through the looking glass

pardon the completely random nature of this email, I’ve just got internet up and running but have been jotting down notes to share later, so some of this is rather old (on my timeline at least). I can hardly believe I’ve been here almost a month. crazy. I’ve met some interesting people, made a few friends, and managed to explore a decent chunk of my end of town (the qingchen district, next weekend I’m shooting for the modern half, beidao district). though in true annie fashion today was the first day I actually brought my camera out on a migration. so if the words don’t help you get a better picture of where I am, peek at
http://www.imageevent.com/echoes/tianshui
for some shots of my new home (limited so far, more coming soon), some of my students (ditto) and some of my new mah jong teachers.

two weeks in. well, I think it’s about two weeks, time’s gotten wonky on me. my mandarin’s improved somewhat, but recent forrays for food and into town with antony, the intriguing globe trotting in china ten years english teaching brit on the fourth floor whom I met a few days ago, have pushed the learning curve back a bit, removing some of the necessity from the equation from time to time. though I did manage to remember the word for glue without looking. a small event, but one I’m rather pleased with.

I’m learning chinese like a true american. glue (to fix, I might add, the broken toilet seat which insists on repeatedly almost dropping me on the floor and which I at one poing succeed in crazy gluing myself to, but I digress), lamp, water, sheets. how much? ;-) here, kids learn relationships first. I’m giving this to you. now you give it to me. good. we westerners learn words, objects first. look at the firetruck, look at the bird. it’s intriguing, the thought that those early times in language aquisition might have just a bit to do with the resulting cultures.

they’re beginning to haul the coal in. waiting for the bus today, three large trucks pulled into campus, lovely black soot trailing behind. so the lack of pollution I’ve been enjoying may proove temporary. I’m attempting to enjoy the sunshine while I can. then again, with temperatures likely dropping to a brisk -15 in winter it’s unlikely I’d be much up for a stroll anyway.

classes begin monday (or so I’m told, which could mean they begin tomorow or next month, impossible to tell for sure) and the dean of the english department arrives from beijing tomorow. oh my. this leaves me zero time to prepare. mentally I’m still running errands and making sense of the dialect (whatever they speak here bears almost no resemblance to putonghua, the common language), so attempting to absorb the contents of a textbook and create something resembling a syllabus should be interesting. but. que sera sera.

the digs. mark, the peace corps volunteer who occupied this space until two years ago, seems to have been not so fond of cleaning but quite fond of hotpot; the walls, floors, and everywhere in between were absolutely covered in a level of grime and grease heretofore unimaniginable. thus far my days have been half wandering, half cleaning. two weeks in and, depending on how the kitchen floor that’s currently drying comes out, I might be close to done. but there’s something comforting in manual labor when in bizarre situations, so in a strange way I don’t mind at all.

linda, my waiban (ie my link to the university, both academically and as a go to girl for things like a phone, which I still do not have, and the new washing machine which arrived yesterday, though with the amount of work required to manually fill, drain, move, and spin drain I might as well wash the bloody stuff by hand) is sweet but somewhat absentminded. after dropping me off in my dirty new home I had to practically drag useful information out of her. it was pouring rain, late, and I was starving and sans umbrella. I asked which direction the nearest restaraunt was in, we’d seen nothing on the drive from the bus station, and she handed me a piece of paper with ‘where is the nearest restaraunt’ written on it in mandarin. I got quite the laugh over the image of me wandering around asking any chinese people I could find on the street in the middle of a rainstorm for directions I could not possibly understand. but I did manage to find an umbrella (in an art supply store, of course) and pick up some crackers and water, and toilet paper as there was none (the nearest bank of restaraunts is hidden up an alleyway, I found them the next afternoon) so aside from really wanting to drop her in the middle of minnesota without a map I’m not holding a grudge ;-)

gansu is one of the poorer provinces in china, so many things are subsidised, but odd things are expensive. rice, for example. it’s too cold and dry to grow it here so it must be brought in from other areas, which practically doubles the price (though bear in mind it’s still only 2 yuan/kilo, ~25 us cents). I found an outdoor mall, teens in trendy clothes sit chatting on cell phones with the quintessentially bored look on their faces, patrons stroll in unusually nice outfits. but meander into the back alleys and the city drops back twenty years in time. vendors hawk their fruits, veggies, and live chickens just like anywhere else.

I’ve only just figured out how to work the stove, which is okay as I’ve also only just found the local produce area. the supermarket downtown has some but it hasn’t looked particularly enticing. there is something wonderful about walking to the outdoor market with your little bag and haggling over a jin (half a kilo) of of grapes or corn or pears picked that morning by the riverside. there’s a rather enormous resovoir between my side of town and downtown but the river itself takes up maybe, maybe 1/4. the rest remains dry in places, but where there is fertile ground there are farmers, so a good chunk produces my daily meals. now that the students are arriving the quiet street outside the east gate near my building has begun to bustle with carts of bread, fruit, mongolian bar-b-q and ip cards. the once food dominant little stores have pushed other items aside to carry paper and pens and books and lamps and toothpaste. gas stations here may be relegated to gas, but in little stores you are just as likely to find rope or flip-flops next to ramen as ink or stockings or electrical wire.

tianshui supports both a han and muslim (hui) population, though the only way to generally tell the difference is by the hats. although I’m noticing that the muslim men tend to favor outstandingly large black-framed round sunglasses, for reasons I cannot begin to imagine but rather enjoy. what else, it’s a surprising challenge to organize a way to explain my life here. the water generally goes out between midnight and 6 or 7 am, though now that I’ve found a bucket I can fill it with water before I go to bed just in case I need to flush. the campus is large, with innumerable buildings as well as banks of ping pong tables, a playground with the requisite excercise equipment included, tennis courts, badmitton courts, and a croquet pit. outside the gate to my block of buildings someone tends a lush rose garden. inside the gate, a bike shed containing more motorcycles than bicycles. motorcycles, incidently, appear to be the preferred mode of travel in gansu, however poor they may be they’re doing well enough to zip around on 150cc buzzbikes, some even have honda nsr’s (though one poor bastard has some serious oil burning issues) and what look like 500cc bikes of indeterminate make. this, I hope, bodes well for my motorcycling future.

learned mah jong today. wandering through a section of town near the fuxi temple, someone came over to see what I was taking pictures of (an old door. I know, shocker) and chastise me for not taking enough of the ancient gate. they invited me to try tobacco out of a ridiculously long pipe (yes, it was tobacco), and apparently I aroused enough amusement that they thought it a good idea to take out the mah jong board and teach me how to play.I still can’t for the life of me figure out how the ‘dealing’ works, too bloody fast for me to keep up, but I think I get how it’s played, and by the third round I was pointing out my moves at the same time as my new teachers, which of course caused much celebration and laughter.

when they pick up the tile some of the men feel it with their finger, knowing by the indentations what piece it is without looking. beautiful details.

not even one month in and it feels completely natural to hum a little simon and garfunkle or nina while I hang my socks over the laundry line out back.

I have a million things I want to share but so many just do not have words. bits and pieces invade my mind when I close my eyes, whether it’s simple, like the sound of the crazy dialect floating in the window when my downstairs neighbors cook their breakfast over the fire, or complex, the face of the timelessly ancient man begging table to table at dinner tonight. the sounds of the bus brakes as they narrowly avoid a motorbike, or the new experience of the number 2 bus I’m on passing (on a road about big enough to be one way in the us) the number 2 bus that should be seven minutes ahead. the visual of a three cage high chicken coop next to a sock store. the smell of muslim barbq. the taste of fried vegetable balls from a street vendor. the act of peeling a grape.

pardon the completely random nature of this email, I’ve just got internet up and running but have been jotting down notes to share later, so some of this is rather old (on my timeline at least). I can hardly believe I’ve been here almost a month. crazy. I’ve met some interesting people, made a few friends, and managed to explore a decent chunk of my end of town (the qingchen district, next weekend I’m shooting for the modern half, beidao district). though in true annie fashion today was the first day I actually brought my camera out on a migration. so if the words don’t help you get a better picture of where I am, peek at
http://www.imageevent.com/echoes/tianshui
for some shots of my new home (limited so far, more coming soon), some of my students (ditto) and some of my new mah jong teachers.

two weeks in. well, I think it’s about two weeks, time’s gotten wonky on me. my mandarin’s improved somewhat, but recent forrays for food and into town with antony, the intriguing globe trotting in china ten years english teaching brit on the fourth floor whom I met a few days ago, have pushed the learning curve back a bit, removing some of the necessity from the equation from time to time. though I did manage to remember the word for glue without looking. a small event, but one I’m rather pleased with.

I’m learning chinese like a true american. glue (to fix, I might add, the broken toilet seat which insists on repeatedly almost dropping me on the floor and which I at one poing succeed in crazy gluing myself to, but I digress), lamp, water, sheets. how much? ;-) here, kids learn relationships first. I’m giving this to you. now you give it to me. good. we westerners learn words, objects first. look at the firetruck, look at the bird. it’s intriguing, the thought that those early times in language aquisition might have just a bit to do with the resulting cultures.

they’re beginning to haul the coal in. waiting for the bus today, three large trucks pulled into campus, lovely black soot trailing behind. so the lack of pollution I’ve been enjoying may proove temporary. I’m attempting to enjoy the sunshine while I can. then again, with temperatures likely dropping to a brisk -15 in winter it’s unlikely I’d be much up for a stroll anyway.

classes begin monday (or so I’m told, which could mean they begin tomorow or next month, impossible to tell for sure) and the dean of the english department arrives from beijing tomorow. oh my. this leaves me zero time to prepare. mentally I’m still running errands and making sense of the dialect (whatever they speak here bears almost no resemblance to putonghua, the common language), so attempting to absorb the contents of a textbook and create something resembling a syllabus should be interesting. but. que sera sera.

the digs. mark, the peace corps volunteer who occupied this space until two years ago, seems to have been not so fond of cleaning but quite fond of hotpot; the walls, floors, and everywhere in between were absolutely covered in a level of grime and grease heretofore unimaniginable. thus far my days have been half wandering, half cleaning. two weeks in and, depending on how the kitchen floor that’s currently drying comes out, I might be close to done. but there’s something comforting in manual labor when in bizarre situations, so in a strange way I don’t mind at all.

linda, my waiban (ie my link to the university, both academically and as a go to girl for things like a phone, which I still do not have, and the new washing machine which arrived yesterday, though with the amount of work required to manually fill, drain, move, and spin drain I might as well wash the bloody stuff by hand) is sweet but somewhat absentminded. after dropping me off in my dirty new home I had to practically drag useful information out of her. it was pouring rain, late, and I was starving and sans umbrella. I asked which direction the nearest restaraunt was in, we’d seen nothing on the drive from the bus station, and she handed me a piece of paper with ‘where is the nearest restaraunt’ written on it in mandarin. I got quite the laugh over the image of me wandering around asking any chinese people I could find on the street in the middle of a rainstorm for directions I could not possibly understand. but I did manage to find an umbrella (in an art supply store, of course) and pick up some crackers and water, and toilet paper as there was none (the nearest bank of restaraunts is hidden up an alleyway, I found them the next afternoon) so aside from really wanting to drop her in the middle of minnesota without a map I’m not holding a grudge ;-)

gansu is one of the poorer provinces in china, so many things are subsidised, but odd things are expensive. rice, for example. it’s too cold and dry to grow it here so it must be brought in from other areas, which practically doubles the price (though bear in mind it’s still only 2 yuan/kilo, ~25 us cents). I found an outdoor mall, teens in trendy clothes sit chatting on cell phones with the quintessentially bored look on their faces, patrons stroll in unusually nice outfits. but meander into the back alleys and the city drops back twenty years in time. vendors hawk their fruits, veggies, and live chickens just like anywhere else.

I’ve only just figured out how to work the stove, which is okay as I’ve also only just found the local produce area. the supermarket downtown has some but it hasn’t looked particularly enticing. there is something wonderful about walking to the outdoor market with your little bag and haggling over a jin (half a kilo) of of grapes or corn or pears picked that morning by the riverside. there’s a rather enormous resovoir between my side of town and downtown but the river itself takes up maybe, maybe 1/4. the rest remains dry in places, but where there is fertile ground there are farmers, so a good chunk produces my daily meals. now that the students are arriving the quiet street outside the east gate near my building has begun to bustle with carts of bread, fruit, mongolian bar-b-q and ip cards. the once food dominant little stores have pushed other items aside to carry paper and pens and books and lamps and toothpaste. gas stations here may be relegated to gas, but in little stores you are just as likely to find rope or flip-flops next to ramen as ink or stockings or electrical wire.

tianshui supports both a han and muslim (hui) population, though the only way to generally tell the difference is by the hats. although I’m noticing that the muslim men tend to favor outstandingly large black-framed round sunglasses, for reasons I cannot begin to imagine but rather enjoy. what else, it’s a surprising challenge to organize a way to explain my life here. the water generally goes out between midnight and 6 or 7 am, though now that I’ve found a bucket I can fill it with water before I go to bed just in case I need to flush. the campus is large, with innumerable buildings as well as banks of ping pong tables, a playground with the requisite excercise equipment included, tennis courts, badmitton courts, and a croquet pit. outside the gate to my block of buildings someone tends a lush rose garden. inside the gate, a bike shed containing more motorcycles than bicycles. motorcycles, incidently, appear to be the preferred mode of travel in gansu, however poor they may be they’re doing well enough to zip around on 150cc buzzbikes, some even have honda nsr’s (though one poor bastard has some serious oil burning issues) and what look like 500cc bikes of indeterminate make. this, I hope, bodes well for my motorcycling future.

learned mah jong today. wandering through a section of town near the fuxi temple, someone came over to see what I was taking pictures of (an old door. I know, shocker) and chastise me for not taking enough of the ancient gate. they invited me to try tobacco out of a ridiculously long pipe (yes, it was tobacco), and apparently I aroused enough amusement that they thought it a good idea to take out the mah jong board and teach me how to play.I still can’t for the life of me figure out how the ‘dealing’ works, too bloody fast for me to keep up, but I think I get how it’s played, and by the third round I was pointing out my moves at the same time as my new teachers, which of course caused much celebration and laughter.

when they pick up the tile some of the men feel it with their finger, knowing by the indentations what piece it is without looking. beautiful details.

not even one month in and it feels completely natural to hum a little simon and garfunkle or nina while I hang my socks over the laundry line out back.

I have a million things I want to share but so many just do not have words. bits and pieces invade my mind when I close my eyes, whether it’s simple, like the sound of the crazy dialect floating in the window when my downstairs neighbors cook their breakfast over the fire, or complex, the face of the timelessly ancient man begging table to table at dinner tonight. the sounds of the bus brakes as they narrowly avoid a motorbike, or the new experience of the number 2 bus I’m on passing (on a road about big enough to be one way in the us) the number 2 bus that should be seven minutes ahead. the visual of a three cage high chicken coop next to a sock store. the smell of muslim barbq. the taste of fried vegetable balls from a street vendor. the act of peeling a grape.