Green Futures

Sun. Jun, 14

The chances that I will maintain a daily account of my time in China are approximately zero. Nevertheless, one of the advantages of unresolved jet lag in a city I know very well is that I rise very early and have no particular desire to go out and see interesting sights, and instead can write an account of my life.

Having my own laptop also helps. To be fair, the past two times I came to China there was a laptop among my belongings. In both cases, however, the machine was broken and served only as an extra four pounds of dead weight to lug around. Having a working machine greatly facilitates writing these things, as I can choose the time and place,I don’t have to pay, and when I am done I just find a computer with an internet connection and upload what I have.

My accomplishments yesterday included finishing up yet another draft of my presentation for FS and submitting that to the appropriate authorities. I e-mailed it to them from the basement of the ACC facility, only to discover a few hours later that the people I was e-mailing, whom I vaguely thought were in Chengdu, actually were in the same building just two floors up. This was mildly disconcerting, as I was not really very satisfied with my draft, but the deadline forced me to submit.

Afterwards I celebrated by getting money from the bank and confirming twice over with the salesmen at the electronics store that my computer can use Chinese power without being fried (the reason for my first dead computer in China), and tested it successfully. Along the way I discovered both that the relentless Chinese desire to tear things down and rebuild them (cherished at least since the first emperor) is still strong; many sidewalks were a ruble-strewn mess, with giant slabs of concrete sinking slow into piles of dusty dirt, which gradually transformed into some new sidewalk that, to my eyes, looked about the same as the one before. To my surprise, however, I noticed significantly more lush green grass than on my last trip here. They appear to be planting and watering the stuff much more than before. The skies also have been quite clear and sunny; and the maddening endemic of Olympics-associated frenzy has abated (though I did see one tenacious “One World One Dream” sign in the airport). It’s not the same Beijing I know.

I had agreed to help ACC by pretending to be a student for their teacher training sessions, and was frankly quite nervous; so after preparing my presentation draft, I made sure to study quite hard the 2nd-year text (which, just between you and me, actually had a couple vocabulary words I had never met before) so as not to make a complete fool of myself. My studying paid off, and I think I did an okay job. It helped that they told me I could make “mistakes” for the teachers to correct, to help them practice. I definitely made a bunch of “mistakes.”

As part of this whole activity, I manged to also bump into most of my former 4^th year teachers, many of whom seemed to remember me. Having an atrocious memory myself, I rarely assume that anyone else will remember me (especially teachers, who will have taught about 20 new students each semester since last summer), but I suppose I left them with a memorable impression.

Alas, at about the time we finished up (roughly 5 o’clock), I was hit by a huge waave of fatigue, an attach no mere mortal could withstand. I did my best to stave it off, first by buying a pen and some powdered milk from the nearby grocery store, and then by practicing writing characters – but it was all for naught. I found myself dozzing off every few seconds in the lounge, and I was worried I might go completely under at any moment, so I caved, and took a short nap (which the back of my mind knew might not be so short), and woke up 3 hours later.

Jake’s two classmates and fellow ACC students, Hector and TK, were going to go out to celebrate Hector’s birthday, so after making an ultimately successful telephoen connection with Hector’s parents, we ended upwandering out to Sanlitun, one of the two famous bar areas popular with expats. The other, Houhai (“back lake”) borders about half of an old man-made lake in the western-central part of the city, while Sanlitun is surrounded on three sides by foreign embassies – and is much closer to ACC. Knowing that it was expensive and not enjoyable, I never went out with my ACC classmates on their frequent excursions to Sanlitun, but figured I should make it over there at least once – so I decided this might be as good a time as any. We ended up in a pretty low key place which had some folks singing popular Chinese songs and old school (by which I mean 1990s) American songs. We got turned off by the prices, however, which were (quite literally) ten times what you would pay in any little grocery store. After wandering around a bunch more, my companions wanted to go to a club. I accompanied them to the door, but there cut my losses and took a cab back to the dorm at about midnight. All in all, not a bad experience, but one not likely to be repeated anytime soon.

And then today, I woke up at 5:45 am.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 14th, 2009 at 7:32 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.