When I think I should do something (even something I want to do) and I don’t do it right away, a sort of looming brick wall goes up between me and my power to self-motivate. When I finally struggle up the brick wall and look down on my sad little pile of self-motivation, I see that it is lying crumpled at the bottom of the gulf that separates the present moment from the time when I first thought “Oh, I should do that.” Thus, I haven’t posted for a whopping 24 days, and there is much to relate.

First, a major national holiday occurred here on October 6—Mid-Autumn Day. It’s a kind of harvest festival which families celebrate by eating moon cakes and standing around outside together to look at the moon, which is full. The entire country takes a week off work, the students who live nearby go home, and the fruit vendors in our beloved back ally disappear. Friends and co-workers celebrate by giving each other moon cakes—hockey puck-sized, fruit goo-filled concoctions that come in a variety of flavors. I swear I had one that contained strained peas, but some of them, namely fig and coconut, are what my students would call “delicious.” (It, along with “interesting,” “beautiful,” and “changeable” (in reference to the weather), makes up the list of their favorite words. I tried to banish those words from the classroom, but it failed miserably and I sacrificed my love for words that mean something to the necessity of just being understood.) No one really chows down on the moon cakes. They mostly just get passed from one person to another, like large fruit-filled money that can't buy anything but goodwill...not a bad currency.



During the first part of the weeklong break, our foreign affairs officer (FAO) organized a two-day trip for us to a nearby mountain. Let’s call him Fred. Fred is our Chinese liaison to the school, and as such, plays an important and sometimes frustrating role in our lives. Fred is not only responsible for relaying information to us, getting us our mail, and making sure our accommodations and transportation to and from school is in order, he’s responsible for our safety in the eyes of the school officials. We are big news here. We are stared at as if our noses were painted purple. It’s a matter of “face” for the school to show us off (more on this frustrating manipulation in future posts) and take care of us. So, when presented with a whole week off, Fred treated us to an all expenses paid vacation to Lu Shan Mountain, the fifth most famous mountain in China. (How do they even know that?!) My theory, which has substantial proof, is that Fred wanted to keep us from traveling around China by ourselves and getting maimed or kidnapped. The pictures of our excursion are below. I told my students about it and taught them a new word: magnificent!










My roommate Alli and I. Sadly for me, she went to California during the holiday in an amazing turn of events and attended her best friend's wedding. In this picture, I think neither of us really looks like ourselves.


For Mom and Dad, who worry: pictures that prove I am alive and even basking in luxury....
There is no cheese in China, but there is a German retailer! You have to have a passport to shop there, and we went last weekend. Find of the day: a block of cheese that defies reason. We bought it and split the cost seven ways. Mmmmmmm, cheese.

Girls' afternoon out at a coffee shop. I was way excited.

In more recent news, last night we attended a concert on very short notice. Fred came and picked us up in our usual van with the checkered-upholstery and drove us to the new campus (about 15 minutes away) where we listened to a teacher/student orchestra play portions of Tchaikovsky, Vivaldi, Ravel, Mozart, and whoever wrote “Carnival of the Animals.” It was the most interactive concert I’ve ever been to, almost like a children’s concert, as the conductor (whose deep red bowtie matched the red prom dresses the women were wearing) turned to the audience and asked them to guess which animals were which. Here are my notes written during the affair. Please be kind. They are uncensored and unrevised, which seems eerily akin to baring my throat to a viperous snake, not that I've ever done it...or that you are a viperous snake.

“Two hours ago, we were told we were going to a concert, and now we are here, microphone screams and all. Buzzing students with their feathered I-want-to-be-frizzy-but-I’m-spaghetti-straight hair are in the folding seats all around us, some taking pictures of the backs of our heads with their camera phones. The slightly pungent boys behind us are trying to read this over my shoulder, quite obviously, and I can’t decide whether I feel angry and invaded or ambivalent.

"The orchestra is warming up. I feel a strange camaraderie with the short boy carrying a bassoon across the back of the stage—I think I’m scrambling for anything familiar to hold on to. My eyes cling and stick to the English words on signs, and my ears try to make Chinese words into something intelligible: English. –break— The first song was a ton too heavy on the trumpets. Now they’re playing a section from “The Nutcracker” that everyone recognizes and the whole room gasps and starts talking! What! It’s like in class when they get excited or laugh at one of my jokes. –new page--- (I have thwarted them [the boys] with a clean page! Ha!) On a screen behind the orchestra is a projection screen with moving lights that look like bacteria—“The Dance of the Psychedelic Fungi!” Guards in uniform at the entrances are stony-faced, but I bet inside, there is one for whom this is supremely wonderful. Maybe this is his favorite music in the world.”

And it goes on for another two and a half pages, but this post is already long enough, and I’ve no doubt it is more interesting to me than it is to you. To all of you who are thinking for me, please know that I’ve experienced growth of catastrophic proportions during the last two months. (Catastrophic as in disastrous to my former harmful ways of thinking and epic in magnitude = really good things are happening.) Know that being here—interacting with the culture, loving and being loved by my team, getting to know and build relationships with my students—has created an atmosphere in which my soul is flourishing. Jeremiah 17:7-8 says, “But blessed is the man who trusts in the father, whose confidence is in him. He will be like a tree planted by the water, that sends out its roots by the stream. It has no fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought, and never fails to bear fruit.” Know that you, my friends and family and co-laborers in this adventure, are in my thoughts! I’d love to hear from you always!

Random Fact of the Day: Inside small shoe stores, of which there are many in China, the tennis shoes are covered in saran-wrap. It makes them look extra shiny, but what do they do when someone wants to try them on?