(no subject)
2006-09-09: Today's Saturday so I've had three days of school. All the teachers we've had so far are great. They're lively and smart and judge our level well. The most exciting thing is that we're learning Chinese through Chinese - not through English in lecture form like in Edinburgh. Yesterday we had our first "Chinese Culture" lesson, where we ran through the basics of what Confucius had to say. Most things I'd only seen in English before. I like "己所不欲，勿施于人" ("what yourself not wish, don't impose on (other) people" - it's kind of the modest version of "Do unto others...") and "死生有命，富贵在天" ("mortal beings have fate, wealthy precious in heaven").
There's a nice atmosphere in the class because our level is surprisingly equal, so we all find it just as difficult and are all just as game. Some people have moved to an easier class but none of the Koreans are budging, meaning that Chinese is the lingua franca among us, even between me and the young American couple. This week I want to talk to the elderly Japanese man I mentioned, Mr. Ridgefield. I think our teachers really like him because of what he's doing. I definitely admire it. I just can't really understand his Chinese through his heavy Japanese accent. We have another Japanese classmate called Beautiful Summer. She's pretty and bizarre and so is her boyfriend. Yesterday they came to class wearing gorgeous matching colourful outfits. Very Shinjuku, or wherever that place is.
I'm settling in all round. I like getting up quite early (please may that liking last) and I like walking through the xiaoqu to the bus stop. They're still hard at work creating the landscape through which residents walk down a long marble flight of steps and across a plaza to the dusty street below, and it's looking nice, if a little weird, since the trees seem to have been transplanted already mature and are being held in place by big ropes and planks until they take root. I presume that's what's going on. It looks a bit like Isengard in the unfinished bits.
I like the autumn weather, too. Dalian really does have clear blue skies with white clouds, and today was bright and sunny with a cold wind. I would have gone out and walked around in it more, but after the first week I'm so tired that today all I did was go and play badminton with a Korean friend (Dazzle Upright) and her Chinese posse, come home and have lunch with Teacher Order and Clear Logic, and sleep for three hours.
Yesterday evening, though, there was an amazing cartoon-style traffic jam like something out of a Gaulish town in 'Asterix', so everyone piled out of the stuck bus and walked home. It was suddenly cold and dark and the wind blew dust into everyone's eyes. I was hungry when I got home. I always look forward to Teacher Woodchild's dinners. I've been eating too much meat. Left alone in a familiar environment I'm quite a strict vegetarian, but I never refuse meat. There's a story behind the logic, a long story involving my mother and the monks of Glenstall Abbey in Co. Limerick, but the upshot is that I wouldn't dream of being vegetarian in China... to the extent that when Teacher Woodchild says "have more prawns/pork/very fatty beef/pig's trotter" I generally obey. She has allowed me to wash dishes now, by the way.
Trust me to say "there's a story behind the logic" instead of the other way round.
The university's first-years are all marching around in bright blue cammo uniforms doing their compulsory month of PLA training. The girls don't like the fact that it makes them "black" from lots of healthy exposure to the sun. It's all a bit surreal, and sometimes hard to squeeze through their ranks to get to class.
In fact I'm not sure how seriously those freshers are taking their army training. Sometimes they march past extremely earnestly, file after file, with a guy from the PLA shouting "Yi! Er! Yi!" into a megaphone. Hearing that in the background while trying to get to your foreign email through a tightly filtered network and looking out at a huge statue of a benign MZD does make you think "dude", in exactly that tone of voice. But after I discovered the more forgiving wangbas (net bars), I noticed that some of the junxun freshers have their caps on back to front and some of them are playing football. Some are racing around for no reason and some are swinging their arms and looking bored and some are sitting on the sidelines having a laugh. Today I saw a small chunk of the real PLA, though. They were having a bit of an auld drill in front of the university swimming pool, probably to demonstrate to the junxunners. They look pretty smart, and I realise that I've never seen even the smallest section of any army in the flesh before. I was like, "dude", with just that inflection. I came by ten minutes later and they were sitting around having a laugh too.
Will write again,
K