tifanjo

02:27 am: new blog
I'm sure you all thought I was long gone. My camel got lost in the desert, I ran off with a Kazakh nomad and had no time between milking the cows and churning butter and hauling water from the well to post to my blog, or that I had simply been blown away in one of our windstorms.

Well, all of those are possibilities but I have actually just been busy and mostly off-line. Off-linedness has its advantages, but here's to being connected.

03:20 am: Yes, I'm a lazy cow, but that's not the reason I haven't been updating. China has now decided not to be friends with livejournal, so until I move my blog somewhere else you won't hear much from me.

I can't say I'm working on it but I'm thinking about it, and as soon as I turn myself right-side up again I'll try and sort it all out.

08:48 am: this sort of news item cheers me up to no end.

i wouldn't want to live in a world without a few sinister camel-smuggling criminals.

09:29 am: there is no news worth knowing from my little world here. i have sunk into a life so routine-filled that what gets me through the day is the knowledge that it will end soon.

i'm not completely depressed, but happy that urumqi and all of its evils are awaiting me. happy that i will return to a life of different frustrations and fewer monotonies.

here in los angeles i walk on water and have repeatedly been offered attractive packages for staying and every time empty promises that i will "think about it" fall out of my mouth, smile and all. i am a pensive person but the thinking never takes me more than a few minutes, every time returning to the conclusion that unless losing my mind is in the itinerary, staying is impossible.

i'm not ready to sentence myself to that kind of death. the death of 9-5, the death of business casual, the death of a promising career path, vaulting from beige-carpeted cubicle to beige-carpeted cubicle, each more prestigious than the last.

i'll continue counting my pennies in never-never land.

12:10 pm: yesterday, i was talking to someone about china, my experiences there, and what i thought of it. the issue of human rights came up. this well-educated person who apparently reads the news was shocked and a bit disbelieving when i described the political situation, and the extent of censorship and fear.

it was actually the second conversation i had had that day on that very topic, and both times my observations were met with veiled skepticism.

my perception of it is skewed, for sure, since i live in far west, "turbulent" xinjiang, home to terrorist separatist muslims who would like nothing more than to destroy the peaceful, harmoniously integrated multi-ethnic society the CCP has so laboriously built up.

my google alerts recently have been flooded with this news item, about a "terrorist camp" found in a desolate mountain region of south xinjiang. here's the chinese angle.

now, these guys were probably not hanging out there having a tea party, or a male-bonding drum circle sort of thing, or plotting ways to make the communist party more powerful, but ... 18 people shot dead on sight? is this what a country does when it's working hard to improve its human rights record?

more of you probably heard or read about the incident made famous by a climber and his cellphone camera, where tibetans trying to cross into india were also shot on sight. here's a bit about that.

things are definitely more tense in xinjiang and tibet, minority areas with long histories the chinese don't figure into as much as (or in the ways that) they profess. if all the minority areas in china split off, it would be a pitiful fraction of its current size.

of course they're nervous.

but this kind of cruelty and repression is not limited to people who speak a different language. take a look at the front page of RFA and you will see stories about human rights lawyers and journalists being detained, tried, and found guilty of various crimes constantly.

it's no north korea, it's no turkmenistan, but the heavy hand of the powers that be is much, much heavier than most people seem to realize.

10:47 am: life goes on and on and on
and i am here again in los angeles, with both feet on the ground in this supposedly celestial city.

happy two thousand and seven, dear readers. i hope you rang in the year having good times or perhaps good dreams. i was not too bothered about staying up for midnight or not, but happily had a chance to chat with a certain someone in xinjiang who i miss very much, so i ended up awake to see the birth of the year.

there is not a lot to share about being here. i find everything is in the same place, most people are doing the same things. the holidays were fairly uneventful - last year's chihuahua circus party is still the undefeated champion of christmas eves.

there it is - my holiday greetings, some words dragged from my reluctant self so i don't lose my beloved bloggees.

01:11 pm: a window on western china
follow this link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdHbupaAfcU

for a moving talking glimpse of my life.

many thanks to talented, kind fausto who did all the work.

01:12 am: it's a beautiful day, let's go stand in line
david recently sent me this article, about mobs of old people in beijing lining up in the wee hours of the morning for one head of free cabbage. apparently there was a bumper harvest of cabbage around the capital this year, sending prices plummeting and leaving sellers with more of the green leafy stuff than they could sell.

the free cabbage thing is a publicity stunt to attract other buyers who see long lines, and a way to get rid of the surplus they'd never sell all of anyway.

this phenomenon is something i've witnessed plenty of times. it's quite amusing in a newspaper article about a faraway land where the elderly clamor for cabbage, many of whom could easily afford to shell out a few cents.

all of us urumqi residents who go to the large french supermarket chain with any regularity know what it means when eggs go on sale. all seems normal and calm in the dry goods sections of the store: bored employees demonstrate juicing machines, useless xiaojies lurk in every other aisle to help you choose merchandise they actually know nothing about, and customers wander around picking things off shelves.

but the closer you get to the produce and meat section, the thicker the crowds become. you begin to realize a couple things: they are all elderly, they seem particularly cheerful, and they are all carrying more eggs than i generally eat in an entire year.

i've never investigated egg prices at carrefour; when they go on sale i generally regret having walked into the store at all as the checkout counters and the eastern half of the store are choked with enthusiastic egg-consumers who are agog at the great deal they're getting.

they swarm in great droves, chattering constantly. i have to think it's more about socializing than actually getting eggs.

a few weeks ago i stopped by on a weekday around lunchtime to pick up some pie-baking supplies in preparation for thanksgiving. i expected crowds to be relatively thin, but instead .... carrots were on sale! i discovered it's much worse than eggs - they're not breakable so you can load an entire cart, or multiple shopping baskets with them, and they keep for a long time.

lines of cheerful old people with twenty kilos of carrots each, and a few irritated people like me who had somewhere else to be, snaked around half the produce section. there was only one employee weighing and stickering an entire village of carrot-buyers' treasures.

i imagined these delighted people, loaded up with carrots, returning home to subject their families to weeks of carrot-eating. carrot jiaozi, carrots in stir-fry, carrot ...? what on earth can you do with that much carrot?

as the article points out, these are people inured to hardship and a few hours of waiting in line doesn't add up to much. will this kind of frenzied cabbage-hoarding and carrot-collecting survive to the next generation? probably not.

it makes things crowded and inconvenient for a lot of people, but one thing i admire about the country and its people is the way the elderly live. go to the parks at dawn, the square at dusk, and anywhere in between; you'll find old people doing tai chi, ballroom dancing, knitting, play chess, walking their dogs or their grandchildren, or just hanging out.

where are the elderly in the US? is everyone sitting inside watching TV?

last year, on a lunch break i stopped by a little noodle shop by the school to have a quick bowl then get back to teaching. an old woman and her about-12-year-old granddaughter sat down at the same table.

they heard me talking to the waitress and the woman, obviously amused, chuckled and nodded with approval: "she can speak chinese!"

she asked all the usual questions, and i asked her about herself: retired, two grandchildren.

"retired life is pretty good, huh?" she was glowing with carefree-ness and beamed after my question.

"it's great! no pressure! no work! i can look after my grandchildren and do whatever i want!" it's a kind of satisfaction i wonder how many of our elderly can profess, and i wonder how many more generations this attitude will last in china.

09:56 pm: i hate the pressure of coming up with a title for every post
i walked out of my friend astrid's house today after dinner, wine, and long conversations. urumqi winter hit me in the face.

it's at least a month late; i smelled that scent of coal combined with the bite in the air that means it's close to freezing. it's something you smell only once or twice, then it sinks down into you and becomes so normal that you don't smell it again until the next year, when it happens for the first time. it should have been snowing for at least a month already, but we haven't had the first storm yet this year.

i made the short walk home, thinking all the while (as i have been constantly these days) that i am glad to be making another visit to the states this year, and especially glad to be leaving this neighborhood soon, very soon. every time i walk down these winding lightless filthy roads to my solitary home where i hear my neighbors occasionally switching on a light and drunk men on the streets below fighting with each other, i think how few times i have to do this again.

astrid (who is also living alone) and i were talking today about the unnaturalness of our solitary lifestyles, of occupying a space with just one body. my kitchen usually produces food just for one person; i read under these lights and no one else; this coal-powered radiator keeps only me from freezing to death.

this is particularly poignant in a place where it is the given to constantly be surrounded by people. if not family, friends. if not friends, classmates or workmates. if not them, strangers. the constant press of people becomes so natural that many locals don't seem to enjoy time by themselves.

the contrast, the clash, of being americans in a place that is so focused on community reminds me of the need for balance. i appreciate our independence, our opportunities for aloneness, and the privilege of going into a room and shut the door, knowing no one will open it without at least knocking first. however, i recognize the naturalness of community, family, and sharing space and time with other human beings.

as i learned from hitchhiking with lots of truck drivers several years back, sitting around by yourself all the time makes you crazy. out of all the truckers we hitched with, only one was passably sane: he had a dog.

i've lived alone for the better part of two years now. while i have a rich social life here in urumqi (sometimes overwhelmingly so) i find that my introvert ways are being overridden by the desire to share the occasional morning cup of coffee, to come home and discover someone hanging out in the living room, to have the opportunity to appreciate an empty house.

08:59 pm: two days in my life
Tuesday

I woke up early at Fausto’s house; peering through the lacy curtains with sleepy eyes I saw an orangeish sky. Dawn already. I lay awake in bed, thinking of the coming day after my five hours of sleep. It’s just not enough at my advanced age.

I reluctantly got out of bed to rush home, then off to my morning class.

Today is Oraza Eid (in other places called Eid ul-Fitr), a Muslim celebration that marks the end of Ramadan. It’s an important day to go to Mosque, and the locals heeding the morning call to prayer filled the entire mosque, its expansive courtyard, the sidewalks, and the whole street was packed with men lined up on their prayer rugs. The mullah’s voice resonated across the quiet morning as commuters fled from motionless buses, huffing up the street past praying Muslims.

At home, after gulping down a cup of coffee and a few bites of naan, I grabbed my books and headed to Chinese class. After a restless two hours that normally would have been four (Kazakh class cancelled due to the holiday), I came back home and basked in a couple solitary hours spent alternating between bumbling around my house doing little things and half-heartedly cracking a book.

In the afternoon, I wandered down the road to hang out with David, whom I have not seen much of lately. We talked for a couple hours about Xinjiang, future plans, and classes. In that time, a call came from my Kazakh teacher’s daughter, inviting me over to their house for the festival. It’s customary to go to friends’ and relatives’ homes to have some snacks, eat some meat, chat, and then move on to the next one.

I arrived to find a house empty of guests except myself. My teacher sauntered in with wildly messy hair and around-the-house clothing, and started ordering her daughter to bring tea, spoons, fruit. I admired the dastarkhana spread of pastries, Kazakh cheese-type stuff, fruit and nuts. Soon the meat appeared and I was ordered to je (eat), and after that dumplings appeared and I was ordered to je some more. About the time I was preparing to bid farewell (these holiday visits are intended to be short and sweet) a gaggle of Kazakh women showed up. I had to je some more, had a bit of conversation with them, and got to listen to them talk about me in Kazakh. I could understand most of what they said, I’m very proud to say.

I left with the gaggle, made my way home with a gift of several kilos of raw mutton, and nearly immediately left again to have ice cream with a traveler coming through the region who had crashed on my couch a few weeks ago and an American archaeologist I met recently in a supermarket.

The ice cream store is run by a friendly Uzbek man who once discovered I’m studying Kazakh and ever since only replies to anything I say in Chinese in Uyghur. Close enough, I can understand.

The three of us were happily going on mostly about systems of education until the above-mentioned proprietor began yawning loudly and eventually got up to close the shop doors. We took the cue, paid up, and headed home.

My head hit the pillow and I was in total oblivion until

Wednesday

Another early morning class. I woke up an hour before class started and managed to peel myself away from my sheets, groggily have some coffee and naan, and arrive at class a few minutes late.

I found myself again completely restless in class, unable to imagine how I could manage to make it through all four hours of class today. But in the break between classes, I received a call from another traveler I’m hosting right now to say that he had arrived in town, and was waiting on the street by my house. The excuse to skip the last two hours that I desperately wanted just materialized.

I ran home to meet my guest and almost immediately ran off again to take him to the train-ticket selling office. After trying several sold-out destinations, we got him a ticket for Lanzhou and we proceeded to other places to inquire about camera prices and change some foreign currency.

As we made our way back up to my side of town, lunchtime had arrived and we headed to a local semi-Turkish restaurant run by an Azeri woman for lunch with a few other friends.

After lunch, Guillaume (my guest) and I sat in my living room for hours while I answered question after question about the United States and China. I tried unsuccessfully to get some work done. Even the simplest task was unaccomplishable as every time I left the room I was called back with a cry of “Tiffany!” and another question.

He left for dinner, and I cooked up some vegetables with some of that mutton for myself. I got a call from another friend I’ve seen too little of lately, we talked for quite a while, and now I’m at home writing this waiting for Fausto to come over.

I haven’t prepared for my classes tomorrow. I’m not concerned.

Tomorrow I’ve got classes straight through till dinner, then a dinner date, and then I’m hoping I can come home to an empty house to collapse, sit around and do nothing, or maybe page through the Chinese travel magazine I picked up recently.

12:01 am: it's all over now
i find this more frightening than the north korea nuclear test.

08:59 am: it's one of those days
where the higher the sun rises in the sky, the lower the temperatures drop. it happens inbetween seasons sometimes, when the promise of spring is retracted and nighttime rain turns into daytime snow.

i woke up happy about the sound of rain, hoping it heralded the end of the unseasonably high temperatures. i know winter is long, dark, cold, and depressing, but the two major seasons in urumqi seem so interminable that i get unreasonably excited about the change; the transitions are my favorite time of year.

i'm easily amused. all it takes is a day that starts out appropriate for sandals and ends up needing snowboots; a northern wind that blows away t-shirt weather and blows in a siberian snowstorm; an icy, snowy night that turns clear and hot by midday.

06:56 pm: 云中漫步
it feels good to have made the right decision, and it's good to be single, good to feel that i can go anywhere without the choke-hold on my neck dragging me back here, over there, punching me in the gut and pouring rivers of tears down my face.

06:57 pm: 如果天上有星星
it's been an action-packed several days since i last posted.

there was a difficult, tearful, and most likely final parting with the kazakh guy i've been seeing off and on for the last two years. he showed up on my birthday with a beautiful bouquet of 27 roses; i threw them out today, not waiting for them to wilt away entirely. i'd rather get rid of that flagrant reminder of him, of all his good intentions he was throwing away on me.

i had a get-together at my house on friday, at exactly the right time - i had just pulled myself together from me and zhanati's parting, and had just barely recovered from a strange illness that left me unable to put anything solid in my body for days.

it was mostly successful, i think, although i did pull together a number of people who didn't know anyone else, leaving a few conversational stragglers struggling with language barriers and my inability to talk to everyone at once. it was the first time i'd had any number of guests in my home. i've done almost no hosting since moving into this apartment, even though it's rather nice for it.

yesterday, i attended two weddings: one chinese, one kazakh.

the first was for my former student from last year's private school. it was the first time i had been to a han chinese wedding and had time to stay for the whole thing.

the second wedding was my friend bahar's; just a couple months ago, she had been expressing doubt about the wiseness of getting married, as her now-husband is in the army and stationed in another city in xinjiang that is an overnight bus ride from urumqi. on the evening of my birthday party, i received a phone call from her: "i'm sorry i can't make it to your party tonight; i'm getting married tomorrow. please come to my wedding."

at both kazakh and chinese weddings, guests are not expected to give gifts, but cash. when you walk in and greet the family (kazakh) or the couple (chinese), the next stop is a registration table where you record your name and the amount you have given. when you or your child get married, the same amount is expected to be returned to you.

the traditional forms of both weddings include paying respect to both sets of parents, although i was a little surprised to see it omitted from bahar's wedding. in a kazakh wedding i attended a couple months ago, the couple stood in front of the parents while a man sang a very long song about what they should and shouldn't do, while the couple bowed repeatedly to the parents. this is the tradition, but i suppose it's a given that it's dying out in the city.

both brides wore a white western-style wedding dress as well, which is also quite common. however, at most modern chinese weddings, the bride changes into a traditional qipao for the reception.

the kazakh wedding was, hands down, the better of the two. there was less talking, more dancing. the chinese wedding ceremony was chock full of leaders giving speeches, whereas the kazakh ceremony was quite perfunctory. everyone quickly moved onto eating and dancing and congratulating.

david and i were sitting at a table of middle-aged to old kazakh men. for a good long while, david and i spoke to each other while the kazakhs chatted amongst themselves, not really sure what to say to the foreigners, or in what language. i got my big chance to practice my kazakh while politely refusing alcohol. word got around the table quickly that i knew some kazakh, and before i knew it i got lots of chances to make small talk, had food forced on me, multiple toasts (i stuck to tea), dinner invitations, and requests to dance.

in spite of the good times, i cut out early and returned home to find that the water in my house was still not on; it had been off since that morning. today's the second full day with no water, and i've found that my neighbors have also disappeared. i presume they're staying with relatives for the time being. there's nothing to do but wait, shower elsewhere, and cart water home for everything else.

02:11 pm: thirty years ago
when my mother celebrated her 27th birthday, she had already been married for over seven years. she had a two-year old daughter and another child on the way.

she lived in the town of bloomington, ca: a dusty town populated mainly by mexican immigrants, if my vague memory serves me correctly. housing was cheap, and space was plentiful.

my mother baked bread from scratch, tended her gardens, cleaned the house, and scrambled to keep up with her lively 2-year old. when my father came home from work every day he took care of the sheep before having dinner, and whatever else he did.

i hadn't been born or conceived, or even conceived of yet. however, i wonder what my mother imagined her children would be doing on their 27th birthdays, if she imagined it at all?

04:08 pm: Бапа мысық
if you have the right fonts installed, which i'm sure few if any of my readers do, the subject of this entry should read "baby cat" in kazakh. it's the title of a children's story i read last semester, and now i have my own Бапа мысық story to tell.

on my way back from my afternoon class today, i saw a kitten hanging out in an alley. it was the second time i saw the little guy - the first time i was rushing to a 7:30am class, so had no time to investigate. at a glance, though, it looked dirty and uncared for. the image wasn't helped by the fact that it was sitting in a pile of trash.

that morning, sitting in class pondering this little creature, i resolved that if i saw it again and made sure it didn't have a home, i'd adopt it and find a way to take care of it till i leave urumqi. i seriously considered getting a cat recently, and then ended up dropping the idea. however, if one needed rescuing, i couldn't not help it.

today he was sitting in the same alley. he did look dirty and uncared for, and he was disarmingly friendly. i also noticed his two back legs were no good - he had to drag them along the ground behind him to get anywhere, so mostly just sat in one place. that one place this time was on top of a sewer grate.

classes had also just let out at the elementary school next to my house, and a few of those kids came down the alley, getting the kitten a lot more attention and, to my surprise, concern. one little uyghur boy (probably about 10) hung around the longest, talking about how he wanted to take it home and take care of it.

some other kids came and went, and then another pair of little boys hung around for a bit. i mentioned something about it being too thin, and they disappeared, reappearing a few minutes later with a processed sausage thing for it to eat. i had the uyghur kid translate for me, and by asking another kid who obviously lived there, figured out that the cat does have someone "taking care" of it, and they do want to keep him.

this is such a pleasant surprise for me, and i'm devoting so much energy to writing about this because caring for animals has not been something i've seen expressed by most chinese people. the city residents that have little dogs generally take good care of them, but most people don't seem to have that kind of feeling for random strays on the street.

going to the zoo is a horrible experience. the animals are cooped up in filthy, cramped concrete quarters surrounded by adults jeering and throwing things at them. no one seems to see much wrong with this, at least not the people who patronize the place. expressing real feeling for a random animal is generally met with bemused smiles and silence.

but here, in this little back alley, i found that not a single kid was taking advantage of the kitten's immobility and utter helplessness; on the other hand, they all wanted to help it.

i'm sure it's not a statistically representative cross-section of chinese elementary school children, and in the countryside where most people don't have enough for themselves and their family, it's probably a different story.

accurate or not, i feel better about this country knowing that the next generation has a bunch of boys growing up that can be so compassionate to a scroungy, crippled, dirty little cat.

12:05 pm: a twelfth of a year slips by
this long interval between posts is for no reason other than being busy, and being distracted.

i relished the last bit of my holiday, somehow managing to stay busy in spite of very little teaching and very little studying.

i spent a weekend in karamay, a city northwest of urumqi that is famous for nothing more than oil, and the resulting explosion of prosperity. when you say "karamay" in urumqi, people say it's very clean, with lots of parks and wide streets. civilized, they say. but civilized can be dull, and as munira (local uyghur friend who took me) and i wandered the streets between having food practically stuffed down our throats by her well-meaning relatives.

the streets were wide, quiet, and clean. there were patches of green everywhere, with interesting sculptures and pleasing water arrangements. however, i found myself with one complaint: there's nothing to do, nothing to see. that's not entirely accurate. we were taken to a bazaar, night clubs, bars, and even an amusement park on the edge of a reservoir. we were also shuttled between relatives' homes, and ate the equivalent of about five meals per day, if not more.

it turned out to be my only bit of traveling this summer, as classes started earlier than had been predicted before.

now, classes have started and i am, to tell the truth, sort of dreading this semester. ten hours of kazakh and ten hours of chinese every week. my chinese classes are still not presenting a huge challenge to me, and somehow my kazakh classes always manage to be way over my head. no matter how much progress i make, my teachers find a way to make me lose all hope by insisting we work from materials that are so inappropriate for my level it's laughable.

there has also been a fair amount of upheaval in my love life which i find quite distracting. i don't think it's going to help my studies. on that train of thought, they are calling to me right now; if i don't use this one free afternoon wisely, i will suffer tomorrow through four more hours of demoralizing and headache-inducing kazakh lessons with a two hour reprieve of reading chinese newspaper articles (i am still, thank god, the top of my class).

09:09 pm: the worst soccer match i've never seen
since i've been in china, i've heard little grumbles here and there about "meetings".

of course, anyone who has worked in an office thinks they know about the drudgery and uselessness of meetings, but they really do have an entirely different history and meaning in contemporary china.

in the days of the cultural revolution, meetings were a time to denounce anyone and everyone, and be pounded with propaganda most of us westerners have never seen or imagined the likes of (myself included).

now, chinese bosses and political leaders still love meetings. i remember in the school i worked for last year, every wednesday the local staff would be subjected to day-long meetings. they were locked in a little room, listening to the owner of the company spew out useless words until midday when an hour-long break would be taken. in the afternoon, they were all back in the same seats, eyelids drooping and feet tapping impatiently.

"what do you talk about in those meetings?" i asked a local employee once.

"oh, nothing. larry (boss guy) just talks a lot about how we should behave towards the customers and how great this school is, and a lot of other stuff i don't pay attention to."

yesterday, i got a hint of chinese meetings. i was at a friend's sister's house for lunch. we ate, we chatted for a while, we watched really stupid chinese game shows, and when i was literally starting to open my mouth to announce my imminent departure, they asked me if i wanted to see a soccer match between two chinese teams (xinjiang and harbin).

"definitely!" i thought. i like soccer. i've heard the chinese teams are not world-class, but it's still a chance to see a live match. it was 3:30pm local time. the match started at 6:00. i was about to say "i'll run home and grab a jacket" when they announced we should leave right away to avoid unmanageably crowded buses and a packed-full stadium.

we ended up on a long bus ride up to the part of town i've been working in for the last month (reliving my awful commute), arriving nearly an hour early. we sat in the uncomfortable stadium seats, anxiously awaiting the beginning of the performances, and the following match.

we waited, and waited, and waited. i started squirming in my seat like a little kid. i paid way too much attention to the 4-year old seated in front of me and developed a strong dislike for her. finally, around 7:00, the performances started.

a replica of the huge tianshan mountains was erected on the field in a painfully slow manner. then, the dances started - a group representing every recognized ethnicity in xinjiang slowly undulated its way around the field.

finally, the dancers and mountains disappeared.

then, groups of random people from random places around xinjiang appeared in formation to march around the field as well. such-and-such group from altai, such-and-such school from changji, some-sort-of dance group from urumqi, the local police from whatever-district. i had a clear view of the door they were appearing from.

one group after another after another marched around and were announced. with growing impatience, i watched the door they were coming from, waiting for the time it would remain empty after one group started marching. it was a damned long time coming.

at this point, i wanted to leave. we had been sitting for hours, the reason we had come still hadn't materialized, and i still had some lesson planning to do that evening (not to mention a long bus ride home).

finally, finally, all the random people nobody really cared about disappeared.

then, the meeting started.

a number of important xinjiang politicians were in attendance. they were introduced and applauded for one by one. the most important one in the group stood up and began speaking. every time, he spoke for a few minutes in uyghur, then would translate into chinese. it was all utterly uninteresting and useless.

废话！(loose translation: nonsense, useless words) my friend shouted over and over again. he continued speaking. we leaned over and held our heads in our hands.

when he finished, another politician began speaking.

where's the soccer? i was thinking. it was already after 9:00 and my mind was on the long bus ride home and my unplanned lesson for my early sunday morning class.

people were hemorrhaging out of the stadium and it soon became clear that the majority of the audience didn't give a damn about the soccer game; they just wanted to see the dance performance.

i said to my friend "i can't take it much longer", and she said the magic words, "let's go?"

so we joined the masses of people leaving the soccer game before the soccer game even began, and found bus after bus so packed with people that we caught a taxi down the road a bit where we could actually get on a bus before the mobs arrived.

i came home, thinking it rather silly to go to a soccer game with no intention of watching the match, and gradually started to see it in another light.

this is the modern china. they still have meetings; they still listen to the same old propaganda, but now they have the freedom to roll their eyes, get up, and walk out (in some situations, at least).

in my dreams, i cheered for the xinjiang team.

07:11 pm: mission accomplished
i just wrote a really long entry that disappeared into the ether.

it was about how relieved i am to be finished teaching teenagers and happy to have an adult conversation class starting on monday, if there are enough students.

it was also about how happy i am to have found a new kazakh teacher who knows how to teach, and does not waste hours of my time telling me personal anecdotes in chinese, and actually lets me open my mouth and speak.

last and least, it was about how incredibly scattered i've been lately - breaking and forgetting things left and right. i'm blaming it on either the heat or the mental energy expended on my teenage students.

this short and sweet and entry is better anyway ....

11:18 am: going postal
so my dreaded teaching teenagers job has turned out to be nothing to dread at all, so far.

these kids are great - they are generally ready to participate and (like most chinese kids) are short on creativity but can manage with a little prodding and help. i am spending more time on lesson planning than i would with adults, just because they do need more activities and games to stay interested and focused, but that has turned out to be okay because i'm only teaching one class of teenagers instead of two, as originally planned.

this week, we're doing a unit in the book called "services". it's about things like going to the bank, the post office, the library, getting your car fixed, calling directory information. really boring stuff like that. this weekend, preparing for my lessons, i spent a good long time reading the dialogues and sighing, a feeling of anxiety welling in my stomach as i pictured an entire week of talking about checking accounts and express mail with 15-year olds.

as it has turned out, i think this may be one of the better weeks of the class, for the simple reason that it forces me to get creative with my lesson planning.

monday was bank day. i taught some vocab and, elected a couple of students to be tellers, gave the customers a mission to accomplish and let them have at it. after that, i took some checks from my own account and passed them out, taught them how to fill out a check, and instructed them to fill out any amount to anyone (except themselves) and then explain why. they had great fun, i received a total of $100,020.00, and then they got to learn another word: "void".

yesterday we went to the post office. i appointed some postal workers, gave the others slips of paper with annoying tasks (mail yourself to canada, send 47 big express packages to south africa) and then told them that postal workers in the states have a reputation for being mean and unhelpful. since this textbook is about life in america, i instructed them that they had to pretend to be unhappy american postal workers.

it started out slowly, but by the end a "postal worker" and a "customer" got into a yelling match (completely in english) that ended with the customer storming off, and the last girl in line had to try three times before getting her 72 postcards sent, as the first two simply refused to do it.

today, we're going to go to the mechanic, and call 411.