A Karmic Lychee @ rah-kun.net

So here I am, finally in China. Sounds like a strange sentiment for someone who’s been living in the country for, already, the better part of a year, but it’s finally happened, along with much else since my last post.

The last stretch of my employment at Aston were a bit of a rush. The last week of classes strained itself through my malaise attitude, one born of waiting on the edge of an abrupt, yet planned change. With thoughts of a new apartment and the various possibilities it held, I couldn’t get my head in the game. My classes were lackluster and I was seriously distracted – detached, even.

Throughout my semester, I had kinda been offered only the short, dirty end of the stick – low level classes with students of questionable aptitude (and a notable handful of questionable character). While Mark and Alex raved about their genius mid to high levels, I found myself like Mengzi’s idiot farmer – trying futilely to make plants grow by tugging at their roots. I was granted a slight reprieve in the form of a short “Oral” class in the style of my one awesome Oral session from the summer – just, instead of 20 students of extremely high level who were willing to talk, I walked into a room with 7 students who’s entrance had been based more on “will you pay?” rather than aptitude.

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I get listless at the end of things. I enter into a state of fugue a little earlier than I’d wish for, otherwise. I find myself with an overriding sense of there being little point to starting new projects on account of time or logistics; as far as I can see, I’ll just be packing things up in a day or two.

But that doesn’t stop me from dreaming about what’s to come. And that makes me listless with an impending sense of futile excitement – I WANT, but I can’t have, so I must wait, but in waiting there is frustration, so I daydream… it’s a brutal cycle, really.

Listless. Le sigh.

It’s been warm lately. Real warm. My understanding with the weather is that the cold snap over the Spring Festival was the last gasp of winter – the coldest gasp, indeed, but the last one nevertheless. In the past three days, my right hand has shrunk to only about 110% of its normal girth, compared to the estimated 300% increase in size I managed to accrue in stages over the course of a couple months stretching from mid November to now. I’ve shed layers, though I’m still wearing three (again, due to the fact that my apartment is still pretty cold, and that most of the heat is from the sun, which I never see indoors).

It’s also become warm enough that the city has started to smell again. This was a bit of a surprise, since I had (somehow) managed to forget that Xiangfan has a special odor at all. Yesterday’s stroll through the back-alleys (another wonderful gift of the warmth is the ability to hang out outdoors again) confirmed that – yes, Xiangfan smells.

And my apartment smells. I woke up yesterday with a huge blast of nostalgia for last Fall. A strange fact of my stay here was that my adjustment period took place during a change in a season. It seems that once you attain that local mindset, the one you arrived with – and all sights, sounds, and experiences you ingested with said mindset – gets shelved somewhere far away, like a dusty photo-album on a top shelf somewhere. That’s how, I think, it’s possible to feel such strong, life bending nostalgia for something that only really happened about three months ago. Contexts shift and change, life weirds itself out.

But back to my apartment. The smell, upon waking up yesterday, was a pleasant sign of warmth returning. Fruit peels, a leaky toilet, laundry, over-used bed covers, and dirty dishes from early January (my tap water is ice cold – washing dishes has not been a priority) arrayed as a legion of aroma. The streets were alive with the stench of sewage, old food stuck in clogged drainage, and exhaust – both man and machine-made.

It is an odd feeling to be enthusiastic about something you’re not really enthusiastic about.*

*Someday, I would like a psychologist to tell me why my most memorable travel experiences, specifically the ones I enjoy recalling the most, involve things that others would term “TMI” (for those of you less savvy on the lingo – “too much information”).

Just got back from something that was simultaneously the coolest and coldest things I’ve ever done – Spring Festival out in the boonies, a few hours outside of Xiangfan. During one of the coldest weeks of the season thus far.

There’s a lot to digest – both literally and figuratively – though I will say this: there are no pictures. Not on my side of the lens, anyways. I read someone having said that “photography is the ultimate act of non-intervention” in regards to wartime photo journalism. While my situation may not precisely be of a wartime nature, it nevertheless causes me to amend the statement for my own purposes – that photography is the ultimate act of non-engagement.

Anyways. Later.

Ain’t never been so drunk that I’ve neededt ohug a toilet, but rigt now, I’m higging a toilet. rock on

sprong festival is nutty.

Editor’s Comments

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It’s been a bit difficult to fire off entries lately, or at all, really. Things happen so fast here – on a daily basis, for the most part – that stopping to ruminate upon just one thing means I’m probably simultaneously leaving out three or four other things I could be writing about, or I’m actively excluding myself from something that’s happening at that moment. One thing that’s clear is that, a) my brainspace is limited when trying to be experience and digest simultaneously (thinking, constantly, about how much I’d love to write and relate that really cool thing that just happened, and simultaneously trying to figure out when I’ll have the time AND energy to do so).

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But it’s okay, I only have a short update.

Today, for dinner (a second dinner, mind you), I managed to accidentally eat an eyeball, and I tried both frog legs (they were good) and turtle (there are some lines that shouldn’t be crossed).

I maintain, though, I don’t like to eat things that look like themselves. Frog legs did, in fact, look like legs. Very well developed muscles those little guys have. And the turtle was just strange and brought back memories of a really fucked up nightmare I had several months ago, but I won’t get into that – it was fucked up but I remember very little of it save something vague about turtles.

And the eyeball… well. That was hidden in a portion of fish that, in the end, turned out to be the head. I managed to miss this fact since the thing was swathed in a delicious sauce that covered the eyes. Unknowingly, I popped the eyeball-laden face-segment into my mouth and, seconds later, there was wretching. You see, eating an eyeball is an unmistakeable experience. Unless you ever eat an especially juice-swollen kernel of corn with an unusually strong skin that also happens to contain something small, round, and semi-hard within it.

Anyways. That’s all for the now. Sleep needs to happen before class happens tomorrow…

…so close to finishing with this crap. More on that soon…

Augh… something is seriously not okay with my insides. Something that started off feeling like indigestion and turned, very rapidly, into traveler’s stomach hit me hard on Sunday night after a very long, bad weekend. I slept it off through Monday and Tuesday and it was just about getting back to normal, when suddenly, this morning, at 2 AM, I got hit with a full relapse.

This is not good. I actually broke out the antibiotics, of which I only have course, sadly. One week of stomach problems can’t decide if they’re getting better or not, I think, is indicative of not bad food – that I’ve had plenty of – but something alive in my gut. This must me remedied.

On the downside, I think I might have to skip work this afternoon. I’m feeling quite woozy now. By the rules, I’ll get docked 57 RMB/hr, but it’s possible I’ll have to fight the boss if she decided to institute her Special Math where she gets to siphon off as much money as she wants per hour.

It’s times like this… and I think this is only the third or fourth time since I’ve been here, and the first time since the mid-fall, that all other thoughts in my head (the ones about jobs, Istanbul, South East Asia, etc) are cancelled out by an overwhelming “I wanna go home.” Ah, the land of pasta and bread…

Mein gott – two posts in a day?

It’s ’bout that time… my daily routine (the one that sorta makes it difficult to write on account of every day looking kinda like the day that came before) is starting to break up a bit. Now I spend afternoons pouring over travel sites, looking for stuff to do in the coming months.

I’ve waxed poetic it enough – but there’s a two month furlough between the end of my contract at the end of February and when I’m pegged to be in Istanbul by come the middle of May. My plan for the two months has had various permutations, stemming from cost considerations, political stability of various regions, what seemed to strike my fancy at the time.

But right now… I’m looking at something like this -

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Last week was a particularly trying time: stressful, tiring, annoying, expensive, and long.

My brain and presence of mind being what it is, I’ll see what I can do to piece together the events of the last week for your reading pleasure…

…the first thing that comes to mind is the big hassle that was my endeavors to transfer my money from here overseas back to the States, where the government can idly chew on it to sate my debt. I’ve got an account with the big Construction Bank of China. It’s one of the biggest banks in China, and more popular, I’ve been told, than Bank of China. Hooray – I didn’t expect to be pulled through the ringer sending money abroad.

Well, to be fair, it was two things that made it difficult.

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“You are a waste of beautiful things.”

The best mixed compliment I’ve received in my life. My big eyes, long eyelashes, and long, thick hair are a constant source of annoyance to my many female coworkers. When I have to retie my hair at work, the girls make big, annoyed sighs and stamp about* because my hair is, apparently, by far better than theirs.

So, the other day, upon close examination, one of the CTs – a particularly prickly one with a forward personality quite uncommon for a Chinese girl – declared me a “waste of beautiful things.”

To which I laughed. For very, very long time.

Stuff like this has started to come out more frequently since I and everyone else just realized that I’ll be leaving next month. Crazy.

*this is because, for all their age (21-24 range), they act like 15 year olds… which is both very very strange and very endearing.

Some more things:

I bought these. I ate them. They're horrible. Literally every third bean tasted honey-roasted while the next tasted like a bit of crap one might find wadded up under their shoe.

A really cool alley way. It's dark, seedy, and leads to a sketchy pool hall in a basement. Little American alarms started going off in the back of my head as we walked down said alley, but... China's really safe... right?