chestnuts roasting by an open fire : part one

And by chestnuts, I mean sweet and sour pork, and by open fire, I mean a greasy wok. Anyway, I went to Xi'an this weekend to meet up with a few other PCVs from various other Peace Corps sites. My brother recently arrived in Beijing and after telling him I was going to Xi'an, he and I decided to meet up the following morning.

I met him at 8:30 at the train station in Xi'an after one of the longest and most uncomfortable train rides I've ever experienced. Trains from Nanchong don't go directly to Xi'an, so I had to transfer in Dazhou, a smaller city about three hours east of here. It was actually very interesting. When I went to go buy the ticket in Nanchong, a man tried to cut in front of me and buy his ticket first at which point the cashier explained something to the man in Chinese, and the man recoiled and went behind me. I couldn't pick up everything the cashier said as the local dialect is enormously different from standard Mandarin, but I could understand it was a scolding of some kind and she was explaining that Chinese people shouldn't act that way. The big stereotype of Chinese train stations is that it's first-come-first-served, and pushing and shoving is not only acceptable but encouraged. This clearly evidences, however, that it's changing and it felt really good to know that someone was on my side trying to help the poor laowai get his train ticket. So, with my ticket now, I left at 4:00 to Dazhou.

After arriving in Dazhou at 7:00, I had three hours until the train to Xi'an. Unfortunately, the train from Dazhou to Xi'an was considerably longer than the train from Nanchong to Dazhou; around ten hours. I should probably mention there are three types of train tickets in China:
-Yingzuo (hard seat: the most basic ticket. Essentially a bench with a thin piece of padding with a cloth cover. It's not bad for short trips, but it hurts after a while and it's nearly impossible to get any sleep unless you're by the window where you can put your head down on the table or next to the window)
-Yingwo (hard sleeper: six beds in an open compartment. 66 beds (I believe) in each car)
-Ranwo (soft sleeper: four beds in a closed compartment. I can't remember off hand how many in each car)
So, I have an yingzuo on the ten hour ride from Dazhou to Xi'an and the biggest problem with the yingzuo is that you have very little leg room. You can't stretch out in front of you because there's another passenger. You can't put your legs into the aisle because there are food carts and cleaning personnel that come down the aisle and have no qualms about stepping on your feet or nudging you to wake up and move. I'm also seated in the aisle seat so falling asleep is much more difficult because there's no armrest and no place to really support your head. I admit I have pretty bad posture so naturally I want just to lean back and prop my head up somewhere to fall asleep. No such luck. Imagine trying to fall asleep on a ten-foot-tall stool, and you have some vague notion of what it's like at 3:42 AM on an yingzuo from Dazhou to Xi'an.

At around 4:00 I got up and walked from one side of the train to the other and managed to scout out a few seats where there was no one sitting in or on the either side of the seat. This meant I could put my head down on the mini table or up against the window and stretch my legs out. It was divine. I managed to get an hour or so of sleep before a group of really loud and screechy women came and began chatting until we arrived.

Once in Xi'an I called my brother and he was still on the train from Beijing. It was about 7:30 and he would arrive in an hour or so. I walked around the train station for a while, bought some bananas and cookies and then returned to the station where I met him.

Stay tuned for part two.

Last thing: there was almost a fight in one of my classes today between two of my male students. It was in my advanced oral English class where I'm having my final examinations in which groups of seven or eight students which have respectively researched topics of the Iraq war, gay marriage, or immigration will use the formal debate structure (opening statement, cross examination, rebuttal etc..) to argue against each other (more about this later). Anyway it was at the end of class and I'm not sure what was said, but one student slammed his water bottle down on his desk and jumped up at which point the two students were face-to-face separated by only a few inches. The rest of the students who were packing up their bags immediately turned and the whole class fell silent. It was scary in that "I hope to god this doesn't happen but it sure looks like it will" sort of way. They looked like mountain goats eying each other out before butting heads. Fortunately, one of them turned away and left before the situation escalated, but I really thought I was going to have to break up a fight. When I went to eat hot pot after class with some other students, they didn't hear what was said, but the two guys involved apparently have a long history of confrontation and both have notoriously short tempers. I'll see if I can more information on what exactly happened later.

The GAP catalogue

The new fall line is in. Here's Bill in a delightful sweater vest ensemble available in cream (shown here), burnt umber, and navy blue. Perfect for barbecues, picnics, or back-breaking manual labor: $40.

short about the lecture

I was asked a couple weeks ago to give a lecture at the school by Kitty, the head of the English student union organization. There weren't any details about the content except that it should be around 90 minutes and about whatever I wanted. In my classes I incorporate some lecture, but for the most part, there's a lot of discussion and interaction. I thought about how I could talk constantly about something for 90 minutes and make it interesting at the same time and realized it required a lot of planning.

The lecture was scheduled for 7:00 PM this night, and in typical Phil fashion, I started working at 4:30. I had told Kitty the topic would be culture, but in order to give myself some leeway so I could change the content in the future if I wanted to, I didn't tell her much of the specifics about what exactly about culture I would be talking about. I wasn't worried though. I wasn't going to be reviewed in any way and I knew that even without any planning I easily make a 90 minute speech about culture.

I figured it should be a lecture about something students were curious about. I haven't seen a Chinese teacher's lecture, but according to other students, all of the lectures from Chinese teachers are pretty dull. It's essentially a professor at a podium speaking for 90 minutes. It was a Friday night and I know I wouldn't want to attend a lecture held by a foreign teacher about something strictly academic, so I decided it I would try to keep it light. The biggest thing was making sure I didn't stand and talk like the Chinese teachers, but I love to be dynamic when I'm on stage so that was the least of my worries.

Knowing students absolutely love to look at pictures and are incredibly curious about traveling and foreign culture, I took about 45 of my nearly 2,500 travel pictures on my computer into a powerpoint separated by information slides about culture:


-Culture is what makes us different
-Culture makes our cities different
-Culture is our ideas about religion
-Culture is what gives us ideas about what is acceptable and unacceptable, what is good and bad, and what is funny and not funny
-Culture is the food we eat
-Culture is what we like
-Culture is also what we don't like
-Culture makes us friendly

After each slide I put in some pictures from my travels. I explained the pictures and told some stories surrounding them. The time when I got my cell phone stolen with a friend while sneaking back into estadio nacional after leaving to buy pisco got the best response. I used some pictures of dishes from Chile and Egypt for 'the food we eat' and the pictures of the protests in Chile for 'what we don't like'. Man, I love those protests.

I ended with a slide about what I have learned from traveling:
What have I learned?
-Culture is a beautiful thing
-We are all different, and culture is what makes us different
-You cannot get rid of your culture
-We need to respect other cultures

The whole thing went flawlessly. I couldn't have asked for a better response. After my speech, which lasted about 60 minutes, I opened it up for questions, of which there were a number and I had to end the Q&A session myself after about 20 minutes to prevent it from dragging on. There were lots of laughs (exactly what I wanted), and afterwards lots of people came up, asked to take a picture, and thanked me. I then took some of my students who had come to the lecture out to eat some hot pot and a local restaurant.

I also heard one of the English teachers, described by Kitty as 'plump', is interested in my new online newspaper for students: www.cwnutimes.com. I'm not sure in what capacity, but it'd be nice to have a Chinese English teacher around to help or maybe write some articles. I've put a lot of time into the website so I hope it's successful. The first meeting is on the 13th, and I've been actively promoting it by telling other teachers and students to put up flyers and inform their classes. I have absolutely no idea how many people will show up on Wednesday.

In all:
a great day.