Ancient Town

The Monday before last was Tomb Sweeping Day, when families traditionally visit the tombs of their forefathers to make sure they're all in order. Since there was no class that day, and I was invited to teach again at the English school in Chongzhou on Sunday morning, it became an overnight trip. The last time I taught at that school was also my first time teaching an English class (when I gave those "Christmas lessons"), and coming back three months later with a little more experience and confidence gave me a feeling of accomplishment.

Chongzhou is only an hour away from Chengdu by bus, but the climate makes it feel a lot farther; both times I've left a gray, smoggy Chengdu to arrive in a warm, bright Chongzhou. My friend Z____ came along with me, and after class we walked around taking pictures.














There's an ancient town called Jiezi (the "z" is pronounced almost like "ts", and the "i" at the end is sort of like "ə", the generic unstressed vowel) not far from Chongzhou, so that afternoon we decided to take a bus there. And we would have taken the bus, if there had been one. Instead, there was a line outside the bus station, and every ten minutes a van would pull up in front of it. Then an attendant would oversee the cramming of as many people as possible into the van (short of sitting in another person's lap). I was lucky; because of my height they chose me to sit shotgun.

We drove for about half an hour down dusty roads that were mostly under construction. Suddenly, the traffic got extremely crowded with pedestrians, cars, and motorbikes, and we started to make our way through some kind of open market. A few times we stopped unexpectedly to let somebody in or out--I couldn't figure out how the people standing on the side of the road communicated to the driver that they wanted to get in the van, or how they knew the unmarked, unremarkable silvery-gray van was the right one.

After the crowded market, the scenery quickly turned green and rural. The road was lined with tall, straight trees, and behind them were fields of yellow rapeseed flowers and intermittently an old, brick farmhouse. But this only lasted about 15 minutes, and then everything was under construction again. We came to a gigantic intersection where equal numbers of buses and tractors were lumbering around, kicking dust into the air. This was the stop. When we got out of the van, the driver told us that Jiezi was just a short distance up ahead. We could have taken one of the motorized pedicabs that were waiting around, but after riding down a bumpy road for the better part of an hour we opted to walk.

In retrospect, we should have taken the cab. For about 20 minutes we walked down a gravel road with no sidewalk, dodging mud puddles and the continually passing, continuously honking trucks that carried over-sized loads of sewer piping and other construction materials. The ancient town is being expanded into a luxury resort. Immediately around the town, the architecture at least is trying to mimic the old style. A little farther out, everything looks modern. On a fence, behind some people digging with shovels, there was a red banner that Z____ translated for me as "Never forget the policy."

The real "ancient town" is only a few blocks of buildings in the middle of all the mayhem, but once you get there it's surprisingly peaceful. True, the streets are full of tourists (though I might have been the only foreign tourist that day), but the absence of cars on the narrow, carved stone streets, and the profusion of outdoor tea houses with people dozing in their chairs, and the generally relaxed manner of the locals makes Jiezi feel like a decent place to live. The main street runs parallel to a wide river. Branching off from the street toward the river are numerous, narrow side roads with quiet guesthouses, and at the end of each there is at least one tea house where you can sit and look across the river at the bright green hills on the other side. Actually, when we were there, this experience was somewhat diminished by the heavy tractors that kept driving up and down the river, which had been made temporarily shallow so they could build a new bridge.




Looking out the entrance of a restaurant (hanging meat overhead)




Making sesame-peanut candy in front of the shop




Steamed buns--brown sugar, black rice, sesame filling, meat filling, ...







Medicine shop




The first section of the main street

A half-meter of panda, please.

In Chinese, pretty much every noun uses a measure word. "A person" is yi ge ren, which is literally "one (measure word) person". Ge is the most generic measure word, so I guess it could also be translated as "one unit of person". The way that measure words are categorized is interesting. Zhang is the measure word for something flat--yi zhang zhuozi for "a 'slice' of table", yi zhang piao for "a 'slice' of ticket" (or any other paper-like object). For animals, zhi is usually used, so yi zhi gou is "an (animal-unit) of dog". One of my favorites is tiao, which is seemingly used for anything longer than it is wide. This includes yi tiao sheng ("a length of rope"), yi tiao lu ("a length of road"), you tiao, the name for a length of fried dough sometimes eaten for breakfast, and even yi tiao yu ("a length of fish"). I've heard that in China many people don't consider fish real animals (I guess this is analogous to pescetarians who think of themselves as vegetarians), so when I first learned about yi tiao yu, I thought it was telling of this fact. But then my friend told me that tiao can apply to other animals as well, like in the alternative to the yi zhi gou already mentioned, yi tiao gou: "a length of dog". If I wasn't already a pescetarian, it would make me think twice before buying one of those sausages hanging in front of the little shop down the street.

"Welcome to China. We have walnut milk." - Chinese people

Everybody goes home on Chinese New Year. The shops all close, the cities empty of the large portion of their residents who come from the country, and the trains fill up to standing room only. Luckily, my friend Diana invited me to go stay with her family in Kaiyuan for the holiday, saving me from two weeks in a post-apocalyptic Chengdu. Kaiyuan is in Yunnan province, which is just south of Sichuan. The city is a four-hour drive from Kunming, the capital, and this is where we landed when we flew there two weeks ago. Despite being next to each other, Sichuan and Yunnan's climates are completely opposite (at least the parts I've seen). Chengdu is in a basin, and in the winter it is pretty much continuously grey, clammy, and just above freezing. Yunnan, on the other hand, is hot, and because it's on a high plateau the air is dry. It makes me think of southern California.

We took a taxi and got to the bus station around 4 o'clock, and bought tickets for a bus two hours later. The station was crowded but not overwhelming, and we only had to wait about 15 minutes in line at one of the dozen ticket windows. We were both pretty hungry and there was a cafeteria, but all they were serving were some elderly-looking noodles, and we couldn't find a table that hadn't already been occupied by flies. So we went to the convenience store instead, and bought some pistachios, sunflower seeds, peanuts, desiccated date cake, spicy papaya, and bottled tea, and then sat outside in the bright afternoon sun.








The Greyhound-style bus was pretty poorly kept, none of the overhead lights worked (which after the sun set turned out to be a bummer), and the windows rattled so loudly when we hit bumps in the road that I was afraid they might shatter. But the bus was also mostly empty, and so the ride was pretty comfortable. While there was still light I just watched the changing iron-red hills and the weird, skinny trees with tufts of needle-like leaves at the top and in the middle, cracking sunflower seeds and throwing the shells out the window. I've read several times that in China, every square meter of arable land is under cultivation, and whenever I go outside of the city this seems to be true. What from a distance look like gradually sloping hills with wild vegetation turn out to be terraced garden plots, crisscrossed with raised mud walkways.

We got to Kaiyuan around 10 o'clock. By China's standards, Kaiyuan is a small town, mostly organized around the axis of one main arterial. Diana's apartment is on the arterial, but a few miles north of the town center. Her mom had cooked a late dinner for us, including stir-fried potato slivers, cabbage, and spicy pickled garlic cloves. Diana's family was extremely welcoming, hospitable, and generous. They graciously accommodated my vegetarian preferences, gave me my own room, included me in all of the various family and extended family outings, and when we left her mom sent me back with a big jar of homemade "rose sugar", which as far as I can tell is made of rose petals preserved with sugar--an exotic take on the fruit jam idea.

Two days after arriving, I took the bus back to Kunming for a couple days to see my friend, Z____, who happened to be traveling through. This time the bus ride was in the morning, and I got to see a completely new stretch of land, which we'd only passed after dark the day before. The land was mostly red, flat farmland with hills in the distance. Every once in a while, at a gas station, there would be a few guards or officials sitting under a cinderblock shelter, with more cinderblocks to hold down the plastic roof. Along the road there were also villages, which mostly comprised crumbling, faded brick single-story houses of indeterminate age. Sticking out amid these humble, handmade dwellings, there would sometimes be another kind of house--new, wooden, tall, and boxy, often painted garish pink or green, with a new car in the cement driveway. This sometimes created the appearance of a Malibu beach house that had been air-dropped into the middle of a medieval village.

Whenever our bus passed another car--which was about once every three minutes--the driver would lean into his horn before swerving into the opposite lane, sometimes swerving back just in time to avoid oncoming traffic. Once or twice, when the roads were crowded, this "passing lane" would grow to two or three lanes wide--as drivers who felt that other cars in the middle of passing weren't passing fast enough proceeded to pass them--and it felt like a miracle when we got back into our (single) lane without getting into a head-on collision. The bus was also full this time, and although the wind was strong I kept the window open because at any given moment it seemed like half the passengers were smoking. One man had a tattoo of a swastika on his hand, but I assume the direction was a mistake.

The eastern bus station in Kunming is pretty far from the city center, and it was a little bit challenging figuring out which buses to take. A few times I got what seemed like contradictory information from different people. On one of the buses there was a girl sitting behind a big, cardboard box, which was tied shut with straps. In the middle of the ride the box started crowing.

Kunming is smaller (and cheaper) than Chengdu, but it also seems to have a higher proportion of foreigners. There is one street in particular that hosts a whole plethora (really, an entire, honest-to-Kant plethora) of Western restaurants. On Wednesday morning we went to a French cafe called French Cafe, where we had a chocolate crepe, a strawberry tart, and panini. A happy man tried to sell us a jar of honey through the window.








Then we went to a farmer's market down the street, where I bought a wedge of goat cheese to take back to Kaiyuan. (I was also planning to buy several more wedges at the request of some friends in Chengdu when we passed back through the following week on the way to the airport, but on that day the cheese stall turned out to be closed, since it was only a couple days after New Year's.) The market and cafe are also right next to a beautiful park of walkways, bridges, gardens, and lakes, filled to the brim with dapper old men (the park, not the lakes). One common phenomenon in parks in China is a group of old ladies dancing. These are often traditional folk dances where everyone does the same thing at the same time. In this park on this day there was a particularly large group of dancers, and not all of them were old ladies.











After the park we went to a bakery and bought a green tea-flavored roll thing, but half an hour later we were accosted by three children begging for food. After making them promise to share it, we gave them the roll, but the kid we handed it to ran away, and the other two kept following us asking for food. For some reason, poverty is much more conspicuous in Kunming than it is in Chengdu. Kunming seems to have a higher number of people begging, a lot of whom are missing limbs or are otherwise mutilated--this it has in common with Hong Kong. I saw a few of these doing calligraphy with brushes held between their toes. Another phenomenon that seems to exist in Kunming but not Chengdu is performing or begging children. Every other corner had a child or two singing with a cheap, little microphone and amplifier, and none of the children looked very happy to be doing it.

Walking through the center of the city, we came to a little plaza, on either side of which was a line of old people in white lab coats. Each one was standing behind an office chair. The men and women in the coats didn't look at us as we walked passed, but seemed to be gazing benignly into the walls of the buildings across the street. I wondered if a chemical lab nearby was having an emergency evacuation (and was going to great lengths to ensure each staff member would still have a place to sit...), until a woman passing by sat down in one of the chairs and the scientist behind it started giving her a shoulder rub.

Z____ had been teasing me for being so fascinated by the old men in the park earlier, and when we passed a table selling "old man hats", I started trying some on. I was surprised to find one that I actually liked, and I asked how much it was.
"160 kuai," the lady said. I thanked her and started walking away.
"Don't you want that hat?" Z____ asked. "You have to bargain!"
"There's no way I can get it down to a price I'd be willing to pay," I said.
"Those hats should be 50 kuai at most," said Z____.
"But she wanted 160! She'd be insulted if I asked for 50."
But Z____ assured me this was not the case, so I walked back and made the offer, trying to sound jaunty. The lady laughed and shook her head, saying she couldn't possibly go below 100.
We started walking away again, when the lady called out after us "Ok! 60!"
Z____ replied "We'll take it for 50!"
"Well, in that case..." the lady conceded, and that is how I became the owner of an old man hat.




Me and Diana with bananas and hat


It seems like there is always one movie that must be mentioned immediately whenever anyone talks about movies here. When I first arrived it was 2012. For the past month or so it's been Avatar. In Kunming I finally saw it (in 3D...golly!). This was also my first experience going to a movie theater in China. We arrived two minutes after the nominal start of the movie, just in time to find out that it would be shown dubbed in Chinese with no subtitles! But since I was more interested in the animation than the dialogue, this didn't stop me from enjoying the film. When we entered the theatre, the lights hadn't yet been turned off, and a lot of people were still chatting. There was a picture of a space station on the screen, which I guessed was some kind of promotional preview, maybe for Avatar: The Game, or Avatar: The Theme Park Ride. We found our seats and I turned to Z____ to say something, but noticed that she seemed strangely engrossed in the preview. I looked around at all the people talking to each other but watching the screen, and then realized that there were no previews. The movie had started. There was a pretty steady stream of conversation going on around us through at least the first hour of the movie, but since I couldn't really understand it it was easier to tune out.

I'm writing this sitting by the window in a bakery, and there's a group of kids setting off fireworks right outside. They light a firework in their hands, and when it starts popping and shooting sparks everywhere they throw it on the ground and play soccer with it. One of them was standing by the window earlier staring at my laptop, and when I looked at him he grinned and gave me a thumbs-up.

The next night we ended up going to a movie bar, which I believe was called "Movie Bar 1895". They advertised as having live music and old movies. We had a hard time finding it and had to call three times for directions, but when we finally made it the waitress greeted us as if we were distinguished and anticipated guests. The bar had a PA, a piano, and several guitars, but the live music that night turned out to be a middle-aged woman singing movie theme songs over Music Minus One. Around 10:30 the woman left and the staff lowered a projector screen over the stage. The staff hadn't yet decided which movie to show that night, so they gave us their DVD album. We suggested 8 1/2, but were dismayed when they started the movie without turning off the lively Latin music playing over the PA. "Most of the customers here don't want to watch the movie, so we have to leave the music on" was the explanation. Looking around at the group of Chinese people playing cards, the white guy with his laptop, and the couple enjoying a romantic evening in the corner, I realized they had a point--none of them seemed too interested in watching a Fellini movie. We watched it with subtitles for about half an hour, and I laughed a couple of times imagining that the Latin music was the movie's soundtrack, and then we left.

I was hungry after that so we went to a sort of food court where we'd been the day before. Yunnan is known as having a large number of ethnicities (as recognized by the government), and each restaurant in the food court represented the food of a different one of these ethnic groups. This time it was late when we arrived, however, and most of the places were closed. Also unlike last time, the food court was ridiculously filthy. Pools of water and other liquids lay on the floor with paper plates, napkins, leftover food, trash, and plastic mats and buckets. The tables weren't much better. We were wading through this, looking for a place with that magic combination of openness and cleanliness. As we were walking, a scrawny young man suddenly jumped in front of us and started shouting "Eat! eat!" and making weird growling noises and miming someone shoveling food into their mouths. We ignored him and walked past, but soon realized that this was the only truly open restaurant. For a while the guy--who was actually a waiter--would come around and shout something at us, but we kept ignoring him and eventually he stopped. We ordered a famous Yunnan dish called "across the bridge noodles", which are rice noodles in a big bowl of hot, oily soup, with mushrooms and vegetables that you add at the table and that you hope will be sufficiently cooked by the hot broth. I made sure with the waitress that the soup had no meat in it and also no meat in the broth, but in retrospect I'm almost sure that it was chicken broth.

An hour later in the hotel room my stomach started hurting; over the course of the night things deteriorated until by morning I had completely rid my digestive system of all traces of food--past, present, and future--using all means at my disposal. The next day I had a fever and couldn't hold down anything but bread and water. This was also the day when I was supposed to take the bus back to Kaiyuan. But I'll save that story for another time.

While we were walking around in Kunming, Z____ and I entered a convenience store to buy some water when a little glass bottle with a green and white label caught my attention. The picture on the label looked like a big walnut. And lo...walnut milk it was. I had never noticed walnut milk before, but after that of course I started seeing it--and advertisements for it--everywhere. The walnut milk consisted of nothing but walnuts, sugar, water, and sometimes an emulsifier. I was so excited I bought three different brands and wrote reviews of them. I have never seen walnut milk in the U.S.--does it exist there?

Another place we went was "lady street" (女人街), which is not a red light district, but a big shopping mall that caters only to women (I know, what a strange concept). The mall was a lot like those malls in Taipei where each floor is a ring of tiny shops organized around a central escalator. We went down to the basement and saw what I think can best be described as a "manicure warehouse": rows and rows of tables and easy chairs with women getting manicures, pedicures, and a few massages, stretching as far as the eye could see (more or less).

Finally, I would like to mention a clothing store bravely called Unsightly & Peculiar, and a restaurant called My Favor Restaurant with, underneath this in big letters, the subtitle My Favor Steak. That's all.

Photos from Hong Kong

Near the end of the main street of the main town on Lamma Island, an island near Hong Kong Island where no cars are allowed. To the right is a used bookstore and vegetarian cafe.





Something I ate at a vegetarian restaurant.





A view from Kowloon Park.





Smaller statues in front of the Giant Buddha.

New Year's Competition part 2

After a couple hours of listening to a story about a wolf who terrorizes a riverbank and the coalition of thirsty animals who try to stop him, we were almost finished. I was given a chart and had to put a check mark next to the names of the 15 or so children who I thought had given the best recitations. We drove back to the hotel courtyard, where groups of children in various costumes and uniforms were milling around one building in particular. We went inside. To the right was a stage and a catwalk, on which four emaciated girls who couldn't have been older than 13 were awkwardly modeling skimpy dresses. In front of that were several rows of chairs, all empty except for four in the front that were occupied by the judges--including Aileen and Liu Xiao. Behind that, on the other side of a crowded aisle, were more seats, which were full.

Mary and I stood in the doorway for a few moments, and then a guy with a headset pushed through the crowd and beckoned us to follow him. He led us to the judges' chairs. Feeling a little embarrassed about this special treatment--I wasn't actually going to judge these models, was I!?--I chose a seat several rows back and on one side. Soon the modeling transitioned to dancing, which was mostly hip-hop and I thought pretty impressive. After about half an hour I decided it would be more fun to use the remaining hour or so until lunch to explore the city. Mary and I pushed our way back through the crowd of people--assailed with "Hello!"s from every direction--to the courtyard. After checking in with the woman in the neon orange coat--who I had started to think of as my handler--we left. We walked across one of the covered bridges and through some sunny open markets.





Influenced slightly by my throbbing head, I suggested we stop for tea. Instead of a traditional tea house, Mary took me to a black-and-white cow-patterned, narrow place across the street from her university. I ordered a hot green tea, and a black ceramic mug on a shelf behind the cashier reminded me to ask for it in something other than plastic. "Plastic is all we have," I was informed. "What about the mug right behind you!?" I asked. That was for display purposes only. With Mary's help, however, I prevailed upon them to serve my tea in it. The cashier called the busboy over and asked him to wash the dust out.

After tea we walked back toward the hotel and intercepted the other judges and organizers (including the woman in the neon orange coat) on the bridge. Together we walked to a nearby restaurant and feasted on foodstuffs. As we walked lazily back to the hotel, we passed an old man sitting at a little table with a camping stove, on which there was a bowl of shiny brownish liquid sugar. In front of him was a baking tray with a piece of wax paper on it. The man picked up the bowl and with deft motions poured tiny amounts of the liquid sugar onto the paper, soon creating a fish, which he mounted on a stick. Another of the judges paid the old man two yuan and asked me to choose an animal. The man had a wheel with twelve different animals on it that you could spin, and the arrow ended up pointing to a crane (sorry it's not the best picture).





Walking back to the hotel, Mary told me that the man was a local celebrity.

We were taken back to the school for another round of speeches. This second time, however, the contestants were the same (minus the ones I hadn't given check marks). And they performed the same speeches, recited the same stories. The only difference was that this time I had to give them ratings on a 10.0 scale, marked next to their names on another chart. As far as I could tell, I was the only one rating these children, and I found it a little disquieting that although I had no formal training and had been given practically no instructions, I was solely responsible for how they fared in the contest--for which most of them must have spent a long time practicing.

After the second round of judging, we had more time until dinner, so after watching the dancing again for a while--this time it was mostly large groups of children doing traditional ethnic dances, although right when I came in someone was breakdancing--Mary and I took off again. We walked toward the biggest of the bridges, which was lined with teahouses and tea shops.





We were sitting in one of the teahouses sampling their finest grades when Mary got a call. It was the woman in the orange coat, calling us back for dinner. So we went to another restaurant, where we had a private room on the second floor. This time there were about 15 people, and there were so many dishes on the table that they had to start stacking plates on top of the edges of other plates. One of the dishes was the famous "Ya'an fish soup". One of the reasons the fish is so famous is a bone in its head that looks a lot like a saber. The restaurant guarantees that any customer who orders the fish will get a saber bone to take home with them. When they brought the fish out, the orange coat woman and the waitress spent several minutes digging around in its head with a knife, but they were unable to find the bone. Fortunately, the restaurant must have kept a stock of extra saber bones just in case, because the waitress returned shortly with a little gift box. It was passed around for everyone to see, and then the woman in the orange coat gave it to me.

New Year's Competition

In the middle of December I got a call from a guy I met through a teaching interview, asking me if I wanted to judge an English competition in Ya'an on New Year's Day. A driver would pick me up on New Year's Eve around 6:30, I would stay in a hotel, judge the competition the next day, and they would drive me back that night. Ya'an is a town about a two hours' drive from Chengdu, famous for its elaborate covered bridges, high quality tea, copious rain, edible fish, and beautiful women (there's a pun in Chinese about the last three). That was about all the information I could get.

On New Year's Eve, around 9:00, a van drove up to the gate. There were already four people inside plus the driver, and before leaving Chengdu we stopped to pick up one more. I sat in the middle row next to a young couple, and we chatted for a while. I tried to ask them if they were going to the same competition, but I couldn't understand the answer. I thought maybe they were honeymooners or something and this was one of those unofficial cabs that take multiple groups at the same time.

Once we got onto the freeway I dozed, and when I woke up we were driving along a wide river. We turned down a covered bridge, at the end of which was a huge, perfectly shaped tree silhouetted against some street lights, the air around it glowing orange. Some people were strolling along the bridge and river bank with big red paper lanterns.

We went through a gate into a courtyard and got out of the van. Some other people were there waiting, but they left with the driver and the couple who had been sitting next to me. I stood by the van with my bags, wondering if someone was going to tell me where to go.

After what seemed like twenty minutes, a woman who had been sitting behind me in the van motioned for me to follow her. She was walking with two other guys toward what turned out to be the door to the hotel. Inside the deserted lobby she gave me a key. I tried asking again what was going on. Finally I learned that these three were also here for the competition. The woman, Aileen, was a singer; one guy, Liu Xiao, was a dancer, and the other guy, M_____, was a professional MC. I started to feel slightly under-qualified. They helped me find my room and said they would come get me the next morning at 8:00. It was then about 10:30.

The room was considerably nicer than the hotel room in Chongzhou (not that I'm complaining! There are worse things to suffer than being put up in an imperfect hotel room). The bathroom was big, clean, and didn't smell like sewage, the heater worked well, and the wallpaper was only peeling in one place. I put on my pajamas, but I didn't want to go to bed right away since it was New Year's Eve. Fortunately, I had anticipated this scenario and had brought some DVDs. I was just about to watch one of them when the door became the source of a knocking sound. "How did you become the source of a knocking sound!?" I asked. Actually, I think I just called out "Hello?" The voice from the other side of the door belonged to the other judges. I opened the door. They had come to ask me if I wanted to go eat something with them. I ran back into the room and threw my clothes back on, and we went.

At the entrance were a man, a woman, and two cabs. The man and woman were introduced as friends. We took the cabs across the river to a restaurant on the shore. The place seemed to be made completely of weathered wood, with gaps between the floorboards and stairs that creaked alarmingly. It was mostly empty, but we were led up the stairs to a little nook directly over the river. If not for the darkness and fog, I think it would have been quite a view. The waiter then put up a theater curtain, turning the nook into a private room. The darkness, wooden walls and furniture, little windows, and that we were sitting above the river made it feel almost like we were in the cabin of an old ship.

First beers were distributed, and "soy milk" for the ones who didn't drink ("soy milk" in China means a combination of soy and cow's milk). Then dishes quickly started appearing. My clearest memory is the chicken feet--a plate of five or six long, gnarled claws covered in brown scales that glistened under the hanging light bulb. There were also skewered vegetables and meat, sliced meat, stir-fried meat, and just meat. But there were some things I could eat, like corn, stir-fried greens, and tofu. The tofu had an interesting flavor and I asked about it. The man who had been ordering and seemed to occupy the head of the square table said it was stinky tofu (chou doufu), but it tasted nothing like the overpoweringly pungent stuff I had in Taipei.

I also got to experience Chinese drinking culture again. Even after the first toast involving everyone at the start of the meal, it's considered impolite to drink by yourself; you either have to toast someone else, or be toasted. But it's hard to break the habit of drinking whenever you feel like it when that's what you're used to. Once I caught myself doing this, but luckily, I made eye contact with someone across the table and was able to avoid a faux pas by shouting "Happy New Year!" before we both took sips. At one point the waiter brought us a big pitcher of some kind of steaming yellow liquid with flowers and vermilion things that look vaguely like walnuts. Is that tea? I asked. They told me it was beer. It tasted kind of like Dimetapp. Near midnight everyone had pretty much finished eating. I was still picking over a plate of home-made potato chips, dipping each one in a plate of powdered chili pepper and MSG. Everybody seemed to be half focused on whatever conversation was happening around the table, and half focused on text messaging with their phones. At midnight we all stood up and had another toast.

The next day, after a breakfast of cold vegetables and steamed buns (mantou), hard-boiled eggs, and milk (no coffee or tea!), I was ushered into another car. A girl got into the front seat and introduced herself as Mary, my interpreter. She was a student at the local university. Then a woman in a neon orange overcoat drove me, Mary, and the MC to a slightly dilapidated school building not far away. There we met up with the "honeymooners", Y_____(f.) and Z_____(m.), who were actually also judges. Mary, Y_____, and I were shown into one of the classrooms. All of the desks were pushed against the far wall, except for three set in the middle. We sat at these desks.

Up until this point I had an extremely faint idea of what I was supposed to do. I had pictured myself sitting at a judges' table near a stage and holding up signs with "9.7", "8.5", "9.2" printed in big numerals as crowds booed and cheered. I wasn't really sure how this empty classroom fit into the picture. I wanted to ask Mary about it, but I didn't know where to start.

A small child walked into the classroom and started giving a well-rehearsed speech in Chinese. Y_____ made a few notes, asked the child some questions at the end, and thanked him. A little girl came in and gave another speech. These children were almost offensively cute. "Am I supposed to be doing anything?" I asked Mary. She said that the English speeches were later. The English speeches turned out to be about 20 children later.

They mostly acted out stories, or gave monologues about a particular park or school or something. Most of the children from the same school had learned the same speech. And not only were the speeches the same, but they were told with almost identical intonation. At the end of each speech I was supposed to ask the children questions (that was the extent of the guidelines I received), so I usually asked them their names and ages, and then I tried to test comprehension of the stories they had told. I was disappointed that most of them seemed to have a very foggy idea of what their monologues were about.

To be continued...

Yak Butter

[edit: I can access blogspot again! Woohoo!]

As of today, my living room has graduated from "rustic" (3 out of 5 on the living room homeyness scale) to "comfortable" (4 out of 5). A friend just went out of town and generously let me keep her bookshelf and couch. And I have even gotten around to acquiring such civilized articles as a plant, a non-eye-frying, non-headache-inducing light bulb, some real speakers, and a bowl of fruit. And the fridge is perfectly situated so that no matter which of the two couches you sit on, you can open it and grab a drink without standing up.

The other night I got together with my friend Aileen for dinner. She's one of the people I met at the New Year's Day arts competition I judged at, and she's a professional singer and singing teacher. We went to a Tibetan restaurant in the Tibetan part of town, where we met another of Aileen's friends, J____--who also happens to be a kung fu teacher--and a friend of his, T_____, from Tibet. I think this Tibetan friend must have invited us, because he ordered and paid for everything.

We shook hands in the parking lot, and then T_____ handed Aileen and me each a long strip of white, silky cloth. Aileen put hers around her neck, so I did the same thing. Are these scarves? I asked. Everybody laughed, leading me to conclude that these were not scarves. The ends were frayed and the material had a tendency to get wrapped around things, so pretty soon there were little strands of white fiber clinging to everything. Eventually I gathered the cloth might be a Tibetan holiday tradition. A Tibetan tallis?

The restaurant was in a 3-story complex with a lot of statues, instruments, and art, and the interior was made to look like an old wooden building (I think this was carried out pretty well). As I sort of expected, the meal was not centered heavily on vegetable matter. I broke my normal rule by drinking some of the salty yak butter tea. Tasting like liquefied buttered popcorn, yak butter tea somehow manages to occupy that ambiguous space between a soup and a beverage. I also tried some kind of pita sugar sandwich, and an extremely crumbly, maroon-colored cake of tasty but mysterious contents that in terms of texture seemed closest to wet sand. At the end of the meal we played rock-paper-scissors/"stone-scissors-cloth" to determine who would have to eat the last three pieces. The main dish was a big plate of beef cubes (or was that yak meat?), and there was also a plate of meat dumplings. And we were each served a bowl of yogurt. I don't usually eat yogurt, but I ate it this time, and while I can't say I exactly "liked" it, it wasn't a bad experience. Finally, I think my friends were feeling bad that I couldn't eat some of the things on the table, because halfway through the meal the waitress brought out a heaping plate of french fries with ketchup.

I have a tutoring session in half an hour, so I'm just going to add a picture from my first teaching experience, on Dec. 27th, in Chongzhou. Christmas lessons!