a few nights after the riots, i went to my favourite xinjiang restaurant.

ive been hanging out here in my apt. for a few days trying to get things done. one corner of the living room is stacked with Things i am Not Taking with Me (there's a please-dont-reinvent-the-wheel box for the new humboldt college writing teacher, who has yet to write me back [though i have written him several times. you'd think he would want to know what i have to say...? i did help design the pgram], and lots of random stuff for the 3 new humboldt teachers who are coming) and another corner is stacked with boxes and suitcases and stuff that Needs To Go Home. save the kitchen and the bathroom, both stocked with things not coming with me (mostly; i am keeping a few of my coffee mugs and some of my toiletries are returning with me), im more or less sorted. now comes the deciding what to ship and what to take with part. obviously, the cat is coming with. har har har. he's been watching me pack with keen interest. when he's not sleeping.

we went to the vet last week. i LOVE how pissed he is at me (i hate you so hard):


he was SO GOOD. and he was fine in his carrier too. he loves his carrier.

( cat and pagoda adventures )
today im going to see:


and remember kids, there's no such thing as a free lunch, but there is free luggage!:

ive narrowed down thousands of pictures to a hundred pictures to 20 pictures.


im going to make some print to frame.

some of these i want to be large, even poster sized.

and maybe when i get home, i can commission to have prints done for a show at art's alive or something...?

i havent been to the muslim quarter in a while... but it's one of my favourite places in the city. i took christian there today only to discover that... it wasn't there. i mean, it's THERE, but it wasn't there. why? construction. we arrived and went to turn down the usual ally way leading into the shops and met a funny sign instead:



so we walked down the main road and turned down the other side street. that half was there. although my usual snack people were gone. this was not cool because i was hungry. there were still lots of other snack people, but i like my snack people. who have my favourite snacks. sad! one of my favourite muslim quarter snacks is a fried bread thingy stuffed with greens and egg. so greasily good. there's another snack that tastes just like the inside of a butterfinger. my tea lady was still there, thankfully, and we kept walking down the street. we turned into the other usual allyway and things were fine. things were under construction, but still... still. we got to the great mosque and, where there are usually shops, nothing. this is what we saw:



my usual shops are all on the half of the allys that arent there. i was so disappointed. we had made the trip mostly to buy some art from my favourite guy, professor ding. i had told christian all about him, and was so excited to show him professor ding's shop. professor ding does amazing wood block prints. it's different than the standard ubiquitous chinese art.

i was so distraught i didnt even want to purchase any schlock (you can get almost anything at the muslim quarter.). i was there for art. and my usual people--the people i have bought treasures from over the years--were just gone. i'll go again. i promised josh a mao watch, after all. and at least next time, i'll be prepared. china is like this. things happen so fast. restaurants change all the time. one can never expect something to be there. but the muslim quarter!?







ive got my last month nearly arranged. christian is leaving soon for traveling with his family. they'll come through xi'an for a few days, so i'll probably go out to see the terra cotta doods one last time. i hear they have some new ones, recently unearthed.

i'll spend some time packing up my beloved apartment. Chris and John and Oliver will all be stopping by xi'an and i'll have a chance to see them one last time on our old stomping ground.

i'll then fly to meet christian in shanghai. there i hope to meet with Humboldtian 1.0 Claire, freshly graduated from HSU. christian would love to see hangzhou, and since it's close to shanghai, i'm returning there with him for a day or two. then we're off to Xiamen. we'll return to xi'an and i'll cover the city with kisses and then louie and i will take a sleeper bus to beijing. christian is a kind person and is flying to beijing with my bags so i dont have to try and wrestle with too much on the bus journey. we'll meet up and stay with oliver, harass the swede, and the next thing i know, i'll be on my way to california.

last night we met up with tony mu, the panda pimp. we watched him play some basketball and then went to the Good Dofu Place for dinner.


louie, thankfully, likes his pet carrier. he's been playing in it on his own volition. i still need to get him shots and certification.


im concerned about how he will be during our travels. i cant exactly go down to Fin and Feather (or < enter name of favourite local pet shop here >) and fetch him some kitty happy pills, so i just hope that things work out. if anyone has any tips about how to sedate a cat, it would be appreciated. vets here can be sketchy. one of my friends tried to get a sedative for her cat* but the dose was too much and her cat almost died. scary.

this week i give finals. and then... FIN!

right now im going to finish writing a final and bake some banana bread.

*this is my friend, sati, who was a teacher here last year. she happened to return to china for a visit and helped me get louie his carrier. we tried to get his shots organized at that time, but encountered a great deal of hassle (ma fan) instead. she was kind and wrote out how to say things like, "im taking my cat to america. i need the following things..." i really appreciate her taking time out of her vacation to help me out. im lucky she happened to stop by xi'an. two students from humboldt 1.0 and humboldt 2.0 have offered to help too, so i think things will work out just fine.

it was wonderful to see my old friends, chris and john! chris and john, expats from australia and the US respectively, had returned to australia last winter (er, summer as it were, since they were down under) but struggled to find work what with the economy being what it is and all. so, they decided to return to china, but not xi'an--wild and crazy kids!--because they wanted to try something different. john first came to china 15 years ago, and chris is no stranger to the middle country either, so it seemed a logical choice to return to their other home (australia and the US not withstanding), and to a new city just to be adventurous. they've been in changsha for about a month, so the city is still quite fresh to them. this being the case, divi, christian, and i got to help them explore their new turf. and thus we had a whirlwind of a weekend.



( chang-sha-cha-cha! )
remember kids, if you see a pig, RUN!

we learned from this Public Service Announcement posted at Mao's school:

when you last met your hero, school had started. and laura was here with me.

you'll forgive me if this post is a little disjointed. that's what happens when one is trying to write about 4 months in one go ;)

i took her to the banana temple.


and made her eat pickled garlic.


( adventures: February through the present )

remember kids, make live, not war.


and, kids, no scribbling!


this weekend, we're traveling with divi to visit chris and john in changsha. they had a difficult time landing jobs in australia, so they came back to china. since my goodbye to them was rushed and not really what i wanted (i did, afterall, leave china in a hurry last time), i cannot wait to see these wonderful friends of mine.




*during the fall of 06, i was teaching on the new campus and spied a pagoda (it was a clear day!). the students did not believe me that there was a pagoda near the new campus, even after i pointed out the window and tried to show them where it was. i knew it was out there. so, adam and i went on our annual Thursday Adventure Day to the pagoda and it was fabulous. i returned to class and told the students where i had gone. and i said it wrong. i said xiāngjiāo (香蕉, banana), not xiāng jī (香积, not banana). henceforth, the banana temple was known as the Banana Temple. even the parents of that first batch of disbelieving students now call it thusly.
**the project keeps getting stalled because as they dig, they find cool relics from the past and have to call in the archeologists. andrew wishes he could get in on that action.

hey all...

because of access *cough*cough* ive moved the journal. it's here: http://xianmazing.blogspot.com/

the first week of school ended, for me, in a blanket of white:


and this evening, laura, graham, and i are off to chengdu. PANDAS OR BUST!

laura and i are here! we left mom's house at 3am on monday (USA time) and flopped into my apt. 12:40am on tuesday (china time). that's 30+ hours of travel. but we're here safe and sound and the worst part of the whole trip was my vegetarian "lunch" on the plane: two salads, two bread rolls, and fruit. thankfully i did get a real dinner. still, if that's the only thing to bitch about, that's pretty good, no? our last flight leg was delayed by about a half hour but we had both totally fallen asleep on the plane and didnt even notice we were still driving around. i woke up to hear a stewardess announce they were "sorry for the delay and we would be taking off soon..."

louie is SO happy to have his human back. he was gifted toys and he loves them so far. he's having a good time. right now he's hanging out with me in my lap.



laura's reaction to china thus far? "it's dingy but everything seems well kept!" a fair description...

amelie is meeting us in a little while and we're going to find food and watch laura react to the Outside World.... MU HA HA HA HA...

but we're here and we're safe.

one of the most difficult decisions i have ever made was to move to china.
i didnt want to be so far away.
but i am.
so far away.

im thankful my dad got to see china.
im thankful i got to share my life here with him.



tomorrow i hop on a plane.
i need to be home.
i need to be with my family.

i'll return to china in february.

( inured yet injured )

why do students think teachers are stupid?

and now for some positive! positive! positivity!

about a month ago, amar, mary, and i went on a field trip with some exchange students from HSU. we went to see a small village--a place known for its papercuts--and a temple.

( photos from trip to huxian )

we also had thanksgiving with our darlings. since amar and i are both vegetarians, I made stuffing and gravy so we could enjoy it too. my kitchen smelled like proper thanksgiving. it was glorious. my grammie would have been proud.



the weekend before thanksgiving, the school took us on a trip to Qianling Tomb and Famen Si, both near baoji.

exotic flavor of the foreigner.



the Qianling Tomb is the final resting place for Wu Zetian (武则天), China's only empress. her story is pretty outragious. reminds me of the complexity of british royality (henry VIII, i'm lookin at you!)
( tomb photos )

it was a chilly day out


then we went to Famen Si, home of Shakyamuni's finger bone!

gratuitous incense burning photo:


( at the temple )

what else is new?
louie is cute. oh wait. that's not new.


i got a new coat:


i love jiaozi. oh, that's not new either.


it's cold:


jupiter, venus, and the moon (my view):


and ive been doing yoga weekly with divi and a few other women from our apt. complex for about a month now.

im looking forward to a H O L I D A Y.

soon im traveling to beijing. my passport needs to be renewed. but that doesnt count as a holiday. school is out mid-january.

hope all is well with everyone.




*this student is referring to unfinished work. it's common to see the students scramble to finish an assignment in class.

works cited:
Connor, Ulla. “New directions in contrastive rhetoric.” TESOL Quarterly 36.4(2002): 493-510.

Halloween was fun this year. i was a scary marionette:



mary had a flash of inspiration--she told me of a friend of hers who used to decorate pumpkins with sparkly things. and thus, the bling-a-riffic jack-o-lantern was born. mary wanted to avoid cutting open and gutting pumpkins, so we decided to go this route. i cleaned out the import store of pumpkins (nothing to see here people, just a white lady with 13 pumpkins in the cart, what?) and mary and i went to The World of Decorative Cloth to get things like sequins and straight pins and other doo-dads (buttons, snaps, googly eyes). we figured this would be a hit here in china, home of the shiny.
making jack-o-lanterns (BLINGARIFFIC)


pumpkin pride! clockwise from left: wei, beau, vera and jinna, panjie and yuting,


pumpkin pride! clockwise from left: mary, jinna, weiwei, donna


then we did bobbing for apples. to get enough water, we asked the students to bring in their hot water thermoses.


sword fighting witches:


i put on some halloween music--thriller, the monster mash.... and a good time was had by all. joining us that day were some new students! we're up to 15 now.

adam is sending me a package--lots of goodies in there, including a number of surprises he didnt wish to reveal. he even put in presents for louie!! when louie was a baby, and lisa found him, that was during the glorious three weeks of our friendship when adam and i realised she was nuts but had yet to discover just how nuts she was an that it was not a good kind of crazy. she never named him. adam and i did. he was named for king louie, since we jokingly called ourselves the three musketeers. she always hated that name for him. we thought it was perfect. and it is. suits him very well.

adam sent the package to me via fedex so he could carefully track it. he already had mailed me a different package that somehow wound up in thailand. he didnt wish for that to happen again. following the tracking number, he discovered that it made it as far as beijing but was flagged as... d a n g e r o u s. he was going crazy trying to figure out what was so bad. was it the cranberry sauce? the olives? (amusing side bar, evil olive is one of my favourite palindromes) ...what was so scary, he thought. turns out, it was the CAT TOY he found for louie, decorated with a fleur de lys. quoth adam, "apparently when customs examined it, it went squeak squeak and vibrated. they were not amused" (adam left the batteries in). yes. they were frightened by the cat toy that squeaked. yes, i can see how that's scary at first... but... once the box was opened, clearly a cat toy. i mean really.

the good news is, the package has been sent domestically and i'll get the rest of the goodies.

wow, i have been busy....

and how in the world is it november?! and where did the time go...??

and OH was the election so strange to witness from afar. alas, i never got my ballot. sorry, california. i tried. damn prop. 8....

using the Overseas Vote Foundation, i was able to vote for president and senator. but nothing else.

i tried a new tailor and decided her first project was going to be a chinese-styled shirt. not the most flattering for my figure type, but how could i leave china without one of these? she did alright. i will next attempt to have her copy a shirt and we shall see...

and then some jeans...

louie is with me. im still working on finding him a home before next summer. meanwhile, i do enjoy his company. chris and john are headed back to australia at the end of the term and have told me that ned would like me to adopt him.

i have a lot of stories to share. the water vacation (entries 6-9), halloween, a trip to the countryside, and my most recent adventure, a jaunt to Empress Wu Zetian's tomb, and Fa Men Si (home of buddha's finger bone!!).

i have a huge pile of student papers to read, and more quizzes to grade, and a number of misc. assignments to record in my gradebook, so i will probably write in my journal soon to give myself a break.

haha.

all is well here. i mostly wanted to say hi.

terribly scary, a score in a market in lanzhuo. how could i resist?!



the good news is, school has settled in, we think. we now have 9 students and things are rolling along smoothly. good, good, good.

hopefully i'll catch up on some writing this weekend. we shall see....

sometime this next week, ruhi is having some of us over to see her new apt. im interested in seeing the elevator of her building because, im in it! yup! there's a tobest ad. in her lift! she called because she says she sees me every day... craaazy, eh? oh, china.

and that's the news. ive just returned from chris and john's where we had a lovely game of trivial pursuit. and now, bed time!

...and now that i finally wrote about louie living with someone else...

he's coming back to me! but temporarily. i just got a call from tom. one of his friends, john, has been injured very badly and is in the hospital (it's a long story). tom and cindy are spending most of their time at the hospital with john soooo... i'm taking the lil bugger back :)

my poor plants!! they are just starting to recover... hahaha...

it has gotten very cold as of late. and it's getting dark earlier and earlier every day. i have a feeling winter will be here before we know it.

i dont think i ever mentioned this--i am letting tom and cindy keep louie. he seems really happy to be with them, but what really allowed me to make that decision is the fact that they're not going anywhere. they are not just living in china temporarily like i am. and im happy to give louie some stability. the lil bugger is doing fine with them, so why not give him even more stability by letting him stay put.

the trip to qinghai was quite interesting and im glad i decided to go. i'll finish writing about the Great Water Vacation and then i'll share about Qinghai and Lanzhou. but that's when i have some time. school started this week. er, it was supposed to start, i should say...

as of sunday night, we knew nothing. no one from the school had bothered to return mary's calls, so we were totally in the dark. we planned to go to the classroom at 8am as a collective (mary, amar, and i) and go from there. we went to the old classroom and there were no students there, save one young woman who informed us that it was no longer the humboldt college classroom, but just another classroom for the translation dept. greeeeeat, we thought. now what? we went hunting for information. surprise surprise the chinese dean wasnt around. we finally found some folks who had an inkling of a clue as to what was doing on. "[your] classroom has been moved," they said. uuum, ok. so we're now on the 5th floor. we went up to check it out and was a disaster--it had obviously not been cleaned after last year: used tissues, random trash on the floor, other broken chairs... and no students. just to add to the effect, the podium and a broken chair were blocking the entry. a nice touch. we walked back down to the offices to try and figure out where the students were, and how many of them there were. we also were rather curious why the hell no one bothered to tell us we wouldnt have students on the first day. the answer to this was brilliantly chinese: "the students have had military training" ...Oh! Gee! Really?! So that's why all the other freshmen had successfully started school at 8am. Makes perfect sense. they couldnt tell us the real reason: dean li is an incompetent ass. recruitment happened last spring, supposedly, and we were told we had 40+ students. not quite. the 40 got whittled down quite a bit. what happened? hell if we know. were there really 40 enrolled to begin with? dunno. we were told we would meet with our students at 2:30. we thought it would be a hi-how-are-you-welcome-to-the-program meeting. but nope. dean li was there and it was really a meeting to attract students to the program. a handful raised their hands and said they were already enrolled. the other 9 students submitted they were "thinking about it." dean li conducted the entire meeting in chinese, and when mary kindly suggested he speak in English, he informed us that they were freshmen and simply wouldnt understand. the ONLY thing that dean li needs to do for humboldt college is recruit. our side does the rest (read: mary). and we saw the fruits of his labor before us. it was disheartening.

so today, i went up to our new classroom at 8am to get things rolling...

we have 7 students.

7.

that's it.

HSU has mentioned pulling the plug if enrollment was too low... so is 7 too low? we know not. so....

we're waiting to see what happens and meanwhile, pushing forward. there is a chance that somehow more students will miraculously appear.

i am all for small class sizes, but this is insane.

and here's a random thought: it's strange being off milk. i am quite used to drinking yogurt for breakfast, or eating oatmeal, and then in the evening, sometimes i'll have a yogurt bar. i hope i havent done any serious damage to myself, drinking chinese milk for a year and a half. of course it's in the candy too, and i have a fondness for milk candy. damn.

i'm off for another brief adventure! i will conclude the water vacation entries when i can... (still to come: 杭州, 黄山, 桂林 and 阳朔)

tomorrow afternoon i leave for qinghai. and school starts on the 6th. busy! busy! mary has returned and we are faced with a number of challenges--do we have any students? when are their chinese classes? (we cannot schedule our classes until we know). how many of them are there? what is the skill level of the student? who is our secretary and where can we get our copies done? it's a lot to take in.

a week ago i wore a sundress. now i am wearing a scarf. the weather shift has been dramatic and sudden. the heat comes on october 15 (gov't regulation specifies that on 10.15 the heat comes on and on 3.15 the heat goes off. no matter what the temperature is like). meanwhile, it's crisp and cool and it's hard to believe that a few weeks ago i was drenched with sweat as i biked around the countryside.

On the train, off the train, no worries. To the wharf! i got to the harbor and was greeted by a nun. the first ferry left at 6am, so i was a bit tired as i didnt sleep well on the train. we had to go by bus for a little over an hour and then hop onto the boat.

there was a HUGE billboard proudly declaring, "Only development is the truth." the background of the sign included a smiling Important Looking Guy with lots of large imposing buildings. During the whole ride on the bus, it was rather obvious that we were in factory-land. factories factories everywhere. scary. i saw the end result of this truth in the ocean water. and it was heartbreaking. disgusting.

this was the only leg of the journey that filled me with apprehension. i had written down the name of the hotel but had no idea what to expect... there are lots of fancy hotels on putuoshan--way out of my price range--and no hostels. and not every hotel can legally house a foreigner. my fingers were crossed.

i got off the ferry and called the hotel. "i am here!" i said. we had a short-lived phone conversation and then i sat down to wait. everyone wanted me to stay with them. as i sat on the curb, folks with brochures and photos of their hotel danced around me. this is just china. i just kept repeating 不要! (dont want). 等待朋友! (wait for friend). not too much later, a man on a bike arrived holding a placard with the hotel name on it. that's me! i leapt up and ran over to him. he put my bag on the bike and the two of us walked to his house which was the hotel. it was like a bed and breakfast. and it was right on the ocean. when the woman asked on the phone if i wanted an ocean view, i assumed it was an "ocean view" but no, it really was an ocean view!

( the rest of the story )

then i went to the bus station, and i was off...! again! headed for hangzhou!

"Above is Heaven, Below are Suzhou and Hangzhou." (上有天堂，下有苏杭)

i left adam and enjoyed my busride, staring out the window. the houses were tiled and lovely. i was captivated by their colours--they were quite subdued. lots of houses were a seagreen and muted blue. they were the colours of blue and green glass, smooth and soft and worn from years in the sea. come to think of it, i have some glass i put in my camerabag pocket when i was on the beach in lianyungang! i totally forgot... i have some shells too.... i did not get any good photos of the houses, sadly. some of the tiling work was done with a rather complex pattern. some of the tiling patterns were more simple. it reminded me of europe.

i have joined a global network called couchsurfing. i first heard of this when i sang with the humboldt chorale a few years back in order to do carmina burana. one of the women in the group was a couch surfing member and she told stories of traveling across europe meeting interesting people and saving on costs. i'd forgotten about this until last year when chris and john and diego would sometimes have couchsurfers stay or join our tribe for dinner. my purpose in joining was to meet up with folks who could show me around or, at the very least, join me for dinner or a drink. there are not couch surfers everywhere, there are a number in suzhou and hangzhou. i met angelo* in suzhou.

of all the hostels in suzhou, i picked one that was close to where angelo lived because he had broken his leg and was on crutches. i figured, if this person was going to show me around and the like, i should be in close proximity. after i got checked in, i gave him a call and he met me for dinner. it was rather uneventful. then we had a few beers (real qingdao!) at a cafe/bar overlooking a canal. the place was near where i was staying so that became my spot for getting coffee each morning.

the next day, angelo and i grabbed some baozi, had breakfast at the city park next to the river (which acts almost as a moat), and i watched this guy do tai chi:


i also watched this lady knit:


angelo marked some places on my map and then headed off to work. we joked that i was a traveler and not a tourist.

my first stop was the garden adam's grandmother had recommended, the Humble Administrator's Garden (拙政园), built in 1513. it was massive and beautiful. quiet, serene, peaceful, romantic... i really didnt want to be there alone. but i was. so i enjoyed every moment and tried to soak up the good feelings this place had to offer.

( good golly that's a garden with lots of lovely lotus! (CLICK HERE) )

*yes, humboldt county super-stars, i did have the angelo's pizza jingle stuck in my head damn near the whole time i was in in suzhou
** we often made fun of his ghetto cast (he's really a mummy!):

Adam and I bussed first to huai'an, had a pit stop, and then climbed on a smaller bus to Hongze. once off the bus, i took my first of many bicycle taxi rides.


i had been a little concerned as to where i was going to stay during my time in hongze. as it is a "small" town (that's china small, not rest of the world small), i didnt know what to expect hotel-wise. it turns out, since i was the special guest of honor, adam's dad put me up in a really nice hotel. really nice hotel. adam and i took the bicycle taxi to the hotel and then met up with adam's best friend from home.

( it's a small town, it only has a couple hundred thousand people... )
i was off to suzhuo!