China’s Approach to “Nature”
August 27th, 2008
The University’s wake-up music lasts for much longer than Wuchang Exp. Primary School’s music did. Now that I’ve been up for forty-five minutes, I realize the “wake-up” music is actually a radio station being blasted through a loudspeaker somewhere on campus. Right now there’s a commercial blaring, earlier it was a discussion between a man and woman, early morning Regis and Kelly?
I’ve got to be somewhat utilitarian in my approach to the blog this second time around. I will try and get to my impressions about arriving in China now compared to my first time, but I’ve got to press on from yesterday’s entry, which ended abruptly because it was time for lunch. I don’t have Internet in my room so I’m trying to write as things happen so that when I do have a chance to plug the computer into the Internet, I’ll have a pile of entries to load. Although it is mildly inconvenient for my “job” while over here, I really like being cut off from the Internet like this. It reminds me of a time when we were all further from each other and communication took a concerted effort and time and patience.
So to finish up with yesterday’s entry, we were all reeling from jetlag and slept very well in our compound, though most of us missed the closing ceremonies of the Olympics. In the morning we were loaded back into the large bus and returned to the airport. We had an easy time of it in the domestic terminal since the majority of Olympic traffic was leaving China that morning. We were in the airport for two hours before boarding the plane to Guilin, which was a three-hour flight. I slept most of the way in between Josh and Michelle and we arrived in Guilin, all seventeen of us, ready to start our adventure.
The first day was dedicated mostly to eating and settling in. We were taken, in a group of over twenty, to a small fruit stand just outside one of the University gates to “buy fruit”, which was a shocking experience for me. Just imagine these migrant fruit vendors being inundated with twenty loud, babbling, camera-wielding foreign twenty-somethings. It was an awkward exchange. The professor who took us to this fruit stand is in charge of International exchanges for Guilin University and he had been charged with keeping us occupied for an hour or so while Yu Laoshi changed money for several students who hadn’t visited an exchange counter in the airport. We arrived at the fruit stand and he said stoically, “Buy fruit” and we all stared at the fruit and the vendors stared at us and then my peers started snapping pictures of the vendors, of the fruit, of each other in front of the fruit and then someone mentioned to the professor, “We don’t have any money yet” to which he replied, “Let’s go.” We followed him back onto the University compound and walked matter-of-factly behind him, as he led us along a strange route that eventually circled around and returned us to the dormitory right as Yu Laoshi was arriving from the bank. We were told to rest until dinner and I followed these instructions, waking four minutes before the banquet. I was groggy and disoriented throughout dinner and not hungry for my fourth meal of the day.
The food here at the University has been, so far, incredible! Really, really amazing food, both simple and complicated has been provided at each meal. There is no fear of anyone going hungry or losing weight on this trip.
After dinner, I walked the ten flights up to our floor to try and shake my drowsiness. I met Josh coming out of the elevator and we walked up to the eleventh floor to survey the “exercise facilities” that are available to the professors living on that floor, and to us, apparently, as well. What we found is certainly my kind of exercise equipment. Along a narrow glass-walled hallway, facing the gorgeous view, were several self-powered calisthenic-type contraptions. A tiny purple treadmill that consisted of a purple mat wrapped around a wedge that you provide the impetus for. If you stop for even a second, it stops with you. Gorgeous! And some other curious contraptions that I don’t yet know the purpose of, but may soon try to use if the walking up the stairs trick doesn’t work for making room in my belly for all this delicious food! After this quick exploration we returned to our rooms and I fell asleep after reading one or two pages from my book.
I feel a bit rusty, I must admit. There once was a day when recording the above would have taken mere minutes. Of course, when I was living in Wuhan, I had a lot of free time on my hands for ruminating on small experiences. Here I’ve got little time and a full day of all kinds of impressions to get down. As I said before, utilitarian. But the joy of the blog is taking something small and following it through its seeming strangeness until I’ve grappled with the differences and come to a conclusion that illuminates something back to me about what I’ve experienced in relation to my own background as it perceives this new background. The overlay of the two is what I love discussing and discovering. Here, I feel, I will merely have the time to write snatches from my memory…with little time to see how the impressions have worked themselves through me. Am I complaining? Sheesh!
Okay, I will say this though, I’m going to have to keep the titles simple because, well, this entry is over and I didn’t manage to get to the story from whence the entry’s title came!
