Incase you’ve not been paying attention for the last entry or so, I’ve got a spot of the cold. I took the day off yesterday, and this morning, braved the kindergarten class that I had first off. I got as far as second period before I started to fade again, and got a whiff of that tell tale smell that declares “your throat has gone beyond sore to being infected”. It’s been coming on for a few weeks, and it’s totally normal for me to be getting more sick here than I would if I was in Australia.

Normally, this would be utterly non blogworthy, and I’d not burden you with my whingeing, but today’s experiences could not go by without a mention.

So anyway, I feel (or rather smell) this throat infection coming on, and I know that if I don’t get something done about it, it could either clear up or get worse, in which case I’d still have to get something done about it. A simple decision tree from Game Theory 101 dictates the reasonable course of action, the course in question being one of antibiotics.

So I simple mindedly asked King to come with me to the doctor, where I was just going to ask for some of the aforementioned antibiotics. The college clinic is part of an old 1950s building, with the same bottom 2/5 green, top 3/5 white walls that seem to grace most Chinese institutions. If you’ve ever seen The Last Emperor, have a look at the walls of the “Reeducation Camp” that the emperor is sent to. They are even like that at the Primary School. I’ve been meaning to ask what it means. Perhaps there was a factory during the Great Leap Forward that made a century’s worth of green paint, rather like the wool stockpiles in Australia, and the only way to use it is to paint two-fifths of every inside wall in China that colour.

Anyway, I sit down in this room that looks like it’s furnished with exactly the same furniture that we have in our teaching offices – desks that look like they were built 20 years ago, and matching chairs. They chat for awhile about my ailments (I can actually understand quite a bit of what they are saying, thanks to last week’s class on going to the doctor with the kinder kids), stick a thermometer under my arm, and tell me that I should stay out of the cold weather. Then, just to drive that point home, they decide that my chest needs x-raying, which involves a 10 minute walk in the cold weather to the x-ray place. Bloody hell. All I wanted was some antibiotics…

So we get to the x-ray place, where an oldish looking bloke takes us into a room filled with even older looking equipment. I recognise the x-ray machine, and standing next to it is a smallish steel booth (a nod to the safety of the x-ray operator). This steel booth looks like it’s been invented by a mad scientist who is trying to create a time machine, or a machine that mingles man and fly DNA, or perhaps a machine that will send a recombinant Man-Fly into the future to collect samples kryptonite. Seriously, there are knobs and dials that look like they predate spaceflight. They probably do.

So, once the x-ray is done, we’re told to wait half an hour for the prints. Precisely an hour later, the x-ray operator comes out to tell us what I could have told them – there is nothing wrong with my lungs except a bit of phlegm.

Trudge trudge we go, back through the cold weather to the doctor’s clinic. They decide that they should run a blood test, and one quick finger prick later (using exactly the same little gadget that my dad uses to check his blood sugar level), they tell us to wait five minutes. I roll my eyes at King, and tell him that in Doctor-Speak, that translates to 10 or 20 minutes. But lo! and behold, out comes the pathologist, clutching a piece of paper that displays information that, once again, I could have told them – my white blood cell count is high. Well no SHIT, Sherlock! That’s what happens when you get a cold and throat infection! Then the doctor tells me that perhaps I should go on a drip, one hour a day, for four days. At this point, about 2 hours after I arrived, not feeling really TOO sick, but knowing that I need some antibiotics, I put my foot down.

“No!” I tell them. “I’m not going on a drip. Just gimme the drugs, damn you!”

I battled with the doctor, through poor King’s so-so tranlating skills, over whether they’re going to waste yet more of my time sitting me in a hospital bed with a needle stuck in my arm, and eventually we compromised – if I’m not “feeling better” within two days, they’ll attach me to the dreaded drip.

So they sent me out of there with boxes and boxes of tablets, and an admonition not to take “aspilin” when I have a cold. But I think that there are some wires being crossed – the more that I hear Chinese people talk about “aspilin” (ie Aspirin), the more I’m convinced that they mean paracetamol, or in other words, Panadol. I’ve seen bottles of what they call aspilin, and there in big huge letters on the side, it says plain as day, “PARACETAMOL”.

This whole episode was summed up neatly by Aussie Pat – “paranoia”. They are nervous about their foreign teachers getting sick, so they want to take every precaution. Or, as we thought later, it could be that the desire to put me on a drip comes from a Chinese doctorish desire to be seen to be DOING something more hospitally than merely prescribing pills.

As I was walking back from the clinic with King, I said to him, shaking my head “Chinese doctors for a cold? Never again!” The whole thing had taken 2 hours. King came clean at that point, and told me how little respect he had for Chinese doctors also. Then again, King is a cynic about everything (she says cynically, at the end of a cynical blog entry) so I’m chalking this one up to an “I’m not going to think about it any more, and just concentrate on not getting sick in China”…

ETA: Was just chatting with my mum on MSN, and she pointed out that with the x-ray, they would have been checking for pneumonia, which you sometimes don’t feel to badly till you’re almost dead.

No sympathy comments, please. Just gimme comments on how much you’d have liked to play with all those knobs and dials when you were a kid, pretending to operate the Millenium Falcon through an asteroid field with Imperial fighters on your tail…

Charlotte

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Aaah, another fun weekend in Kelamayi with the Crazy Canadians ™. It was well and truly time for Aussie Pat and Kristine to hear what all the fuss was about. And despite a gruelling teaching schedule on the part of what seems to be all of the teachers in Kelamayi, they put on a marvellous display of TagTeam, entertaining us with the usual flair and style, culminating in an inspired game of Charades in the pub where we usually play music, Culture of September.

I think that everyone who came out to Culture last night was in some stage or other of the cold that seems to have swept through Xin Jiang faster than a gust of icy snow laden wind. And judging by the amount of people in the pub last night, I’d say that everyone in Kelamayi is at home sick with the flu.

Those of us who usually would have got up to play some music on stage agreed that we were either a) too sick to be inspired to play, b) too sick to be able to play, c) to sick to be able to even sing, or d) all of the above.

So we found ourselves a nook, eight or nine of us, and drank beer and played Charades. It was a close game, having to go into several rounds of Sudden Death to determine the winner. I’m proud to say that my team, consisting of the Patricks (both Aussie and Canadian), Stu the Aussie and myself, managed to take the title of Charades defending champion by a whisker.

OK, be warned, here follows a rant. To the Kelamayi people reading, this is just a mountain being made out of a mole hill. I’m just talking. “Don’t mean nothing”, in the immortal words of Cap’n Reynolds.

Some of you may remember my silly gushing over the “handsome Arken” at Christmas, and at this point I hang my head at my own silliness. See, I’d got the false impression that I’d made as much of an impression on him as he had on me at Christmas time. So when I saw him again in Kelamayi, I thought that it would simply be a remeeting of friends. However, I was quickly shed of this notion when we met him by chance in a restaurant, and I greeted him warmly by name, and he looked vaguely surprised and said “oh, you know my name?” as if we’d never met. When I commented on this later, one of the foreigners (I forget which) pointed out “well, you did only meet him once, at Christmas”. A good point, but … well, it wasn’t like we’d just been introduced and had not interacted after that – we actually chatted about something more than small talk, namely the state of the Chinese economy, and how the banking regulations here affect things. Like me, he’d studied a bit of economics at uni, and I thought that I’d at least made some sort of impression, especially going by the body language that he’d displayed at Christmas… But no, this weekend, just that polite neutral face, vaguely surprised that I seemed to know him.

The next night, he met up with our group for beers and charades at Culture, and he was sitting right opposite me. There again, he sat there radiating the same signals that he had at Christmas time, and if I was not already aware that that radiation meant nothing, I’d have been in the same situation as I was at Christmas, developing a crush on a spectacularly unobtainable Uyghur lawyer. Actually, it irritated me, when I found him staring into my eyes from across the table once or twice (wow, those big black eyes of his… no! *SLAP*), that he could give of those “I might be interested” vibes that evidently mean nothing. If he was a girl, there’d be a not nice name for him. I can’t think of it right now, but I know it’s there. And it annoys me that I could have so misjudged his signals. I’m usually fairly good at judging these things. I think my annoyance is more based on my own sheepishness than anything else.

I can console myself however, with the fact that we beat him at Charades. But only just. And don’t get me wrong, I still think he’s a good bloke. Just a little dangerous for the emotionally unwary…

Now, please do not infer from this entry that Arken was all that occupied my mind in Kelamayi, quite the opposite. I had very much more important things to do, such as find cat food for my baby – with summer just around the corner, I have no intention of feeding him mincemeat when I could feed him whiskettes – all those worms and other nasties will be out in force in the non refrigerated meat that tends to be the norm here. To give you an idea of how much they value food safety here – god, I wish I had my camera. We went into the ThisnThat, which is a large supermarket. Actually, it’s more than a supermarket. So much so that I need a new word to describe this kind of store. It’s like a supermarket and department store in one. Perhaps “Megamarket” would be appropriate. I’ll be taking suggestions in the comments section. Anyhoo, we went to the Megamarket to have a look around, and buy odds and ends that one can’t get in Dushanzi or Kuytun (I finally managed to get me a couple of butter knives, after 8 months here!). But when we got to the “fresh” produce section, there before us is a huge carcass of meat, like what you’d see well behind the counter at a butcher’s. But behind the counter this dead animal is not. It’s just hanging on a hook in the middle of the aisle. And past it walks li’l ol’ me, suffering from the latest incarnation of flu bug that China has been kind enough to provide. This incarnation involves much coughing and hacking and sneezing and blowing of noses, and as if this virus needed yet another mode of transmittance between hosts, here is one conveniently supplied by the managers of the ThisnThat, in the form of a poorly covered meat carcass.

Just lovely.

*cough* *hack* *sneeze*

Eeeww. Brains came out on that one…

Perhaps that was more than you needed to know. Sorry.

Anyhoo, to the folk reading this in Kelamayi, thanks again for a great weekend, as usual. Always just what the doctor ordered. Actually, I think that the doctor would have ordered bed rest and lots of liquids for me, but instead I got plenty of pub rest. And beer is a liquid, no?

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So what better way to get one than to MAKE one?! Or is that a little Frankensteinian of me? Actually, I don’t need a man, I’m quite busy enough as it is, but today, the snow was, for the first time since I arrived, PERFECT for building snowmen. We’d had a fresh coating of snow last night, and it was just the perfect texture to make it utterly sticky.

My mother had regaled me with stories of how when SHE was a child, you just rolled up a peice of snow and trundled it along the ground to make it bigger and bigger. That’s the snowball effect that everyone is always talking about… Countless cartoons spring to mind, where the an/protagonist rolls down a hill in an ever increasing snowball. But until today, I’d always suspected that they were merely stretching the truth, like cartoon figures who run through walls and leave a silouhette of themselves carved out of the plaster.

Today though, my dream came true. Christine and I dashed downstairs at lunchtime, like little kids (well, I was like a little kid, Christine was more dignified) and finally had our cartoonesque experience. We made a three tiered snowman, solely by rolling balls of snow along the ground. As we were putting the head on, a couple of the Aunties (dorm mistresses) from the boys dorm next door came out and began to help, wielding switches of pine for hair, and demonstrating their snow engineering skills by helping us add arms and a sculpted head. Here’s the finished product, Christine on the left holding the switch of pine, then me, then two of the ladies who helped us.

Notice the Australians with the goofy expressions, and the two Uyghur ladies with the stern, matronly expressions. This must have been the only time they stopped smiling the whole time, for this photo.

Soon, people started coming back from class, and stopping briefly to admire the snowman. Some of my kinder kids came by too: Daniel, Ben and Corey, and Sharon in the photo by herself.

By the time Sharon came along, the Uyghur ladies had gone back inside, and I decided that the snowman’s eyes looked a little doleful. So I turned ‘em round and made ‘em slanty. No similarities to any particular racial group was intended, I just thought it made him look happier. Christine may have had a point in saying that it also made him look more evil, so she gave him eyelashes, which made him look a bit more kind.

He’s a handsome one, though, isn’t he?!

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With Pat arriving last week, Dushanzi felt a breath of fresh foreign air through it (not that it was the old foreigners making it stale, just that it’s always nice to talk to new people), and yesterday, the newest addition to our little now-four-person Western community arrived, Miss Christine from Ballarat.

Miss Christine is a few years younger than me (turns out she’s but ten days older than Pat), but as fate would have it, she went to the very same high school as me, in Ballarat (Grammar). I think she spans the tribal gap between Pat and myself in terms of taste – on one hand, she’ll reminisce with Pat about movies and music that I’ve not even heard of, but then she’ll turn around and dance with me to The Lucksmiths (a fine Melbourne iconic band tastefully uploaded onto her iPod. Both Pat and Christine have their own iPods, and although my Palm Pilot will play MP3s, I’m thinking that perhaps an iPod will be my “goodbye China” gift to myself in Beijing). She’s a cool chick. I like her lots.

She’s been in Dushanzi but one night, but already today we were invited by Sun Hua, one of the College English teachers, to take part in the College’s recognition of International Women’s Day. It was, of all things, a skipping tournament. When we were first invited, I said to Sun Hua in no uncertain terms “you do realise that I’m perhaps not the best addition to your skipping team?” The skipping team being the female teachers in the English department. I’m not even a teacher at the College anymore, but I suppose that their semester of utter neglect of li’l ol’ me while I WAS teaching college classes has made them consider me an honourable teacher for this term.

Apparently they needed Kristine and I to make up the numbers anyway, to bring the team to five people. So, this afternoon I changed out of my habitual skirts into one of the only pairs of pants that I own (few things can induce me to wear anything other than skirts!), and soon enough, Christine and I found ourselves in the College gym, practising our skipping rope along with the other teams, made up exclusively of female teachers from the college.

There were two events, the individual, and the group. In the individual, we had two from our team get a one person rope each, and skip FAST for one minute. The idea was to get as many skips in in the one minute time frame. Christine was one of our two for that event, and MAN can she ever skip! I was vastly impressed. Unfortunately, there were women on other teams who I’m sure were professional boxers, because our team didn’t place in that event. We spent the down time practising our Team Skip – where all five of us skip under the long rope for as long as possible. I’m sure that while we were practising, we didn’t get further than 8 or 9 rotations of the rope, but THEN! WOW!

Our turn came for the group skip, and lo and behold, we got FIFTY TWO rotations before we stumbled! (and I was not responsible for that stumble, would you believe it!?) That meant that with one other team, we placed FIRST in the group category! Our prize money would have been a whole 200 yuan between the five of us, but because there was another team, instead of going to Sudden Death, the referees declared both teams the winners, and so split the prize money down the middle. We’ve decided to go out as a champion skipping team for dinner next week some time, with our booty.

I speak so glibly of the skipping competition here, but in truth, I am always a little blown away by how seriously the Chinese seem to take events like International Women’s Day (which is not till next monday). In Australia, it goes by in most places without much of a fuss. There may be a dinner hosted or whatever, but I can’t imagine the lovely female folks at Smith and Gilbert (my old workplace – how are you guys?! Long time no hear from!) teaming up against the folks at Arbee Real Estate to have a Skip Off in honour of Women’s Day. Perhaps the odd lawn bowls tournament… But today just demonstrates the different cultural attitudes towards different activities – in Australia, skipping is thought of as the domain of children (or boxers, I suppose!) but here, it’s just another physical activity, but one that is associated with women, I suppose.

The whole thing was actually really fun. I had a great time – I’d forgotten how much I enjoy skipping! And the college Vice President was there, cheering us on, which was nice. This guy’s name is Wang Laoshi (Wang Ke something, and when he introduced himself to Christine, she later told me that she was trying not to crack up, because it sounded to her like he was saying “wanker”. She amended that eventually, and now he will forever be, “Wonka”), and he’s possible the most charismatic Chinese leader I’ve met. He’s got this mischievous smile which makes him look stacks younger than he really is, and which puts everyone around him at ease. He’s second in command of the College, so having him there meant plenty to the assembled ladies and gents, I imagine. It certainly meant plenty to me – out of all the Chinese bureaucrats that I know, he’s the one that I feel most comfortable with, even though he speaks rudimentary English. He was there, barracking for our team, being an all round good sport. What a good bloke!

I just wish that I’d had some, ANY opportunity to get to know some of the other staff at the college while I was teaching there last semester. I quite literally didn’t meet ANYONE from the college – no teachers, no leaders, noone apart from my students – until Christmas, when there was only 2 weeks left of term. In some ways it irks me that Pat and Christine are getting such good treatment from the college (in the form of dinners, invitations, etc), when I had to rely on my students for guidance even in important matters like assessment. For example, I had not been told by ANY college teacher or leader that I should give aural exams to my students – I only found out because my students asked me, “when are you giving us oral exams?”

But on the other hand, I’m vastly relieved that they’ve finally got their act together, and are making life easier for Pat and Christine, firstly by actually introducing themselves to the new foriegn teachers, and secondly by giving them a bit of guidance, and even providing *gasp* textbooks. I’d not wish last semester’s lack of attention on ANYONE.

Happy Friday. I’ve decided that any Friday is worth celebrating. So Happy Friday, all…

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The only man made object that can be seen with the naked eye from space. As Nixon so glibly put it (according to our Lonely Planet): “It sure is a Great Wall!”

One cold blustery morning, Jess and I set out from our hotel in the middle of the Hutong (more on that later) that sits just North of the Imperial Palace in Beijing, and made for the bus stop that we’d been told would take us to the Great Wall.

The bus ride was … very Chinese. We got onto one bus, thought “oh, good, there’s not many people on the bus, we can spread out on the back seat!” But to our dismay, the bus we’d climbed onto travelled all of one half block, before stopping to allow everyone to jump out and pile onto another bus, which was CHOCKAS full of folk. We were the last off the first bus, being the backseat bogans that we were, and so the second bus was so full that Jess and I couldn’t even sit together. In fact, they put Jess up in the tour guide’s seat up the front! And when I say “up the front”, I mean, the seat that folds down over the stairs at the door of the bus!

We’d studied our Lonely Planet well, and had carefully chosen which section of Wall to go to, based on distance from Beijing, and impressiveness. We decided on Badaling, a refurbished, but still quite impressive section. Once we got there, we climbed off to find that up there, it was even more windy (if possible) than Beijing, and was even snowing in little tiny ice razors.

Not to be discouraged, we began the steep climb up the hill to GET to the Wall, dodging hawkers (bu yao, xie xie = don’t want it, thanks – this little phrase works so much better than just shaking your head, and Jessie was a master of it by the time we were done in Beijing), and getting more and more excited as we went. We were finally here! The Great Wall of China!

Once we got there, we saw that the entrance to that section of the wall was in a saddle between two hills, and there we had a choice – right, up the shallow slope, where all the crowds were, or left, up the massively steep looking part, where there seemed to be less people. Actually, there was no choice.

Left.

The climb was just amazing, and although the wind was blowing icy gusts all the way (the sort of thing that makes you want to stay right in the middle of the wall, lest you get blown off), the exercise was more than enough to keep us warm, and then some! It was really interesting, on the steep side of the wall, there seemed to me so many more foriegners. I wondered to myself, is this because Westerners are more adventurous, and want the hard slog, or are there proportionally as many Westerners on the other side of the Wall?

Photos? Photos:

To start off with:

Click on the thumbnail to get a pop up image – this was just too big to leave embedded, for those of you with slower connections… This was the view from the top of the section of wall that we’d climbed. This picture cannot do justice to the sight from up there – you could see sections of wall meandering all over the craggy hills off to the right.

Here’s a closer shot of the view from the top:

I had an exact idea of the photo of me that I wanted on the wall. Unfortunately, noone I asked to take the photo had the same idea. This photo of Jess is the framing that I wanted (note the amazing Crocodile Hunter impersonation – Jess had just finished saying, “Cor!”):

Here is the framing of the photo of me that I ended up getting. Not the framing I had in mind, but you can just make out the blurry wall in the background. I’m tempted to go back to Beijing on my way home, just to get the framing that I wanted (and to pick up some more sublime Chinese scroll art. I’m addicted…)

Here’s me and Jess, happy as Larry, but ready to get moving again, before we turned into icicles:

There was one section of wall that seemed more like rock climbing than going up stairs. There were a couple of Portugese guys with flawless English, who were going at the same pace as us. Their comment for these practically vertical stairs was “in skiing, we’d call that a Double Diamond slope, where you can’t see any of the slope from the top, cause it plunges out of view.” Thus, we were honour bound to make some silly photos.

Here’s Jessie, ready to go snowboarding down the DD slope:

And Jess, in a Cliffhanger moment:

This last one is my attempt at an arty shot. All along the Wall, there were signal towers, otherwise known as wind-breakers for the hapless soldiers stationed along there. Tell ya what, I’d not want to be one of them! Anyway, the signal towers were basically big stone rooms with no roofs, and open doorways and windows. Not much protection from the wind, but better than nothing. Here’s the view from one of the windows. Kindly ignore the power lines:

I reckon that’ll do you folks for awhile. Do enjoy. I’ll give you some more perhaps later in the week, if the mood takes me.

Love to all,
Charlotte

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