Yesterday I was feeling pretty low much of the day -- listening class is very difficult for me to teach, and since I'm not having fun in there yet, the students certainly aren't. A day where I felt like a poor teacher, and hated everyone looking at me like I was supposed to know what I'm doing. I still don't entirely know how to work the lab equipment, & lord knows 5 students and teachers clustered around and talking at me in Chinese isn't going to help me figure it out. Just one of those days where it felt like people were yelling at me when they spoke Chinese to me, or treating me like an idiot because I couldn't understand them. Of course that's all mental, and wholey inside me. The people here are wonderful, even if the systems are sometimes frustrating.

Today is a very different story though! This morning I taught my "making decisions lesson" to my second section of seniors... first we did activities with moral decisions, discussed in groups but dealing with individual opinions, and held an informal debate. Then they made analytical decisions about business partners from profiles I'd made up, and both justified their rationale and tried to poke holes in their classmates' rationales. Talked about working with both advantages and disadvantages. Next class we'll go over the rules of formal debating, and in teams, prepare more formal positions having to do with global events. The following class they will participate in 3 half-hour debates. The class went down well, and when I walked outside, it was brisk but with a bright sun, an art exhibition up where I walk home, and students everywhere. One of those days that makes you so happy to be on a college campus. As I was entering my neighborhood, a little boy jogging past looked up at me and gave me a casual hi before sticking his hands in his pockets and kicked his ball on down the way. With all the wide-eyed stares and "Hellooooo"s that we're used to getting, this simple hello made my week.

I moved my friday afternoon speaking class to this afternoon, just for today, and with them I'll be doing identity. Brainstorm questions whose answers would really tell you who a person is. Discussion on The Incredibles (we watched that in listening class this week) and what it means to use words like special, fitting in, image vs. reality, a calling, obligation and desire, etc... Then: what does it mean to be self-aware? Read a Native American "I Am..." poem, talk about verbs that can really get at the heart of who you are (I am, I will be, I wish, I want, I hope) and then they'll write their own I Am poems and present them. Wrap-up discussion: happy with self vs. always wanting to improve oneself. Key english expression? "It's not just black and white." Ohhhh three hour classes -- so hard to plan for and keep up the energy, but you can really develop a lesson and carry it all the way through!

Annnyway, tonight I'll clean and relax and tomorrow (friday), lots of PCV's scattered around Gansu will be coming into Lanzhou for the week, or at least the weekend (national holiday)! I'm holding a big party to celebrate two of their birthdays, and because on saturday we'll have been in China for 3 months exactly!

[edit: Afternoon class went well -- lots of laughter early on, and beautiful poems from all the kids! Walked home with a student whose I Am poem was terribly sad... had a great conversation and she told me that they all really want to help me settle in here, they just don't know what I need! I told her what I need was to be taught how to cook chinese food. She said they all think I just work so hard (debatable) preparing lessons for them and they really appreciate it -- this from the class I thought I wasn't bonding with! I was just really touched. She took my number when I offered it and said she'd call next time she feels really sad.]

It's nice when the small routines start to develop. If I hold my kids right up until the bell, I'll be walked almost all the way home by one group of students or another. Our front doors have some stick to them: Pierce opens his with a body-check, I open mine with a hip-pop. Oatmeal in the mornings while I go over my lesson-plan for the day, beef-noodles sometime later in the day. Odds and ends out of my dresser/cupboard or the market for a third meal.

Two nights ago, David, a Chinese english teacher here who's been very close to other PCV's over the last two years, had us over to dinner. He and his roommate, a student here named Wondering, fixed us dinner in one of their bedrooms. David cooked, in addition to setting up hot-pot on a hot-plate in the middle of the room. It was awesome and we've already made David promise us cooking lessons. The next night our department took all the foreign teachers (there are about 8 of us total this year) out to dinner. It was interesting, with toasts all around, though I was a little pre-occupied with taking some giardia meds to hopefully kick the stomach-aches. Afterwards we went out with David to meet up with Cayce, a China 11, and his site-mate, my beloved Chinese class classmate, Angie. Solid night.

Today I was feeling a little alone and down in the apartment for much of the afternoon, but I met up with a student in the late afternoon for dinner. She had invited me to her aunt & uncle's home on the other side of the city. We took a bus about 45 minutes across town to the street where shops make and sell ceramic home-goods, then walked the remaining 20 min to the apartment. There I was treated to a huge dinner (including hunks of chicken breast -- chicken usually comes chopped up and on the bone here, so I was stoked), the best wine I've had yet in China, 5 hours of practicing my own special brand of Chinglish, and a beautiful tea ceremony. This family was so incredibly gracious! They made me feel entirely at home. We spent half an hour after dinner hanging out around the dinner table trying to figure out metric conversions using all the measure words we knew, both Chinese and English. My student wanted to take a shower there before we left (the dorm showers are communal and if they are anything like the toilet trenches in their dorms and by the classrooms, pretty awful), and while she was doing that, her aunt and uncle laid out a beautiful tea ceremony for me, over a special wood and clay set that they have. The aunt spent about 15 minutes telling me about different teas and traditions and how they vary regionally in China... I'm not saying I understood all of it, but I got a lot of what she was telling me. When it was time to start slurping the tea (all Chinese have the slurp down pat in order to drink down the very hot teas and show appreciation), they had me inhale deeply over it first, then roll a sip around in my mouth before slowly drinking it down. Just like a good wine-tasting.

The only other things going on right now are the continuing process of home-ifying the apartment and trying to get the rest of my semester sketched out for each class. Speaking of which, I'd just like to give a shout-out to the joys of teaching Oral English: in the last 20 minutes of class on friday, I had my kids designing alien species who live on Mars, and presenting each species to the class with mucho descriptions and their best story telling techniques (body language, facial expression, diction, pacing!). All aliens must have a super-power you know.

my apartment, a work in progress:

This is the view from my kitchen back down the apartment. To the left, just in front of the easy-chair, is my front door. I don't have any small side tables yet, so as you can see, lamps are still on the floor like the one there by the TV. Through the door way on the right, you can see my bedroom. Next to that is the bathroom (straight through that doorway), and around the corner, opposite my bedroom, is my study.


This is my kitchen. It looks sort of like a little deck extension at the front of the building and has sliding glass doors in order to help insulate the apartment during the winter as a lot of cold can come in through the kitchen windows. Here on the left are my gas burners and hood, and on the right is my sink. The counter space in between is lined with windows which overlook the same row of small shops that my study looks down on.

This is the dining room I guess you could call it. It stretches back from my living to the kitchen. On the left is my orange wall and my table... the pictures on the table will eventually go up on that wall. To the right are my fridge and microwave; water cooler; dresser for silverware, cooking utensils, food; coat rack which will eventually go on the wall over the shoe-rack. To the right, just out of sight, is the door to the apartment, sitting between the dining room and living room.

This is my bathroom. It's about the size of a shower stall altogether, which works since I shower right there in between the toilet and sink... on the left you can just see my showerhead up there on the wall. Actually, I think I'm very lucky because I have a family-size water heater just for me. I think the pipes give it a very modern art-deco look!

This is my living room... the couch and chairs are definitely as comfortable as they look! Opposite the couch is a tv and my new DVD player. The curtains in the back of the room can be pulled completely to close off the room (I usually do this at night or to keep the chill out), but cracked as they are now, you can see my windowed catch-all room, with a broken washing machine, a spare desk, some cleaning supplies, and the clothes line.



This is the spare bedroom, now my study. The WaiBan provided me with the PC and printer... as soon as I can get the two machines to communicate, this will be a godsend when it comes to preparing lessons. In the lower left hand corner, out of sight, is a bookshelf and some pictures of bamboo that I hung. The window overlooks a whole row of tiny mom-and-pop restuarants, and beyond the campus wall, a dorm.


The bedroom. The WaiBan kindly bought me new sheets and they're beautiful -- the bed is very comfortable too, unusual here! At the foot of the bed, you can just make out a few paintings leaning against the wall. Once I figure out how to hang them on my cement walls, they will hang on that opposite wall, a triptic of flowers, warm yellow and green and orange. In the lower right corner, out of sight, there is a small wardrobe for my clothes and toiletries.

Things that have happened since Monday:
1) painted my dining area bright orange. shades of UVA... (happy Homecomings!)
2) met all my students
3) bought a DVD player, but no DVDs
4) had my window and door fixed
5) discovered my washing machine is broken
6) broken my toilet. fixed my toilet. (okay, Ben actually did both of these things, but they are very symptomatic of my apartment as a whole)
7) started getting to know these bus routes: 139, 111, 141, 142, 137, 6 ( 6 of some 25 odd routes)
8) found the black-market cheese provider. okay maybe not actually black-market, but by far the most random and sketchy adventure I've been on so far in China


+ As it turns out, no tape + China-quality paint = interesting paint job. Perhaps a little brighter than planned as well. It's growing on me though, and is a far sight better than the dirty white walls from before.

+ My classes are great, and I only teach a total of about 90 students in my 12 credit hours this semester, so I should be able to get to know all of my kids really well. My two senior classes have very high English levels, so the biggest challenge there will be, well, to challenge them! I definitely expect to have a good time with these advanced students, though. My sophomore class, which I have 6 hours each week, is still a little intimidating at 35 students, but there are a large handful of kids in there who I am already really enjoying! Several have been volunteering in class (almost never happens in Chinese classrooms), and several others took me across town the other day to buy paint. As a class they're really rambunctious, but not many Chinese classes are so lively, so I think it's going to be fun.

+ They've cracked down on illegal DVDs lately, so DVDs have been hard to purchase! Still, with no tv and quite a bit of free time on my hands (at least for the moment), I'm happy to be able to watch what movies I can get my hands on.

+ Without the gaping hole in my window, and without the large square cut-out in my door, I'm feeling rather warmer and safer than before. Yay!

+ The hose to my from the faucet to my washing machine is full of holes (does an awesome immitation of a sprinkler), there is no top, and the water won't stay in the machine. Still, with a little ingenuity and hands-on interference in the machine-spasming spin cycles, I have one load of now dry clothes which smell like detergent, if their actual cleanliness is still debatable. I may just take some clothes into the shower with me next time.

+ My toilet has a definite and fairly obstinate personality.

+ My biggest Now-I-Actually-LIVE-Here goal is to figure my way around this 3.1 million person city that runs by bus. Some days this is quite a job since the combination of hectic intersections, train crossings, and completely torn-up sections of the road leading to my university can turn a 10min home-stretch part of any journey around the city into a 1 hour, stop & go, exhaust fume-y ordeal. Still, it's a very cool city with an immense mix of Han, Hui, and other minority cultures and a huge Muslim presence. I love getting instructions on which buses to take to certain locations, and then people & neighborhood watching all the way there. I try to make mental notes about where certain things, like flowers, or tools, or books, are to be found.

+ So, cheese. I miss it so much. Matt, one of the China 11s in Lanzhou, told me that there is a place where large blocks of cheese are to be found at prices that we can more-or-less afford. His instructions were as follows: "Take the #142 East. After it gets through the downtown area, it wil go through a bunch of small twists and turns. When it hits a T in the road and turns left, get out, and backtrack about 100yards West. Go into a sketchy-looking building and look for a door with western-food advertisements on it. Knock on the door." A little vague to be sure, but this is cheese we're talking about. Ben came to visit for the day, and after picking him up at the bus station, we set out on the search for cheese. After a half-hour bus ride looking for a stop like what Matt described, and 15 minutes of wandering through a mechanic-shop neighborhood, we spied a promising door around the back of a building, down an alley. It was padlocked but through a crack we could see a shelf full of McCormick spices and suspected that we were in the right place. No one was around, however. So we circled the building and came out by a dusty set of apartments. Seeing an open door, but uncertain and fairly confused at this point, we were about to leave, when a neighboring lady, face hidden behind one of those germ-blocking masks, gestured us to go on into the open door. We did, and seeing another open door, proceeded back into a ground-floor apartment where we found a two men knee-deep in sales paperwork. One of the men led us back to the padlocked door, opened it, and showed us (in addition to the spices), fridges full of mammoth blocks of cheese and cuts of meat. Twenty four hours later and I'm still pretty pleased with myself for such a successful mission!

Never fear, the backpacks showed up -- a lucky thing since it's been getting nice and crispy cool at night and in the mornings. Plus we were starting to get smelly.

The next big challenge is hanging things in the apartment. It's made of concrete and my attempts to drive in nails just create large holes in the plaster layer, making minimal progress into the walls itself. Bah humbug. I went to a huge market yesterday and bought a whole lot of little odds and ends I needed (like pans, and a shoe rack) as well as pictures which will really make it all feel a little less bare. Eventually. But no, it's definitely already getting to the point where when I unlock the door I have that "oh good, I'm back home!" feeling. Not bad. And there's this one noodle and shaokao place right down on the street in front of my place which I can tell will become my "regular" place... they already know without my even asking to please take it light on the peppers they dump on top of my noodles. There's a 10ish year old son who works there too -- he's in charge of keeping the tea cups filled and he takes his job VERY seriously. Really sweet kid.

On Monday I don't teach, so I went into the department that morning to try and get a better fix on my actual schedule (still a little elusive) and to see the language lab in which I'll be teaching my listening class. It's very high-tech. So high-tech in fact, that it doesn't have a tape-player, although the only resources I've been issued to accompany the must-get-through-or-students-will-not-pass-very-important-certification-exam-! book are tapes. We also couldn't get the control computer to turn on. Okay. We wander around rounding up various English teachers and staff who are in the department in hopes of getting an impromptu lesson on the multi-media resources. They do manage to get the computer turned on. After which we all stand around in mutual confusion for about 20 minutes while they come to the conclusion that no one really knows just what we should do. Solution? They will lend us a tape recorder to play the tapes manually. Pshaw to all that high-falutin' technology. We don't really have access to the tapedeck outside of class though, so I don't really have any way to preview the tapes... I think I may just bypass the problem altogether an assign the kids to do the formal listening outside of class and just do all supplementary things in class. The kids would probably appreciate that too, though now I've just go to figure out a way to get my hands on these kinds of materials: newsclips, videoclips, songs, etc. ...and then figure out how to play them through the department-baffling multi-media console. For tomorrow at least, it'll just be me up there.

Today I taught the first section of my Senior English majors. It was aaaawesome. I was done with introductory activities after just half of the three hour class, but didn't feel right about letting them go so early, so I improvised an activity based on resumes/job interviews & professional presentations which went really well. It's a practical skills class and their English is extremely high-level so my overarching goals for the class are 1) to provide students with practical oral skills for after graduation, specifically in the workplace and 2) to equip students with the ability to have meaningful conversations with native English speakers (they are so shy to use their spoken English!!). Anyway, I'm a totally lucky duck because there are only 16 kids in the class I taught today! That gives a ton of time for each student to get a lot of time speaking, with eachother, in front of the class, and with me. Even my larger Sophmore class which is supposed to have just 35 students may actually be only around 30 kids. Some of the other volunteers are caught in the predicament of trying to teach oral English skills to classes of 50 or 60 students.

The afternoon was less fun as I was stuck in the apartment with a bad cold waiting for the repairman to show up. He never did show up in fact, so I still have a smashed open bedroom window, broken peep-hole in the door, and ripped apart cable cord. BUT I have internet and hot water and peanut butter and a comfy bed so I'm holding the fort down just fine. I also got a cute phonecall from the English Dept. secretary. As far as I can tell, the 10 minute phonecall was just to see if I was "settling in"... the odd part being that I'd just met with her on Monday about my class schedule and her intro questions on the phone went along the lines of "so you just arrived this weekend? and are you settling in? do you know where the department is? and how are you settling in? do you know your way around campus? and how are you settling in?" I was slightly perplexed, but touched, when we hung up.

The department registrar also called me and I understood all the info he gave me in Chinese, though we switched to English at the end of the conversation. Score!

I've been in-transit in one form or another for the last week, so don't worry, I haven't actually fallen off the face of the earth. And I really appreciated all the emails waiting for me when I finally got online again -- thank you!!

So! The host fam appreciation dinner went beautifully. Ben and my families were at the same table and our host-moms spent the whole dinner gossiping in Chinese about the foods we like/don't like. At the end of the meal, my host mom sadly shook here head and informed me that Ben and I do not have similar eating habits, with the clear and ominous message that this does not bode well for the relationship. Eating and everything surrounding eating is extremely culturally important in China -- I made my counterpart's mother-in-law's day by overstuffing myself for fear she think her food is not delicious (she had looked ready to cry when I paused after two bowls of food). The slideshow went off without a hitch, to much clapping from each family whenever a photo of one of them popped up. Afterwards, we went out to KTV (kareoke) for a bumping good time before finishing off at our regular shaokao (chinese bbq) & beer place for cards and conversation late into the night.

On sunday night my host family took Ben and I out to dinner where we all toasted each other silly and they told me that my Chinese home is with them -- it was wonderful. Monday night I packed up my things and then we all spent one last evening at our regular spot, where the owners wished us luck and safe travels and thanked us for patronizing their business. My host family gave me a beautiful silk scarf, and this really great apron for whenever I can finally convince a Chinese friend to teach me to cook Chinese food instead of hospitably refusing my help in the kitchen. Saying goodbye was surprisingly hard despite nearly all of us definitely being ready to move on to our own places. I have some really great pictures with the whole family and especially the baby that I'll try to post soon.

At the hotel we received our LPI results (I inched my way into an Advanced Low score which I'm really happy about, though am not sure I really deserve), as well as air-filters and water purifiers. For two days we had fairly interminable meetings followed by long nights generally involving wine and 80s dance music (we won't all be back together again until january at the earliest). On Thursday we were officially sworn in by the Ambassador -- you can call me Volunteer Rush now, thank you very much. Over half of the group left for site right after swearing-in which was really rough on everyone. Between some of our closest friends leaving and goodbyes to all our language teachers and training site manager, I was not the only one crying.

Yesterday our bosses (who had been at the swearing-in ceremony) scooped us all up along with our baggage and we all piled onto the train for Gansu. This morning we said more big goodbyes, leaving Emily and the Rosses off in Tianxue, and Ben in Dingxi. We had sent a few bags in the baggage car to leave room on the train, but come to find that the bags are not actually on our train... Pierce and I are hoping that our backpacks show up tomorrow... mine had all my clothes in it, and I need them to layer up. It's already down into the 50s and even 40s at night here!

I finally got to see my apartment at long last. And it wasn't quite what I was expecting at first! I guess I'd just assumed it was identical to Pierce's which we'd seen, but little things I'd counted on like some cabinets and the beds were really different. I'm defintiely PMSing but the moment the door shut behind my counterpart teacher and my Waiban liason, I burst into tears. Don't worry! About 3 minutes later I found some old sheets to cut up and started scrubbing the place down, instantly feeling much better. I also hooked up the computer they provided me, and it has some music on it from the previous volunteer! I don't think I'd mentioned this, but my iPod was stolen about two months back and I've really missed having music around me. Even the small selection on the computer put a huge smile on my face and made the cleaning go more easily. I moved the furniture around and while I still have a long way to go before it's really homey, I'm really pleased and I think it's going to be super cozy before I'm done with it! I'll have internet in my apartment hopefully starting next week, so I should be able ot stay in much better touch than I know I've been doning lately.

My counterpart, who is a Chinese English teacher here who will sort of be my special go-to person for help and friendship, invited me over for a "simple meal" at her home and I had this really simple and delicious dinner crouched around the coffee table in her home with her in-laws and 5 year old daughter. It left me feeling so warm and much more at ease. My chinese is improving, but people in Gansu speak with a much clearer accent and are much easier for me to understand then in Chengdu with the Sichuan dialect. After dinner we walked around campus and the cool crisp weather felt all the world like October in Virginia. I think I'm going to really be happy living at this University. I'm feeling really good right now, and looking forward to shopping tomorrow, lesson-planning like a fiend on monday, and teaching starting on tuesday!

Now just as soon as they fix the broken window in my apartment and my sweatshirt shows up along with the rest of my clean underwear, I'll be right as rain.

love, kexin