yaramaz

You know you've left the Urbs of the Eastern Seaboard when you pull into a train station 3 hours and 45 minutes away from home and the platform is stacked high with straw and a bound-straw sculpture of sorts greets the herds of bundled up steam-breathing passengers as they shuffle down the exit gangway, trying not to trip on the thoughtlessly dragged wheelie-bags ahead of them. To exit the Hefei train station, one is simply merged into a stream of bodies, down the slope and into a series of semi-outdoor corridors, somewhat reminiscent of the pathways cows take en route to their execution. After a half dozen long stretches interrupted by turns, we exited into an even thicker throng on a muddy side street, with motorcycle taxis and beggars all clamouring for business. Ah, Hefei. Lots of car horns. Vendors. Hordes. The usual. We are all posh, working for the British Council and all (*snort*) so a driver from the Hilton was there to pick us up. However, because of the throngs and hordes and all, he had had to park so far away from the station that we might as well have just walked.

How was the weekend? Tiring. I did 29 interviews, the last 5 with a sore throat and very distracting cheekbone/earache. I was one of only two examiners up on the third floor, flanking on either side the bundled up young monitor who sat at the landing on the stairs, directing candidates to their test rooms. Between interviews, she brought out the enormous thermos of hot water and refilled my cup. Between interviews, I stood out in the short, dead end hallway, with looking out the open window at the sunshine and birds and laundry hangers on rooftops.



(phone pic)

Hefei's a big small city, sprawling and greyish and concrete but surprisingly calm to work in. There are birds and strong shadows from actual sunshine. Shanghai doesn't do shadows. You need light for that. I actually enjoyed the weekend, up til the point when my voice started giving out and I had to take the second tylenol for my face-ache. We had dinner at the Hilton- going wild, ordering South African white wine by the bottle (*sigh*) and delving deep into their buffet spread (crispy duck pancakes, sushi and cheese cake? Ok!). Our room was on the 19th floor, with a wall of window that looked out over the city, with comfy chairs to sit in to look out over the city.

I'm tired though, very tired. We only got in around 10:15 last night (nearly 4 hour train ride with face pain and exhaustion) and home by 11. Our taxi driver took the unnecessary elevated freeway instead of just taking our simple and direct and empty road from North Shanxi Lu near the station down to South Shanxi Lu. He drove like a pinball ball and I closed my eyes for most of the journey. We narrowly missed a half dozen cars, sliding in and out of lanes for no good reason at speeds that were just silly. I was feeling better about my life here over the weekend, but that taxi reminded me of things that just make me tired.

Must get ready for work.

It has been damp and finger-numbing cold this week, with the need for a constant umbrella outside (just in case) and a jacket and scarf in the classroom (even though the heat is on-- the wall of windows is only thin, single-pane glass and the draught is palpable). It is dark when I rise, dark when I stumble to the kitchen to make coffee, semi-dark when I leave and frequently dark when I come home. The skies are leaden. Scooters and their riders are homogenized under huge, bright rain ponchos. They ride through puddles and splash me. As do black cars, because black cars are generally driven by ass-hats. Puddles are deepening. I drink tea to keep my fingers warm. I have two duvets on the bed now.

But you know what? I prefer this immeasurably to the heat of summer. I prefer being cozy under two duvets and drinking hot tea and bundling up to sweating all over everything, sleepless and dizzy.

Going to Hefei tomorrow, early early early. Thirty speaking tests to plow through. I will bring a thermos of my own coffee, brewed at the crack of dawn tomorrow, so I needn't endure the hideous 3-in-1 Nescafe crap again. And I'll fill my thermos with hotel coffee Sunday morning. We're staying at the Hilton. I've never stayed at a Hilton before. The Hefei Hilton doesn't have quite the came cachet, as say, London or New York, but still!

Best spam headline ever: Alone she cuts and binds the grain‏

I have NO idea what they are trying to sell (penis enlargers? cheap Canadian drugs?) but I like the style of the subject line.

The heat in my classroom has finally been turned on, though the air coming out isn't quite warm yet. In my office, repairmen have been traipsing in and out all day, fiddling with the controls. My fingers are numb and I'm wearing many, many layers. For a city as abruptly and fiercely hot as Shanghai in summer, it is also abruptly and fiercely cold come autumn. I'm sleeping under two thick duvets at night now, where two weks ago even one was iffy.

I'm totally not in the mood for my Long Day. The kids are in a stupid, pointless mood and it's hard trying to corall the unwilling when your fingers are numb and you are just plain old tired.

Fromhere

After sleeping in til the absurdly late hour of 7:30am, I drank strong coffee and did bugger all except read cheap n' tawdry chick magazines until we bundled up warm to go get hot, garlicky noodles for breakfast, followed by our first ever jaunt to Ikea. Our driver was a woman (still surprising to me, after so many Levantine years) and kind and careful and had spent the last five years trying to teach herself English in her free time. We didn't race any buses on the road, nor did we weave in and out of traffic. She didn't smoke or chat on her phone whilst driving. All in all, a shockingly pleasant experience. At Ikea, we got a new french press coffee pot, a laundry hamper (yay! no clothes on floor!), a huge down duvet and very nice duvet cover for nights on the sofa in winter, big warm pretty cotton towels AND (oh, god!) a dish rack! With a little tray under it to catch the run off water! You can't find dish racks anywhere in Shanghai. We've been looking since we arrived in March and have had to make do with the one that was left behind in the flat- a rusting, bent-wired one with no water tray, so all washed dished dripped rusty water onto the countertop as they dried. Very very exciting. We lunched at the dongbei hole in the wall restaurant up on Fuxing Lu, and its heavy, hearty coziness was exactly correct for our sudden wintertide. Garlic broccoli, bok choy and glutinous rice, saucy fried spud with greens and baby tomato halves, sharply green veggie dumplings dipped in vinegar and chili-sesame paste. The skies were clear and light and the air was crispy and frigid. At the gringo supermrket at the metro station, they had their Christmas gear up-- Christmas here being a very Euro-goodies focused holiday: bags and bags of dark chocolate dipped German gingerbreads filled with apricot jam or liqueurs, Belgian beers, English cookies. I bought a bag of apricot heart-shaped gingerbread and ate three hearts with a cup of hot milky tea. Today will be cozy.

After coughing and sniffling my way through over 3 continuous hours worth of mid-term speaking assessments (55-odd kids on a factory line) , I lost my mind. Just a little bit, mind, but enough. When I came home and got ready for the gym (my hour of academic treadmilling beckoned), I failed to see my sweats (which were hanging in the laundry room, plain as day) so ended up wearing jeans; I also forgot to pack a towel and water bottle and money to pay for a new bottle of water. The tshirt I packed turned out to be D's and not mine. All in all, an utterly stupid day. And cold. Cold and stupid. At the gym, Karlene asked me if I'd been smoking illicit substances. I was obviously not in top form, mentally. She had had to call after me three separate times on the street before I even noticed. Alas, no illicit substances. Just Lanzhou noodles (with extra chili paste and vinegar) and coffee.

The howling winds of a sudden-onset Shanghai winter are battering the windows. Yesterday was shirtsleeves, as was the day before and the day before that and so on, but today is fucking freezing. Seriously- all numb fingers and unheatable core and jacket and scarf in the classroom. It's like the first three months of last term all over again. Trying to hold chalk with stiff fingers. Trying to keep one's everpresent umbrella from blowing inside out. Drinking tea for the warmth rather than for hydration. Five more months of shivering to look forward to! Huzzah!

We rolled back into Shanghai later than necessary after several hours on a train where seatless people kept hanging out directly behind our heads, talking loudly on their phones or just resting their elbows on our head rests. I kind of miss personal space. We rolled in late and it was dark and the air was thick- thicker than usual and rather eye-burny and smokey. I suppose it's crop-burning time in central Shanghai.  Seriously, the air was heavy and smokey and smelled like the back roads of Indonesia or Guatemala during the slash and burn seasons. I woke this morning with a brutal sore throat and a cold-ful nose and feeling quite awful, so I called in sick for my one little afternoon class (the other was canceled anyway, for a mid term exam with another teacher) and am adamantly staying horizontal in bed with my orange juice and gummy sharks (wild cherry flavour!).  I have a feeling that not having had a proper day off in about three weeks may have contributed to my malaise. This weekend's 30 speaking tests were what pushed me over the edge though. By the time the 20th candidate rolled in, my voice was going. I sipped a lot of tea over the weekend. Random loose green leaves in a paper cup with vaguely chemically-tasting bottled thermos water. I've never seen so many thermoses in my life until I came here. There were a good half dozen corked thermoses on the table in the admin room at Nanjing uni, and last weekend at Qiandao lake, there were big thermoses full of hot water parked outside every hotel room. You never know when you'll need a liter or two of piping hot water.

At the gym this afternoon, I did my Absurdly-Steep-Incline Walking Meditation Hour on the treadmill, staring out at the Luwan sports field and football players below, with three consecutive albums of shouty Le Tigre to keep me company. All the while, random pointless academese kept popping into my head-- does anyone else have this problem when doing repetitive exercise? Somewhere around the 20-minute mark, the word heteronormative pulsed through my brain repeatedly, and eventually segued into dialectic, followed by paradigm. These words aren't even connected to any particular thought strands- they seem to be operating as isolated, spontaneous single-word mantras of some sort.

How very very f*cked up.

On Sunday night, after our six hour long drive back from the Lake of Silt (plus a few rest stops en route), we got home to find our door covered in bright yellow stickers shouting at us in Chinese, with one acting as a sort of door-sealing Police-Line that we had to rip to get in. It was all very odd and mysterious and seemed to have had something to do with our gas (I recognized their little ball-of-flames logo) but really, when one is illiterate as we are, one never really knows what the hell is going on. A gas guy had come by the previous friday for a brief Nihao and quick poke around the gas cupboard above the stove. Again, all a mystery to me. So last Sunday when we got back we checked the gas, fearing we'd been disconnected without warning (a very real fear based on many years' experience with this in Turkey) and found that not only was the gas not disconnected but that it was so free flowing that our stove burners were flaming wildly out of control when turned on. The hot water was erratic and touchy and everything smelled just a little bit too gassy for comfort when it was on. That was Sunday night.

Monday evening, our neighbor decided to finally tell D that our building was in the process of converting to natural gas, so it would be a good idea to not use the stove until further notice (wild uncontrollable flames and all) and to make sure all rooms are well ventilated when turning on the hot water so we don't die of gas poisoning.  We didn't die, as you can see, but we haven't been able to cook until today (Thursday). Yesterday at some point, our landlord's wife came by to supervise the installation of the new natural-gas friendly stove top. i had my monthly meeting in the morning and was aching for solitude and a nap in the afternoon but she lingered there at the kitchen table with her knitting all afternoon and when I got in at 2:30 I had to sequester myself in the bedroom for a hint of rest. 

It's all good though, in spite of the wild flames and deathly hot-shower gas fumes-- our water is stronger and hotter than ever before (it doesn't take 20 minutes to pour a bath now) and we have a brilliant new stainless steel stove. It's really pretty and the flames aren't wild or out of control. I like that in a stove. Did I mention how pretty it is?

Going to Nanjing this weekend for two wild n crazy days of testing. Woot.

First, the divey bits.

( Underwater stuff )


The non dive stuff



( Mostly food and cold )

I really don't feel like working today.

I have lived long enough to see my name in lights. Though the huge scrolling-light bulletin boards at the university may not count  100% toward one's 15 minutes of fame (I appear on every fifth screen). I can be found at the entrance gate and in the foyers of the teaching buildings. I believe it says something about my mother being a hamster and my father smelling of elderberries.

 
( Lots and lots of pictures from our big walk up there this morning )

It's freakishly strong Belgian beer week chez nous, with the gringo supermarket up the street having a big feature on 6-11% alcohol Trappist trippel/bok/bruin ales. It's a definite step up from the usual TsingTao and the horrible, horrible Snow (which I'd originally misread vertically as Mons and thought it rather risque for a communist beer). Today's selection is a lovely, light brown Orval, which has a fish on the label and comes in a brown perrier bottle. After an excruciatingly long afternoon spent trying to wrestle wet cats in jello whilst pulling teeth and banging one's head against a brick wall repeatedly, it is a pleasant treat (along with the lovely dinner of homemade marinara tossed with sauteed bok choy and garlic over tricolour pasta). By wrestling wet cats in jello, I mean, trying to get my kids to talk. In English. And not while I'm giving instructions.  Mondays are my double block of Speaking/Culture classes and we have a curriculum that is nicely set up to get the kids prepped and ready for their sojourn to Australia in year 3. However, the materials I need to carry it out never seem to exist. I was supposed to show some sort of video clip as the foundation for the whole lesson on differences between past, present and future and the variations of degrees of change and, well, I have no idea where this clip is or what it is. So, as always, I rewrote the whole lesson in PowerPoint because I don't have a printer and ran with it. Mixed results. Wrestling cats and all.

Had rough, rough face-pain weekend. I hadn't had the raw nerves coursing through my cheekbones and jawlines in eons but they were back, all electric and humming.  I tylenol'd my way through long hikes across the city and was able to be happy for my mother's birthday at a very hard to find italian place in the old part of town (#19a was on one end of a block, a short, closed door next to bun sellers; 19b, the restaurant, was across the street and hidden). Very very good tomato and mozza salad and best tiramisu ever (since Europe, anyways).

Need bed.

So I've decided to Officially Implement (caps added for vehemence but not shouting) Shanghai's first ever Sunshine and Lollipops week.  In light of my recent inner struggles with the external/internal world, I'm going to work super duper hard to be realistically PollyAnna Happy Pants.

Assisting in this endeavor is Shanghai's very own weather system, which has irregularly manifested itself as bright blue-skied sunshine for THREE whole days! Unimaginable! No more white skies over planet Krikkit!

Also in the pleasing category is the fact that today I only have 2 exams to invigilate. I love invigilating- seriously. In spite of the tedium of so much staring and glaring, I love watching the kids write their exams. It's like watching a baby sleep- the litle flutery hand movements, the snuffles, the sighs, the slightly-moving pursed lips mouthing silent phrases in their dreams. Like the Tom Waits idea of innocence when they dream (or write summaries of short texts with opinion responses)

Sunshine and lollipops aspect:

The weather has been great for the past few days- blue skies and bright sun and singing birds. My parents and I went on a tourism binge to the old town, checking out the Yuyuan Gardens (crowded but not insanely so) and froggy-crabby wet markets down side streets and bun-filled lanes and temple/skyscraper juxtaposed skylines. We walked 16,000 steps according to my pedometer/class-clock. Trees were still green and rustly and the birds all chirpy.

We went to a Hunan place for a late lunch yesterday after our long walk and feasted on the following: crunchy thin slices of lacey rounds of lotus roots marinated in vinegar and chilis; savoury pungent stir fried green beans and long soft slices of eggplant (and more chilis); sauteed shoestring strands of vinaigry potato and red peppers; soft wet brothy dumplings with an oily hot dipping paste; dry fried cumin beef slivers with the little nubbins of cumin poking into the folds. It was all very good. For some reason, this restaurant serves Belgian beers so we drank some fine Duvel with our feast.

At work, my big kerfuffle/standoff about having to do extra work and extra classes for the kids who should never have been admitted is slowly evolving into my favor. A representative from the Oz university flew up over the weekend to find out how the kids got admitted and to let me know they support me. A Chinese teacher is being hired part time to give the remedial lessons they had tried to pin onto me (at times that were  convenient to the kids but not to me- the 3 timeslots proposed would have had me coming in 5 hours early on a monday or staying 5 hours after class friday or coming in on my wednesday off... just for a one hour tutoring session that the kids may or may not attend because the slower kids are also often slack-assed kids). My friday 3 hours of classes will be changed from a general review day to a day of self-study for the good kids and more personalized review for the slower ones.