黄瓜

Cucumber flavored ice-cream.

That's all I have to say.

凤凰

**This post is my first slap in the face of the Great Firewall.  Brought to you in part by Sammie and friends.

I've had my fair share of sitting on a train all night with my earplugs stuffed in my ears.  It's definitely not my favorite activity.  But usually the end result makes it worth enduring the pain.  This particular time I got lucky and was able to stretch out across a seat for three in a semi-dark compartment and sleep for about half the night.  It's a rare train that has so much empty space and I'm thanking heaven for it.  I only got woken up three times by security guards who wanted to talk to me with the pretense of telling me to take care of my *dongxi and watch for thieves.

At 7am as we descended from our cozy train we were greeted by a strange burning orb in the sky that seemed to emanate heat and hurt my eyes.  Legend has it it's called 太阳 and the ancients saw it quite often.  It was accompanied by a lack of wetness in the air and seemed to turn the sky from grey to blue.  No one can remember the last time it appeared from behind the protection of clouds.  (Seriously the locals did tell us it had been a solid month since they had seen the sun)  The next thing to assail my senses was a middle-aged gentleman who yelled "I LOVE YOU!!" repeatedly after me in an attempt to get me to take his taxi the rest of the way to FengHuang.  I'm relatively certain it was the only English he knew.

FengHuang means Phoenix when translated and is the site of a novel written by a famous Chinese author, and so has recently become a popular place to travel, but is not yet so touristy as to be annoying.  Everything was still moderately authentic and absurdly cheap.  Our hotel was not the cheapest in town and only cost me $3 (American) per night.  I went with two friends who I've been studying with and we had a delightfully relaxing time wandering around the old-style town and shopping.  In the afternoon when my Chinese buddies were taking their siesta I sat by the river to enjoy the sunshine and wrote.  Naturally I aroused the curiosity of the fishermen nearby.  A few bent over my shoulder trying in vain to read the strange characters I wrote before giving up to ask me instead.

My two friends decided to speak with me only in Chinese for the weekend which gave us quite a few laughs as they had to speak idiot speed and I made a number of ridiculous mistakes.  We went boating on the river, and our guide made up a song for me as we paddled around.  The only part I understood was, "Welcome foreign friend" but I video-ed the whole thing for later study.  He had such an obviously joy-filled life and it's small wonder with such a job.  All day every day he boats down a beautiful river singing at the top of his lungs.  I can think of many worse ways to make a living.

Traveling is inevitably adventure-filled but I think I'll keep the stories to a minimum so that I have time to tell you about our return.  We took the train from 3am to 9:30am back to YiChang and I taught class with a pretty substantial headache which was alleviated that night when one of the girls I traveled with made the decision to give her life to our Dad and take the plunge.  We actually had two new births in the same night, so be praising his name!

"The less routine the more life."

-Amos Alcott

*stuff

A Message From Down Under

And now a brief message from Katie's favorite person in the world:

Katie would like to inform you that her blogging privileges have once again been revoked for an unkown period of time. She offers her deepest apologies for any undue anxiety that may cause you and asks for your patience despite deep interest in her day to day activities. She looks forward to being able to entertain you once more with captivating tales and profound wisdom. Until then, Adieu.

我能用左手吃饭

Occasionally I like to challenge myself, you know, just to prove how talented I really am.  I've gotten pretty good at using chopsticks, in fact they feel more like an extension of my hand than a foreign utensil.  So I decided I'd better step it up a notch.  I mean, anybody can use their right hand, but only a real pro could eat left handed.

So I was making chocolate bread this morning for my evening study group, at the request of James and I went to light my oven...The one that had the minor explosion several months ago.  I lit the fire and it went out after a few seconds, so I reached back down in the bottom and sparked the lighter a second time.  BIG mistake.  A ball of fire the size of my oven came rushing at me, removing all the hair from my arm, some from my eyebrows, and nearly incinerating my hand.

Since then I've been alternating two wet towels between the freezer and my charred right hand.  At lunch I was either about to cry or cut my hand off, so rather than eat I went and got some Chinese medicine to put on it, which looked like poop and smelled worse.  That's when the challenge began.  It's nearly impossible to eat with your right hand when it's smeared with poop sauce and balancing an ice cream bar from the nearby vendor.  I can now say I've used chopsticks with my left hand but I wouldn't exactly call it a success.  Not much food made it in my open mouth.

While the medicine was supposedly healing my burn I was whining non-stop about the pain so Zack took me to get some pain killers too so that I could be comfortably numb.

"There is no pain, you are receding.

A distant ships smoke on the horizon.

You are only coming through in waves.

Your lips move but I cant hear what youre sayin."

-Pink Floyd

星期天

It starts with a camera innocently pointed your way.  They're trying not to be obvious but not really succeeding.  You see them snapping pictures nonchalantly out of the corner of your eye.  You know what's coming.  They'll want to talk to you pretty soon.

Sure enough after a few minutes they approach.  "Where are you from?"  "What do you do?" "How long have you been in China" "Have you got used to China yet?"  This is where my mood determines my behavior.  If I'm feeling friendly I politely answer the questions and try to hint that I was on my way to dinner and am getting pretty hungry.  If I'm feeling less humorous I pretend that I don't know any Chinese and "ting bu dong" my way out of the situation.  Lucky for me yesterday I was in a good mood and wound up being approached by a newspaper man.  He wants to take pictures of me for some YiChang paper.  No idea what for.  A few days before that it was a video camera, so we could be in a commercial for some local company who wants to show their international friendliness.  I wonder if my face will be plastered all over posters like Yao Ming's is.  I sure hope not.

Aside from being treated like a movie star one of the things that warms my heart is seeing new faces on Sundays.  It's like taking a mustard seed and watching it grow into a tree.  Sure makes life worthwhile.

Also someone wished me a "Happy Mother's Day" today.  That's the first time I've ever gotten that one considering I'm not a mother.  I really don't know how to respond.

"There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life--happiness, freedom, and peace of mind-- are  always attained by giving them to someone else."

-Peyton Conway March

给你

Chinese people are the most selfless people I've ever met.  Yesterday was one of those suffocatingly hot days when the very air seems to press down on you.  Between my afternoon classes I heard a knock on the door and two of my students, Shelly and Sophia had brought me a bottle of water to help me survive the next two hours.  Last week Rita brought me ice cream before class-just because she thought of me.  The week before that it was iced tea.  It's like they cannot buy something for themselves without first getting one for each of their friends.  I've learned so much about thinking of others and unselfish giving from living here.  You can see it reflected in everything they do but perhaps most evidently in table etiquette.  You never fill your own bowl of rice, but you serve everyone else.  You never pour yourself tea but you fill everyone else's glass.  The utmost consideration is shown by putting food in your friend's bowl.  Which incidentally was one of the hardest things for me to get used to when I first came.  I couldn't understand why people were filling my bowl with food.  They were showing that they care about me.  I hope someday I will be able to constantly think of others the way that they do so naturally.

"No one has ever become poor by giving."

-Anne Frank

我很累

A large number of frogs were seen crossing the road heading away from their water source last week.  Perplexed by such a phenomenon the witnesses speculated about the cause of such bizarre behavior.  Could it be that amphibians possess some special sense that allows them to know about some sort of natural disaster before their human neighbors?  Soon the speculation become certainty.  The frogs were fleeing impending doom.  This can only mean one thing:  earthquake!

The first time I heard the story it was a large number of frogs.  The second time it was a few hundred.  Last night they numbered in the thousands.  I'm assuming each person was talking about the same event so I allow for quite a bit of exaggeration.  Around 12:15 last night I got a number of hysterical phone calls from students telling me with absolute certainty that there was going to be an earthquake sometime in the night.  Now I heard a few different time estimates, some told me 2am, others 3.   But they all agreed on one thing:  I needed to evacuate my apartment immediately and go outside in the safe parking lot.

As much as I value my life, I didn't immediately run outside to await with the rest of my more safety-conscious neighbors.  It was already past midnight, I had class in the morning, and the best reason people could give me for believing this story was, "I heard it from a friend who, heard it from a friend who, heard it from another..."

It is too true that often the rumors that circulate around here turn out to be more accurate than what you hear on TV but I just couldn't see the sense in waiting around outside all night for something that may or may not happen.  So I went to bed.  Around 4:30 I was awakened by a text message in Chinese telling me not to worry, there wasn't going to be an earthquake, it was just a rumor.  The message was sent to everyone in the city I think.  I spent about ten minutes trying to decipher the puzzle that is Chinese characters, eventually guessed that it was saying something about the earthquake not happening, and tried my best to go back to sleep.  The damage had been done; however, and the little sleep I got after that included dreams about my apartment crashing down around me.  So when the sun finally rounded this edge of the world it lit upon a very tired and unhappy teacher.

It turns out I wasn't the only one who slept poorly.  I had class at 8am, and about 10 minutes into what ordinarily would have been a semi-interesting activity I noticed about half my students blatantly sleeping, mouths hanging wide open and bodies sprawled across desks.  The ones who weren't quite so obvious about their exhaustion were trying desperately to fight the heavy eyelids waging war against them.  Any other day I would have had fun with their struggle, and deliberately slammed books near the napping students, or called upon them to answer a question I'm sure they didn't hear.  But I had a little sympathy for their plight since I wasn't in much better shape.  We struggled through a torturous 2 hour class period together and were relieved to hear the bell ring out the freedom to nap.  I hope in the future my students won't worry about me so much, and will leave me in blissful ignorance when they hear of a coming disaster.

"I can live for two months on a good compliment."

-Mark Twain