SUN!!!

The sun came out today, for the most time it's been visible (maybe
even more than half an hour) in nearly a month. And our response was
almost pathetic. It first poked out around 8, while I was at taiji.
Upon seeing shadows on the ground I immediately dropped what I was
doing and ran over to where I could see it, stand in it. It showed up
again while I was walking back to my apartment, and a couple other
times throughout the morning. Laurie, one of the other teachers, said
she went over to the window in the middle of class just to look at it.
Seriously, this climate is ridiculous. In the last month before
today, I think the sun was visible AT ALL for maybe 10-15 minutes just
before it set a couple weeks ago. The streets are almost always wet,
not because it's raining, but because there's so much moisture in the
air that as soon as it touches something even slightly colder, some
water will condense. And now this weekend it's supposed to drop down
nearly to freezing, according to Ben (another teacher, boyfriend of
Laurie, live right below me, do the most rock-climbing, cool, friendly
people). Okay, enough griping.

In better news, I've got my apartment mostly cleaned up, needs to be
mopped again, and I need to do laundry, but it's in good shape, and
I'm starting to get real groceries and cook for myself. The other day
Ben, who's been here about 5 months now, took me to the market and
introduced me to the people he knows to buy from, people who
understand that I'm here for a while, will be a repeat customer, and
won't haggle or try to rip me off, just give me a good, fair, price.
So today I realized that it's time for me to start cooking for myself
and went and got a bunch of food and spices. I already have some rice
other spices from the convenience stores/supermarkets, but it looks
like I'll be able to get everything I need a lot cheaper at the
market. Which is fun.

I was surprisingly nervous going back to teaching on Monday, but that
was just because I'd forgotten that I can do it just fine. As soon as
I actually had a class, I stopped worrying. Although one of my
classes is now almost all new students, which is actually really
difficult. I don't know their speaking level, they're not familiar
with the book, or with me, or, it seems, with listening to English in
general. Not surprising, I don't hold it against them, but it's a
pain to discover that my lesson plan isn't going to work very well and
then readjust in class simply because they aren't at the same level as
the older students.

Part of the problem with this is the way that we're supposed to use
the book. I've ended up teaching Business English (shudder) to the
higher and lower elementary classes. It's not too bad, but I don't
have enough familiarity with the subject to stray too far from the
book. Since students are constantly rotating in and out of the class,
I can't restart the book every time someone new shows up. But when I
continually progress through the book, it can be a big challenge for
new students, since they aren't so familiar with some of the concepts
we're working with in later chapters. Right now it feels like the
lower elementary class is actually more advanced than the higher
elementary class, and I think it's mostly just because the students
have been around longer.

When I started here the classes were pretty stable, we didn't get too
many new people and we were at specific places in the book, so I just
took it from there. But the higher elementary class reached the end
of the book before break (although I think that part of the book is a
little advanced for their level), so now I'm trying to figure out
where to start them at. It can be a little frustrating, but it's not
too bad.

Oh, a few other strange things I don't think I've mentioned:

Last week some time I went into one of the bakeries along the main
street near the market. I wanted to get a loaf of bread, and I saw,
back-lit from outside, something that looked kind of like a marble
rye. I got it down and bought it, along with a couple cookies for
dessert. Then when I got home and got a good look at it under
fluorescent light, I realize it's not marble rye. It's something akin
to white bread, with the white marbled with what seemed to be white
bread dyed purple. Yes, purple bread.

So up in northern China, small denominations of currency, 1 or 2 kwai
and certainly 1 or 5 mao, are dispensed in coins, not surprising since
they're common, and it's not much money. Typical. Not so in the
south. There are almost now coins, everything, down to one mao, has a
bill. That's a bill for something that's barely worth more than a
penny. Once a guy actually apologized to me for only having coins to
give as change.

My taiji teacher is a cool guy, and he's invited me over for dinner a
couple times, once on the eve of the spring festival, and last night.
And it's usually pretty good food, if mostly unidentifiable.
Unfortunately, and this seems to hold true for a lot of restaurants
around here too, that sort of food does not agree with me. I don't
know if it's the vast quantities of oil that are used in cooking, or
if there's just something in anomalous meat products that my body
recognizes as unhealthy, but oof, I hate waking up at 4 in the morning
having to go to the bathroom. It seems to have passed now, my
stomach's regained enough strength to fight off what little it can't
dump out, which is some improvement over a couple weeks ago. So I'm
still trying to figure out what to do, because usually the food that
makes me sick is at dinners or banquets I've been invited to. The
street food's safer. Speaking of which, it's late, and I need food.
Later.

Happy New Year!

Aaagh! It's pledge time for NPR! Nooooooooo!!! It's so nice to be
able to stream it onto the computer that's in my room, and now it's
destroyed because of pledge drives! Wait, I can choose which programs
to listen to. Maybe I can skip it...

Ooh, I think I can type with my gloves on, that makes it better.

I think I may have been watching too much Simpsons; both those
thoughts were far too much in Homer voice. The weird thing is that I
haven't really watched actual episodes for quite a while, I've been
watching all the commentaries. It's interesting enough, although
there are times I feel there are other things I might be doing.

It's time for the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year), so we have a
week off from school, which is pretty sweet. Lot's of firecrackers
are getting set off, and the remaining staff and students had a big
banquet yesterday, but what's most important to me is that it's
givingf me time to really settle into my apartment, prepare a little
more for teaching, and now to get caught up on my e-mail.

The apartment situation was a little interesting. I started out
sharing a room with a student on the fourth floor of what is mostly
the teachers' apartment building. I was (correctly) under the
impression that I wouldn't be there for too long, because the bedrooms
were without HVAC units (yes, the heater and A/C are combined in one
little machine that is often positioned high up on a wall) and it just
wasn't very nicely set up. After a week another teacher had left and
I moved into an apartment on the fifth and top floor. It's a nice
place, possibly the best room in the building. It's the driest and
warmest, and it looks out onto the side of a mountain in Yangshuo
Park. Which isn't a great view, but sure beats facing a bunch of
other apartment blocks. And across the hall, instead of another room,
is a roof, which will probably be a fairly nice place when it gets
warmer and drier. It is interesting to look out over the street,
watch constuction, seeing the clothes and sausages hung out to dry,
but more so when I've got some mobility and it's not my bedroom. The
only (sort of) downside, besides it being a walk-up, is that the
teachers' computer is in my living room (I can lock my bedroom door
separately). But really, the others don't use it very often, if they
do it's a chance to hang out with people, and if not, I've got ready
internet access and a way to listen to Boston area NPR. Good luck
with that snowstorm.

I just checked, altitude here is probably somewhere around 450 feet,
it's 491 in Guilin, and we're a ways downstream along the Li River. I
have no idea why it's still chilly, I guess it's probably not that
cold, but most of the teachers are still wearing fleece or wool hats
around (not that I should be complaining about cold, with MA about to
get 24 hours of snow). It might be in part the high humidity meaning
the cold is felt more, combined with the high level of cloudiness
which greatly reduces the sunlight we get. I'm getting kind of used
to it, but the other day I was at my afternoon taiji practice, the sun
was actually visible through the clouds, and it felt so good. That
day kind of felt like the start of spring, a little lightening of the
air, a sense of foggy, rainy relaxation. It also felt curiously like
a Chinese spring, not American spring. I think what makes the
difference is the leaves. I can't remember the name for it,
mono-somethings, but I think all plants here have single-bladed
leaves, nothing like maple or oak or ivy, just thin, unornamented
leaves.

So yeah, I'm taking taiji lessons. It started when I finally got fed
up with my cyclical GI problems and went to see Dr. Lily, an
acupuncturist recommended by two of the teachers here. She doesn't do
just acupuncture, her family has been providing traditional medicine
in the area for several generations at least, and she had a solution
for me. It was pretty simple, she first took a little piece of
string, something, lit it on fire and put it out at several places
around my belly-button. Then she mixed some herbs, which smelled
rather Christmas-y, spread them around the same area, and covered it
up and taped it down, dried it with a heat lamp, and told me to keep
it on for a day. She also sold me some herbal tea, a month's supply,
which seems to be composed of dried orange peel, licorice root, some
hard white sliced stuff, and some brown things that might be some sort
of dried berry. And it seems to have worked, went from three or four
days of nothing alternating with a day, day and a half of diarrhea to
relatively normal bowel movements. I did eat something somewhere
along the way yesterday that had some unpleasant aftereffects that
night and this morning, but nothing hugely disruptive, should be okay
now.

So right, taiji. After Dr. Lily had finished treating me, we were
chatting a little bit, I was asking some questions about what she did
(garlic and ginger are excellent for health, apparently, yay) and
decided that she'd probably also be a good person to ask about taiji
lessons, something I've been hoping to do for a while, and especially
since I decided I was going to China. She said she knew someone, went
right out, and a few minutes later came back, told me to wait a few
minutes, and a little later my teacher came in with a woman who is his
wife or business assistant, I am not sure which. We talked a little,
with Dr. Lily acting as translator, and agreed that the woman would
meet me at Dr. Lily's the next day at 10, we'd go over to the taiji
center, and talk it over more there.

So I went over, and it's surrounded by a small pomelo (a citrus fruit
that seems unique to this region, it's yellow, the pulpy part is about
the size of a grapefruit, but the pith is much thicker, and it's
pear-shaped) orchard, against the side of a mountain, with a good view
of the mountains around town, and a pleasant walk or jog from both my
apartment and downtown. We talked some, as we could, with the limited
English of the woman, talked about what I'd need (special clothes,
which make me look like a kung-fu bad-ass, but are also very
comfortable and easy to move in, and some shoes, which we had to get
at the Army surplus store to find a size that came close to fitting)
and scheduling which right now just means me saying when I can do it,
and it's two hours in the morning, two in the afternoon/evening, every
day (except for today), one-on-one, for RMB1000/month. Which is a
tremendous deal, but just about kills my savings. And it's great
exercise, relaxing, and helps me learn more about how I work.

There are all sorts of interesting, bizarre, kind of gross things to
see here. If you're a meat-eater and spending time off West Street
it's pretty hard to avoid seeing that from which your food comes. The
other day I saw a chicken get killed as I was going into my apartment
building. I had walked in and turned around to lock the gate behind
me when I saw a woman just across the street with a flopping chicken
stretched between her hands. At first I wasn't sure what she was
doing, if the chicken was dead and she was shaking it or if it was
struggling... then I wasn't sure if she was choking it or what... then
she set it down on the edge of the road, where it flopped weakly a
little longer... she couldn't have choked it, and then I saw the
little pool of blood forming near its neck. I've kept an eye out
since then, and it looks like most chicken are killed by having their
throats cut. In fact, I think that's how most animals are killed
here. There are lots of other things to see to. In the next couple
days, especially if we get a good one, I'll do a little photo journal
of a day, go places around town I'd normally go, and I will put it up
with captions.

Last thing for now, woo-hoo Pats! There's a popular bar on West
Street, the Buffalo Bar, run by an Aussie bloke with a Chinese missus
(actually a few places like that around here, just with a variety of
Western nationalities) that gets Asian ESPN. So at 7 on Monday
morning there were 6 or 7 people who made it in to watch the game. It
was fun, decent game, good atmosphere... Ended up being a very
expensive day, what with getting breakfast there, along with some
celebratory beer, then got a haircut later in the day. The haircut is
good, and gives me a fair amount of flexibility, much more than long
hair, although I'd forgotten how easily I become an over-grown English
choirboy.

Okay, these sentences will have to do for wrap-up, conclusion, etc.
Write with questions, or whatever, I'm sure I've missed some important
detail somewhere in that. Good night.