Montreal since September

Montreal has been treating me decently since September. It's less Chinese than Chengdu, but still French and fabulous, so I can't complain. Other things I can't complain about (at all):
-my cute little 1,1/2 apartment on Saint Denis, coin Duluth. It's jungle-themed, and it's on the street level, so people can just knock and come right on in through the window. Very sitcomlike.
-Laura has an (awesome) apartment, 10 minutes away on Saint-Dominique. So I just spend all day walking back and forth on Duluth, which is nice.
-Steph, Brendan, Alexia, Nicholas. Montreal friends.

I've been up to Ottawa a few times now, to visit my mom and some brothers. The thirteen pictures in this album are from either my apartment, or my mom's house in Ottawa, with Laura, Benjamin and Alan. The pool pictures are from a cold autumn day when we dared each other to jump in the pool. Work takes up a lot of time, but in between, Montreal is still a party.

Family Camp 2006

This year, like every year since 2001, I made it to Harrison, Maine to work at family camp. And this year, like every year, it ruled. The difference was that this year I was coming straight from China. Laura and I flew from Hong Kong to D.C. and I took a plane to Boston and caught a bus to Portland.
Laura couldn't make it, but Benjamin showed up for the second week, Nate Frederick was stirring things up both weeks after another whole summer at camp, and there were a whole lot of others, old and new. Speaking of which, props (propositions?) go to Evan B, for being totally new and totally... fantastic. Some combination of Lizzie L. and Liz T. convinced him to come up from NYC, I can't remember exactly. Sunny days on the dock, boat rides with kids, and more shenanigans than you can shake a stick at. Too many fun people to mention, so all the pictures are here. Ashley Penrose, who hadn't been seen in those parts since 1999, even made an appearance near the end, to top off 2 weeks of hilarity and hijinks. At close of 2nd week, travelling Cam Martindell went up to Grey Knob hut to be a mountain man, Benjamin drove me to Montreal which I hadn't seen in a year, and Laura met me there the next day, which is where we both are now. Posts from here on in will be Montreal fun in the autumn sun.

Pillow Fort

Douglas, pillow fort
Originally uploaded by miaowmatthew.

Ain't nothing wrong with pillow forts. And by that I don't mean they're just okay. I mean there's nothing wrong with them. They're entirely good and right, to make, to crawl into, and later to break by jumping on.

In this photo from March 2006, my friend Douglas models a living room structure in Chengdu, complete with tastefully contrasting red drapes and yellow pillows.

Hong Kong with Laura

My last stop in Asia was Hong Kong. I flew down to Guangzhou, took the train across the border, and spent 10 fun-filled, well-fed, brightly-lit and occasionally awestruck days being shown all around Hong Kong by Laura, who had been working there for 2 months and rooming at Hong Kong Chinese University in the New Territories. One of our highlights was hiking out to a secluded beach in 大浪灣 Tai Long Wan (pictured right). I know - I wasn't aware there were secluded beaches in Hong Kong, either, but the New Territories hold many secrets for the intrepid. Language points: I was all messed up while I was there. Almost everybody I met spoke Cantonese as a mother tongue, but I always had to guess whether their second was English or Mandarin, because a lot of times they knew one but not the other. In the end, they seemed to be about equally useful, English for stores and restaurants, and Mandarin in taxis, small shops, and off Hong Kong island. You know... rule of thumb. I didn't take that many pictures, but the ones I have are all here on Flickr. You'll see that they're a little more quiet-Hong-Kong than skyscraping-metropolis-HK pictures, but if you want those, Laura took plenty of beautiful ones, here.

Chengdu Bike Ride with Music

Another video memento of Chengdu. This is what it looked like to bike from my apartment to Tian Fu Square (天府广场) in the centre of town. In December.

The great song playing is by Mongolian 布仁巴雅尔 (Bu Ren Ba Ya Er). One of Natalie's favourites.

Bike Ride with Friends (video)

I'm going to share a video from this past May. Back in May I couldn't, but now I have a YouTube account so you all get to see my top top secret secret videos. Speaking of which, when something is really secret, you're supposed to put it on the bottom not the top. Just FYI.

This is Michelle (pink) Maria (red) Natalie (blue) and Brien (dude) riding home from ZhaoJue temple 昭觉寺 in Chengdu. It's about an hour's ride from the TV tower 电视塔。We played badminton there, until a monk told us to stop. Oops. Another monk had told us we were allowed!

All I Really Need Duet

My brother Benjamin has been working at a preschool in Ottawa for a while now, and since he left Ottawa this week, he got together with Doug from his band, The Fox and the Hound, and recorded (in only two hours) a CD of some of the songs he's been playing for the kids. One track mysteriously got deleted, however, and so when he came through Montreal yesterday he asked me to re-record it with him as a duet. The song is one I've played here before, "All I Really Need" by Raffi. We did a few takes and I'm posting the one where we cracked up because midway through the first verse, we both sing the same wrong line. So we went with it.

Kelamayi， 克拉玛依

After the stans I went back to Urumqi to meet my friend Reshalati, who was coming up from Chengdu to visit family. Waiting for her at the station, however, I got to be useful and help a lovely English stranger who needed help finding lodging. Long story short, her name was Sarah, she had lunch with Reshalati and me and we all decided to travel together up north to Kelamayi, the heart of XinJiang's oil country, where one of Reshalati's Uighur uncle is ... basically an oil tycoon. It's complicated. He's also a government official. Anyway, we went. It turned out, however, that due to XinJiang 's foreigner laws, not only were we not allowed to stay at his home, we weren't even allowed to set foot inside. This was embarrassing to him, as host, but apparently being a Party bigshot doesn't translate into getting to bend the rules, but actually needing to follow them really strictly. So that weekend we stayed in a hotel, and every day were treated out to breakfast, lunch and dinner by the Uncle's entourage. We never actually met Uncle the entire weekend. He was "in meetings" the whole time. We were, however, driven all over the territory by a chauffeur and one of the Uncle's assistants. If you can imagine, we were driven to our hotel in a luxury sedan, but half an hour later we left in a luxury SUV, because they were worried the car was too small for us. It was posh and a half. Kelamayi is a big city, but before oil was discovered fifty years ago, it simply didn't exist. Seriously. The place has a populist oil legend you can read here. We saw billions of dollars of water gushing in from Russia here, and finally, ghost city: here.

Talking about Chengdu (我想念成都）

Here's a radio piece on Chengdu I didn't like at all. The reporter tells the wide-eyed story of what was obviously her first trip to China, and passes it off as informed reporting on how "[this] backwater city in western China became an urban metropolis overnight."

It's filled with:
bogus facts like "Chengdu suffers blackouts for two to five days every week." trite observations like "young couples laughed, nuzzled and walked arm-in-arm in a way that would have shocked earlier generations of straight-laced Communist youth." and (try not to barf!) "Chengdu is a place full of right angles and contradictions."

Wasn't "place of contradictions" banned as clichéd and meaningless in like 1994*? Needless to say, she never mentions any actual contradictons.

I'll leave you with her closing, which I think you'll find deliciously ridiculous and just a little sad, given that this is really all she has to say about "the newest Chinese boomtown".

"In the end, I stopped trying to tease through Chengdu's many contradictions and, instead, embraced the one thing that for me remained absolutely, unvaryingly good and true: the food. Szechwan is known the world over for its fiery cuisine, and no matter where or what I ate in Chengdu, I always ate like an empress. I had one of the best meals of my life in a state-run dumpling house. Sitting on a hard bench surrounded by office workers and students, I feasted on a 75-cent bowl of tender meat dumplings floating in an oily, spicy sauce. I still think about those dumplings, probably more often than I should say."

Awwwwwwww, listening to vapid reporting on Chengdu makes me miss it even more.**






*Along with "Land of contrasts"
**And not because I think 6 kuai worth of pork jiaozi is "eating like an empress".

Growin' up: the song

First song on here in a while, I know. I'm working on earning back my readership. Listenership. This is an old favourite of mine by Bruce Springsteen, that hard-rocking, rough-folking leftist.

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Bishkek

Listen, I cannot say enough good things about Bishkek. It's the laid-backinest, good-timinest, most beautiful city in Central Asia. So far. It's Kyrgyzstan's capital, but it has the laid-back feel of small-town America, with the Turco-Islamic exotism of central Asia and what I assume are the identity issues of any far-flung former Soviet bloc state. Imagine the gorgeous National Theatre (pictured) with children and adults frolicking in the fountain. Beautiful parks downtown with unmown grass. Everything about Bishkek says "kickin it".

In addition to the unmown parks and nighttime crickets, on my very first day in metropolitan Bishkek I saw a station wagon packed to the gills with watermelons (!) and a horse wearing a hat pulling a cart full of laughing kids. This was followed by the scene of a conservatively clad Muslim family picnicking in a field of yellow sunflowers, just in front of a sunlit range of snow-capped mountains. Throw in some free-grazing livestock and some of the nicest people you've met, and you'll see why it's the national capital that thinks it's Anytown, Nebraska. With Muslims.

On day two we drove out to Asel's uncle's farm, where we drank homemade shoro (fermented barley) and had more bread, jam and tea, as always. For a couple of hours, we all went out to a nearby national park where we walked in the mountains and drank from a cobwebby spring and a very cold, very sweet river.
Most of the people I met in Kyrgyzstan were ethnic Kyrgyz, some Russian. I also met (thankfully!) some Chinese. But riding in the back of Azat's Ukrainian jeep with Asel and Belek, they pointed out whole towns that were primarily Dungan and German respectively. (Germans in Kyrgyzstan?)

Above is the nicest picture I took in Bishkek. Here are more.

My Kyrgyz family

So where were we? Oh right, Kyrgyzstan. Well, I left Almaty, Kazakhstan after a day of torrential rain: see here, and people being acutely unhelpful to me. (I must have just caught them on a collective bad week, no hard feelings.)
I hopped a van to cross the border into Kyrgyzstan and found that the girl sitting beside me was from Bishkek, the capital. We talked a little bit. I spoke no Kyrgyz and pathetic Russian, but she spoke some very basic English, and I didn't have a place to stay, and so the next thing I know I'm sitting at her house with the whole family drinking tea with sugar and jam in it and dunking chunks of nan.
Now tell me, right off the bat, how much of an awesome difference is that from Kazakhstan where the general populace wouldn't have pulled me out of a hole, let alone given me the time of day? (in Russian)
The girl's name is Asel. She lives with her Aunt, Lira, who presides as the single matriarch over a huge family, 9 of whom actually live in the house, which is actually two houses, built by her son Azat out of wood and straw and mud. Each has a television and one has running water, although numbers one and two must be taken to the outhouse, still very much a fixture of Kyrgyz life. They live in the suburbs of Bishkek, which means out where goatherds drive their flocks through the unpaved streets and the night soundscape is filled with crickets and barking dogs.

I stayed with Asel's family about 10 days, total, playing with the kids, playing guitar, getting shown around Bishkek and learning to speak Russian (and some Kyrgyz) by immersion. Why keep wandering when you've found a family?
Do go look at the other photos here: they're cuteatacious.

The K-stans: A Parable

Verily, verily I say unto you; Kazakhstan is like unto a DJ who entered a club and laid down some beats. And all the people up in the club was like: "We're not feeling this". And again there came into that place another DJ, and this DJ was like unto Kyrgyzstan. And this DJ laid down some fresh beats, and all the people in the club threw their hands up at him and said: "Yo, this rocks the house."

And his disciples were not amazed, for this one wasn't too hard to figure out: Kyrgyzstan totally rocks the house. I joke you not.

I have so many fresh pictures but they're not uploading! I'm going to get them all to you within the week, though!

Kazakhstan

No pictures this post! I'll be adding them later cause I'm bussssssy. Busy trying to not get lost in Central Asia, that is.

I took the train from Urumqi to Almaty, Kazakhstan on Monday, July 3rd. I presented my brand-new Kazakh entry visa at the border and got across no problem (unless you count waiting 6 hours as a problem...)
Quick fact: the Kazakh language is closely related to Uighur, Kyrgyz and Turkish, and although the new president is pushing Kazakh language prevalence over Russian, Russian is still the major language of education and business in this former Soviet Republic.
Almaty isn't the capital of Kazakhstan, but it's the biggest city, so it's the place to be. Unfortunately, I found out pretty quickly that if you don't speak the language(s) it isn't the place to be. I walked around the city a lot and scrambled to learn Russian as fast as I could. I totally support ethno-linguistic group language preservation, so I was going to try to learn Kazakh, but if you've ever tried to find an English-Kazakh language primer in China... well, I bet you haven't. So Russian it is. Anyway, Almaty was fascinating for what bit was (central asia, man!) but, I'm sorry to say, not a friendly town. So, on Friday, having spent a few days of not-being-helped by various aloof locals, I gave up and hopped a bus for Kyrgyzstan. Which is where I am now. And the rest is going to wait because I've got secret stuff to do!! Later fools!

3 awesome things about otherwise not-awesome Almaty:

• The Kazakh flag is the most beautiful flag in the world.
• I ate at an awesome Hare Krishna restaurant. The Hare Krishnas have been harrassed on and off by the Kazakh goverment, but they're still in operation, I was happy to see. I was going to go out to their farm, but the seat of my pants flew to Kyrgyzstan before I could.
• I arrived in Almaty with no place to stay, but one of my Chinese cabinmates from the train had a friend meet him at the station (a Chinese friend living in Almaty) and this friend, unsolicited: gave me some Kazakh money/drove me to a hotel in his car with a right-side steering wheel even though they drive on the right side of the road/paid for my first night/left without giving me a phone number or anything. Wo-oah. I know. What a sweet stranger!
  

General Xinjiang

Look, I'm not getting political or anything, but Radio Free Asia is. I take no responsibility for this article being awesome, but I'm going to stick a link to it in cause it's relevant to Xinjiang, which is where I've been travelling. That's all.

An agricultural official in the Xinjiang regional government confirmed the continued existence of a system of forced labor called hasha in remote areas of the countryside, in which laborers are not paid for their work. The official told RFA's Uyghur service, "At the moment, there is no money to pay the peasants. The money given to the government is very limited." more

A couple of interesting Xinjiang tidbits while I'm at it: Uighurs are like, the most physically diverse ethnicity ever. In XinJiang, which is IN CHINA, remember, there are these people walking around with blond hair and blue eyes, speaking Chinese because they're Chinese! And they speak Uighur too, cause they're Uighur. They might look Arab, Persian, Scottish, small-town Nebraskan, or straight out of Beijing, but basically, this is the first time ever in China that anyone has ever had to ask me if I'm a foreigner. It's wild.

Nan Shan

Short post for my homies*
This blog is about a week behind schedule, so I'm going to catch it up pretty quickly in the next 5 days or so (depending on internet availability) pay attention now:
"shan" means mountain in Mandarin, so when I say I went to Nan Shan, that means I went to "Nan" what? Mountain, that's right. I went to Nan Shan which is an hour from Urumqi on a bus with standing room only and a video from the 70's playing the minor hits of euro-soul-funk group Boney M**. Most of them seemed to be about semi-historical characters who were 'bad cats' like Ma Baker and, hilariously, Rasputin.

Ra-Ra Rasputin(e)
Lover of the Russian Queen
There was a cat that really was gone
Ra-Ra Rasputin(e)
Russia's greatest love machine,
It was a shame how he carried on

Anyway, Nan Shan was a different groove altogether, being a large many-peaked mountain, with goats grazing in the foothills around Kazak yurts, some of which you can pay to sleep in. I was just there to hike, though, which was fun because you can hike anywhere on the mountain, unrestricted over and through the crags and brambles and dense coniferous slopes.***
So I went up, I came down, it was great. Highlights were playing Jeremiah Johnson on my little guitar, and crawling up a slope of thorny briar by following a little tunnel made by goats. I had to rush to get down, especially since I came down on the wong side of the mountain, but fortunately I ran into a man, in a tent, on a farm, with a motorcycle, who gave me a ride to the bus stop.

***I don't think a slope can be coniferous, no.
**Yeah, I hadn't heard of them either. I had to google it just now.
*Are you my homie? You can be. Send me an e-mail and I'll love you forever. matthewstirlingvaughan at gmail dot com

Turpan

Turpan is one of the most famous cities in XinJiang. It's the heart of XinJiang's wine region, and incredibly hot in the summer. I went there for a day or two and happened in on the annual grape festival. I skipped the festivities, however, to go out to see some countryside. First I went out to Su Gong Ta, an old mosque made of bricks and mud and straw, with an arresting tower design.
Afterwards I decided to walk back to town, a long way which took me through vineyards and farmhouses and past donkey carts and Uighur locals who invariably told me to come play my mini-guitar for them. Asked me? No, told me. I let the kids play too. Everybody loves a guitar. One of the villagers, Mohammed, asked me to come home for tea, so I did. Mohammed is a grape farmer and his home had a traditional Uighur-style courtyard, overhung completely with grape vines heavy with fruit. We ate local watermelon and nan bread and drank tea and let me tell you, it was the hang-out joint of the century. He and his daughter both spoke a passable Chinese, but the others were Uighur-only. It was great, because I got hours straight of Uighur practice. We also did some religious study, since I had an English Qur'an with me, and he had done the Hajj twice! I was impressed. That's a huge expense, and he wasn't a high roller. At Mohammed's invitation I stayed over that night, since there were no late busses back to Urumqi. He set up a bed for himself and me out in the vineyard (it's cooler) but when the fireworks from the grape festival in town began, the whole family went up to the roof to watch them, and I ended up sleeping up there with two family friends from out west. The next morning I woke to sunrise over the vineyards, I almost peed my pants it was so beautiful, the end.

Urumqi

After finding a hotel at great personal annoyance (a.k.a. 6 hours of tramping the town getting turned down) it was time to explore Urumqi. Actually, no, it was time to sleeeeeeep. The next morning it was time to explore.
XinJiang, if you haven't done your research, is the "Uyghur automomous region" of China. Sichuan, the province where I live, is bigger than France. XinJiang, I kid you not, is slightly larger than all of western Europe.

And Urumqi is the capital. Han Chinese have been pouring in in recent years, but the whole province remains, for now, decidedly Uyghur. Again, Uyghurs are a stateless Turkic people of central Asia. There.

I spent a lot of time down in the Uyghur core of the city, where I was reduced to pointing and grunting like a tourist because no one spoke Chinese, only Uighur. So, I did the only reasonable thing for the next few days: I hired a Uyghur tutor. Actually, it was a language exchange. He wanted to learn French, and it would have worked perfectly, but for a couple of snags.

1. I'm, sadly, a more dilligent teacher than him. So I have a feeling I gave better than I got.
2. He understood "tutor me in Uyghur" to mean "you're my best friend, Copper"
3. He didn't speak Chinese (hardly) so I was essentially helping him in English the whole rest of the time. Again, kind of a lopsided bargain for teaching me the numbers one to ten (a.k.a "bir to teut")
4. Fellow students of his kept "just happening" to be hanging around at our meeting times and getting invited to join my class. Oh well.

Be that as it may, I am learning Uyghur slowly. And he IS a genuinely nice guy. I think the most of the Urumqi sights I saw can be summed up in pictures. Some are on flickr already, the rest will be posted in a while (hold your horses!) by Laura, my gracious and urbane blog editor while I'm on the road.

(XinJiang pictures only)

The Train Ride

One day I'm going to write a song called "54 hours or a kick in the face", and the moral is going to be: just kick me in the nose and get it over with.
I left Chengdu on June 22nd for Urumqi, XinJiang and if you haven't been clicking on my carefully-inserted XinJiang-related hyperlinks in past posts, then you'll just have to google it now.
The train ride, as I mentioned was 54 hours, a.k.a three days long, and here's the kicker: no bed. Ouch. Literally. I did sleep some, on both nights, though, by putting on a windbreaker to protect from spit and other filth and crawling under the shared bench. It was sticky down there, and too tight to turn over, but all-in-all it worked ok. I was woken up by feet in my ribs and crawled out bleary-eyed to greet the same nosy passengers I'd spent the previous 20-x hours beside.
I got to Urumqi safe and sound, though, and was greeted with a new challenge: no foreigners allowed in any of the hotels. No joke, I got turned away outright time after time. Some people thought I may have been Uighur, but once they found out I was foreign, it was "don't ven talk to me, get out." Finally I found a slightly sketchy place from a guy who thought I was going to buy a travel package from him, and was pretty disappointed to find out I wasn't.

That's enough of that story. I had more adventures in xenophobia, but they're for e-mail friends only.
Are you an e-mail friend? Find out by e-mailing matthewstirlingvaughan at gmail dot com ! It's just that easy!

A post on exploring the desert metropolis of Urumqi is coming soon, and in the meantime, you can spoil the surprise by seeing pictures on my flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/matthewvaughan/

Done layed around this old town too long

Two days ago I biked up to the north train station and bought a ticket on a sleeper train to Xinjiang, the wild west of China that borders, get this:
Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tadjikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. So I'm leaving this morning, destination: Urumqi, Xinjiang.

So many things have gone unposted here in the last couple of months. I don't want to confuse you or bore myself by writing about them all, but I have a simple solution. Those who want to get caught up should go to my flickr page and check out my photo sets. Read my comments to know what you're looking at.

-Laura came to visit me here, prior to her 8-week internship in Hong Kong, now in progress. I'll be seeing her again in August and we'll fly to North America together. Her visit was great, I had missed her, and it was good to be able to show her around a little (although one realizes how little of a city you can see in a week...) Set.

-My roommate Maria left Chengdu for always and forever. We gave her a surprise dinner before she left (surprise) and the apartment has been boring ever since. Set.

-Exploring Chengdu. So much of that has happened I can't even tell you. Two photo sets:

1. One of weekend fun with friends (esp. Brien and Natalie) here
2. One of city shots here

The photos here in this post are just to show what I'll be leaving. Chengdu is a fabulous city. For a kind of sterotypical article on its place in the Chinese metropolitan pantheon, click here. For a taste of what I'm headed towards, click right here. Lastly, has anyone else noticed how good I've been about staying under my 300-word limit?

End of School

Classes are over. So I'm on summer vacation! I'm going to leave Chengdu soon to go travelling for a month. I'm not inspired to write a long essay about how teaching in China is for me, because I spend more than enough time talking about the ups and downs of my job with co-workers here. Here's a list of higlights and lowlights, though:

Number 11 High School

• Students at number 11 started to leave 15 minutes before the bell and I had to swing a wet mop to herd them back inside the classroom.
• 1 kid calls me guawazi (stupid melon) every day. I tell him his mom's a guawazi.
• 1 bully kid speaks no English and hates school but likes jazz, and keeps asking me to form a band with him.
• Brought my frisbee to class and it ended up a second-floor ledge. Had to break into a classroom and climb out the window to get it.

Number 7 High School

• Taught my classes to play 'mafia', a murder guessing game.
• Showed my classes an American classic: Edward Scissorhands
• Also taught them lots of English, don't worry. They're clever kids.
  

Number 7 Grade 2
-Brought in my guitar and we spent almost half of every class singing songs.
-They absolutely adore "Mama's taking us to the zoo tomorrow"
-I felt so bad! All my students cried on my last day! Even some of the boys!

Leshan Buddha and Cave Exploring

Maria and I went to see the Leshan Big Buddha, 2 hours away from Chengdu. It's one of the biggest Buddha statues in the world, carved into the side of a mountain on the edge of a river, and very impressive. Also cool was that neither of us had slept much, but I managed to catch up a little by rigging up a head-hammock using the bus window curtain. Neither of those compares, however, to the fact that we went cave exploring!
In the city of Leshan, we crossed the river and began walking around 4k to get to the Buddha. On our left were construction sites, where old buildings had recently been demolished and a sidewalk was being constructed. Behind all the rubble there was an escarpment, and in it Maria and I spotted some cave openings. The workers allowed us to cross through the site, and when we got to the rock wall we found that, yes, there were some cave openings we could reach by climbing. The insides were dank but bare. Further down the road, there were even more caves, hidden away from the road behind some foliage. Those caves were a little more interesting. Maria didn't come up to them, but one had a ledge in it that led (in the dark) to a small tunnel through which shone some light. I ran back to the cave ledge, yelled to Maria to wait for me, and ran back and tried to shimmy through the tunnel with my arms stretched out in front of me so my torso would fit. Fortunately, I made it, got out to a higher opening in the wall with a nice view, and went back the way I came. A very dirty and completely awesome day.

All the Indiana Jones pictures.

Ma Jiang

I'm pretty tight with the baozi restaurant owners on my street, originally because they make me vegetarian baozi, and so in the past month or so they've had me do a bunch of family stuff with them. First, Maria and I went out with the boss' sister who owns a tea house in a scenic town called Luo Dai. Her daughter, Ivy, came too. We hiked for over the hills for two hours, on a replica of the great wall (who knew?) and then were pampered back in the family tea house. Ivy's going to the US to study next year. Anyway, she and her cousin Ai Di are good friends of mine now, and this week Natalie, Brien and I went to their grandparent's house to eat lunch and learn ma jiang (ma jong). See pictures. Ai di is sporting the longgggg hair, and Ivy is in the tea house pictures. Ma jiang is an interesting game. The first time. I can't see playing it every day, like 60% of everybody does in Chengdu, but I think they like it more cause of the gambling.

My first gig. Ever.

-Yes, I'm still in Chengdu. I'm almost done the school year and so I'll be travelling a little, soon.
In recent news, my friends Douglas, Brien, Melissa and Reed are in a band that plays gigs around the city fairly often. This week they needed an opening act and so they invited me to come along and play guitar and sing. Which I did. It was at 8086 bar, in a busy part of town I've never been to before. The crowd was small, but not small enough for me not to feel nervous on stage. I'm not sure I remember everything I played. I tend to skip the instrumental bits of songs I play because I lack the technical skills to make them interesting, and so it takes a lot more to fill up 20 minutes. My repertoire was Billy Bragg-heavy, and I know I threw in
"The Sun Shines Down on Me" Daniel Johnston
"The Tatler" Ry Cooder
"Billy" Bob Dylan.
Being in China, I also found it humorous to perform Billy Bragg's "World Turned Upside Down", a song about collectivist farmers in 17th-century England that includes the words "The sin of property we do disdain, no man has any right to buy or sell the earth for private gain".
Teehee, politics.

You'll notice I'm posting songs again!

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Some friends: a sampler

A short intro to some Chengdu friends, right to left.
Reshalati: my Uighur friend, from Xinjiang (west China), Muslim, studying anthropolgy at the Minority University (fitting, since she's a minority...) Speaks Uighur, Mandarin, Kazak, Turkish, Kirgyz, you name it.
Reed: from L.A. Plays hand drums and improvises pretty ridiculous songs on guitar. Majored in Mandarin in college, so I covet his language skeelz.
Brien: of "Brien and Natalie" married coworkers of mine from Buffalo, NY. Plays in a band with Douglas and Reed. Makes me Buffalo tofu wings with his special sauce.
Me: keeping it real. Trying, anyway.
Douglas: Speaks fluent Chinese, although Chinese people occasionally mistake him for Japanese, because they can't fathom that one of their own would have such weird hair and wear a skirt. I covet both his Chinese skeelz and his musical skills, which are... impressive.

Class time

Guess what! I'm writing a post about class time when I should be lesson-planning! I do it because I care, friends.
I teach high school. I also give a university class 3 times a week, and once a week, I have three periods of little 2nd graders. But most every day finds me at my "normal job", working at high schools named #7 and #11. #7 is a private school with a focus on English, so a lot of their kids are pretty decent speakers, and they're all pretty well-behaved. #11 is a different story. It's near the city center and not well-funded. A few of the classrooms I teach in have no chalkboard erasers. So I wipe stuff off with my hand. By contrast, #7 private school has televisions in every class. The kids at #11 public are streamed into "good classes" and "bad classes", which means I have some classes full of studious but shy girls and some classes full of delinquent and rebellious girls and boys. The latter fully understand my position, which is: I speak a very limited amount of Chinese, they speak almost no English and I'm in no position to give them grades which will directly affect their next year's placement. This equals pretty much no respect for the foreign teacher. They fight in class. They play soccer with crushed coke cans. They throw all kinds of things. They yell. They run out of class. They come back in through the windows. And yet, I don't hate my life. #11 days are draining, and sometimes I dread going from my peaceful apartment to the bastions of ignorance, but it's a challenge, and as these pictures from #11 show, the kids are pretty fun when you're not making them work.

A stolen bike, just like I like

My bicycle was stolen two days ago. But as the kids say, "It's all good". A short story for you crazy readers: I normally rode my bike to the bus stop. One day, I was trying frantically to lock my bike to a post so I could hop on the bus that had just arrived and make it to work on time, but found the post was just a little too thick, my lock a little too short. There was no use, I had to miss the bus and be late for work, or... leave my bike lying unlocked on the sidewalk. So I did! And 4 hours later, I came back on the bus and, yup, picked up my bike and rode it home, all like, "Ain't no thang".

So really, that incident made me feel so good that who cares if a few months later it got stolen? Not me, that's for sure. People in general are so nice that the one joker who took the bike is welcome to it, and may he or she ride it with gusto (and fix that squeaky axle). As for me: it's bike shopping time and I'm excited to get some new wheels.

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P.S. Look at those cute girls! How could you care about a bike when those two are just all holding hands and being cute? It'd be nonsense.

Shui Mo (hike with Maria and Nathaniel)

When my Alaskan friends were here, we decided on the Saturday to go out to a small town to see some rural China. Maria (roommate) and Reed (friend) came too. We went to a bus station and picked a town at random, pretty much: Shui Mo, a village about two hours northwest. The ticket woman couldn't figure out why we would want to go there, but obliged. Once we got there we strolled the small streets and walked by some small farms, before Forrest and Reed took an early bus back to the city, leaving Nathaniel, Maria and I to walk out of town and follow a path up into the hills. As we hit forks, we kept on choosing the smaller trail, until eventually we left the path altogether and followed a stream up into the bush, stopping finally at a little fall where the brush got too thick and the valley walls too steep for us to carry on. When we came down from the hills, school had let out, and all the village kids came to see what was up. After I got the rowdy boys to chase me through the streets while N and M hung back with the rest, there are a couple of pictures of me trying to play a little capoeira with them. With the child-mob over it was getting dark and there was no bus coming through that day (we hadn't thought the return trip through...) so we set out hitch-hiking on the highway. It only took us 3 rides to get back to our front door in Chengdu that night! 1 free, and two others nice and cheap.
The pictures are very me-heavy because Nathaniel and Maria took them all. And yes, that's a Ho Chi Minh shirt I picked up in Vietnam.