A Travelogue and (occasional) Sketchblog
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 [...]
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 [...]
Teaching. It’s… not me. I’ve thought about it for a bit – since I got here, really – and I’ve kind of come to the conclusion that I’ve got a lot of traits and skills that might make me like a teacher, but that’s not exactly my thing. My enthusiasm for the things here that [...]
It’s cold. It’s very very cold. It’s been hovering just above freezing since three days ago and there’s a couple inches of snow on the ground. It’s a damp cold of the likes that gets into your bones and doesn’t get out. Ever. My apartment, I’ve discovered, is little more than a hollow concrete shell [...]
Cold. One thing I underestimated in coming here. I didn’t quite underestimate how cold it got, but what kind of cold it became. For once, yesterday is was about 33 degrees (F) outside. And raining. It rains just about every day in Xiangfan, so you can imagine, being middle November, what we’re in store for [...]
I’m getting itchy. Like… under my skin. I’m getting tired of a bunch of things here – mainly my inability to form connections due to the language barrier, that damnable wall I hit every time I try to forge some new communication with someone, or when I have a question I want to ask but [...]
…everything is so freaking hard here. Not that I didn’t bring it on myself knowingly coming to a relatively remote city. Nevertheless, the circumstances that keep getting in my way are particularly… I don’t know, it’s like someone’s actively seeking to thwart me.
There’s a really subtle brutality to the work that I’m doing here. For any number of reasons, really.
First, there’s the promotional aspect, the “dancing bear” routine that the school has me put up quite frequently to flash my foreignness in order to attract business. I mean, I know that just my face is great for [...]
I just gotta get this out of my system before I can give a decent summary of the Wuhan trip. You have to know what I was pretty certain I knew what I was getting into – the details were not there before this trip started, but the otherwise feeling of uncertainty and “Nah, I’m [...]
For simplicity’s sake, this is a two part post.
First, as promised – here are some photos of my “new” apartment. New, of course, when I took these pictures several weeks ago. And by several weeks, I mean about three weeks ago, almost.