Worst Kept Secrets

Ok, first of all, some boring grammar stuff from class. You can skip that if you want to scroll down for the bathroom stories.

Today I had a student come to me to discuss menstrual issues, and another asked for dating advice. Apparently, I’m THAT teacher (menstrual issues: the poor girl was concerned that western people didn’t get menstrual cramps and was worried that people would think she was crazy when she went overseas. Dating issues: I was tempted to be honest and admit that I have historically had HORRIBLE luck dating like normal people do and that the only tried and true advice I could give would be, get an internet connection and instant messaging - sad but true).

Today in my lower level class, we were studying a grammar beast called the present perfect continuous or the present perfect progressive. I spent about two hours racking my brain trying to think of a good way to explain this particularly idiotic construction (have + been + present participle - combination of a perfect tense - have + past participle [used to indicate an action that began in the past and continued up until the present]- and a continuous tense - be+ present participle [used to indicate an action in progress at a given point in time]), confused every English speaker I tried to explain it to, and created about eight thousand practice worksheets before forcing myself to just go to bed and deal with the likelihood of frustrating my class and confusing them to the point of ultimate failure on their final exam. I mean, really, is this my language? Of course, like every native speaker, I use this tense all the damn time, but when forced to think about it, it seems absolutely ridiculous, especially taking into consideration that my students’ native language DOESN’T HAVE TENSES as we know them.

And god bless ‘em, they stayed right with me the entire time and seemed to pick it all up very well. I was very proud and a little confused as to why it was harder for me to figure the thing out than it was for them.

So, Friday night, Chris and I found ourselves on our own after dinner, and we headed over to check out Latin Bar, which we’d never been to and is very near our school. There was a positively amazing cover band that performed a highly improbable cover of “Let’s Get it Started” by the Black Eyed Peas, along with “La Bamba,” “What I’ve Got” by Sublime, and “Sweet Home Alabama,” among a diverse range of others. Seriously, this has got to be the only place in the world where a bar band plays “Sweet Home Alabama” and you start cheering and grinning and singing along, loudly. So Latin Bar was a hit - fun music, reasonably priced tequila, nice atmosphere, easy walking distance.

The other major criteria, though, was a little bit of a downer. I always make mental notes about bathrooms we visit, so that I can dress accordingly. Ok. I realize that you should not have to get undressed to use a squatter toilet. I know that I’m probably the only girl in China who hasn’t figured out how to pee with her pants on. But over time, I’ve learned to work around this handicap and developed a pretty good method. I remove one shoe and lift my foot up so that it doesn’t touch the urine-soaked floor, and remove one leg of my jeans. Then in one fluid motion, I bring my foot down on top of my shoe, continuing to avoid the urine-soaked floor and gather my pant leg in the opposite hand. Then, I pee, without making a mess, and get dressed again. It’s like a dance, really, or a well-practiced tai chi move, and the only accident I’ve ever had was when my camera fell out of my pocket and into the toilet.

So I went to the bathroom at Latin Bar, and pushed open the door, then squealed an apology and shut it quickly, as it opened upon another girl relieving herself. A few seconds later, a different girl walked out and gave me a weird look, while a group of other girls pushed past me and walked on in. I didn’t know how to say, “there’s someone in there,” so there wasn’t much I could do. Finally, someone was able to tell me that there was more than one stall, I could go on in. So I walked in, and found two squatters sitting side by side, with no doors and a nominal partition.

There wasn’t much I could do - holding it wasn’t an option - so I shrugged, steeled myself, and started stripping down. And apparently, a half naked naturally blond foreigner peeing is a spectacle and a half, and about halfway through my business I noticed that there were five or six ladies STARING AT ME. And this happened every time I went in there. Lesson: Latin Bar’s a pretty cool bar, but wear a skirt.

Friday night was fairly low key, since Saturday night was Leif’s birthday party, and Lily had made us solemnly swear that we’d be willing to get ripped to celebrate his twenty-fifth. It happened at Jimmy’s - a foreign-run pizza restaurant with informal poker nights and sports stuff and what have you. Jimmy’s shares its bathroom with Yes Bar. You go out the back door in Jimmy’s and enter a black corridor thumping with bass and walk past several rooms containing nothing but a bed and brush shoulders with very scantily-clad entertainers in order to get to it. After some shrewd investigative questioning, we found out that you don’t so much pay for SEX in Yes Bar (although I’m sure it happens), but you can pay money to have naked ladies take you into a room and play sexy games with you. One of these games involves a napkin tied around your man bits and then set on FIRE and allowed to burn until your stripper spits beer on it at the last possible moment. SEXY!

Anyway, realizing that we would be drinking copiously at Jimmy’s, I thought ahead and wore a skirt to avoid any possible contact with surfaces contaminated by possible hooker pee. And had a lot of fun - a lot of people came out, and I had a long drunk talk with a really sweet girl who was amazingly patient with me being an ass and drunkenly scrawling the characters I know and asking her to proofread them, and the whiskey flowed. Then around 12:30, a motion in my stomach suddenly began swirling at about the same rate my brain was, although unlike what was going on in my consciousness, this internal roiling was extremely unpleasant. I thought about it for a little while, decided that this was something that I could most definitely not take care of in a squatter surrounded by possible hookers, and then it reached the point where I had to get up and find a toilet I could sit on. I managed to say goodbyes without being entirely rude, and made it into a cab at a fairly dignified pace.

Once in the cab, though, it started getting worse and worse. I didn’t know how to say “please drive fast or I’m going to have an accident in your cab,” in Chinese. All I knew was a line from a children’s song that goes to the tune of “Frere Jacques” translated thusly: “two tigers, two tigers, running fast, running fast, one has no ears, one has no tail, very strange, very strange.” So I pleaded with the driver to “run fast” making big, desperate, drunk foreign eyes. He did get me there very quickly, but I’m not sure if that’s because of my improvisational communicative prowness or because he thought he was in a car with a lunatic. I threw ten kuai at him and burbled a xie xie, and then took off down the alley, running as fast as I could, because really, this was a point where I had no choice but to suck it up and hoof it.

I live in a fortress. I’m not sure if I’ve ever explained this online before. First of all, there are gates surrounding every entrance to the school, one of which is double and hoppable if you’re anyone except me. I was barrelling toward the one that I actually have a key for, and I fumbled in my purse and had it ready. I almost got through it without even breaking my momentum. I ran as hard as I could for the front door, panting like a race horse, sweating profusely, REEKING of whiskey, and nearly crashed into my departmental supervisor, who I have not seen since to apologise for what must have been an incredibly perplexing and aromatic elevator ride.

I made it to the toilet, and there I sat until around three in the morning. I slept for two hours, and then woke up just in time to make it back to the bathroom for another three hour session, during which I mostly got really freaked out that I was going to die of diarrhea on a toilet in a fortress in eastern China, which is just really NOT the end I was hoping for. But thankfully, it did end and I’ve been ok ever since, just drinking a lot of water. I would honestly prefer food poisoning to take vomitous form.

The End.