I'm starting to make plans for my trip back. For whatever reason, the semester ends in mid-July. I'll go to a few of the places in Sichuan that I've wanted to see--maybe I'll try to find one of the old towns that's still actually old, and hasn't been rebuilt as a tourist trap--and then go east, stopping in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Taipei before flying home sometime in mid-late August.
In about a week I'll have been in Chengdu for six months. I find that hard to believe. When I think about such a length of time in the abstract--such as before it happens--it's made up of habits, patterns, and repetitions. I see myself going to class every morning, studying every afternoon, working every weekend, etc. But when it happens, of course, it isn't really like that. Every class or lunch or studying session or neglect of one of these is unique, and the real events don't blend together, they elude categorization. And because every "event" is so different from every other, it's impossible to comprehend them all at once. So naturally my mind summarizes the period, alighting only on the most interesting or somehow otherwise memorable parts, and the time necessarily feels shorter.
A month or so ago all of the street vendors were selling pineapple. For the equivalent of 20 cents you could select a stick of pineapple from a jar of water on their cart, or else you could buy a whole pineapple (peeling optional) for a dollar a kilogram. A few weeks later the strawberries appeared. They were big, bright, firm, and delicious, and probably laced with pesticides. At first you had to pay a little over two dollars a kilogram; toward the end of the run they went down to a dollar fifty a kilo. Now they're harder to find. The woman who used to stand every day outside the gate of the apartment complex I don't see so often anymore.
One day, after I paid for a stick of pineapple and was inspecting the glass jar, trying to find the best stick, the fruit woman suddenly became agitated and started telling me to hurry up. Usually her patience is inexhaustible, so I was surprised--I looked around and saw a police car driving up. The police got out of his car and shouted angrily, and I took a few steps back, away from the fruit cart. The woman immediately grabbed the handles of the cart and dragged it inside the gate. The officer went as far as the gate, speaking in a rough tone of voice, but he stopped just outside of it. The woman, inside the gate, smiled at him indulgently. The police barked a few more times, but by then it was clear that he was only half serious. Then he left. I went inside the gate and grabbed a stick of pineapple.
A few weeks ago I went to a place called Luodai, which has a lot in common with Jiezi, the old town I visited last month, including the narrow, car-less stone streets, the multitude of small shops selling all kinds of sweet snacks, and the new-ancient architecture mixed almost seamlessly with the real-ancient buildings--which are only distinguishable by the "naturalness" of their decrepitude. What makes Luodai different is its fame as a Hakka town. The Hakka are a minority with their own language and culture, although supposedly they are ethnically indistinguishable from Han Chinese. For a long time they have primarily occupied the eastern provinces of Guangdong, Jiangxi, and Fujian. However, around the turn of the 18th century, the Qing emperor Kangxi encouraged a lot of them to relocate to Sichuan, which for evil reasons was lacking in population. A lot of the Hakka moved to Luodai.
One quintessential Luodai food is "heartbreak noodles" (伤心面), which supposedly serve to remind Hakka people of their far-off homeland. But in case the memory of Eastern China isn't enough to make you cry, the spiciness can help. These noodles were so spicy they gave me a headache.
May Day weekend is a national holiday in China, and this year it was also the second annual Zebra Music Festival. The three-day festival comprised three stages and multitudes of bands and DJs from all over China and the rest of the world. The international acts included Does it Offend You, Yeah? (UK); Exile Parade (UK); and Reptile and Retard (NL). The festival was held in a big park near the Panda Base (which I also visited while I was there--pictures later). Z and I went on the second day and stayed overnight in a borrowed tent, which we set up on a hill right in front of the main stage. Aside from the music, one big attraction was the Jägermeister tent, where if you played a game of foosball you could win a shot of that awful stuff.
The festival was a lot of fun. A few of my friends went on the second day (pictured below), the crowds were exuberant, and at night it rained like hell. Finally, here are a couple movie posters for films coming out this year that I'm excited about.
