tifanjo

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).