Sunday night. The kiddies are all in class right now, poor things, but I have a few hours of freedom and a good night’s sleep ahead before Monday sweeps me away. It’s been a nice couple of days. This morning Mark, Ma LiJun and I went into Heqing proper to go shopping. I found an absolutely awesome (and huge!) outdoor market a little over a week ago, so we went through there scooping up fresh noodles, fresh tofu, and as many veggies as I thought I could consume before they went bad (which is not many, I’m sad to say. Man do I miss having a fridge). I also found peanut butter at one of the large supermarkets in town, so peanut noodles are officially back on the menu. So’s banana bread, one of these days, but I have to wait for my bananas to go bad first.
This was actually a three-day weekend, because Friday was “Teacher’s Day.” It’s kinda a big deal in China, more so at some schools than at others. Pengtun’s celebration was relatively relaxed. We had a “meeting” during the afternoon where a few teachers and administrators gave speeches while the rest of us munched on peanuts, sunflower seeds, tea, candy, and fruit. A few hours later, the teachers and their families gathered again for dinner. Overall, I don’t feel like I got to know the teachers any better, but it was still nice just to see their children and things. And, of course, I appreciated the three day weekend. I also got a gift—a plastic wind chime with little blue birds on it—from one of my students.
The last few days, I’ve been trying to get myself into a running habit. Call it a New Year’s Resolution, if you will. Now, those of you who know me well know that I despise running—that I will walk for hours and hours and hours but flinch at the thought of running more than a block. That hasn’t changed. However, last year at this time, I hated long bike rides, or at least long bike rides that were anything but flat. Not having a car, however, pushed me into biking a lot, and by the time I moved back to Georgia last summer, I could handle hills with relative ease that had me feeling near death earlier. I’m kinda hoping for the same result with running, but, well, we’ll see how it goes. Nobody should be surprised if within two weeks my running career comes to an end. I’ve noticed two things about running here as opposed to running in the states. The first is that this place is gorgeous. My pathetic little walk-jog things take me along paths beside rice paddies and marshes, fishermen and farmers. Mountains and clouds, of course, make up the backdrop. The second is that if seeing a white girl walking around is funny and interesting to locals, seeing a white girl trying to run around (and only slightly succeeding) is downright hilarious.
Running aside, there’re a few other things, in no particular order, that I’d like to muse about. Do enjoy.
Cleanliness and Organization
This afternoon I cleaned my room properly. Oh, it felt so good. I swept and I mopped (mopped!!) and I scrubbed. I did laundry and organized the kitchen (somewhat). And then I washed my feet, enjoying thoroughly the sensation of walking about barefoot without my soles quickly becoming the same color as my hair. I’m not a slob, but if I acquired Chinese language ability at the same rate this room acquires dirt, I’d be fluent by next Tuesday. My room, as I’ve said before, is very nicely sized and very nicely equipped. However, there’s no “hiding space” beyond my cloth wardrobes (which are filled with clothes), and the space under my bed. I don’t have a closet in which to stick those random things that I might need every once in a while, which is why I have things like my space heater randomly squeezed into corners. I am getting used to having these everything in plain view, but it still adds an air of “temporary” to my space that I’m in the process of finding additional ways of combating. I’m considering buying a small, inexpensive rug to cover up some of my beautiful concrete floor, but no decisions yet.
Plain Hot Water
I’ve always been really into cold water. At home, I guzzle it. In fact, at home I rarely drink anything except cold water, tea, and, occasionally, milk. In the summer my list expands to include iced tea and seltzer. Chinese people are not nearly as into cold water. You can get it quite easily—there’re bottles everywhere—but there are also superstitions regarding cold beverages and women’s health, etc. When I studied abroad, I mostly drank bottled water, so my water was usually room temperature. Here, I mostly drink water that I grab from the taps by the cafeteria and boil. (By the way, the word for “boil” in Chinese literally translates to “open,” so you’re “opening” the water. I love that.). I don’t have a compelling reason. It’s not that I can’t afford bottled water, certainly, as it normally runs around 1.5 kuai (20-25 cents), and it’s not that I don’t have time to walk five minutes to the nearest convenience store. At any rate, for my first week or so, I mostly drank either tea or boiled water that I’d left to cool to room temperature. Then, one day, I noticed myself drinking straight up hot water. I don’t remember making a conscious decision to do this, but suddenly it became my habit—not that I don’t still drink a ton of tea and lukewarm water, along with the occasional chilled bottle.
Laundry
As I mentioned above, I did laundry today—two small loads of it. I feel like laundry, more than almost anything else, hammers in for me the difference in the handling of time between some places and others. Many teachers in Heqing have washing machines, although driers are more or less a rarity in China. The students and the locals, however, do not, and neither do we fellows. That was a choice on our part, and one that we could still change. Washers run, from what I’ve heard, around 500 kuai. If we split that four ways, it would hardly be a huge burden. Yet, I appreciate doing the work myself. I appreciate squatting in my kitchen, scrubbing socks, observing as a task that involves no more than ten minutes of my time in the States, including folding dry clothes, turns into an hour or more. It’s so easy, with washing machines, to not think about what’s going on—to just know what temperature to pick and that, when I go back to the basement/Laundromat/wherever my clean clothes will be waiting to be popped into the drier. I don’t think about the soak cycle and the rinse cycle or any of that—except that now I do, because I am the rinse cycle.
Schedule
My schedule is weird. I have some days where all my classes start and end within two hours and others where my first obligation begins more than twelve hours before my last. The last two weeks, I’ve been pretty casual about what’s work time and what’s chill time, but that wasn’t working very well for me, so yesterday, I sat down with iCal and tried to set out a reasonable way to organize my non-class/meeting time. I now have established prep, Chinese study, exercise, cooking/meals, and, of course, breaks. I’m going to try to follow my schedule very closely this week to see how it goes, and then I’ll make changes as need be. Last year, it was so awesome to be done with work when I went home, and I’ll definitely miss that here, but I’m hoping that my set up “office time,” as it were, will lead me to feel like there’s more of a divide between work and fun. I’ve already labeled my desk as my “work space” and my couch as a “fun space,” and while I leave skype on wherever I am, I try to avoid gmail and such things when I’m at the desk. Likewise, I try not to do prep/grading on the couch or on my bed. I do expect that as time goes on I will acquire more responsibilities and thus have less time to myself, but for now I think having a relatively set schedule is best.
Mood Swings
I’m moody here. To be honest, I can be a bit moody anywhere, but it’s more pronounced here, and I don’t like it. I don’t like being unable to predict how certain things will make me feel, unable to gauge how I’ll react to particular situations. What I’m really struggling with right now is accepting my current emotional volatility and trying not to dwell on it too much. I have a whole lot of time left, and presumably I’ll mellow out at some point, but for now worrying about the mood swings is probably worse than the mood swings themselves.
Well, that’ll do it for now, mostly because I’m tired and want to do a bit more prep work for tomorrow. On the tired note, please excuse this post’s not necessarily being quite as nuanced as some of my others. I know I should probably have written this when I was a bit more detail-oriented, but oh well.
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