It's beautiful outside!

After several days of gray, cloudy, and polluted skies, the weather gods have relented and graced China with a beautiful fall day. The all too familiar crisp breeze of change is blowing, and the sun casts it's rays in a way which could only be described as melancholy. I have been very pleasantly reminded of why autumn is far and away my favorite season - I wish a photograph could do justice to the day outside. This morning I walked out the door and was immediately taken by a big tree on standing on the corner of the building which had, seemingly overnight, turned bright orange.

It has been a few days since my last post, primarily because along with the fall I have found myself suddenly very busy. Last week ended in a whirlwind of class, students, and friends, all which blew right on through the weekend, and this week shows no signs of getting any better. Today's beautiful weather has, however, served as a nice reprieve from the grind, so I figured I'd better attempt a post while the going is good.

On Friday of last week, following the end of class, we had a brief meeting with Connie just to check in with the office to ensure that classes were running smoothly, etc., and shortly after that we took Peter and Li Zhao out for a nice dinner at a Korean BBQ restaurant. Let me start by saying a few things about Korean BBQ. It is cooked right in front of you, it's delicious, and its an endless meat fest. The whole meal consisted of a ton of protein and nothing with any carbs - no bread, no rice, no nothing. This is all well and good for anybody still on Atkins, but is BAD for anybody who enjoys beer and/or rice wine. Suffice it to say, we all got very happily loaded, gave Li Zhao an English name (he is now Elvis Thomas Li... say it really quickly and pointedly and it sounds super bad ass), drunkenly decided karaoke would be a good idea, sang out off-key hearts out, came back here, watched Elvis Thomas Li open bottle after bottle of beer (none of which got drunk) with chopsticks, an interesting Chinese parlor trick, decided it would be fun to go walk around the track, and finally end our heroic night of fun at the late hour of 10 pm. Ah China, how I love you.

The next day was Saturday, and after doing my best to sleep in (read: tossed and turned all morning, refusing to get up but being unable to fall back asleep due to the repeated chants of "JI YO!"[which means literally "add oil" or "add fuel;" the Chinese equivalent to shouting "fire it up!"] outside my window coming from the Badminton tournament only feet from my front door...) I awoke and spent a good portion of the afternoon cleaning my apartment for the freshman "free talk" I was hosting at 4. Following the free talk, several of the male students in my class very cheerfully asked me out to dinner - not yet having dinner plans I happily accepted (I decided it would be good to have some guy time). Dinner was in no way noteworthy other than to say that I was really tired... One of the biggest drawbacks to going to dinner with students is that it is in no way relaxing - the language barrier, their desire to impress and make comfortable the foreign teacher, and my desire to maintain at least some aura of professionalism wears you out - especially after a long day and a long night previous.

I had another free talk planned for Sunday afternoon at 4 (one freshman class Sat., one Sun.), but I was looking forward to a relaxing day for the most part - or so I thought. Saturday evening after returning from dinner I received an 11th hour phone call from Peter asking if I would do a favor for a former student of his (we had talked about this on Friday night briefly but we had both decided against the idea) in Jining, a city about an hour away. Peter's student had apparently become very adamant about having a foreigner teach a one hour class to his students, and was, in Peter's words, "begging" me to come and speak. The whole thing was to take only three hours, two of which being travel, and they were going to may be 200 yuan, so I accepted. I was to be picked up promptly at 8:00 the next morning, be driven to Jining to a class where I would teach from 9 to 10, and then be driven back, returning to Qufu by 11:15 at the latest. It didn't sound like a bad way to make 200 yuan.

As with all things of this nature, it didn't quite go as planned... for starters, the car was half an hour late - not that big of a deal, I just taught from 8:30 to 9:30. "Teaching," is however, not really the word I would use to describe this particular experience. I've done several of these little side gigs and have come to one conclusion about them: They simply exist to show off the foreigner, and as an excuse for the cadres of the school to hang out with a foreigner. I read the students some Shel Silverstein poems, I talked about America, we did some tongue twisters, I showed them pictures of my family, the usual hour long show-off-the-waiguoren-routine. Then we took pictures in three different locations for 45 minutes. Everybody had to have their moment with the foreigner... I have decided that if you accept going into these situations that you are there simply as a showpiece, and resign yourself to this, it's really not so bad.

by this time it was approaching 11:15, and they asked if I would be willing to let them treat me to lunch, and given that I hadn't really eaten that day, I happily accepted. This particular group of teachers however was hell-bent on impressing me, so "lunch" meant driving half an hour to this remote, excessively fancy, and excessively expensive, traditional Chinese restaurant. They asked me to pick out what I wanted for dishes, however presented me with an overwhelming assortment of green-onion-thingys-inside-pig-intestines, an assortment of small fowl (I discovered later it was pigeon. Nothing like freshly ground pigeon pancakes... mmm), scorpions, crunchy-looking-exoskeleton-covered-alien-eyed-slimy-bug-thingys, duck heads, and sweet potatoes. I went with the sweet potatoes and let them order the rest... I really just wanted a bowl of rice. Oh well.

The meal itself wasn't actually all that bad, aside from the obviously excessive time and money which went into the affair, which, on top of the 200 yuan they were already paying me, all ended up seeming a bit much to me... I kept wanting to shout, "really guys, I TALKED ABOUT MYSELF FOR AN HOUR. THIS IS A BIT EXTRAVAGANT." I never did get my rice - I figured it would have been a bit impolite for them to order me all this nice food and then eaten nothing but some rice. I had informed them that I needed to be back in Qufu by no later than 3:00, because I had my free talk at 4, a request they happily honored. We had to make a pit stop however to buy some tea to give me and Peter (for letting me come to Jining in the first place). So all in all I ended up with 200 yuan, an extravagant lunch, and a really nice box of tea. Not bad for talking about myself for an hour.

That night we all gathered at Qushida for our second Italian dinner of the week (on Monday night I cooked a surprise spaghetti dinner for Rachel's birthday), a fantastic eggplant parm cooked by Eliza. One thing we have discovered is that, given butter and cheese, things like spaghetti and eggplant parm and garlic bread are all totally doable. Which is awesome. It was a nice cap to the weekend, despite how exhausted I may have felt at the time. Luckily I was able to relax a bit on Monday.

Unfortunately the future looks bleak - from here on out I imagine classes and weekend will begin to blend together more, grading will increase, and sleep will decrease. Also, on a sad note, Rachel has to return to New York early next week for personal reasons, and will likely not return until next semester. The remaining three of us here at Xintan have been asked to cover her classes, which we will happily do, but it means things are going to get that much busier, so blogging might end up taking a back seat unfortunately... I'll try and at least keep everyone entertained with pictures of the week; I've got some good ones lined up.