really were. At first I tried to identify them by their shoes but these didn't follow any pattern. The profile I eventually developed was: middle-aged man, conservative or short haircut, sour expression (only one exception), substantial build, average to above-average height, earbuds with wired microphones for communication, Nokia cellphones that looked like they hadn't been upgraded in years, and either smoking or carrying a bottled drink: water, tea, or fruit juice. I didn't see them engage anybody the whole time I was there but they did a very professional job otherwise; no chatting or joking around, kept an eye on me as I people-watched and read a copy of Southern Weekend. It was a nice, quiet time of being introspective about the role I play as a liberal foreign national living in this society. Maybe I'll write a blog post about that later.

The only thing out of the ordinary happened about 10 minutes before I left. A young man and woman, about mid-twenties and Chinese, who had been sitting a few feet away from me, sprang up and started passing out A4-sized fliers to certain people in the crowd and along the side of the sidewalk. It seemed to me that they were targeting the plainclothes police, though I can't be sure because they walked down the sidewalk a few dozen meters away from me as they did so. In all they must have passed out about 20 fliers and I eventually lost track of them in the crowd. I didn't get a look at the papers up close. From far away it looked as likely to be an ad for a real-estate development as any sort of political message so it's hard for me to draw any conclusions about who they were or why the police left them alone.

That concludes my report.

There are two websites that I found today that caught my attention. First was a website recommended by Frank Noschese, a physics teacher from New York that I read on Twitter. It is a set of Scientific Abilities defined by Rutgers University that he picks a couple from to practice during each lab.

Rubric	Scientific Abilities (Revised 02/18/2008)
A	Ability to represent information in multiple ways
B	Ability to design and conduct an observational experiment
C	Ability to design and conduct a testing experiment
D	Ability to design and conduct an application experiment
F	Ability to communicate scientific ideas
G	Ability to collect and analyze experimental data
H	Ability to engage in divergent thinking
I	Ability to evaluate models, equations, solutions, and claims

I had been planning to do something similar this year: make a list of all the skills I want my kids to learn during their labs this year, and check them off as we go through the year. This list is a little more abstract than I had been thinking because it deals with higher order thinking skills. It will take creativity figure out how to apply these.

Another website is the Hong Kong Association for Educational Communications and Technology (HKAECT), which has announced a "Multiliteracies for the 21st Century: Education, Communication and Technology" conference to take place in November. Maybe that can be my birthday present? I e-mailed about registration but got an automated vacation message in response, so I'll wait until August 25 for more information.

These make me cringe, but are worth a chuckle:

By graphic designer Heather K Phillips.

We ran around to a couple places looking at e-bikes today, but came home with only some groceries and a tummy full of Sbarros and Hunanese food. The main problem is that we really want a solid bike with a quality child-seat on the back. The problem is that the seats we scoped out online all seem to fit bicycles and bicycle-style e-bikes only, and larger e-bikes don't have solid structures on the back that could support a toddler in a child-seat. Tomorrow we're going to make one more trip to Carrefour and then decide. If it comes down to it, we may just buy the bike we like and have the local e-/motobike shop jimmy-rig the seat onto the bike using some solid bars and bolts.

So far this summer I've had one week-long class on Research in Teaching & Learning. It's nice being in the student's seat again; the change in perspective always lets me see new things about my teaching.

If you're interested in being a part of another possible University of Oklahoma Masters in Education cohort at SMIC School in Shanghai (open to anybody, not just school faculty) please get in contact with me: msittig@gmail.com

Today I found a couple of these in my mailbox downstairs:

It's an ad for a VPN to get around the Chinese government's "Great Firewall" (GFW) that blocks many foreign websites used by dissidents, like Youtube, Face and Twitter. This is the first time I've seen offline advertising for a service like this, and I'm guessing that our building was targeted because our neighborhood has a high concentration of foreign nationals. This type of ad goes right along with the majority of ads my mailbox sees, which is illegal satellite dish ads, illegal moving companies, and legal(!) housecleaning referral services.

With the help of Jodi's parents we've become the owners of a dark blue Chery Tiggo. Since Jodi go her license in March I've been serving as the co-pilot, but we've run into a few situation where it'd be more convenient if I could drive too. So for the past couple weeks I've been working on using my California license to get a Shanghai license. I'll update this post as the process moves along (in it's usual bumbling way, in my case).

• The first step was a visit to the DMV office in Minhang, at 闵行区沁春路179号 (179 Qingchun Road, Minhang). The guard informed me that all licenses for foreigners are being issued at the main DMV in Changning. That would be at 长宁区哈密路1330号 (1330 Hami Road, Changning), which is best reached on public transportation by taking Metro Line 10 to the Shanghai Zoo, walking over to Hami Road and catching the 739/807 north for two stops. The DMV main branch is open 9am-5pm.
• The second step was a prelimiary visit to the Hami Road DMV. They asked me to bring: my original driver's license, an official translation of the original DL, my passport, and my temporary residence registration from the local police station. The DMV recommends two translation services: the one I used was the Shanghai Interpreter's Association at 静安区北京西路1277号1607室 (1277 Beijing W Road, Jing'an).
• The third step was to get my California license translated. I went to the office mentioned above, a long-ish walk from Nanjing W Road metro station, where the translating took less than 10 minutes and cost RMB 50. The Interpreter's Association is located in a nondescript office building on busy Beijing Road, and the translation is done by the lady at the front desk. The people in front of and behind me were also there for driver's license translations.
• The fourth step was to go back to the DMV at Hami Road with the correct documents. I took a number at the front desk of Building 1, had a quick chat with the desk on the second floor for foreign driver's licenses, and was directed to building 9 for photos and 10 for physical exam.
• In building 9 I paid RMB 25 for a set of photos with my Chinese name and passport number printed below each photo. The photographer was quick and efficient, got a good shot on the first try without having to take my glasses off.
• In building 10 I collected the photos and a form, filled out another couple of forms according to the poster examples on the wall, and paid RMB 60 for the physical exam. I was directed out, to the left, and upstairs where I took the exam form to each of about 8 different little rooms for a series of physical checks that were also quick and efficient. Which meant that the bad news was delivered swiftly and with finality: my left eye (cornea scarred by a childhood herpes simplex infection) did not meet the 0.8 standard, being only 0.3. Thus, I failed the physical exam. I was given an address in Minhang, 莘东路508号 (508 Xindong Road) where I could go for a re-exam any Wednesday 8:30-11:00 or 13:00-16:00, presumably after getting better glasses (wouldn't help me).
• The fifth step was to go to the re-exam place, intending to do my best to explain my condition and plead for leniency. I took Jodi along for a language bonus, and Josie for a cuteness bonus. This is where the TIC started. The staff immediately grasped our situation and explained that they understood, but that they were required by the rules to use the same standard and that we would most likely fail again and lose the RMB 10 re-exam fee. They strongly suggested that we choose an alternative path, which was to go to a district-level hospital — Minhang's being conveniently located just down the road — which would have the driver's license physical exam form and be able to do the exam, and that the standards just "might be looser" (heavy emphasis on that phrase, repeated several times). We got the hint, hoofed it to the hospital, and boy were they right.
• The sixth step was a visit to the hospital, the Minhang branch of Shanghai's famous Ruijin Hospital. Physical exams for DL take place on the fourth floor in the department that combines service for Taiwanese passport holders and plastic surgery. Several other people were there for the same service as me. I filled out the same form as at the DMV, pasted on another photo, and paid the RMB 40 fee. We chose the eye exam first as it was the highest hurdle to pass. And get this: after walking into the eye exam room and rousing the nurse from his nap, he took a look at my California license, verbally noted that I wore glasses, and then proceeded to fill out the form to the effect that I have perfect vision in both eyes, perfect hearing in both ears, and no other physical defects. Choosing to not look a gift horse in the mouth, we took the form back to the front desk where it was stamped and handed back. TIC indeed.
• The seventh step is to go back to the Hami DMV and make an appointment for the written exam. Report coming soon.

Notes:

• On my first visit to the Hami DMV I met a "fixer" at the gate who offered to help me out. I'd heard of this before, hiring somebody to grease the wheels, but since I was deteremined to go through this myself and also on a budget, I declined the offer immediately.
• Coming out of the re-exam place, we also met a fixer who offered to smooth over the eye problem for RMB 800. Naturally we turned him down. I read on Shanghai Expat that somebody used this kind of service for RMB 500.
• In summary: to change a foreign license to a Shanghai one, learn Chinese, get your license translated, then take original plus translation, passport, and temporary residence registration to the Hami Road DMV. It's pretty easy from there.