Bonding

It's been a day since I've been back. I spent most of yesterday trying to get the electricity in my house fixed. Got that and internet and I was almost set. Too bad there's no heat and I can see my breath even when I sit in bed under my comforter. But then I walked to town today and it was sooo nice outside! Like at least ten degrees warmer than in my apartment! And as I was walking to town, I realized that it was only the second time I had walked to town that way during the daytime. Ever. Crazy, huh? I usually only walk to town at night when there are no motorcycle taxis, and during the day I'm always in a rush and take a taxi. And it just got me thinking: I need to slow down and enjoy where I am. This place is so amazing. Just saying "xinnian hao" to everyone and walking along was so nice. And then I got all my errands done and ate and bought groceries. It was so nice still that I decided to walk home with all my bags. And that way I could rationalize buying two dishes for lunch (not paying for a motorcycle taxi).

On my way into school I ran across Wu Laoshi, my calligraphy teacher, and his wife. I chatted with them for a bit and then they invited me back to their house to hang out, and I was like eh? No no I couldn't intrude, etc. etc., I'll come another day. And they were like okay, but then I was like, wait, how will I know where your house is? Haha. And so I went with them to see where their house was, but then they were like now you're here, you have to come in, and so I laughed and went in. And their house is soooo nice! They have a big TV and leather furniture and clean white marble floors and it's so nice! And they gave me tea and snacks and fruits (Xinjiang pear, pomelo, these sesame hard cracker things that are only made in Hunan) and I was just like wow! We talked for almost an hour about stuff, with the TV on in the background, and I did pretty well, I thought. :) We talked a lot about Hunan and the recent weather and their family and stuff. And then people started trickling in -- their nieces and nephews and other people's grandkids and their friends -- and we all just sat around and watched Animal Planet in Chinese. It was sooo awesome, and I talked with some cousins about their work in Guangzhou.

Then Wu Laoshi and the guys left to hang out with ex-Principal Yan and I hung out with the girls, snuggled under a comforter on the couch. Some people were falling asleep and so was I, so full and warm and happy. But then Principal Yan called and said I should come upstairs to hang out with them. So I went. But everyone was talking in Hengshan dialect and I didn't understand. Wu Laoshi tried to translate for me a bit, and they were talking a lot about some guy in Guangzhou that really wanted to go home so he decided to walk, in the ice and snow, but then he got injured and his shoes fell off and he just kept going but his feet split open, something something, I didn't really understand, haha. But yeah. I was just really tired and then Wu Laoshi offered to walk me home and that was it.

Such a good night!! They said I should come and eat with them sometime. I hope I can! I'm nervous because I feel like I've exhausted most of the topics of conversation that I'm comfortable with -- the weather, people's families, my recent travels. Haha. But I'm really happy and motivated to study more Chinese so that I can become more a part of this community, and be where I am. This is an amazing place and I only have four more months left here.

Back in Hunan

I just got back to Hunan yesterday after being gone for a month, and having traveled around with my family for almost two weeks before that. So much has happened since I was last here. China suffered it's worst winter in fifty years and people all over the country suffered. The timing was perfectly horrible, as the Lunar New Year holiday hosts the largest annual movement of people on the planet, when almost EVERYONE in China has at least two weeks off to go home and celebrate the new year with family. The weather caused both passenger and freight trains to stop running, leading to logistical nightmares around the country, including between 400,000 and 800,000 (at various times) people stuck at Guangzhou train station for the better part of a week. In addition to this, many places suffered from loss of electricity and backed up shipments of coal, which means no heat for the house or warm food for the family, as coal is still China's main source of energy.

It was particularly bad in Hunan. Temperatures here dropped to -5 degrees Celcius during the day, colder at night. In a town where it has not snowed in three years and it normally gets no colder than 5 degrees, storms brought rain followed by extreme cold that caused telephone poles to freeze and crack, power lines to snap, and transportation routes to close down. There were almost two feet of snow and ice on the ground, and many trees broke in half under the weight of so much ice. There was almost no power for the better part of twenty days -- as in a few random hours a day -- and my students took their final exams shivering in their classrooms, cursing the weather which caused them to be unable to study after the sun went down. Candles were among the first things to sell out at the grocery store, followed by the Chinese version of Cup-o-noodles. There were scares of food shortages across the country and province, but I am told most people here ate alright. The train lines were blocked off and it was dangerously icy on the roads, preventing many from going home for the New Year.

But everything seems strangely back to normal now, and if I hadn't been aware that this had happened, I probably would not have noticed the small differences (thank you to Andrew for telling me to document this):

-- Many of the trees are stripped of their branches. There is a big, knocked over tree blocking the walkway to our apartment.
-- The hands of the lady who puts the groceries in the bags at the store were about twice as large as usual, red, puffy, and cracked.
-- There are more people out on the streets, talking to each other. I was wondering why, and I think it's because not everyone has their power back yet, and so their TVs don't work so they have to socialize outside. -- Many people do not have cell phone reception back yet. One of the two towers (each for a different company) is broken.
-- Outside my calligraphy teacher's house, under a ramp, there was big mound of ice three feet tall, that hadn't melted yet.
-- The market still has no fang bian mian (cup-o-noodles).

Crazy, huh? I can't believe I missed it. Part of me feels lucky to have gotten out in time to make it to Southeast Asia. But part of me feels like I missed something very important, a bonding experience that would connect me to the people of Hunan forever.

Esperanto and a Drug Proposition

In China, traveling by hard seat on trains is always a good way to meet people. The trip home from Guangzhou was no different. The 10:45 pm train was SO so crowded that there were people trying to squeeze onto seats that weren't theirs, people squatting down on the floor, people everywhere. I was seated on the opposite side of the aisle from Nhu and Jenna, surrounded by four university student-age friends. I tried to make small talk with them, but after first insulting them because I thought they were speaking Cantonese but really they were speaking Changsha dialect, and then asking a few questions and discovering that they neither went to university nor worked and that they lived in Changsha but had just come to Guangzhou to "play" for the weekend, I gave up. I had the aisle seat, but the girl next to me let me take the window so that I could sleep and she could play cards with her friends. Nice. She was cute, small, and had lots of small tattoos on her wrists, hands, and shoulders, strange for a young girl in China.

I slept on and off until 3 am, when I woke up and stared out the window for a while. The girl next to me asked to switch back seats if I wasn't going to sleep, and I let her have her seat back. Then, this older man across from me struck up a conversation. He asked the usual questions, where I was from and what I was doing here, before explaining that he was a teacher of English and Esperanto at the Changsha Foreign Language Institute. CRAZY. Esperanto* is the world language that I knew was invented some time ago and was supposed to incorporate lots of different languages but never really caught on.

Anyway, so I was really interested and kept talking to this teacher. His spoken English was not so good -- his main foreign language was Esperanto -- and so we continued the conversation in Chinese. He taught me some words in Esperanto (Ĉu vi parolas Esperanton? = Can you speak Esperanto? and Kiel vi (fartas)? = How are you? and Dankon = Thank you). I asked him about how useful he thought it was and he said it was SO useful because you could go anywhere in the world with it; he said with English you can only go to the UK or the US, but with Esperanto you can go anywhere because people all over the world speak it. I listened carefully, but thought about how so many more people all over the world speak English and so if you speak that, then you're pretty set. He said that Esperanto has also helped him to be able to study new languages, and to get to know some really good people from other cultures. He and some students were just coming back from an international Esperanto conference (either in Guangzhou or Hong Kong, I didn't ask).

Then I talked to one of his students for a while in English so that she could practice. She told me how Esperanto was a designed as an international second language so that it would be EVERYONE's second language, and we'd all be on a level playing field. Like there wouldn't be native speakers, like the US and UK have with English, and everyone would just have started from the same place, and so when they communicated in Esperanto, it would be with a level of mutual understanding that they both had worked hard to learn this new language, along with a tolerance for the other person's culture. I thought that was a nice, idealist, good international relations kind of a goal, I just didn't know how practical it was, given that it had been around for a while and not caught on really. She kept saying how nice Esperanto speakers were and how English speakers were not so nice. Just to make sure she realized it, I said that this observation made sense because of the differences in the makeup of the pool of people she was sampling. There are so many English speakers that of course some are going to be good and some are going to be bad; furthermore, the people who have studied Esperanto are more likely to be those who are on the more open and international-minded side. So yeah.

*In case you were wondering, Esperanto was invented in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof of what is now Poland but was at that time part of the Russian Empire as a universal second language in order to foster peace and international understanding. I looked it up just now and Wikipedia says that the vocabulary comes from the Romance and Germanic languages while the phonology comes from Slavic languages and there is evidence that learning Esperanto first is better preparation for later language learning than learning any other single language. Makes sense. There are between 100,000 and 2 million (what an insane range, I know) fluent speakers, and about 1000 native speakers of Esperanto.

One of the girls in my section (the university-age people) was trying to listen and understand what we were talking about, but her English wasn't good enough to chime in. I felt bad leaving her out of the conversation and so when the other girl left to go to the bathroom, I asked her what she had understood and she told me and then I was like yeah, wow, your English is so good, and then told her what we'd been talking about in Chinese. And then the cute, tattooed girl next to me woke up and we all talked together. She said her name was So-So*, but that wasn't her real name, even these friends she was hanging out with didn't know her real name. After a bit, she typed it into her phone and showed me her real name, which she hated. I felt privy to a big secret and it made me feel special. She was only 19 and an interesting mix of child-like innocence and grown-up-world hardness. There was something about her that really attracted me, some mysteriousness that made me want to learn more about her. She showed me pictures of her and her boyfriend on her phone, and when I expressed interest in seeing more, she took out a Keropi sticker book (like Hello Kitty, kid stuff) and showed me her collection of sticker pictures of her and him together. They had been together for more than three years (which struck me as very grown up), and she was going back to Changsha for his birthday. I asked her for her favorite songs and she wrote some down for me. We teased back and forth about stupid stuff, like watching each other sleep, using a lot of the same teasing/kiddy phrases that little kids use to tease each other (我不理你！- I'm not talking to you! and 不要碰我！- Don't touch me!) and those kinds of silly children's jokes.

They were all rich and lived the party life. Soso played Usher, Lil Jon, and Ludacris' "Yeah!" on her phone and I was tapping my feet to it and she asked if I liked to dance. I said yes, and asked if they went out dancing (clubbing) a lot in Changsha. She said yes and said that if I wanted to come I was invited. Then she asked me if I did "anything else" and I didn't understand. I thought I had heard wrong, or missed some part of the conversation for the context of that question. After she said it again three times, and I was like eh? What do you mean? Can you say that again? She finally was like... "you know, other stuff, other stuff, like [smoking motion]". And I was like (in my mind) OOOOOOOOH! DRUGS! and my eyes got big and I was like NOOOOO, I don't do that stuff. And she was like cool. And we went back to our conversation about music.

Interesting. I'm kind of proud of the fact that I got close enough to a stranger in China that I was offered (kind of) access to drugs. Yay for my Chinese getting better! :)

Before I got off the train, the teacher gave me his card and told me that if I wanted to teach Spanish, they had an opening, and he would love it if I would come teach there. I told him I was most likely going to study Chinese in Nanjing next year, but that I would pass the news along. So, if you want to teach Spanish in China in a REALLY awesome city, let me know and I'll hook you up! :)

Guangzhou - Green Grass and Students' Love

Nhu is now 22! For her birthday, the three of us took a trip to Guangzhou for the weekend. Ligaya (the Xining vol), Tracy (her girlfriend), and Ben (the Guangzhou vol) all just happend to be there too (because of the VIA Post Switch, where two VIA vols at different posts switched jobs for a week, so Ligaya and Tracy were on their last day in Guangzhou and Ben was just coming home from Xining, so awesome that their trips overlapped). It was SOOOOO nice to see all of them!

The most interesting thing about my impression of the city of Guangzhou is how green it is -- we spent so much time in parks and on playgrounds. It was a really nice change from the usual concrete, glass, and pollution of other major cities in China. Our cab drivers complained about the pollution in general, but for the days we were there, the sky was blue and the weather was like 70 degrees. It was gorgeous.

Parks in China all come with not only normal playground stuff for kids like slides and seesaws, but also exercise equipment for adults. It's SOO awesome! There are people working out on the (just metal but always colorful) eliptical-type things, people doing sit-ups on the bench-y type thing, people doing quad leg lifts on that machine. It's not hard core by any means, but it's a pretty good workout for the old people who come. They even have a massager machine (like a swing-y thing with two rods with bumps) that you can use to massage your muscles out after. :)

This is me failing to do a straight-up chin-up. Sad, huh? I blame my shoulder. :) But yeah, all the muscles are gone... And those saggy, faded jeans in the picture? Yeah, I'd been wearing those every day for four weeks (yum) because they were the only jeans I had. Another awesome thing about Guangzhou is that it is the shopping capital of China! The next day, we just shopped till we dropped. I bought two near pairs of jeans, for a total of $9. Sweet, yeah? They're tight and short. Yay for China! I like them short because then they don't skim the dirty ground or get wet in the cafeteria (GROSS), so it works out. No one in China cares what I look like anyway. :)

We were just park maniacs, and after dim sum, we spent the rest of the day at Yuexiu Park in the middle of the city. We found a nice grassy hillside overlooking a river and sat down to just take it all in. It was so nice to see GRASS. WOW. I never knew how much I loved and appreciated the feeling of grass under my feet. I just wanted to roll around in it and slide down the hill, but I was scared I wouldn't be able to stop myself and would just keep going into the river at the bottom, haha, so I settled for doing cartwheels and jumping up to try to touch tree branches. SO FUN! :)

The best thing about the whole trip was Ben's students putting on a surprise Welcome Back Ben/Farewell Ligaya and Tracy party. Ben works at GETCH, Guangzhou English Training Center for the Handicapped, and he has about 60 or so students, among whom he has lived and worked for the last year and a half. He's an amazing guy, really has a special gift, and he would do anything for his students. They, in turn, love him to death, and rely on him for a lot of help, whether it be calling him to come help carry their groceries home or just asking him to take the time to listen to their individual battles with having a handicap in a handicap-averse country like China. It's pretty tough sometimes, but at the same time I feel it was moments like this night that make his job/post so rewarding.

Ben had just gotten back from Xining and all night, his students were like "Ben, why'd you come back? We didn't even miss you!" (kind of sad, yeah?) and Ben was just like :( but then around 9 pm, we heard singing and one of his students told him (and us) to look outside. Ben lives on the fifth floor, so we looked down over the balcony onto the open/play area and all his students were standing in a heart-shape holding up their cell phones (it was dark so it was magical) singing 月亮代表我的心 (the song Nhu and I sang at that hengyang foreign teachers banquet - yueliang daibiao wo de xin) and it was just so amazing. So moving. I thought I was going to cry, and the party wasn't even for me! Haha... then we all gathered in the meeting room and there were snacks and drinks on the table and the students had put together a program of mini games and contests, SO fun, dancing and singing contests, and it was just hilarious. The dance party was great. :)

The rest of the trip went by quickly, as we just went shopping all day the next day, ate at a vegetarian restaurant (which was SOOO ono, I was blown away), and then took a train home. Good trip. :)

Will's Birthday and Nanjing Friends

Nanjing is like my home away from home (from home). We had three weeks of VIA in-country cultural training and language classes there, and they city is really awesome. In my opinion, it's not as crowded as other cities in China and the people are nicer. Also, three VIA vols and all my friends from training are there. Anyway, so I went back two weeks ago for Will's birthday. It was SOOOOOOOO fun! :) The night before his birthday, we went to all-you-can-eat Japanese food and we combined to eat 21 dishes, I think. It was Benihana style, with the chef right in front of us cooking special for us! We had steak, unagi, shrimp, scallops, beef wrapped around mushrooms, more steak, lamb, and then of course sushi, sashimi, miso soup, curry stuff, hand rolls, tempura, the usual. I had six orders of sashimi, tuna and salmon. The night was amazing. Best meal I’ve ever had in China by FAR. Oh yeah, and it was all you can drink too! But we didn’t drink very much cuz we wanted to taste our food. Haha… I did try sake for the first time ever… I was disappointed. Haha.

This is Wang Dong and Weng Fei. They were two of the language partners that VIA hooked us up with back in August. What started out as set-up conversations quickly developed into some awesome friendships. There is a crew of like 6 guys who all study/live together at Nanjing Normal University and are going next year to the University of Maryland to study law (I might be off on this). They have all graduated from really good schools across China already. They’re SO SO SO SO awesome and teach us lots of cultural stuff. They hang out sometimes with Will when I’m not in Nanjing, but they always make it a point to get together when I’m in town. :) It’s SOOOO FUN! We go out to eat and just sit around and talk stories for hours. In Chinese! Before, I wasn’t following a lot of it, but now I can! They speak English really well too and can explain stuff to me if I don’t get it. :) In the picture above, we are going out shopping for food for Will’s, Wang Dong’s, Weng Fei’s, and Yun Feng’s (another language parter) birthday celebration. It was SOOOOOOOOOOO fun! Everyone made a dish – Wang Dong made these Coca-cola chicken wings that were ono, Yun Feng made this steamed rice with ono sauce and veggies inside thing, Will made CHEESEBURGERS (WOOOO!) on this mini bbq grill thing that they bought before (SOOOOOOOOO ONO! And we got to eat the leftovers the next day too, haha!). This picture is all of us cheers-ing (ganbei! 干杯!) and that's Will's supernice apartment.

SOOO, in China there is a tradition where you always cake the birthday boy/girl (as in, eat your cake, save your frosting, and then smack the birthday boy/girl in the face!). It was SO hilarious – Will wasn’t even suspecting it, and someone came up from behind him and got him SOOOOOOOO good. J And then everyone started caking everyone and I ran away to finish eating my cake (no like waste you know!? also so no one would cake me). I came back to take pictures and I thought it was over and I was safe and then I turned around, and Wang Dong was coming at me. hahaha… I turned my head and took the cake straight in my ear/hair. What a mess… haha… but then after we all washed off (just stuck my head under the shower) and it was fine. J Cleaning up the next day was not that fun, but Will did most of it, so yeah. Sucks that since the get-togethers are usually at his house (it’s a nice house), so he always has to clean. Oh well.

Then we all went to KTV (karaoke)!!! It was so much fun! J We sang songs in English and in Chinese and everyone had a good time. The cool thing about this birthday party was that there were an even number of Chinese people and foreigners, and so we did a lot of talking both in Chinese and English. I am really happy that we’ve made some Chinese friends and that we’re not just hanging out with Americans, cuz that would defeat some of the purpose of coming to China. We all struggle a lot with whether to hang out with Americans just because it’s easy and semi-fun or to stretch ourselves and maybe have to fight through awkwardness to hang out with Chinese people. I am really glad that Wang Dong and co. have turned out to be such good friends of ours. They are so much fun and this night of a million birthdays was amazing!

The Three Musketeers (Me, Jenna, and Nhu)

When I first heard there were gonna be three girls at this post (there is usually at least one boy), I was like darn because I get along with boys so much better, in general. But after being here a while, I’ve come to know and love Nhu and Jenna. They’re both really great girls – super supportive and understanding. We all have each other’s backs. We’re all pretty silly together (lots of girl-on-girl action jokes, haha). We had to take some random pictures around the school for something that the school wanted, but we took some goofy ones as well. :)

Seriously, I couldn’t ask for any two better partners. Maybe it’s because it’s Thanksgiving time and I’m feeling in a love-y mood, but I am really really thankful for both Nhu and Jenna. Jenna likes to cook and in general plays the “mom” role. She just whipped up the best Thanksgiving dinner -- with mashed potatoes and my Granny's yam recipe and everything (without access to an oven or microwave or normal ingredients). She's a vegetarian and humanitarian in general as well. Jenna’s apartment is also the general hang out spot for all of our student friends, just because it’s way more PIMP than ours.

These pictures below are taken by the basketball courts, where it says on the wall “Make Ouyang Yu Famous … Train the Students First Rate”. I thought our school was crazy the first time I saw this. But it’s just the Chinese way. There are like motivational sayings all over campus. Like in the cafeteria, in HUGE letters on the wall it says 尊重他人就是尊重自己 (zunzhong taren jiu shi zunzhong ziji), meaning like to respect others is to respect yourself. It’s cool.

Nhu is awesome. She and I make a good complentary team, as she likes cleaning and I don’t. I like taking out the trash. :) Man, I have to get on that; it’s piling up. Haha. Other than that though, she’s helping me stop caring so much about what other people think and to stop thinking that people are judging me all the time. It’s actually really good to be here in China to learn that lesson, because everyone stares at everyone. It’s part of the culture. I do it, too. Haha. And so it’s like whatever. Really, people are just curious. And I like talking to them! :) But about other people too, I am working on just doing what I want and not thinking so much about what other people will think about me all the time. It’s good. :)

For Halloween, we all dressed up. It was awesome. Jenna was a rock star, I was Maggie Cheung from In the Mood for Love (google images it, she’s a Chinese actress and in the movie she is like a 1930s Shanghai woman or something I forget), and Nhu was the grim reaper with a scary mask. We reserved the media room especially for that week (we usually teach in a more ghetto classroom with just a chalkboard) and we taught an awesome Halloween lesson together (Nhu and I). It was so fun! We told scary stories and taught the kids “Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat, if you don’t I don’t care, I’ll pull down your underwear!” … haha… that went over well. :)

Jenna did my hair and makeup – it took like an hour. She has a background in stage makeup, so she was on it. The hair was the main thing. That whole thing was so teased and hair sprayed up because we don’t have a curling iron here. It was ridiculous. But I did get one good picture of myself that day. :)

The Past Couple Months...

Sorry I've been MIA for a while on this blog, but I'm back! Here are some of the things I've been up to for the past couple months, as well as comments on what life is like here:

This is the three of us (Nhu, Jenna, and me) at the Hengyang County Foreign Teacher’s Appreciation Banquet, which was on September 24^th. Nhu and I had to sing two songs IN FRONT OF EVERYONE – Right Here Waiting by Richard Marx (Wherever you go, whatever you do, I will be right here waiting for you…) and 月亮代表我的心 (Yueliang Daibiao Wo de Xin), an old Chinese song that you can youtube if you want to see how it sounds. The music was all off and we came on after this really awesome Chinese woman singer and it was just the most embarrassing thing ever. But we got through it and everyone laughed and told us we were good sports. Other performances included a mime show, a bunch of foreigners singing another song, a soccer demonstration (lame), a Beijing Opera changing faces one man show, violin, and some ghetto hip hop dance that was really scandalous, haha! These little girls presented the flowers to random foreigners who won awards.

This is me holding my wannabe hamburger that I was really excited to eat, but ended up sucking really bad. Hahahaha… In my town, we get teased a lot --- like we get our hopes up about stuff only to have them come crashing down. And that’s okay, that’s life. Man, I was so excited for this hamburger. My town has no Western food whatsoever, but on this day, Nhu, Jenna and I were in the next town over, 30 minutes away, and it’s bigger, and we thought maybe they would have a good hamburger. TEASE. Oh well, though, it wasn’t bad, actually. :) Other teases in our everyday life include the school telling us we can get paid on a certain day, but then the office being closed; that we have a holiday on a certain day, but then the day getting changed after we have already made plans (:( Indonesia); people saying they will come visit us but then plans falling through; our families sending us packages but then them taking forever to get here or the post office not being open or something; the electricity going out in our apartments; tons of last minute changes and random decisions; and the list goes on. It really isn’t bad, and we’re getting used to life here, lowering our expectations, and just going with the flow. It is what it is. :) I'm happy I'm here. :)

This is me playing basketball against the army! WOOOO! I am fouling someone, as usual. J Haha… the guy in the yellow is like the Kobe of our team. He’s really good, but when he’s on the court, the offense is stagnant. This is the second game that I played against the army. We lost. Bleh. Oh well. I had two points. :) haha… I am getting more and more out of shape. All my muscles are shrinking – I can tell by the way my pants don’t fit and even some of the other clothes that you sent me that used to fit. Eh well. :(

These are some of the English teachers at our school after the Halloween party that we put on. Nhu, Jenna, and I organized a party (read: 320 students in an auditorium where everyone had a numbered ticket and if their number was called they got to come up and play a game). I emceed and it was SOOOOOOOOO FUN! We set up games like the balloon stomp (balloons around kids’ ankles and they went around stomping them and the last person with an un-popped balloon won), three-legged race, rice sack relay (like potato sack, except here it’s a rice sack haha), etc. It was soooo fun! :) All the kids had a really good time, and we gave out candy and prizes. The teachers said it was a lot more orderly than last year and that they felt it was more successful. Here at OYY, everything is compared to previous years (it was kind of strange at first to be here with all of the expectations that everyone had because of the past volunteers – like in Mexico, I was the first volunteer the community had experienced, in Yunnan last year, I was the first – but now I’m used to all the references), so it means a lot when the teachers or students say that we’re better than previous years. Haha…

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!