thebroad
PSA:
Chinese spiders are a lot like American spiders. They are nothing like Filipino spiders, which are the size of your hand and require a hatchet to kill. Chinese spiders crawl across my rug at a pace that barely catches my eye, and they move quickly to dodge the container of baby powder that is rapidly descending upon them. They dart into the gap between the window and window frame when they detect me coming to hang a washcloth out the window — but more importantly, they are susceptible to such substances as milk tea and a combination of conditioner and salt.
I am starting to be of the (rather widespread) opinion that you can’t go wrong with a Margaret Atwood book. To date, I’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Blind Assassin. I’ve enjoyed them all, and plan to read The Year of the Flood soonish.
I’ve seen it written that The Blind Assassin is her finest work, though I’m not sure I’d agree with that just yet. I read a lot of books that grab me quickly and I end up finishing them in about a day and a half. The Blind Assassin was not one of those books. First, it’s huge. There was a paperback copy in the tiny library here, so I read my very first paper book (aka DTE/Dead Tree Edition) since last Christmas, when I got my Kindle. After 7 months of reading on a Kindle, hefting a huge paperback that kept wanting to close on me wasn’t terribly pleasant.
The story itself was interesting, but it didn’t compel me to read for hours and hours each day. I was curious and wanted to continue, and I suppose that’s just as good. Three stories are happening at once here – the chapters are split between accounts of the narrator’s childhood, bits of her current life as an elderly woman, and chapters of a story written by her sister. The twist at the end was predictable (which may have been the point) and unnecessary. If it had simply been omitted, the story would have ended with a bit of mystery and book clubs everywhere could debate what REALLY happened. Laying it all out gave me the brief satisfaction of a “See? I was right!” but I think I enjoyed it more when I was in the middle of the book suspecting things and going back and forth. It was the puzzle that kept me reading. I still recommend it.
I finished The Postman by David Brin last night, and while I enjoyed it and recommend it, I’m not going to review it. So nyah. Now I’m reading Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth. 
Wow, 2 posts in 12 hours. You may be thinking, “What did I do to deserve this?”
I’m just feeling generous. It’s just how I am.
*ahem*
Actually, I had a bit of a shock today, and realized that perhaps a little accountability to you, my 4 readers, would help me behave a bit better. I sat down at the office computer today to do a Rosetta Stone Chinese lesson. I knew it had been a while, but looking at my log file and seeing 6/30/10 as the date of the last completed activity made me more than a little ashamed. I hadn’t done a lesson in TWO MONTHS. In just a few weeks, I’ll be traveling to Beijing alone to pick up my mom and mom-in-law and show them around for a few days. Had I been keeping up with my lessons, I might have been able to wow them with my amazing skills. As it stands now, I could probably tell them that the blue dog is running. I often confuse blue and black. At a coffee shop in Taipei, I told the hubs that I was going to go look for a “ying yu si xing che”. An English bicycle. I meant newspaper.
It is obvious that I have a bit of learning and practice to do, but at least I can order a cup of coffee. (Note to the moms: Don’t worry, I also know how to order 3 cups of coffee. I cannot, however, order seven or nine cups.)
So without further ado, a list of monthly goals. I stole this idea from a couple of other bloggers. Please feel free to guilt me into achieving these.
- Work on the Rosetta Stone Chinese for 30-45 minutes per day.
- Study and practice Tibetan for 30 minutes per day.
- Plan lessons for the week on Sunday. These lessons should include at least 2 major NON-TEXTBOOK activities per week.
- Tuesday morning is for cleaning, not internet. Laundry is also an acceptable activity. If you see me online at this time (Monday night in the U.S.) send me a message in ALL CAPS so I know how mad you are at me.
- Leave the room at least one evening a week to be social. Monday Movie Night doesn’t count because people aren’t talking.
- Get in bed @ 10ish and read for 45 minutes or until I fall asleep, whichever comes first.
- Finish the sleeves for the coat I was supposed to finish making before coming to Shangri-la but have barely touched since I got here.
Ok, that’s enough. It might even be too much. I’m just hoping that small chunks make things doable.
It’s confession time. This will come as no or little surprise to at least some people who read this, though the extent may be shocking.
No, Mom, I’m not pregnant, and I wouldn’t tell the internet first if I was. BUT – this post has everything to do with babies. I am *deep breath* a birth junkie.
This has been going on for years. It started a sometime while I was still at UMich… I think someone on LiveJournal must have mentioned the forums at mothering.com because signing up there was probably the first thing I can really remember doing. Then friends started having babies and I learned things from them and from the things I gave them. Last summer I gave two books as baby shower gifts – Your Best Birth and La Leche League’s The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding. I had to be careful as I read them because I wanted to make sure the book still looked nice enough for a gift.
I’ve researched various baby products like carriers and diapers. I’ve researched what birth options are available in Madison vs. what my insurance will cover. I’ve researched classes.
I watched The Business of Being Born by myself on my computer shortly after it was released. I have Babies waiting to be watched, and once I watch that, Orgasmic Birth is up next. I hear that last one isn’t actually as bizarre as it sounds. I always watch these alone, then discuss them with other non-mom birth junkies on the internet.
I currently have 8 birth-related blogs on my Google reader. One is just someone’s pregnancy journey, but most are written by birth activists and natural childbirth educators. For contrast, I have 3 related to eating gluten-free, and 6 dealing with my Kindle. Speaking of my Kindle, it’s nice and easy to read baby books with it since there’s no cover to make people say things like “Oh, are you pregnant? Congrats!” followed by the awkwardness that ensues if you decide to say that you aren’t. Not that it would go down like that in China anyhow, but at least I’m protected for my return to the U.S.
The result of all this is that I’ve managed to form VERY strong opinions about things that I have no experience with. In conversations with people who are actually parents, I often have to hold my tongue. If I have argued with you in the past, I apologize now. I was learning so much at such a rapid pace at one point that I was just overwhelmed and didn’t know how to either contain it or discuss it in a sane way. I feel like I have information and advice to give (if it’s wanted) but that I won’t be taken seriously because I am not Someone Who Has Been There. I’ve just read all the travel guides.
I uh, also bought a Tibetan baby carrier.
Anyway, the reason I’m laying this all out here is because occasionally I read something that I want to share. Without this very long explanation of just how into this I am, the reaction could be confusing and embarrassing. But I promise this will remain (at least for the next few months) a blog about me being in China. Once I’m home who knows what could happen?
Despite having read a huge amount of books here, it’s been quite a while since I’ve done a book review. It’s going to be a little longer, because I have to lead up to this review.
Thursday, I was quite ill with who-knows-what, though I suspect it was a virus of some sort. I spent the entire day in either the bed or the bathroom, and started to feel better around 9pm. I took tiny sips of electrolyte drink as I woke up through the night, and felt much better the next morning. Newsflash: it’s difficult to teach when you ate NOTHING the previous day. I took another day off and napped. This morning I was starving and ventured out for food that was nothing like what I had thrown up two days ago. I settled on fried potatoes with cheese and some hot chocolate, and stared up at the TV while I waited for my food. It was a Chinese nature program with the sound off, because the cafe had it’s own preferred soundtrack. So, naturally, I got to watch baby elephants swimming to the tune of Knights in White Satin.
After stuffing myself and listening to a man complain about “boom boom nightclub music” until 1am (twice) I got up to leave and felt dizzy. Lucky for me, there’s a couch by the door and a table covered with books and magazines. Next to Amelia Bedelia (which I read, of course) was a book called Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China
If you’re interested in the ethnic minorities in China, if you wonder what we eat out here, if you want to see amazing pictures of food and people, and especially if you want to read the stories of Westerners who roamed China when it was barely open to tourists, then get this book. It has recipes alongside stories of how the couple met, encounters with notable folks, and the adventures and touching encounters they had 25 years ago when I was bopping around to Madonna’s True Blue album in my driveway.
In a half an hour (assuming my ride partners show up despite not having called me yet) I leave for Deqin to see the hubs for our first anniversary! From Deqin we’ll head back to Xidang, where we’ll hike over the mountain to Yubeng and visit a neat waterfall.
The approved first anniversary gifts are paper and clocks, and I’ve been racking my brain to figure out what to get him that would survive the drive and the hike. Answer: hypothetical gifts of paper, and the gift of time.
Thanks to a neat idea shared by a friend a few months ago, I will suggest that we use our anniversary as a day to take an annual picture of ourselves and any future members of the family. Once we get home, I can print them and start sticking them in a book. Made of paper.
I am a pretty adventurous eater, within my annoying dietary restrictions. Even when it comes to meat, if I am presented with something unusual or special I will at least have a taste. I don’t think I was all that adventurous as a kid though, since I ordered the chicken a la king at Bill Knapp’s every. single. time. My brother would always think long and hard about the most disgusting thing on the menu and order that to gross me out. You should have seen the smile on his face when the liver and onions came out, followed quickly by the look of fear that came when he realized he had to actually eat it. Chow down, bro’. I’ve got my chicken a la king.
I have often been in situations here where a refusal would have been incredibly rude, so I’m polite, and I eat up. Even though it means eating fatty salt pork while I’m on my period and retaining water while on a hike at above 3000 meters. I thought my wedding ring was going to cut off circulation in my shiny little sausage fingers.
Today though, oh god, today…
I should start by saying that the cook here is awesome. He makes generally great food, and despite being mostly deaf and only speaking Tibetan, manages to crank out gluten-free vegetarian food for me. When the starch is bread, I usually get a buckwheat pancake, and when the main course is meaty there are 2 dishes of veg food for me and one of my students (he aspires to be a monk). Today was like that, except the leftover tomato and egg from lunch had an extra ingredient in it. It was cubes of congealed pig blood.
I am not Carrie. I want nothing to do with pig blood. It took some time and 2 of my students to figure out for sure what it was. Imagine this scenario: I get the cook’s attention, point to a cube, and mime slitting my wrist. He shakes his head no. One of the students tries a cube and mimes the position of various organs. Is it a heart? Is it a kidney? I still stick by the blood theory. I’ve seen this stuff in the market a lot. The chef draws a square in the air with his fingers. He means a cube, which means I’m right. For him to put it in our bowls would mean that he didn’t know what it was.
Luckily the other half of the plate was tofu. I quietly got another bowl and picked off the top layer of tofu so as to avoid whatever was seeping into the bottom layer. I am not an “omg THE MEAT JUICES!” type of vegetarian (anymore…) but hi, that’s blood. My student was not as careful nor as polite. He just grabbed his bowl and dumped the tomato/egg/blood cube mix into another bowl and walked out. Actually, he did it like any 14 year old boy probably would. No delicate plucking with chopsticks. That’s for 30-year-old foreign chicks.
This is different from me (formerly) eating my steak rare.
Yes, it is.
Because it just is.
I’m not having this conversation with you anymore.
A rare break, talking to my Uncle Hans.
By interesting, I don’t mean good. It’s been a mix, really. The biggest thing to happen was the death of my uncle. I’ve been avoiding making a blog post about it because I’m afraid that anything I say will be trite. It seems even worse to say nothing at all, especially since it’s been on my mind so much. He was the uncle responsible for making my rocking horse when I was little, and also for taking more photos of my wedding than the paid photographer! He was full of love for his 4 kids, his uncountable nieces and nephews, and his grandkids, as well as the adults. He helped my grandma just as much as her sons did. Everyone was full of love for him, and he will be missed in a huge, huge way.
And here’s the hardest part about this post. What do I say next? Nothing I guess. Everything else can wait.
I keep getting new students. At first, the guy who funds this place would walk in with some friends of his and ask if I could include their teenage child who is on break from school. Sure. Great. No Problem. I got 3 of those, I think, and they all disappeared after a few classes.
Two days ago, I was approached by an employee here and informed that a new student would be joining my class that evening. I made an extra copy of the current materials, and welcomed him. Yesterday, 3 young men showed up to join my class. Assuming they were sent by someone affiliated with the center, I let them in. Between classes, I ran into the owner and asked who they were. He was surprised, and suggested that I was getting famous and he should call the newspaper to come interview me.
Today, a young woman showed up and said she had heard about a foreigner who teaches English, and wanted to join. It’s not like I’m the only game in town. There are other long-term volunteers teaching free classes out at ETTI. So I’m apparently getting popular. It makes me wish I had been able to pick some of these folks up as private students. PAYING private students.
At one point, I was down to 2 students in my Beginners Who Can Read a Little class, and this week I’ve been between 6 and 10 with a possibility of 3 more. It is now a Middle Beginner to High Intermediate class, with material suited for the lower students.
I’ve been wanting to write about Taiwan, but traveling from a deliciously hot location back to a rainy, chilly, rather dreary one has left me utterly uninspired.
Suffice it to say that I LOVED Taiwan – the weather, the people, and the history. It’s had a rather strange trajectory, and it’s interesting to consider what would have happened if the other side had won. On the surface, it reminded me a lot of Seoul. Every block was crammed with private English schools, and traffic signals were respected by cars and pedestrians alike. I found myself telling the hubs that he should get a job at Taiwan University. “You can read traditional characters! We could live here!” (I could drink iced tea and nobody would think I was insane!) I would certainly have no trouble finding a job as an English teacher. Also, Taipei has a subway, so I got to be a subway nerd again.
If we lived there, I’d have to re-learn how to eat. Spicy doesn’t mean the same thing there, unfortunately, and I managed to eat some fries that had been breaded. The wedding banquet featured 10 gluten-free courses, 7 of which were seafood from the sea. Not carp. Heck yes I ate it. Other edibles included a egg-tapioca-shrimp pancake covered in pinkish sauce at the night market, a daily breakfast consisting of sticky rice wrapped around various fillings, and multiple servings of “egg pudding” (it was flan) purchased from 7-11. I passed on the stinky tofu. It was already stinking up my airspace, so why let it stink up my stomach?
I have pictures of tropical oddities and video to post, but that would require effort that I don’t have the energy for right now. Weather plus new (temporary) neighbors with a weird schedule have rendered this broad rather blah.
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