My blog is accessible some weeks, and not other weeks. It seems to be a one to three ratio. So I don’t post much when it’s not available, or I send Tanner text posts to update. It takes him as long as it takes me to upload photos, so I won’t make him do that. So if you were wondering, that’s a large part of why I don’t blog on any regular basis. It’s also why you don’t get fun photos all the time.
Right now it’s Monday evening. But the internet is down today so I don’t know when this will get posted. I’m on my bed writing and watching CCTV 9. This is China Central TV 9, the international version of Chinese TV. It’s in English; I started watching it in Seattle before I even came here. It has a lot of news shoes and culturally focused shows. It also has one great show called Dialogue, which is a news conversation show that actually lets guests speak, for an hour, on serious topics, without too much political censorship. They are often very random. The news is alright, sometimes I get much more coverage on issues that American news won’t cover. Sometimes I get such obviously shallow and politically bent news that it bugs me. But if you have a medium or large cable package, and you live on the west coast in America, you probably get CCTV and don’t even know it.
Over the weekend I went to Qing Cheng Shan, Azure City Mountain. I planned this trip with Brandi a few weeks ago. She is going to do research on Taoist temple architecture. She doesn’t know the first thing about Taoism. I felt like we could get out of town, and maybe I could help her get started.
Friday night I had my first travelling mishap. We attempted to go to the bus station to leave that night for the town at the base of the mountain. We got a cab and ended up taking a car ride that was over an hour long. Traffic was slow and the train station was much farther north than either of us realized. The bus station was basically closed. We kept our cab, and had to travel back through the city to get home. It was a little over 60 kuai, which is two good dinners for two.
Saturday was easy. I’ll post photos of the mountain soon. It was foggy and misty like the last mountain I went too. There was some nice fall color. The mountain was small, we hiked and I didn’t have a hard time this time, it was nice. The temples are beautiful. They are different enough from the Buddhist temples I’ve seen that it held my interest. It was nice.
The hotel was fun too. It was a small double. The room felt damp, and I don’t know if the rooms up in the mountains ever feel dry. But we had electric blankets, I slept well enough. Dinner was the best part. The woman who spoke a little English had left to try and lure in more tourists, which didn’t happen. So on the patio outside the hotel it was Brandi and I sitting at a table, while two older women were trying to figure out how to feed us. It was obvious right away we weren’t going to be able to communicate well. One woman took over, she gestured and spoke, so that we knew she wanted us to help her figure it out. We understood pork and soup, so that was a start. She held up vegetables, drawn out of bins lined up on shelves against the wall on the side of the hotel. I picked some veggies for the soup. She walked over then with pork and bamboo, she gestured that the bamboo was from the hillside behind the hotel. We ended up with pea stem and egg soup. Pork with mushrooms, scallions and garlic in a sauce. And pork with bamboo shoots. It was all very tasty.
Sunday morning we headed home. I don’t want to speak badly about Brandi. But she is hard to travel with, and I was tired, so I was okay with her decision to head back. We took a local bus through the next town. We got off before the bus station, because a man was standing by a long distance bus with a sign offering rides to Chengdu for half the price. That was kind of funny. We were also the only foreigners I saw the whole weekend, it’s already the off season here. Mom called on Sunday night and that was nice too.
Today, Monday, was a good day. Class was fun. My professor, Xian Laoshi, brought in a huge traditional Chinese floral painting. One of our lessons has painting vocabulary. We held a mock auction which I won. I didn’t realize that by winning I got to keep the painting. During the break Xian Laoshi described it, in English, as “a little old, a little broken.” It was painted locally in 2000, it is a little dingy and wrinkled, but it’s still nice. The red and yellow in the flowers matches the colors Lisa wanted to use to decorate the room. I am really excited to decorate, now that midterms are over, so I kept the painting. I’ve been gifted or have had the opportunity to buy at a deep discount lots of things here already. I’ve had so many surprising chances, now even in my language class.
During class my advisor here, Wang Laoshi text messaged me. That is odd to type, that wouldn’t really happen in America. So I rushed back to my room after class to meet with her. I had to review my interview questions, which I have in English and Chinese now. I waited for her outside her office for almost half an hour. She finally called and told me she had a problem with her grad students, and that I should meet them upstairs. When I came into the room she told me to sit down and practice listening Chinese. So for over an hour I got to (had to) listen to her and her grad students. There were eight girls and one boy. They all looked very different, I tried for a while to figure out if some of them were ethnic minorities or not. The students had just gotten back from field work. I don’t think it went well. When Wang Laoshi would speak the students would bow their heads, obviously taking criticism. At one point one of her grad students, the one who speaks English and has been helping me, started to cry.
Their meeting ended and Wang Laoshi and two of her grad students went over my survey with me. It took an hour. We got good work done. She even offered me one of her grad students as a translator for my field work, until I reminded her that it was during Spring Festival. No one wants to do work with me during Spring Festival, they want to go home. But I’m pretty sure I’ll end up with enough help anyways. After our meeting I realized why Wang Laoshi scares me so much. She makes me feel stupid. My UW professors and Steve Harrell my American advisor are very encouraging. I seem more in control and do more research then a lot of other kids. I am very practical. Everyone feels that I can do the research and it will turn out all right. Wang Laoshi is used to working with grad students and is also used to having them do a project she designed and will get credit for. She asks me blunt questions and sometimes they surprise me. For example, I had a few questions in my interview that were okay, Steve and Eddie both just left them in. But Wang Laoshi wants to know why I am asking it, what information do I want to get out of it, and how can it be useful to my research. I realize that some of them are not very good questions, and they won’t give me anything new or specific and need to be rewritten. She really pushes me. Any small areas that are vague or anything I can’t immediately explain well she jumps on. It’s intense. But it’s also making my project better in some places and is a good experience for me. I doubt any American professor will seem as scary. Afterwards she is also sweet and generous. She tells me every time I see her that my Chinese has gotten better.
The weather today during all of this was sublime. It was sunny and as clear as Chengdu gets. There was also a light breeze. I got to walk around a lot to and from my meeting. The sun was warming. The gingko trees are almost all yellow now. There is a small street on campus with gingko trees lining both sides. On the way to my meeting I saw three students taking photos. On the way back there was a student with his camera on a tripod looking very serious. There were also some girls doing a little photo shoot, the kind I miss so much. That corner of campus is so quiet and very beautiful. I need to explore all the areas on campus before it gets cold.
I noticed that the statue of Mao on the way to my meeting is out of proportion. His head is too small, which I think is actually factual, Mao’s head was small. But his hand, the one he is reaching out with, is huge!
I saw a woman on the lawn with her cat, which was on a leash.
I saw a middle aged couple on a scooter. The wife was sitting on back and had her hands wrapped around her husband and tucked into his coat pockets, like all the college students. It was sweet.
To get an online account with AirChina took me over an hour. Once I was done I felt like an idiot. The order of the blank boxes should have told me what to do, user name, password, password, name, email address, etc. Instead I translated every other word to figure out what went where.
A man approached me, he quickly explained in broken English that he didn’t know some English words and needed a teacher, and then something about Jesus Christ. There was something wrong with his teeth, really wrong. They were almost red, and had holes in them. I told him I didn’t speak Chinese so I couldn’t translate.
There are mosquitoes in our room, still, I wish they would die from the cold already.
I’ve been watching German movies with Lisa, we put on the English subtitles. I am going to be so cultured when I get back. She is also hosting a Saint Nicholas Day celebration with her German friend Ira. I guess December 6th is a big day in Germany. She also explained Advent to me again. As well as something about January 7th when the three saints come, and that Christmas doesn’t end until then. Her mom sent a Saint Nicholas gift which I had to hide in my closet so Lisa can’t open it until December 6th.
I had instant mashed potatoes and Stovetop stuffing for dinner. I was too lazy to go out and break my 100 kuai notes, which is all I have since I just went the to ATM. I’m glad I get care packages so I can eat like a lazy college student.
I also called Tanner who had actually gone to bed at a decent hour, so when I called at 12:30 pm I woke him up! What!? He usually goes to bed much later.
So. It was a long weekend and a long, stressful, but very nice Monday. So many odd things happened to me today, and that was just one day. That’s part of the reason I really do want to stay in China. Life here is so surprising, and no two weeks are alike. Even if I get homesick sometimes (and stay that way for days at a time) I think I can manage it. I think it’s worth it.
I’m going to post a cute picture I took of myself, even though it’s vain. My hair is getting long and I keep getting all excited and taking photos to show everyone at home.
