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JISHOU, HUNAN — Yesterday was unusually busy for me, so I want this chance to take to chronicle it.
Every Sunday, I teach spoken English (and some reading) to five 9-year-olds for two hours. These kids are the children of police officers — friends of my friend Smile, whose husband is an officer, too. One of my student friends helps me in this project, since I need someone to translate English to Chinese. Though the kids are rambunctious, they are also very bright, so the job is not as awful as it sounds (unless the reader happens to be a primary school teacher, who would know what I mean).
At 11, Nora and I left the police residential compound (警公安局 jing gong an ju) and headed for lunch at the university dining hall. There we were joined by four of my students (roommates), our friend from the PE college and a senior in the chemistry college who wanted just to talk with me. Afterward, three of us went for a walk and a sit in the sunshine, which has been in short supply these last four weeks, and the rest went off to their own things.
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CHANGSHA, CHINA — Unlike my last trip to the vicinity of Changsha, this one was not fraught with peril. The disasters were limited to the movies I watched.
Our bus screened two mega-disaster movies, the American 2012 and the Thai copycat version 2022: The Great Tsunami. (It goes without saying both were pirated copies.) And, before I fell asleep in my hotel Saturday night, I watched that classic star-studded extravaganza, The Towering Inferno, with dialogue dubbed into Chinese, of course.
Disaster movies are just really stupid, you know? It makes no difference when or where they are made. They’re just mindless entertainment.
Let’s start with Roland Emmerich’s 2012. As soon as heard the Important Scientist announce ominously that a massive solar flare had sent a storm of neutrinos toward Earth, and these neutrinos for the first time ever (Now with new cleaning power!) were interacting with matter, I knew the rest of the movie would be, scientifically, a stinker.
I was not disappointed.
Physics mini-lesson: Yes, the Sun produces neutrinos. Lots of neutrinos. They are a product of nuclear fusion, the gift that keeps on giving us heat and light from that yellow ball in the sky. The sun has been pumping out these little fellows for the last five billion years, and like all other subatomic particles, solar neutrinos don’t suddenly take the notion to change their ways. Neutrinos normally sail right through the Earth (and us, by the way) like nothing is there. They only very rarely interact with atoms, detectable by little flashes of light in huge underground tanks of pure water.
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JISHOU, HUNAN — My webhost just upgraded many of its customers to a new superduper server over the weekend. Somehow, my site got lost in the shuffle, but now we’re back!
Predictably, the outage happened while I was out of town and for the most part away from the World Wide Web. So, I had no idea anything was wrong until my buddy notified me by email. I sent a message to Planet Earth Hosting, and 24 hours later, the site was up, good as new.
The occasion for my trip out of town was the big car show in Changsha. Two of my former students were going — one to shop and one to wish — and asked me to join them.
So, Saturday morning I took the coach to Changsha. Also on board was a postgrad friend of mine and her friend. They were going to Changsha to shop and (for one of them) to sit for a qualifications exam. To my delight, the bus company has changed its normal stop — next to a swanky hotel — to a place practically next door to my usual — non-swanky — hotel. It makes catching the return bus a breeze now.
That Saturday, I shopping for some wee Christmas gifties with Tina, one of my former students from Jishou U. Her boyfriend was busy at work, and she was bored, so she squired me around the shopping district to find what I wanted. Meanwhile, she bought some stuff, too.
This is a preview of We now resume our regular programming, now in progress. . Read the full post (778 words, 3 images, estimated 3:07 mins reading time)Possibly related posts:
JISHOU, HUNAN — On the spur of the moment, I decided to invite the other four Americans in Jishou to Thanksgiving dinner. Since two of them live right above me, the original plan was to meet at my place.
Then I thought, why not invite some Chinese friends, too? After all, there are many people who have been my family here, but I have never had them in one place at the same time. By the time I got done compiling a guest list, I had 20 names! I can squeeze at most nine people into my apartment at any one time, so clearly we would have to go to a restaurant.
The other Americans were fine with eating out, and since I teach six classes on Thursdays, it was by far a better idea than cooking at my home.
I had this brilliant idea Monday night. Perhaps I’ve gotten enculturated, because the people around here seem to spring dinner plans on you at the last moment. Planning, schmanning. So, I got busy with my cell phone and sent a flurry of texts to my friends on Tuesday morning.
At lunch, I talked the plan over with my friend, Frieda. Her favorite restaurant is Zejiahu, which is near the north gate of the university and which is where our college’s graduates held a dinner in June. The food is really good and the service, very prompt.
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JISHOU, HUNAN — This weekend’s trip to Shaoshan was great during the daytime, but interesting (in the alleged Chinese proverbial sense*) during the night.
Shaoshan (韶山), a county near Xiangtan, south of the provincial capital of Changsha (长沙), is the ancestral home of Mao Zedong’s family. Mao (毛泽东) was born and raised there, and spent his final decade there in a specially constructed compound for the founder and first Chairman of the People’s Republic of China. As you can probably guess, there are all kinds of touristy places to visit.
The area also lays claim to Mao’s successor, Liu Shaoqi (刘少奇), who hailed from Ningxiang county, near Changsha. Liu was at one point a darling of the great leader, then he fell out of favor during the Cultural Revolution, only to be posthumously rehabilitated as a national hero in the 1980s.
So, we visited museums dedicated to Liu and to Mao, the statue of Mao and a mountaintop garden dedicated to Mao. It was an “all Mao, all the time” weekend, with some unexpected features.
(It was a lot like any version of Windows.)
On Saturday night, our hotel lost power — for the entire night — just after we finished dinner. I am still not clear whether the entire neighborhood went dark, or if it was just our place. (Blue screen of death)
This is a preview of My latest travel adventure: Shaoshan, Mao’s birthplace . Read the full post (2237 words, 4 images, estimated 8:57 mins reading time)Possibly related posts:
[Cross-posted at The Daily Kos, and rescued from diary oblivion. That's 3 for 3!]
JISHOU, HUNAN, CHINA — Friday, my sophomores in oral English were more animated than I’ve seen them in ages. It was a set of posters that livened them up.
To preface this diary, I need to explain that our classrooms here are barebones dull: white painted walls, beige tile floors, fluorescent tube lighting, wooden desks and chairs bolted to the floor, and a single double-wide chalkboard. We at least have ample natural lighting from the windows along the exterior wall.
And no heat, but that’s for another diary. [It was at least warmer today than yesterday's high of 6° C (about 43° F).]
In September I decided that staring at the mostly bare walls was getting boring, so I decided to spend a little money and order some posters from the USA off the Internet. (I won’t link to the site here, but the site’s name is no exaggeration. They have ALL kinds of POSTERS.) I ordered four at first, one for each class of sophomores, as the freshmen had not started classes yet.
Three were decently sized, but I failed to read the description of one carefully and ended up with a tiny little poster of Mount Rainier. Very pretty, but not exactly awe inspiring. Since class Z1 of sophomore Oral English meets on Fridays, they were the unlucky recipients of the miniature Mount Rainier. The other classes had claimed the larger posters.
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JISHOU, HUNAN — Today, while I was working on the computer in the office, my deans asked me if I would like to get a flu shot.
That’s the way they phrased it, anyway. The real meaning, however, was, “We really expect you to get a flu shot. Today. With the rest of the staff.”
But such directness is very un-Chinese. As it was phrased, it took a while for the true meaning of the “request” — or “mandatory option,” as my high school chorus teacher put it — to sink into my thick skull. They caught me while I was in the middle of entering students’ names into the Epals.com website, a task which Epals does not make especially easy by limiting you to 25 names at a time.
Distracted as I was, and still without a morning cup of Joe, I stalled and said I would think about it. My British cohort, David, was also likewise pecking away at another computer. He basically said, no. If it wasn’t a requirement, he would rather not. “I try to avoid taking medicines,” he added.
Soon after, David left to teach his classes, leaving me alone with two deans, the staff assistant and one of the head teachers. They chatted away in local dialect (It’s bad enough I can’t understand putonghua, they have to speak Jishou language!), so I could catch a few words, including the Chinese for “flu” and “teachers,”, and our names, David and John. The dean told me she had had her shot earlier in the morning, so I asked her how she felt. (FYI, she’s about my age.) She said her arm was sore and she had a slight headache. No biggie.
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