DIMINISHED THOUGHT

So yesterday we went to Leshan (literally "Happy Mountain" in Chinese that is
known for being the home of the worlds largest buddha. This buddha is huge,
carved into the cliff face on the side of the river and is best viewed by
boat. We hired a little speedboat to take us out into the river and took some
pictures. We then were dropped off on an island or pennisula with a temple
complex and worked our way across the island to the buddha. The line to walk
down to it's feet was two hours long but we got some good snapshots of the
head. We probably shouldn't have gone on a weekend.

So we're heading off for the glacier and maybe some horseback riding in the
grasslands before we come back to Chengdu. I don't know what the internet
situation will be but stay tuned.

I wrote a nice long post yesterday about my travel companions, The Walking
Phrase Book, AKA Chrissy Shaw from UT and Eric Whittington, a Baylor college
student. Literally as I was hitting post the power went out to the hostel so I
don't think that it went through. Oh well.

The hostel itself is an old Chinese house with a courtyard and cheesy chinese
lanterns with the hostels name, Dragon Town, emblazoned on the side of them.
Three stories of balconies and rooms facing the courtyard ring this place that
has it's own ambiance and thus feels a little corny. It's the sort of hostel
they'd choose to film in a movie somewhere.

I'm in Chengdu and I'm taking a day trip out to Leshan which supposedly has the
worlds largest buddha. Then I'm going to be going on a long trip up to some
place that begins with a J that is famous among the Chinese as it is a large
glacier. I am resolved I will not fall into any crevices or freeze to death.

For those of my readers certain of my eminent demise let me assure them that I
am very much alive and traveling, safe and happy, well and fit. I will provide
more info as to my escapades as my journey continues.

So riht not I'm in a hostel in Chengdu that's pretty neat. It's a traditional
building with three stories that has Chinese lanterns and the black tile
roof. In the center of the court yard there are pots full of the bright fish
and just outside the front door there's a night market that sells beer and
chinese snack food (I love meat on a stick!). Honestly, I find it
simultaneously cheesy and neat at the same time.

I'm traveling with two volunteers from the summer camp which means that I'm
definitely the old man on this expedition. Both of whom are from Tennessee
and one can speak Chinese. I need to stop referring to her as "the walking
phrasebook"...my phrasebook has gone missing and I'm not exactly sure where.
I rarely use it anyway so it's not such a big deal.

Everyone told me Szechuan was hot but it's been raining and it's really cool.

So Tsinghua English Summer Camp 2007 has finally come to an end! Yesterday I
had a party for my kids and I passed around my journal. I told them, "In the
United States we have a tradition of passing around and signing a yearbook
with peoples photos in it at the end of each year". Flipping through the book
it's so sacharin at points. One thing that they latched onto was wanting me
to remember them so alot of the entries went like this:

"Remember me. I'm the girl with big eyes that you gave a hug to."

"I'm the shy boy with dark brown skin"

"You're coming to my town Chengdu. I'm the short girl and I gave you spicy
food."

And on, and on, and on....

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Last night Tsinghua held a banquet for their teachers and volunteers. I'm
always amazed at the sheer quantity of food that they present. While I love
the variety and the dishes are usually excellent I think sometimes that it can
be very wasteful. Perhaps my favorite dish last night was deep fried beef
ribs (it might have been mutton) that came out with a heavy coating of
batter. I stripped the bone bare. I only had one but you really can't eat
too much of that sort of thing. The also had these small bread that you
dipped into a creamy sauce about the color of vanilla pudding but with a
thicker consistency. It was very sweet and extremely delicious. Other dishes
included fried chicken that was nestled in a bed of red peppers, baked catfish
(the stuff at home is better), century eggs, sweet and sour chicken,
dumplings, fried rice, seafood and melonballs, and lots of beer.

After the meal we all wandered around and spoke to one another. It's the last
time many people would see each other. While at the camp the teaching team I
was a part of had a foreign volunteer, a UT college girl, a Tsinghua
Volunteer, a young English major, and a Hong Kong volunteer. My Hong Kong
volunteer is a really sweet girl but she's very shy and maybe a bit socially
awkward. I got the impression that after Harry Potter came out (yeah I caved
and bought a copy and I'm currently about 400 pages in) that she sat in her
rooms at night to finish it. Anyway she cried. It was totally unexpected and
it caught me off guard. I stood there and tried to comfort her until she was
ok. I guess she must have felt so disappointed and sad that things were
ending...

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Sorry about the lack of quality posts recently. Just so you know this was my
typical day:

8:30 - 9:30 Lecture on US Campus Culture/ Dating & Marriage in the US
9:40 - 11:30 Small Group Lessons
11:40 - 12:30 Data Collection for Research Project
12:30 - 1:15 Lunch (often I'd spend some time with my students here)
1:30 - 2:15 Relax
2:30 - 4:00 Afternoon Singing Competitions/ Speech Competitions/ Activities
with students
4:00 - 5:00 Prepare for Next Day/ Shower (Hot water is from 3:00-5:00 only)
5:30 - 7:30 Dinner (Often going out to eat)
8:00 - ? Socializing

So in there I also had to work up lessons and work on my research so you can
see it's not anything personal I was just very busy.

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Ok. So nobody panic. I'm going dark for a while. I'm heading to Chengdu
(look it up on Wikipedia) in the Szechuan province down in southern China to
hang out and travel. I don't know when I get to a computer. Just go on the
assumption that I am alive and well.

So apparently I can no longer post to my blog through blogger in China. I'm
doing this through the email function which I think was set up primarily for
mobile bloggers. Someone shoot me an email and let me know if it works.

So on Friday I gave everyone a little scare. I don't know exactly what it was but for about an hour I felt very unwell. Most of the time that foreigners don't feel well in Beijing it's the food. They've eaten something that doesn't sit right with them and they begin ...well I figure you have a good enough idea of what probably happens. I don't think it was something I ate. I just think that my body finally told itself, "Scott, you're exhausted!".

I was sitting in class trying to judge the singing competition (which with all the backstreet boys and disingenious, sappy love songs the Chinese love was painful enough) my heart started to beat extremely rapidly my chest felt like it was becoming a bit constricted. I stuck it out as long as I could. I sat there listening to someone sing Westlife's "My Love" for as long as I could before telling my American volunteer, Dale (yes it's a girl actually) that I was feeling unwell and slipping out. Outside I was sitting on the floor, kind of slumped against the wall thinking, "Well this sucks!". Finally, Dale came out and asked me if I was feeling well and I just took her hand and stuck it on my chest so that she could feel how crazy my heart was pumping.

She made me lay down. Women always overreact to everything.

Anyway what I thought was so funny is how some of my students handled it (most were in class and unaware of anything going on). That ones that did find me were like, "Teacher! Are you ok?" They tried to support me like I was lame as I walked. I ended up down in the headquarters office drinking water before insisting on going back to class. I think that in the long run it was just exhaustion from working so hard and never sleeping. It might have been a food allergy but I've never been allergic to any foods before. I've still got a month and half until I'm 26.

Labels: China, ESL, food, teaching

So today I went to the Lama Temple in Beijing and for the first time in my life I saw a real prayer wheel. The temple was extremely busy and they had the small bonfires in urns outside each hall feed by joss sticks dropped off by the constant parade of pilgrims. Perhaps the most amazing thing was a huge sandalwood buddha that had been carved from a single piece of wood that stood over 19 meters.

I also walked over to the Tianenmen Square (spelling?) and just marveled at the sheer size of it. I've been there before but it never ceases to impress me. I also never cease to be annoyed by the people constantly trying to sell me mao watchs, red books, kites, postcards, and anything else that a tourist might not really need. There were these cute little Chinese kids running around in the square with the string of kites that would sooner or later wrap up in a tour guides flag or smack an unsuspecting pedestrian in the head.

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I love my students. I'm really looking forward to spending a lot more time with them next week. I'll see about getting pictures up later.

So I'm in China. I start data collection on my project today and I'm a little worried about whether I can get enough participants. I've spent a lot of time and money on this project that I would hate for it to all break down now.

I just runned my khaki shorts. In typical fashion, I was issued a knock off diesel messenger bag that bleeds it's color when it gets wet. Not they have a big charcoal grey smudge on them.

I ate hotpot the other night which was awesome. Then I tried it again last night at a place with no pictures on the menu and it was a semi disaster. They just kept trying to help us. Finally the girl I was with and I went out to the curb and had a beer. One of the waitresses walked by and just started laughing at us (good naturedly). It was a semistressful experience but primarily because the poor wait staff freaked out and didn't quite know what to do.

I'm a rock star. I just finished my first couple classes teaching and I feel pretty good about it. I really kind of know what to do after last year and it really makes all the difference. I'm hoping that I will continue to be able to perform on this level for the rest of the summer camp.

This year I have students that have a somewhat higher level of proficiency in English than the ones I had last year. It seems to me to be somewhat counterintuitive that now that I know what I'm doing I get the more advanced classes as I remember how frustrating it was trying to break through to the classes with more spotty English. I'll keep everyone appraised as to how it goes.

Labels: China, ESL, teaching, tsinghua

Yesterday one of my professors from Purdue, Jay Wang took Jen and I out for drinks in Sanlitun, a famous bar district in Beijing. Perhaps what I found most interesting about this experience was that one of the bars was contained within an old Chinese hutong giving it the feel of a Chinese house/cocktail party at times.

The hutong are the old, one story traditional Chinese buildings that have received international attention as they have slowly be destroyed to make way for more modern archetecture in Beijing. However, some are being preserved by the Chinese government and apparently the demand to live in them can be quite high.

Jay explained that only if you had some status or prestige as an artist or some connection to the government would you ever find a single family living in a hutong. Currently they are multi-family dwellings unless a conglomerate or business partnership chooses to buy out the other owners and renovate the building. There are actually many hutong in the southern part of the Tsinghua campus that have fallen into disrepair over the years. This is in part because they are multi-family dwellings and it requires a considerable amount of coordination and agreement to actually find the time and resources to renovate them.

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Once again to those of you emailing me, I'm in the same position as last summer where I'm very busy trying to juggle teaching, traveling, researching, and just having a bit of fun. I also have very limited access to the internet so most of the communication you're going to get from me will be through this blog. This is not personal; it merely reflects time and resource constraints.

Ripped from an email to my friend Chris: "....Being back in Beijing is awesome. I've already randomly run into a bunch of Chinese people that I know and it's great to be on a university campus here because even though I'm not Chinese I can still feel a little like I'm part of the community. I think I'm going to take tonight easy as I've been out every night since I came thus far (all two).

It's weird being back because I really do know this small Beijing neighborhood pretty decently and everything really doesn't seem that weird. In fact, I think that if I hadn't been gone for a year it would still seem a whole lot more novel. Leaving creates the illusion of familiarity because you've seen it before. You have these "oh yeah" moments when you see something that while different from home you know what they're doing or why. For example, ordering food in the cafeteria is not nearly as strange as it used to seem. You just have to tell them what you want slide your card through the slot and presto. The food itself is still relatively familiar."

I have made it to China safe and sound. Pirates did not attack my boat. I was not murdered in the night and thrown overboard. The ferry did not catch fire and there was no mad scramble as normally sane men turned on women and children in a cowardly effort, of which they would have been ashamed in their old age to remember, to save their own skins.

In fact my ferry trip to China was uneventful save for meeting the equivalent of Korean frat boys that insisted that their new American friend drink lots of soju prior to landing in Tianjin.

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On a side note I had myself a Before Sunrise scenario Korean style....