Vacation at Last!

OR HOW TEACHING SUNDAYS, HAVING TWO VACATIONS IN A ROW, AND BEING A VERY CURIOUS PERSON LEADS TO A LIFE WELL LIVED: REVIVING, REGAINING, RECLAIMING, REMAKING

Hello from China! It has been too long since I have told you of my adventures. There is a reason for my internet silence. The problem is that I have too many adventures, too long of recovery times from said adventures, and more personal drama than 1 individual aught to acquire in 3 weeks' time. So folks remember it's not you, it's me.

Now back to the blogging.

China loves to pack in the holidays. Already we have had 3 -- Teachers' Day, Mid-Autumn Day, and National Day. And it's only the beginning of October! On Teachers' Day, I received a bouquet of flowers from a family next door: a super nice couple who speaks English with an adorable kid who draws cute cards. Mid-Autumn Day was our first official vacation period. But these things can come with a price. We taught the Sunday before break and the Sunday after break. Picture this: a 4-day work week, followed by a 5-day Mid-Autumn Day vacation, followed by a 5-day work week, followed by a 10-day National Day vacation. Can we please stop having bizarre vacation periods and just teach a normal schedule? Please?

Ah but for this price, I had a great adventure. Lynn, my language tutor, invited me to travel with her parents for 4 days during Mid-Autumn break. We got picked up by her parents the night before Mid-Autumn day, after watching the first Twilight movie. We drive to her parents' luxury apartment in Yuci (Yuci is halfway between here and Taiyuan) and crash on nice leather couches to watch some English TV. I-Robot is not the same after the Chinese government cuts out all the excessively revolutionary parts! Sharing a bed under a princess-y mosquito net, I dream of what adventures awaite us during tomorrow's festival. The next morning we drove, then parked and walked -- because of the horrible traffic -- to her grandparents' house (maternal?, paternal?), also in Yuci, to celebrate the holiday.

Mid-Autumn day is eerily similar to Thanksgiving. Everyone goes and spends time with their extended family and uses the day to eat amazing amounts of food. What a great holiday! The traditional foods to eat are dumplings (jiao-zi) and mooncakes, though many Chinese dishes (meat, vegetable, noodles, rice...I could go on for awhile) are also eaten. Chinese meals are all family-style: Chinese family-style. American family-style involves large platters of food, serving spoons, and almost equally large plates for the eaters to stack food upon. Chinese family-style involves many small dishes of communal food, no serving utensils (expect in the case of communal soup bowl, which usually has 1 huge ladle), and 1 tiny plate or bowl of rice or noodles for each diner. We're talking smaller than bread plates people. Now this is what I call communal eating.

On a direct flight, each bite is taken from a communal dish to your awaiting mouth, all with your individual chopsticks (kwai-zi). This process is repeated over and over again until you are full or until the dishes start looking rather picked over and maybe even empty. The later is usually the most common way of stopping because normally you eat beyond being full and only stop at food coma. Stopping when you are full is a rather foreign concept here, and is a concept I am trying to relearn...quickly.

One frustrating aspect of the meal was that I could only smile at Lynn's family. Even the slow ball questions were a bit rough. But then I started casually snacking on peanuts, one by one, with my chopsticks.

"You are very good at chopsticks," one of aunts declared in Chinese.
"My son cannot even pick up peanuts with his chopsticks."
"Where did you learn to use those?"
"Meiguo." (America)

Turns out that my linguistic ability did not hold these relatives back from admiring my skills at something. According to Lynn and her family, one's skills with chopsticks are a marker of one's intellectual abilities. I had gone from the confused dunce to the smart, silent type. Wow. I then made sure to use chopsticks at every opportunity in front of them (easy...there are no forks around), smiling with satisfaction, peanut by peanut.

* * *

After the eating and the digesting... Wait. Let's pause to digest digesting, shall we? Digesting is an important part of any Chinese meal. Taking a 1-hour after-lunch nap is acceptable practice here. Mid-Autumn Day, Lynn and I walked our guts off, Lynn's dad slept, and Lynn's mom chatted away with Lynn's aunts and grandmother. We all had our methods for coping with eating beyond our limits. We didn't want to get car sick!

After the family meal, we four popped into the car for a 5-hour car ride to the southern boarder of Shanxi province. Once we arrived, we were able to finish up celebrating Mid-Autumn day by admiring the moon on an evening stroll and watching a Mid-Autumn day singing extravaganza on TV while nibbling on more mooncakes. What a day!

Over the next couple days I lived through a passport fiasco (never forget to bring your passport to a Chinese hotel!), watched my friend Lynn get manhandled for her mooncakes by a macaque monkey at a monkey reserve in the mountains of southern Shanxi province, and listened in a period ensemble play 1 traditional Chinese piece over and over again at Chancellor Chen Tingjing's house from the Qing Dynasty. We came back to Taigu a day early so that we could catch the last day of Pingyao's International Photography Festival. We got there as the many of the pieces were being taken down, but it was still awesome. (In Pingyao, I got to eat two new kinds of noodles: pancake-shaped ones and beehive-shaped ones.) The next day I was back to being a teacher.

* * *

A few days, drama episodes (brought to me from here and abroad [the US is abroad now...cool huh?]), and sleepless nights later, I find myself on vacation again. We are now celebrating National Day, or the founding of the Peoples' Republic of China. And we don't have to make up these days! WOOT! On National Day, the first day of the 10-day vacation, we are supposed to turn on the TV and watch the troops and tanks roll through Tienanmen Square to the sound of fireworks bursting in Beijing and everywhere else, including Taigu, all morning. (I've been told that the fireworks mean that someone is getting married and that people like getting married on holidays. Not sure if the firworks are or aren't more connected to the holiday.) I slept through all this joy and only got my TV working to see the last 5 minutes of the TV special celebrating it, which at this point was showing off the Shanghai Expo. It looks amazing and when I'm in Shanghai during Thanksgiving, I hope to visit it!

Even though I'm the only American left in Taigu for the holiday, I am glad to be here. I hate doing things alone in China -- I always loved doing things alone in the US. There is so much risk and stress around going out without a Chinese speaker (Chinese or American) at my side. However, every time I go out alone, something amazing happens. Yesterday I went out alone for lunch and ordered by myself for the first time. Guess what happened? I got exactly what I wanted to eat! Other walks alone have exposed me to students chanting Crazy English, to guitar players on campus whom I joined and played some Joanna Newsome for and listened to some Metallica played by them, to cornfields and countryside, to the Chinese equivalent of, or the Taigu equivalent of, normal, which sometimes looks really sublime: shiny, fascinating, different, and completely mundane. Beautifully mundane.

Well readers, I hope you too find some beautiful mundaneness.

p.s. I just bought a bike. Freedom!