Get Out of Town!

Last Sunday, I finally made a break for it. I decided to chance the iffy weather and take the bus out to the Huaqing Hot Springs. I was not disappointed, although I found something more interesting in the long run.

Before I left home, I looked in the bookstore for a likely travel book to use while I was in China. Lonely Planet, my usual choice, was short on Xi'an suggestions and long on weight and extra information, so I decided to do without. I looked up Xi'an tours on the internet while I was here and got information about how to use the bus system to access a number of places, including the Hot Springs. So I planned a trip.

Just the day before, our entire group plus the group from Brookline had visited the Tang Dynasty Park in the rain, and we saw this truly over the top dance show with elaborate costumes and loud music about Emperor Xuanzong during the Tang dynasty and his favorite concubine, Lady Yang. She liked these hot springs at it turned out, so this seemed a nice coincidence, although she was forced to commit suicide later in her life. (Blamed for the decline of the dynasty, don't you know.) Fortunately it was not Actively Raining on Sunday and I headed out.

Y and a friend needed to go to the train station from where the connecting bus to the springs was to leave, so we all boarded the 608 which stopped near us. Bus 608 is a double decker bus, and we rode on the top-- the trip was about an hour just to the train station. Y talked loudly into a cell phone the whole time, and her friend who is a Chinese teacher of English sat next to me and asked me questions like the differences among the words "common","general", "typical" and whether you can ever mix tenses in a composition. Riveting.

Y has many positive qualities, but a sense of direction isn't one of them, so when we got off the bus, I told them where I needed go. Y was a little skeptical that I could tell the east side from the west side of the station, even given a look at the map earlier, (isn't that one thing you can tell from a map???) but I found my way over there all right. I waved merrily and made myself disappear into the crowd after saying goodbye. No offense to anyone, but I was glad to be on my own; I really hope it wasn't obvious.

I stopped at a snack cart to get a sort of flat bread thing -- and avoided being overcharged. The woman wanted 6 Yuen, although the sign said 1. (I can read enough to see that!) I just told her Too much; this is one Yuen in Chinese, handed her the note, pointed to the sign and stood there. Wordlessly, she gave me the bread. I felt guilty because 6 yuen is equal to something like a dollar, but I didn't want to pay the Meiguoren price. I just didn't.

The bus to the springs was a city bus, and I was the last passenger on it. They fill the buses for these out of town excursions, but no one stands; if the bus is full for a longer haul, you wait for the next one. I was lucky going out there and coming back because I was on my own -- last passenger on coming back too. I was the only white person I saw after that all day. I sat next to an old man who argued with his son about wanting to pay the fare for him and his wife (typical grandpa thing, no matter what country!). The old guy clipped every single one of his fingernails for part of the trip and then swept them off his lap onto the floor of the bus. People read papers, talked, slept, etc. The fare was 6 Yuen -- like I said before, about 1 dollar each way. We passed a huge nuclear power plant with four stacks, two of them smoking, fields, farms, a small village made entirely of bricks (big bad wolf had blown down the others, no doubt) , and a river where many, many people were fishing. I had the aisle seat and tried to look past the old guy next to me out the window. The other passengers pretended not to look at me, but they really do stare. It's not a mean stare, but they just look and look wherever I go. Sometimes I will say Ni Hao or smile and sometimes they will smile and say Ni Hao back, but not always.

The town the springs in which the springs are found stands at the foot of Mt. Lishan, one of China's sacred mountains. Even this part of China is getting built up and there was a brand new polytechnic university there along with a new resort hotel. Students got off the bus for the Uni, but the hotel didn't look it was getting much action yet. The bus went on to the Terra Cotta Warriors after it dropped some of us at the entrance to the hot springs.

The hot springs were an attractive collection of pools and Tang Dynasty architecture. You could go into a bath house and "take the waters", but the only people coming or going out of there were men. I didn't want to deal with this. Chinese society is not open, is still essentially patriarchal in many ways, and while I could not find anything in any of my reading about the baths being male only or anything, I was not going to overstep my bounds in any way. When I was in Japan, by contrast, hot springs, hot tubs, etc unquestionably were for both men and women and were always segregated in the places I went, which appealed to both a Japanese and my own sense of modesty.

The weather was hazy during the earlier part of the morning, but I wandered around and looked at everything. There were small pavilions, pools of varying sizes, dragons, pagodas, and a few places where you could sit at small stone tables with elephant shaped stone stools. I found a quiet corner of the place and sat in the garden for a little bit. Many Chinese people were visiting this area, and it reminded me of when I went for a day trip to Kamakura when I was in Japan. Like there, this was a kind of tourist destination, but it was local people, Chinese people, who were there enjoying something of their own heritage. What I was seeing was the Chinese middle class -- and a few nice looking cameras other than my own indicated that some of these people were above the Chinese standard of middle class, higher up by the local standard of living. I looked around until I figured I had seen and photographed the place and wondered what next. Since the weather cleared up, I found myself looking up at the mountain above the spa, and spied cable cars going to the top. Hmmmm. This seemed promising, so I exited the gate, and headed vaguely in the direction where it looked like the cable cars were descending.

Once I stepped outside the gates, I was approached by several people, all speaking English, basically, although they were of course, Chinese: "Taxi, taxi, taxi?"" Xian, you go Xian?" "Terra Cotta Soldiers?" "Cable cars? cable cars?" One very nicely dressed woman came up to me and simply asked in beautiful English, "What can I do for you?" I am assuming this was transportation related. She followed me for about 50 meters down the street, actually. "All set!" "No Thanks!" " Bu Yao!" "Bu Qu!!" "Xie xie!" "Seen it!" "I'm OK!" "No!" were a few of my responses to all of this attention.

Good grief. I walked down the block and found a sign to the mountain in Chinese -- was very proud I knew this character, and found a ticket booth where I bought an "Up and Down" ticket. The sign and the ticket seller both said that, actually, "Up and down." So I walked up to the cable car hut and was relieved for some strange reason to see the cable car brand was German or Swiss or Austrian -- was in German at any rate. They know about Alps and stuff there in those places in Europe, so I thought I would be safe taking a cable car in China that was made in a German speaking country. (I mentally castigated myself for my Western bias.)

I rode up with a party of 3 -- again filling out the number by being on my own. One guy asked me I where I was from. I said in Chinese I was an American. "Really? You are American?" Maybe, like so many times when Ruthie and I travel, he thought I was German. I said I was an American teacher, here with students, that I taught history. I spoke Chinese, he spoke English -- good practice for everybody. The ride was not overlong and he and his friends were harmless. At the top, there was another ticket hut if you wanted to explore the park. Or you could just hop back on the cable cars, or take a path down. I bought a ticket. They had maps of the mountain, all in Chinese and quite out of scale, so I decided to just strike out without one.

The first place I hit was a small parking area and plaza where there were food booths, souvenirs, and a place to play a shooting game. The shooting game was a toy sized rifle you aimed at an electronic target. However, the strangest thing about this game was the music. The tune was a kind of American Western style theme of 16 bars or so played with instruments that sounded like those you hear in Mao-era orchestra marches, plus traditional Chinese instruments. It looped endlessly over and over and could be heard through the decent sound system for many yards, including inside one of the Taoist temples nearby, somewhat unfortunately.

I walked past the horse men -- you could get a ride on some tired looking but festively adorned horses if you wanted -- and found myself in a huge bird sanctuary on the side of the mountain. They had netted off quite a large portion of the side of the mountain and were keeping peacocks, chickens, guinea hens, parrots, along with ducks and swans who had a nice pond fed by springs and waterfalls. Most of the birds were roaming free, kept in this very large area by the netting overhead and a gate at the entrance up the hill aways. There was also an exhibition area with a small ring that they clearly used for cock fighting. Nearby, there were roosters in cages -- different than the ones they had roaming free. I did not see this performance-- didn't want to -- but they also had a kind of small amphitheater there for that purpose as well. This was not hidden in any way, just part of what they do in China, I guess. It was a little sad.

Once I got back up the hill and past the plaza, I found two Taoist temples. Both had monks selling incense, and people were purchasing sticks of varying colors and sizes and kowtowing to the gods inside. The second one I went into had many halls, and the biggest hall contained an image of the most important goddess to Taoism, Lao Mu. Here, the hall was filled on one side with about 15 women, over the age of 50 I would say, chanting. I sat very quietly on the floor and listened for a long while until they finished. The hall was attended by female Taoist monks in black headdresses and robes. It didn't seem right to take any photographs in these places, so I didn't. I really liked that place, as it was peaceful and still filled with the energy of the chanting.

On my way back down to the cable car, I passed by a small restaurant, really just some tables on the hillside outside a small open building. The sign was in pretty undecipherable Chinglish, though I correctly gathered they served vegetarian food only, and they were cooking Baozi, large dumplings, in a wok outdoors. The chef was friendly and invited me to sit down. I guess I seemed hesitant, so these two young women who were sitting there invited me to sit with them (there were two tiny tables) and one said in basic English, "It's good. Give it a try. Cheap. Vegetarian." and only 5 Jiao -- half a Yuen for one. "Try some dippage," the other girl suggested, indicating a sauce. It was good, all vegetables. I finished one, and I ate a second. What is this? I asked in Chinese. The chef answered, and I admitted I didn't know that vegetable. "Oh!' the girl said. "Not found in stores! They pick here!" Oh! I see, it was grass and stuff right from the mountain. Picked right there around the restaurant, probably. I tried not to think too hard about this, but I suffered no ill effects then or later, thankfully. It looked like grass, actually, but the dippage gave it a good flavor.

My trip back down the mountain was uneventful, although I traveled alone in the cable car and looked anxiously at the trees which were swaying a bit. I caught a bus going back to Xi'an which was full again, but I got the window this time. Everyone in it had done something that day -- sight seeing, visiting, working -- that was keeping the ride quiet on the way back. The train station was the usual writhing scene of busyness. Many times I have seen Chinese people just sit down on the ground with their belongings and wait for whatever they are waiting for. If my experience in two visits is any indication, Chinese people do a lot of waiting. I pushed my way onto double decker 608 eventually. I stood for a while, but a guy getting off made a big deal about making sure I got his seat, which I took.

I went out on my bicycle to replenish my breakfast supplies after I got back, and it was only after I got back upstairs that it started to rain.

Wasted Calories

I have tried eating a few things here that I wouldn't have at home. I feel like I can justify this because I do not think I am up to my fighting weight right now. So I have tried a few snacks. Some of these things I have eaten by accident because I didn't read the label carefully. The labels are in Chinese, and deciphering them is an additional step beyond putting on my reading glasses.

Here's a small list:

"Orion cakes" -- These taste like Yodels, but feel and look like miniature scooter pies.

"Haw rolls" == tart fruit roll ups that are made from Hawthorn, the berry not the author, I believe. They are supposed to have antioxidant properties. I need that here given the pollution and GIGANTIC nuclear power plant outside of town with four stacks.


"American almonds" -- These are "expensive" almonds that are only lightly salted instead of having MSG, sugar and other things added to them. Most nuts are a little interfered with here.

LABS brand (now that sounds appetizing, doesn't it?) drinkable yogurt - The label shows the yogurt going down your gullet into your intestine -- frankly how I was sure it was yogurt. I tried a sample in the store that they thrust at me, drank it mostly to be polite, and I liked it. I like the plain, and buy this regularly. At one point, I bought a strawberry one, but it is languishing in the fridge because I am afraid of it. I find food actually frightening sometimes. Even at home.

Cream Coke -- yikes. I thought it was Coca Cola. It was Coca Cola plus cream soda. A tad sweet.

BBQ flavored Bugles -- this was a tragic mistake. I got the blue pack and didn't look at it. (I thought Bugles were blue packaged?) I ate one and it tasted strange. I looked at the package more closely and it had a small picture of BBQ spare ribs on it. I admit I finished the package and regretted it. I looked at the Bugles in the store today and they have the following flavors: Chicken; Spicy Chicken; Fish: Sushi (different than Fish);"Tomato Meat"(god help us); and Vegetable and of course BBQ Beef, oh and regular Beef. I miss crunchy food, but am off Bugles now, perhaps forever.

The other day, I bought an ice cream bar, bit into it and the inside "ice cream" was quite purple, and tasted kind of malt-like. A bit of cognitive dissonance there. This was in the food court of the Lotus Market where people LOVE to stare at me eating, so I nonchalantly finished it. It wasn't great.

I am shocked at my focus on food, although I do eat pretty much daily, even back in the States.

Tang Dynasty Park

The kids and I at Tang Dynasty Park, a sort of Epcot for the Tang Dynasty. It rained the whole day.

Carry Water, Chop Sticks, Zenning out

Well at least one friend of mine seemed a little bored by my last blog about doing wash, and how she hoped that my life in China wasn't about the day to day. But yes it is, and now, upon reflection that has been part of the interesting bits and one of the challenges of being here.

I ran across an American here who seems invested in having the most important, coolest, most dramatic, bestest time here. She is not bound by any schedule really but her own, so she can. She has to go here and see this, she has to go there for the most authentic experience, etc etc. I cannot just hop around Xi'an, except at night. And they change things up on us. I am here to work, or "on business" or something. Latest example: I thought up until 6:00 tonight that I had tomorrow morning free, Saturday morning for us. Saturday afternoon is not free as we are taking the kids somewhere. But no, I ran across Y in the hall and she told me that the assistant principal wants to take us out to a fancy restaurant for lunch before we go on a field trip with the kids. I do not want to go to a fancy restaurant and listen to people talk Chinese tomorrow at 11. I want to eat these weird German cornflakes I found in the international supermarket on the main drag and ride my bike. But it is my job. So I found the nice blouse I am going to wear, will put out play clothes for the trip with the kids and hope I get back in time from this lunch to change out of the fancy clothes.

I was invited out for dinner -- strictly social!!!-- by some British expats for tomorrow night and I do want to go. But we may not be back in time. I cannot control the time things happen here. It is just the way it is. One of these Brits says his all purpose response to the unexpected, a daily occurrence, is "Welcome to China."

I signed on for an experience, but no one could predict what the experience would be. China is so not the United States, not in any way, not if you use any of your senses or any other faculties at your disposal. Things do not run like clockwork, except the bell schedule in the school. The school curriculum runs in a set pattern, which is its own entry I guess. But, how I function within that predictability is not the most interesting or instructive part of my experience, actually.

Yes, here, my world is smaller for a while -- we are out in the middle of nowhere really --the bike, my biggest indulgence, helps -- and I live where I work, literally steps away from it. I struggled in a lot of different ways when I got to Xi'an. Some days it was adjusting to the food or issues with my living quarters. And sometimes too I fought against some things I could not name. Issue of time, space, my own demons. Who knows. Well, OK, I do have some ideas.

But now, I have gotten a little better at letting go of the struggle, maybe because that is all there is to do. I do not want to be the cause of my own struggle by holding on to something that is elusive or some that is a fantasy, like an outcome I cannot control. "Let go of all striving," as Sudha in the Kripalu yoga video reminds us. Striving to be perfect in a yoga pose there, striving to have some perfect experience here. And yeah, knowing me, I will have to remind myself of this again, maybe as soon as tomorrow. There will be endless opportunities to practice in this organic Zen way.

I have been attempting various forms of Taoist and Buddhist practices since I was a teenager. "Practice" is a great word. You get to keep trying and trying; it becomes its own activity. Then you get to point where, as Yoda says, "There is no try; there is only do." What is different here is that sometimes the the day to day has its own acuity and color that it doesn't have at home. Carry water, wash clothes. When will I have the opportunity to do this again? (Remember I am a romantic and a dreamer after all, which is how I was pulled into Philosophy in the first place probably.)

At home I can do laundry in my house and do 10 other things at the same time and still have clean clothes for the next day or same day if I really wanted. And I can be very busy! Hurray for me!! But I hope that after I return and my life goes back to the way it was that I never take for granted what I could do here. Or maybe in some way it won't go back to the way it was. Or I won't. If I'm lucky I won't.

I am "seeing China", am visiting tourist locations. I am also seeing China in the people I eat lunch with, the people who were at the outdoor street market I found the other night, the kids at school, the officials who want us to have long meals with them, the pace of the place, the pollution, the poverty, the Communist TV show I like. On the Monopoly board, there is that place around the Jail on the corner there that says "Just Visiting". Well, I am not in Jail by any means, but I am not "Just Visiting". If I were, I could send my laundry out in those nice plastic bags they leave in the room and it would come back all clean.

Washed up

I had to wash some clothes today, finally. Like in a washer. I have been hand washing clothes in my sink using my hot water heater upper that I use for tea, drinking water, instant coffee, etc etc. My jeans are black, but they were getting ridiculous. So I thought, no big deal, I will run them through the plastic and rubber Chinese washing machine here in the dorm and put them out to dry on the line on the "patio." I stuck some other things in too. I filled up the washer with hot water I carried to it in my all purpose basin-- the taps are cold only -- and turned on the spigot. Someone had thoughtfully used duct tape to attach the spigot to the hose used to fill up the machine. This seemed to take too long, so i looked in to see all the water had drained out, which also explained why my shoes were wet. There's always something wet on the ground around here. The cook happened by and in a combination of my little Chinese, his no English, and sign language, he explained which of the knobs meant the water would not drain out. I started all over again. The washing took about 15 minutes, created a frightening amount of black water, and was basically a mechanical version of scrubbing clothes over rocks. The banging noises and violent rocking for the spin cycle resulted in no great loss of water, which would have facilitated the line drying, but no more noise than randomly occurs on any given day here. It is never quiet. I have no idea why there is banging. There seem to be different sources all the time. I almost don't notice it any more. Almost.

I hung my stuff on the line to dry and had a flashback to my freshman year at college where I'd used a dorm machine and the line in the basement for laundry, and someone ripped off my Gandalf T shirt. Surely no one was going to want my jeans and a couple of cotton shirts that despite their day to day comfort were looking to me at that moment as devices to extend the time my laundry was going to take to dry. It started to rain only at about 4, so it wasn't a total, er, wash. I think my jeans will dry in a couple of days.

Oh yeah, the school has been scrubbing itself down for the last 3 days. "People from Beijing" (???) are coming to inspect. Yesterday, the entire school, 1300 people or so including adults, stopped for almost 2 hours and scrubbed inside and out, including the plastic soccer field. (there is no grass here at all) The guys at the guardhouse put on tall rubber boots over their uniforms and used a huge fire hose to hose the guardhouse down. Kids scrubbed the bars on all the windows of all 6 or so stories (yes, there are bars on all the windows -- we barely notice them ) and the gates that lock us in at night with brushes. Groups took rags to the poles on the basketball hoops. There was a sort of advance inspection team sent out yesterday ahead of the big wigs, and apparently the school didn't pass muster! So this morning, they were at it again! The place smells better. One comment from the team was that the cars inside the compound weren't clean enough and that dirty cars like that belonged on the street, not in the school grounds. The school "grounds" are entirely paved except for a planting area out front and a curious inner courtyard no one ever steps in. The sense of urgency about this "campaign" as Y called it, recalling "campaigns" from her earlier life a little fondly, was somewhat diminished today. Yesterday there were no slackers I could see, but today, out in the distance, past the plastic ball field out where kids were supposed to be scrubbing the tennis nets, a few looked like they were goofing around. It was somewhat heartening to see a few out of step with their mates --- rarely happens in group activities.

Teaching At Last

We have been here for two weeks, and while there have been tasks connected to our group that both Hu Laoshi and I have done, we have not been given the opportunity to work with the Chinese students here. Yesterday was when this changed. We have been assigned some sections of reading and writing to a group of very competitively selected students who are part of a British style international program -- a kind of school within a school. Hu Laoshi taught a block yesterday on writing and I sat in on the second part of it as a kibbitzer, so the kids got two teachers' style, etc. Today, I finally got to teach my own class in reading to this same group.


The textbook I was given was a British one, so the article was about British homeschooling, and I found that I was able once again to call upon my training in teaching reading which were mostly from the early part of my career as an educator. Although this is something I have not done recently, I could see how a sort of "sleeper effect" had taken place and the lesson went well, I thought. The text itself was fairly high level, and it will be interesting to see what they do with the assignment I gave them. Their language skills are excellent, but unlike American students, they are a little shy about speaking up, at least just yet. Still in many ways, they are just teenagers.

One guy, who when he introduced himself, told me his name and age, and also said that that he was a "funny person." Funny meaning humorous. At the end of the class, he was the one who asked me if he had to create the T chart of pros and cons from the article I had assigned, or could he just leave his underlining in the text. The T chart, of course, was for them to practice paraphrasing and writing -- all part of reading comprehension in some way. So, here was this guy, in a completely harmless faux "troublemaker" style, trying to sort of get out of a part of the assignment, just like I have seen kids do at home. When I said that aspect of the assignment was not optional, he took it in good humor, again just like a student who was trying to "get out of it" at home would do. It felt good to be in a classroom, actually. I also really tried to talk slowly, which I certainly don't always do at home.


Tomorrow, I begin a series of short classes on American History and culture, and I will continue teaching reading and additional writing sections.

It took a while, from my perspective, to wind all this up and get it going. My personal tempo is a tad rapid, I would say, and while this is sometimes a good thing for me, it may not be the style here with regard to some things. Just like the kids, I continue to learn and adapt. There is a sort of routine here, but our days as teachers have not been highly structured.

Going with the flow? This is one of my lifelong goals, and the number of times in any given timeframe that I have to re-orient myself to this Taoist and Buddhist notion is a great reminder of why meditation is called a "practice." Anyway. I am learning a lot and also calling on so many different aspects of my past experiences to be here. Some of these are visible -- like teaching reading, and some of them are not yet apparent.

Jay Mc Inerny, of "Bright Lights Big City" fame wrote a somewhat uneven novella, really that genre, called "Ransom" about a young American man in Japan in the late 70s. (Yes I know Japan is not China). I have read and re-read this book over the years -- in part because I want the ending to come out differently, I think. One of the things the main character, Ransom, is doing in Japan is taking karate. He finally lands a punch on the top student in his school, and knocks him down, no small feat. The Japanese student he scores on congratulates him on this, and says," All your training went into that punch." That's what it feels like here: "All my 'training'" is required to, at times, just get through my 40 days here, not just teacher training, but all of it.

Hmmm. More to be revealed, doubtless.

Hello, hello? Is this thing on?

Hmmmmm. I have bumped up against another Great Wall of China. I have been able to add blog posts, like this fascinating one and others. And so, obviously, I can get into blogger. But I cannot read any of my own old posts. I know I mentioned some controversy in a post where I discussed my internet experiment a couple of times ago. I have not been able to read my own posts since then. Coincidence? I think not.