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first Chinese banquet

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

When I came home to visit, the number one question I got asked was, “what’s the food like?”, which made me feel incredibly guilty. The truth is, I don’t eat that much Chinese food, and when I do, it’s not especially exciting. My favorite dish is scrambled eggs and tomatoes. There are a few beef and chicken dishes I can get into, but for the most part, I really haven’t gone for gold in a country with arguably the most exciting/fear factorish culinary tradition on the planet.

My awesome friend Wells came to see us last week, and we took him to the restaurant around the corner that Chris and I had tried a few nights ago. We had some really good veggie dishes, and thought that the place would be a solid addition to our dietary canon. Of course, when we took Wells there, we wound up ordering a plate of feet on accident, which caused me to totally lose my appetite.

I felt bad about that - I don’t want to be the white girl in China who gets squeamish about exotic food (even though that’s exactly who I am). Fortunately, last night I had the chance to make up lost points when I went along with Chris to dinner with the family of a student he’d been privately tutoring.

One of the upsides/downsides of working for a school with a really large foreign staff is that you’re spared a lot of the culturaly stuff most foreign teachers get, including formal banquets. I’d never been to a serious Chinese banquet before. The weddings and staff events I’d attended previously were buffet situations. I was terrified when we went. 1) I didn’t want to embarass Chris with my bumbling laowai ways, 2) I was really worried that something would be put in front of me that manners demanded I choke down, even if it resulted in me blowing chunks all over the table, 3) I don’t speak enough Chinese to be anything other than a goofy monkey masquerading as a person.

It wound up being a lot of fun. It was in a really ritzy hotel, and we had a private dining room. We went with the boss and his wife, as well as the student and his family, and some of their family friends. This included another high school student, who I’m pretty sure got dragged along in order to converse with American teachers. She sat by me and bore her cross bravely, spending more time helping me eat than gleaning valuable information about American university systems.

We sat at a big circular table, and when we first walked in, we all had a big showy fuss about who would sit in the seat of honor. I don’t even remember how it worked itself out, but it took a long time. I just stood there until someone showed me which seat I was supposed to be in. In front of me was a plate with some shrimp and cold meats, one of which was duck, the others - I have no idea. It was tasty, though! We managed to avoid baijiu, and performed the required toasting with orange juice (which, incidentally, was damned good juice - way better than any I’ve been able to find in a store). A server snatched the plates as soon as we were done, and plunked down new courses as fast as we could eat them. There was an AMAZING chicken (?) soup that the high school kids told us was featured in Kung Fu Panda, which I haven’t seen, a dumpling course (holy god, good dumplings), a weird custard thing that was tasty, “western” style beef (which was the only thing I had to eat that made me wince on the inside - it was nasty meat wrapped around a huge honking chunk of bone), a rice dish, vegetables, and more. Early on, we got some kind of sweet stuff served with milk and honey in a hollowed out dragon fruit. I don’t know if the actual stuff was dragon fruit meat or if it was just extremely elegant presentation, but it was GOOD. I mean, the food just kept coming, plate after plate after plate. Eventually, the server began passing out what looked an awful lot like an extremely unhealthy piece of human feces with weird little quasi tentacles coming out of it. It was a sea slug. I saw it, and inwardly I felt a huge rush of relief when I realized that I was, in fact, going to be able to do it. And by god, I really liked it. It had a squishy, gelatinuous texture - basically exactly what you’d imagine a sea slug would feel like - but the second I stopped thinking SLUG and started thinking tasty sauce, I scarfed the whole thing down and really enjoyed it. I think I finished my slug before anyone else at the table. I was in serious danger of bursting at the seams when the final round of fruit appeared to signal the end of the meal.

Throughout the whole thing, people periodically got up and walked around the table, toasting everyone. It seemed to be a pretty simple process - stand up, say xie xie, smile a lot, take a tiny sip of orange juice, and move on. Chris and I made a round too, and most everyone said thank you, or cheers, in English, and smiled at us. We also got presents from our hostess - I scored a necklace, and Chris has a handsomely crafted shark with a diamond for an eye that doubles as a keychain and a bottle opener. I was really worried going into it that I was going to breach some sort of etiquette unknowingly, but it was totally ok. My high school neighbor finally just told me, “eat as you want, do not be worried about table manners here!” After a good round of guffaws over my inept chopsticking abilities (there were advanced chopstick challenges here, mind you), I gave it up and used the fork and knife thoughtfully provided.

I feel really silly posting about this, since this is extremely old news to anyone else who’s spent any time in China. It’s also eyebrow raising that I’ve been here nine months and haven’t gone out to a nice  dinner with a Chinese family yet. I sort of feel like anyone I know who’s also in China is going to jump on this post with the “well, actually…” comments that I definitely deserve (once again, the usual disclaimer: I haven’t been here long enough to know much about anything, and I’m the least expert source on anything Chinese you’re likely to find). But it was cool and I really liked it and wanted to tell the internet about it. Also, I really *like* a lot of Chinese manners. I guess it seems like the dominant social principle here is one of hardcore passive aggression (I fit right in!), but there’s other stuff, like the ritual toasting, that’s just awfully nice and respectful. Or like making sure your table has knives and forks and your menu includes “western” beef for your foreign guests. Or putting away the ridiculously expensive baijiu you brought in favor of nonalcoholic orange juice after seeing looks of horror on your foreign friends’ faces. I think people get a little carried away with the Chinese notion of guest/host relationship (witness: the 2008 Olympic Games), but I like the idea that respect and courtesy are the most important characteristics of social interaction, you know?

Anyway, main points:

  • Chinese banquets = fun, not stressful.
  • I like it when people are nice.
  • I ate a sea slug.
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Really, really, really unfortunate.

Saturday, August 2, 2008

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my bookcase

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Ok, if you’re wondering how the China/America jetlag works, here’s my experience: go to America, and be unable to stay awake for five or six days. Come to China, and be unable to go to sleep for the same amount of time. It’s two in the morning, and I absolutely cannot sleep. So, here’s a tour of the bookcase in my bedroom.

The primary bookcase that shows off our dazzlingly varied interests and astonishing levels of literacy is located in the living room (incidentally, when we moved over here and I was ecstatic over winning the rights to organize by subject and alphabetize by author, I realized that sooner or later I’m destined for library science and should just stop fighting it), but we have a second one in the bedroom, with glass doors on the front. The top shelf holds the collection of single issue comics that a couple of wonderful boys in Arkansas took pains to get for me and either send to China or send with me on a plane in one of the most meaningful gestures of transpacific friendship extended to me thus far. There are also some magazines (Vice and a few cooking magazines), Chris’s headphones, and the case of Michael Hearst’s Music For Ice Cream Trucks with a mix CD inside that I’ve been meaning to rip and keep forgetting. Two things to mention: Music For Ice Cream Trucks is the best music in the world to listen to if you’re sad and trying to fall asleep, and that mix CD is one of the best that’s ever been made for me, which is a perennial source of guilt. Its maker got in my way at exactly the wrong time for a well-meaning guy to cross paths with me at my most emotional bulldozer-ness. I have absolutely no idea what happened to him, only that I hurt his feelings pretty badly and the music is awesome. If he ever reads this, dear god, I’m so sorry - try to stay clear of 23 year olds fresh out of their first misguided three and a half year relationship, because heaven knows you didn’t deserve THAT.

The second shelf is where the pictures and souvenirs are. There are two of me and Daniel (from New Years and Halloween) and one of the entire Gresham clan at the beach, containing rare photographic evidence of my ill-fated black hair dye stint. I ADORED the way it looked, but Mom really, really, really didn’t, and after a couple of months I wound up feeling so guilty that I wound up paying an absurd price to get my hair stripped, which was an awful lot harder on the pelt than the dye and has become one of those things that the family jokes about and everyone laughs, but there’s still a sore spot. There are also two pictures from Chris’s sister’s wedding, who I got to meet last week and who was really, really cool - none of the suspicious, undermining, disdainful, all but overtly threatening treatment that I’d be wholeheartedly throwing at my siblings’ significant others. There are also a couple of pieces of coral, a jar of sand, and sea shells from the Philippines, a rock with a lot of fossils Amy and I found in a drainage ditch in Harrison, a weird Chinese sculpture paperweight looking thing that has a purpose I keep forgetting to ask Chris to tell me, and the souvenir “traditional” baijiu cup from the Maotai gift set Chris got for his birthday. Maotai is swanky baijiu, and I think almost everyone reading this now knows exactly what baijiu is after my trip home. I swear the nice stuff tasted worse than the fifteen RMB stuff from Suguo (the name of our local convenience store chain) that I brought home.

The third shelf is along the same lines - a picture of Scout in a frame, the group photos taken of all the teachers and students at the beginning of the year (I’m not in them - I didn’t get here until October), and a jar with some nasty water and the now dead white flowers our landlord brought us as a housewarming present that smelled really good at the time. I tried to fit in the little embroidered panels that one of my students brought me from Suzhou, but they wouldn’t fit, and they’re still in their box until I get around to finding a catproof place for them.

The last two shelves are a little bit junkier. The fourth has all of my Chinese stuff stacked up on it - flashcards, CDs, the scripts for the CDS, a grammar/vocab workbook, the two character workbooks, character grid pads, and the dozen or so notebooks that I’ve accumulated over the last year. I also temporarily stuffed in the bags of Mardi Gras beads I bought for my students in New Orleans as a cheap souvenir that leads into an easy lesson (about Mardi Gras and New Orleans culture, not exposing oneself to get shiny things). The bottom shelf is really junky - it’s the storage spot for Stuff We Use Often (my ipod, cameras, various chargers, cables, stuff like that).

That’s it, really.

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three scary mannequins at the local pageant dress shop

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

No hands.

Inexplicably, one hand.

OH GOD KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT!!!!!!

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chicago/new orleans

Monday, July 14, 2008

Good grief, what a week. I staggered off the plane around 9:30 Monday night, which according to my biological understanding of time should have been 10:30 Tuesday morning, spent the night in Little Rock, drove to New Orleans, saw my sister, drove back to Harrison, spent the night, drove to Arrow Rock to see my brother, spent the night, drove back to Harrison. I am BEAT, I’ve got a cold, and the best two cats in the entire world are fighting for space on my lap and making it very difficult to type.

I’ve read up on reverse culture shock, but I don’t think it actually applies to a two week visit after an eight month absence. I think that stuff hits you a little harder when you actually repatriate after a considerably longer length of time. I think reverse culture shock is a little more serious than the “holy crap everything I thought I was familiar with is freaking weird” feeling that I’ve got going on. 

When we landed in Chicago, we went to our gate to wait for our connecting flight to Little Rock. And I realize how horribly insensitive this is to say, but it was like going whale watching. Bear in mind that I’ve been in a place where the overwhelming majority is skinny enough to look unhealthy or model-quality by American standards, and it was WEIRD to see such a large number of serious obese people. I’m not talking about people with some extra poundage, or with larger figures. I’m talking about *really* large people (the sort whose doctors are frantically begging them to do something), and I just hadn’t seen that in a while. Also, the amount of English flying at me from all directions made me feel a little dizzy. Since I started studying characters, I developed the habit of looking really intently at any printed material I saw outside (signs, ads, etc.) to see if I could recognize any characters. I usually could get one or two, but I really had to LOOK at everything hard. When I stepped into the Chicago airport, that habit kicked in and for a few seconds my brain was on spin cycle, trying to wrestle with such a huge load of symbolic content I’d just actively engaged with. Then there were the people speaking English. Everywhere. Granted, when I’m at work, I’m around English speakers, and when I’m at Castle Bar, most people speak English, but somehow this was a lot different. We were sitting next to a group of missionaries, and I got really disgusted listening to their conversation (I don’t remember specifics, they just had a really disrespectful attitude toward the culture they were trying to “save,” and that really bothers me). And I couldn’t STOP listening. Then I had to readjust to being somewhere where most people could understand ME. I’ve developed a tendency to swear very openly in public, and it takes some conscious effort not to do that, or to converse about people nearby. Stuff like that. I bought a bag of cheezits and some altoids at the airport, and it felt really, really, really weird to use English to complete a transaction and even have a little bit of a conversation. 

Then we flew to Little Rock, met up with our parents, ate at Waffle House (which was fun), and went our separate ways. I was feeling really off balance as a result of jet lag and the unpleasant first impression I’d had of my nation, and I lay down on the hotel bed to try to sleep some of it off. But I’ve been sleeping on a really hard Chinese mattress for eight months, and the hotel bed felt like it was made out of flan. I kept sinking and sinking and sinking… It was very hard to get to sleep. 

But by the end of the next day, I was in New Orleans. I abruptly switched from, “man, the US sucks,” to “THE US IS AWESOME!!!!!” New Orleans is a strange place anyway, and that made it easier to deal with than more familiar ground. I could tell I had China leftovers in my head when I was amazed at how clean everything was, but all the obsessing over my two national mindsets got dropped pretty fast when I was presented with so much eye candy. I got to see my sister, walk around a cemetery, walk around the french market, see a really good production of As You Like It, and get my bearings a little bit. We didn’t stay long, but it was a good visit, and made me much more optimistic about the next two weeks of my life. And I’ll continue later, because I’m too tired to stay awake any longer. Here are some pictures from New Orleans.

 

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back home

Saturday, July 12, 2008

 

If you’ve never been to Harrison, just trust me. The sign’s funny.

 

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going home

Sunday, July 6, 2008

Ok, so tomorrow I’m getting on a plane to go back to the states to see family and friends, drink tap water and cherry coke, eat real Mexican food, buy conditioner meant for my freakish foreign hair, take bubble baths after eight months of standing showers, freely talk to strangers without having to struggle for words, snorgle my cats, and stock up on books, gossip, and uncensored news.

And I am DAMNED proud of myself that I’m going back to visit after making it eight months in China without turning tail and fleeing. This has been a period of time in which I can definitely say that I’ve Done Something, and it feels good to know that over the last eight months, I’ve actually changed and moved forward in a completely unexpected direction. I’ve had some really frustrating periods of time here, and I’ve gotten alarmingly used to feeling incompetent, dependent, and lost. I’ve got to say, though, that the last couple of months or so have been really, really good China months, in spite of a nasty workload.

I’ve noticed that I have a tendency to channel all of my newbie expat issues (frustration, loneliness, feelings of inadequency and general freaked out-ness) into little things, and I’ve seen other people doing this too. Specifically, if I’m having a Bad China Day, I don’t necessarily start screaming at the government or the crowds of people on the street - all of that bile and anger gets directed 100% at the copy machine at work. The poor thing gets jammed with maddening frequency, and it’s not advanced enough to do double-sided pages or any of the fancy things I’m used to copy machines being able to do. And I swear, when that thing messes up on me at the wrong time, it unleashes a really untoward flood of hostility. It’s not China’s fault that I have problems with the copy machine. If you work in an office anywhere in the world, you will have to deal with paper jams and spacial-conceptual puzzles involving which way to turn the paper, what to do when an extra blank sheet spits out in the middle of your fifty copies of a seven page exam, or which coworker is least likely to mind rampant staple theft. But I have had SCENES with that machine that are completely out of proportion to dealing with a paper jam. When I’m in the office by myself, it’s not uncommon for me to wind up screaming profanity, slamming paper drawers, overheating, and cursing China for allowing this stone age piece of shit to exist in the first place. “If this was any kind of NORMAL country, they’d take the manufacturer out back and shoot him in the head….” etc.

So yeah, the copy machine is basically the barometer for how I’m feeling about my life. I wish I had a more poetic symbol of my mental state  than a Xerox machine, but there you have it.

Anyway, I’m pleased to report that lately the odds of me throwing bricks at that unavoidably necessary piece of machinery are really low right now. I’ve been having a really good China time lately (if you take work out of the equation). I’ve been recording voice tracks for an English textbook, and this process requires me to take a lot of solo taxi rides. It’s one of those little things that’s been helping me a LOT. Previously, getting into a taxi and saying my address was a little bit like a key sticking in a door. You say the words over and over again, until finally you jiggle it the right way and something clicks and the driver understands you. On my way to and from the recording studio, though, I’ve been able to fumble my way through a conversation with the drivers, and they’re some of the best, cheapest Chinese teachers I’ve got. It’s a little nerve-wracking, since I really don’t understand much at all, but it makes learning Chinese feel so much more possible when I’m using it and getting things across. I had one guy who spoke a little bit of English, and we spoke a weird hybrid language, randomly inserting English words in Chinese sentences, and laughing at each other and ourselves. It didn’t feel like a struggle - it felt like two people actually communicating as human beings, and it made me feel very good.

I know that I probably won’t stay here long enough to become fluent in Mandarin, but the tiny little chunks I’ve got have been enough to unlock a few tiny Chinese doors, and that’s enough to keep me coming back for more. I’m really excited about coming back after the summer to see how far I can get with it.

However, I’m also really excited about having a break for two weeks… If you’re going to be in New Orleans, Missouri, Harrison, or Fayetteville any time over the next two weeks, let me know, because odds are good that I’d love to see you.

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Ice Cream

Friday, June 20, 2008

We’ve developed a raging addiction to ice cream bars called Magnums. And yes, they do have a sultry female on the packaging shooting a come-hither look. The logo is Desire, 2008. And yes, the size is about what you’d expect from the name. And it’s just funny to say, “ok, I’m going out for some trash bags and magnums.” “Did you pick up any Magnums?” etc., when you’re actually talking about ice cream (and I’m still about twelve years old in my head).

So today, I was in charge of picking up the magnums, since I’d eaten the last one and Chris was away doing night duty (sitting around the school watching students study for two hours). While I was walking down the street looking for places that sold ice cream, it started pouring rain. I found a place that had ice cream, tea, and wine, and ducked inside. I bought enough magnums to lend credit to the idea that foreigners are inherently bizzarre, unknowable creatures, and the man running the shop wouldn’t let me leave without an umbrella. I didn’t know how to explain in Chinese that walking around in the rain on a hot day is one of my favourite things in the world, and kept trying to communicate that I didn’t need to take his pink floral umbrella. He began to get a little upset, and was probably giving me a lecture about walking around unprotected in the rain wearing sandals (additionally, he might have thought I was pregnant, due to how much ice cream I was buying and the poofy shirt I was wearing), so I took his umbrella, walked back to my apartment, got my own umbrella, and walked back to the ice cream store to return it. I wasn’t sure if it was a gift or a loan, and had a huge moral debate with myself on the walk home as to whether or not I should return it - I never know what’s going to be rude here, and it seemed like failing to accept a present might be a breach of etiquette. On the other hand, the man was really nice and I wanted to buy ice cream from him in the future, which I couldn’t do if I inadvertently stole his umbrella (he took it back without a fuss, so I don’t think I screwed up).

And that’s basically how I’ve been treated in China. People help me out, language barrier be damned. When I was struggling to carry an oven home from Jin Run Fa (my Chinese version of Wal-Mart), total strangers stopped to try to help me. If I don’t have enough small change in a restaurant or at a street food stall, I wind up with a one to four yuan discount. People point when I look lost, help me open doors when I’m pushing instead of pulling, and teach me Chinese words with a smile if I ask (learned umbrella yestereday - yu san). One thing that I will definitely say for China is that it’s a damned hospitable nation.

I guess it’s stating the obvious to say that most Chinese people I’ve met have a MUCH stronger identification with China as a whole than I ever did with the United States, and I think that’s why I get the guest treatment. I’m a guest in their enormous home, and on a daily basis most strangers seem eager to make sure that the guest is happy. The dark side of this, though, is that as far as I can tell, I could live in China for the rest of my life, marry a Chinese man, speak and write the language fluently, and every time I walked down a street, I’d still be a Guest.

Regardless, though, the ice cream tastes good and it was a very sweet gesture.

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new apartment! temp job!

Thursday, June 19, 2008

It’s been a pretty eventful week. We got a surprise three day weekend, and decided that if we wanted to move off campus, it would pretty much be our only chance to do it. And we REALLY wanted to get off campus. I don’t recommend living five floors above your office and two above your classrooms. You know that feeling of relief you get when you get home from work? It’s an important, sanity-saving feeling, and I’ve been missing it.

Surprisingly, finding an apartment in China isn’t horribly difficult (as long as you’ve got a Chinese speaker to help you). For us, it was a matter of finding someone to translate and walking around the block and into a real estate agent’s office. We told her that we wanted a two bedroom place in the neighborhood and gave her our price range. She had just the thing, although unfortunately she had left the key in her other pants. So we arranged a time to come back and look at it. Then we met up with a student whose parents were looking to rent out an apartment. It was a decent place, with fun 1970s furniture and a lot of space, but one of the rooms was to remain locked and contained the family’s things, and there was also no washing machine or refridgerator. It was also located in the middle of what appeared to be a retirement community, and I’m not quite prepared to grow old in China at the age of twenty-five.

Then we went back to the real estate agent, and walked for about eight minutes until we arrived at the building I now live in. It was pretty much an instant sell - it was clean, convenient, and had everything we needed. Plus, our landlord is the sweetest human being alive. He’s a graduate architecture student who speaks a little bit of English, offered to let us pay our deposit whenever we had the money (which seems unheard of coming from a landlord), helped us get internet set up, and introduced us to his wife, who brought us flowers. He’s also handling all of our bills, so instead of messing with the electric company or anyone else, we just pay him (I think this is a standard arrangement, but it’s still deliciously hassle-free).

Things that I like: the weird blue lighting in our hallway. Our bathroom sink. Our enclosed balcony with a SWEET laundry system. There are two bars that operate on a pulley, so you hang up your clothes and then turn a crank to get them out of the way.

When I first saw the bathroom, I had it marked as something that was going to be a problem:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3156/2592058587_10e0b3b0d2.jpg?v=0

That metal thing coming out of the wall is the shower, and that silver thing on the floor is the drain. The faucet is almost directly above the toilet. However, it’s actually a really nice shower, if you think of it as a shower with a toilet in it, rather than a bathroom with a shower in it. And it’s got heat lamps that dry the floor reasonably quickly. End of story: I get a nice hot shower with excellent water pressure, and my bathroom floor is always clean. And the bathroom sink is gorgeous.

The kitchen’s very small, but there’s plenty of room for one person to cook delicious home-cooked meals (oh good grief, of course I’m not talking about ME - I’ve changed since I moved here, but not that much).

I was also worried that I’d hate having to walk to work every single day, but so far, I’m really loving it. It’s a short walk - just long enough to give me time to wake up and clear my head before I walk into class. And I like my neighborhood. I like passing the playground equipment that I never see children using - only the elderly placidly twisting through gentle exercises. Then there’s a round-about which is almost entirely COVERED in watermelons for sale, a toy store that only sells Transformers (although I guess there were exactly seven Hello Kitty figurines in there when I checked), little street food stalls, a market, and that pretty much brings me to my school.

So, end of story, I’m happy, Chris is happy, and as far as I can tell, Chris’s cat Scout is THRILLED. She’s got so many rooms to explore and run around in, as opposed to the school’s dormitory, which was, well, a dorm room with a sink. Our only woe right now is that we don’t have a couch, only one red one-person chair. We’re working on it. I feel like I’m living in grown-up China now, and it’s a huge feeling of liberation. And have I mentioned that it’s nice to not live where I work any more?

Anyway, on the off-chance that someone finds this interesting, I’ll post some more pictures when we’ve got it set up to our satisfaction. Some of our friends came over to have a look today, and they brought us a traditional Chinese good luck present - a ridiculously charismatic cricket in a little wicker cage.

He was such a beautiful little guy, and I had a name picked out and terrarium plans made (never mind that I used to feed a very similar animal to my pet tarantula on a weekly basis with no remorse), but I finally decided that I really didn’t need to fall in love with something with such a likely early mortality, and after we thought he’d shed as much good luck as he was likely to, we let him go in a tree outside. So far, my only Chinese pet remains the cactus sitting on my desk, whose name is Eustatius.

There are a few other apartment pictures in my flickr account, and I’ll try to put more up soon. Also, Chris really went the extra mile and made a video tour, here. I feel that I should note that there will not be any broken necks, I promise - we have flashlights and we know how to walk up and down stairs.

The other hilarious news: last night, Chris and I were asked to audition for a recording company looking for English speakers for a textbook CD. And we NAILED it. So now I’ll be the voice that Chinese students learn to hate. I’m going to set up recording times tomorrow, and we’ll see how it goes.

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toilet trauma and class notes (not an entirely appropriate post)

Monday, June 9, 2008

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.

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