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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