Time flies when you’re making videos! It’s been nine months of short filmmaking for Uncle Foreigner and we’ve been oh-so chuffed to watch our baby develop.
To celebrate the growth so far — and in anticipation of exciting changes to come — we’ve put together a compilation of all of our videos since we first started posting in earnest last December. The clips are in order of posting, so you can chart our journey from those first embryonic ideas onward. Look at those teensy, little toes on Uncle’s Shorts No. 1!
Next week, we’ll be back to your regularly scheduled, all-new programming … this baby’s taking confident steps out into the world.
During jumping jacks tonight, my trainer chanted 减肥！减肥！which means “lose weight! Lose weight!” But I chose to translate it as “Have cake! Have cake!” So I will be having cake with dinner. #cake
We recently marked the anniversary of Peter’s hospital stay last year. (In fact, coming soon is the anniversary of the date that he came home … a much happier day.) And a friend’s recent gift of some pomelos reminded me of some of the hope I had felt while Peter was sick.
The view outside of our apartment complex in Lijiang, 2015. We really were right in the shadow of the Himalayas. They started paving that road just before Chinese New Year 2016, but they had not finished it by the time we left in May.
Did you know that Uncle Foreigner uses all original music by Peter Sikoski to score its videos? It’s true! For the early part of this year, we’ve been using work by Peter from earlier on in his life, back when he was a rocker. But for the past few months, Peter has been working hard composing original scores for each new video. (Take a gander at our studio on Instagram.) To celebrate that fact, we’ve put together a playlist of just the music we’ve spun off a whole new channel: Western Toilet! Just close your eyes and imagine you’re in China! With some Americans!
Subscribe to Western Toilet on YouTube to keep up with all the new music!
Some foreigners get annoyed with the small talk questions that strangers tend to pepper us with, but not me. I look at it as a pop quiz … and I am a very good test taker.
The subhead of this post is something I used to chant with my middle schoolers, to get them comfortable with speaking while facing up to the possibility that they might make mistakes. But the substance of this weeks video is about those kids who are shy … and why they like me as their teacher.
Also, it was so hot our first week of school that the government called it off for a heat day; my first one of those. To me, it didn’t feel crazy hot … not more so than usual for Luzhou summer, but I did also spend the day in the air conditioning inside. And I’m not one to look a gift day off in the mouth. What?
China can be a really chaotic place. Forget about plans changing last minute; sometimes plans aren’t even made until the last minute. Just today, I was part of another surprise photo shoot at school. It’s a difficult way to get things done.
But you can wail against the flow, or gracefully bob along on the tide. One way is a heck of a lot more likely to be a pleasant journey. One way is also a lot more honest about how much control we actually have over our lives…
