Is it really November??

First, forgive me, forgive me, forgive me. I can’t believe I haven’t updated this blog in more than two months. I’m sorry to those of you who actually read this for news of my China happenings. Just know that the reason for my neglect is simply that I’ve been completely absorbed in my life here, which I wouldn’t say is a bad thing. So, where to begin…

I. I moved into my permanent apartment in Chongqing City at the beginning of September. It is amazing—indescribable really—and I finally feel at home here. Plus, as promised there is an extra bedroom with real bed, so I can accept visitors at any time (hint, hint). I live in the center of town, but teach 40 minutes away by bus. At first the commute was horrible, especially Mondays since I had to get up at 6:30 and then ride the bus for 40 minutes, but I’ve gotten used to it now. Usually I conk out for the entire ride or else track the progress of the gazillion housing construction sites I pass on the way to the campus where I teach. This commute has created a bit of a problem in terms of bonding with students because I’m only on campus to teach a few hours a day and then I have to dash out of the classroom to catch the bus because it’s fairly infrequent. I’m working on finding a solution to this problem since it’s really important to me to spend as much time with my students as possible.

II. My Chinese is getting better and better each day, but that’s not to say it’s good. Let me tell you, Chinese is hard. I mean hard. I have a private tutor now and she’s a stickler for pronunciation (we spent 15 straight minutes practicing how to pronounce “xue” the other day), which I like, but even that hasn’t helped me make as much progress as I’d like to. I’m focusing a lot on the characters by doing calligraphy at night, which is quite relaxing. As one of my students said, “it brings [me] peace and relaxes [my] body.” The funny thing is that I often hear in the same day that my Chinese is amazing and then a little while later that I should study harder because I can’t say the simplest words correctly. Well, I suppose the important thing is that I can get around, buy things I need, and order food. And believe me, I have ordered a lot of delicious food since I got here, which brings me to my next point:

III. Food! Chinese food is amazing.

A good friend cooked dinner for me one night. He made six dishes from scratch. It was beyond delicious.

I’m not going to say that I don’t crave Western food (there’s a phenomenon that always occurs when PC volunteers get together…within 4 minutes the conversation turns to Western food, discussed in vivid, glowing detail) but I’m actually starting to deeply crave several Chinese dishes on a regular basis. Now that it’s getting colder I’m always craving Hot Pot, a special dish from Chongqing/Sichuan (check out the Anthony Bourdain No Reservations episode on China if you want to understand what Hot Pot is). I’ve also established a few regular lunch places near my house where I get my favorite dishes: tomato and egg noodles, home-style tofu, and vegetable dumplings. It feels pretty great to have my own haunts where the staff knows me and can predict what I want to eat. At the dumpling restaurant the waitress, who is probably about 16, calls me jiejie (older sister), a typical Chinese address, but not something that many people call me since I’m a foreigner. As silly as it sounds, by uttering these words she’s really helped me feel like I’m integrating, at least a little, which is after all one of the goals of PC...

IV. Speaking of PC goals, I’m working on the other two (basically they can be summed up as “help out the local people” and “learn about and respect their culture while teaching about yours”). I teach 8 classes for students: six oral English and two writing. I’m also teaching an oral English class for teachers once a week. Right now I’m contemplating what to do for my secondary project. Some volunteers work on gender issues, some simply try to get more students excited about learning English through book clubs and the like. As for me, I really don’t know what the best choice for my community is yet. For my writing class I have my students keep weekly journals and in one of the entries I asked them to write about what they might like to change about themselves and why. Almost all of the students wrote that they wished they had more confidence, which really surprised me. This left me thinking that I should do some sort of project that might boost their self confidence because they truly are amazing people and I want them to see that. I’ll keep you posted on what I come up with.

Okay, there’s much, much more to tell, but I figure I should post this now or it’ll never happen. I get side-tracked easily these days, but since life is starting to have a rhythm and I feel settled now, I should be able to write more. I’ll end with a quick funny story: While teaching one morning an injured bat flew into my classroom and proceeded to flop around on the floor while my students and I stared on helplessly. After about two minutes I realized that I was the authority figure (sometimes it’s easy for me to forget this) and should probably do something, but I really didn’t know what to do with an injured bat, so I turned to my students and said, “I don’t know what to do.” One of my boy students then got up, picked the bat up (with his bare hands! Why did I let him do that?) and put it on the window ledge. There was nothing to do after that but go on discussing the rhetorical triangle. I felt horrible.

I miss all of you! I hope life is treating you well!