シーン: Sound of Silence

In Japanese, there are a number of sounds for things we don't think of as having sounds in English.  Pika pika means flashing lights.  Fuwa fuwa means something fluffy.  And Shiin means still silence.  The following are all pictures from vacation which I associate with Shiin.

Osaka Castle Park

Summer Palace in Winter

National Museum in Beijing

若草山焼き
Wakakusayamayaki
Burning Wakakusa Mountain

Travel Journal, Beijing, January 13th

I kept a notebook with me during my trip, and when I had free time I would write about whatever I was thinking in various places.  This will take me a little while to type these up, so these will be in episodes.  Accompanying photos will be added soon.

I am an 中山公园. In the spring I'm sure it's very beautiful- full of flowers and people.  Right now it has a much quieter beauty- full of evergreens, stones, and ice.  A few people walk through, but their conversations are drowned out by the crows calling to each other.

I am sitting outside the teahouse, listening to a recording of a biwa.  I can hear when the player plucks the string and moves his fingers. When he lifts his fingers while the string is still resonating from the previous note.  I think of my violin.  For all my complaining, and the many many days I didn't practice, I miss it now.  The bare, singular biwa notes remind me of the trees – without foliage, naked, exposing their branches.  They are natural and random.  Logical and asymetrical.  Cold, but honest and elegant.

It may sound a little silly but for the my first two days I haven't eaten much Chinese food.  For breakfast, there's a great little 包子 place I have been frequenting, but otherwise I've eaten Korea, American, and now Italian.  Yesterday, the Korean place was one that Ting's friend recommended, and Pizza Hut because Ting confessed she really wanted to go there.  Today I'm at a surprisingly inexpensive Italian place nearby my hostel because I've secretely been imagining spagetti and it's only 10 块 here.

What Was Once Lost Has Now Been Found

Thanks to Eaaf, to whom I am forever grateful for many many things, I now have my photos back from vacation.  I went to Beijing, Harbin, Mingshui (a small town nearby Harbin) and Osaka.  Over the next few weeks I will share stories about travels mixed in with stories about the new semester.  But without further ado, here is what I wished to share with you.  Please click on them to open them up to full size.  That is the only way to do them justice.

Kites of Nanjing

I have a set of photos all taken the same day in Nanjing at Zhonghuamen.  Will and I had arrived the evening before.  We explored a bit together then, and together in the morning, we parted ways in the afternoon, a few hours prior to these pictures being taken.  I had chosen to go to Zhonghuamen because of its proximity to our hostel, curiosity, and a desire to walk and observed independently.  At the top of Zhonghuamen were at least half a dozen people with kites.  I assumed they were connected and that they had all planned to be there at the same time, but there was no sign or announcement to the public and on retrospect they may have had no connection at all.  These are some of my favorites of all the pictures I've taken so far.  I showed a few of them before, so I am properly showing them here now.  Usually when I don't add explanations for individual images I don't put them in any particular order.  These ones I have ordered specifically to recreate the feelings I had while taking them.

Fish 鱼魚

Outside Oracle Bone Museum, Anyang Henan 

Anyang Henan

Small Town Outside Kaifeng

Anderson Japanese Garden, Janesville Wisconsin

Anderson Japanese Garden, Janesville Wisconsin

Anderson Japanese Garden, Janesville Wisconsin

Millenium Park, Kaifeng Henan

Some Long Overdue Photos of Nanjing

For some reason I kept expecting that I must have put up pictures, but now I realize that I didn't.  Here's a handful of pictures, and I will try to upload more soon.  Also, I would encourage you to click on the pictures to see a larger version of them.  These ones are a bit more artsy than others.

Unmentionables

There are two events in the news lately that I would like to mention.  The first is the death of Kim Jong Il.  The second is the protests going on in Russia.  If you are not interested in politics, you may want to skip this one.

Friends from high school may recall that I liked talking about Korea.  I am sure I more than annoyed several people, and am glad they decided to remain my friends regardless of my fanatical facination.  Other readers may be interested to know that my interest in Asia began with a project comparing North and South Korea.  I remember I created a cartoon slideshow showing the history of Korean leadership since the country was split in two in 1945.  One of the main themes I tried to show was that drastic changes have taken place in South Korea, while everything in North Korea remained almost exactly the same, including their president.  Well, today still the president of North Korea has not changed.^*  The big question is whether anything else will.

I personally don't think anything will happen soon.  All the major, shadowy figures in North Korea, as well as all the global powers outside North Korea have too much to loose if the area falls into chaos.  But given that Kim Jong Un is very young, and that he has not had much preparation for the position he is about to take, I could see the potential for collapse.  Though many have predicted this sort of thing in the past.  North Korea watching is exciting and boring because so much of it is based on speculation on shreds of evidence.  Any second could be the end of the country, the peninsula, or the world as we know it.  But that potential, which is highly intoxicating, has so far remained only potential.  We have no way of knowing until it is too late whether any of it has turned into anything.

In other news, there are the protests in Russia.  I remember as a teenager hearing my Uncle Matt talk about how they stuff the ballot boxes in Russia.  It is such a common occurrence, that it is little more than an annoying chore.   But now business as usual political corruption has lead to middle class protests.

The biggest question that comes to mind for me is the middle-class democratization theory.  I don't remember its formal name, if it has one.  Basically, this theory stipulates that in a society that lacks a middle-class, most citizens care more about their own economic well-being and don't care if that economic well-being is supplied by a democratic or non-democratic system.  Once there is a middle-class, however, that middle-class is comfortable enough that they don't need to spend as much time worrying about day to day expenses or the near future, but they are still concerned about the long term future, and want more control.  The middle-class tends to be filled by educated professionals, such as doctors, teachers, and business owners.  Such people hold more clout in society than other common protest groups, such as unskilled laborers or students.  Countries that have grown middle-classes that demanded reforms to liberalize their governments include South Korea and Taiwan.  There are other countries in the world that are developing their economies and suddenly have a middle-class.  I personally don't think change will happen soon in these countries, but if Russia should carry out reforms, it certainly would persuade me to think that it is possible in other countries too.

Also, I think I should mention I have read about these events on the New York Times and on The Economist.  I can't say for certain why they are not blocked.  I think it's a PR campaign to show how free information is here.  Adam has speculated that the people who check for inappropriate material on the internet probably don't have the best English.

I won't be home for Christmas – Two Christmases Two Years Apart

Due to similar sounding names in Chinese, many people give friends apples on Christmas Eve.

Christmas is a big holiday.

Christmas is the day that airports are clogged.

It is the day families see each other again.

Christmas is when people are most stressed.

All of the stores are decorated and play music for two months in preparation for it.

Christmas is Christian, yet it is so widespread, so popular, so much a cultural monolith, that it has almost, though not quite, been separated from its religions origins.

Christmas is when many people who are not home become homesick.

The timing of Christmas is almost perfect for homesickness abroad.  Throughout one's time abroad, or at least for the first year or two, one experiences an emotional roller coaster.  One meet challenges and on alternating occasions succeed or fail at overcoming them.  On some days the triumphs seem larger than the failings, and one feels brave, smart, and confident.  On others, the failures pile up and everything seems too large, too different, and the small gains feel pointless.  It's strange, but I have had some weeks where my entire outlook on life turns a full one hundred and eighty degrees over the course of just seven days.  One of the larges downturns most people experience happens about three to four months after first arriving in a new country.  Among other things, there is a feeling of being tired, and just wanting to go back to where everything was 'normal' and made sense.  One's first time, you could wonder if coming to this new country was the biggest mistake of your life.  That was my thinking last Christmas I was away from home.  This year I just feel like I need a vacation for a week, then I'll be back for more.

Christmas can make these feelings more poignant since it has such sentimental value.  If one has friends who are going home for the holidays, it might not help matters.  In Japan, many of my friends were only staying for one semester.  Some of them were especially homesick.  I had managed to feel almost no homesickness for nearly four months, but after hearing them talk about how excited they were to go home it started to hit me.  I had also had some person difficulties and was beginning to doubt not only my language ability, but whether I was likable as a person.  In addition, my mother had been planning to visit Japan during Christmas, but since the plane tickets to visit for New Years Day were significantly less expensive, her visit was delayed a week.  I left my host family on Christmas Eve and moved into a hostel in Osaka.  My memories of that Christmas Eve and Christmas day are of feeling isolated, lonely, and free at the same time.^*

I walked through downtown Osaka, where expensive stores for suits and books had classy Christmas decorations that would have been at home on 5th Avenue.  The trees down the boulevard were wrapped around the trunks with lights.  I passed columns of yellow, blue, and magenta as I passed clusters of people on their way to underground restaurants.

I strolled through the Osaka Illumination, where lights of every color wrapped every individual branch of the trees.  Food stall employees shouted their welcome as a much quieter audience slowly shuffled through the assigned pathway, stopping occasionally to take pictures.  Music played and the lights flashed in time to match it.

I stood on a train platform, waiting for the train to Doubutsuen station.  One of the trains that stops at my platform is completely packed.  Through the window I see a man dressed in a Santa Claus suit.  He appears as nonchalant as the other passengers.  In a moment, the train has vanished and the man in the Santa suit with it.

I sat at my computer checking my facebook page as a church down the street from my hostel played Christmas music out onto the street.  I could hear silent night being played, the tune familiar, the lyrics entirely alien.

The afternoon and evening of Christmas day I spent with my friends Maarika and Rose.  We decorated Christmas cakes, the only widespread Christmas tradition in Japan, with Maarika's friends from koto club.  Then the three of us went to karaoke.

This year's Christmas was in almost every way different.  Most of the people I interact with on a day to day basis are not going home to the United States for the holidays.  We teachers wouldn't be able to go back even if we wanted to – or at least we wouldn't be able to go back for more than a single day if that.  Though I feel myself retreating into English a great deal of the time and know that I could potentially improve my language skills a good deal more than I have been, I am confident in the fact that I have progressed a great deal since I first arrived.  I am getting along well with all the people I interact with on a daily basis.  I find myself actually becoming homesick for Japan more so than for the United States, and can recognize the negative feelings I do have, of being bored, as being very similar to two years ago.  Not only do I recognize it, I know the cure.  Travel and vacation.  Both of which are coming so soon I can almost taste it.

Today we, the five foreigners in the compound, had breakfast together.  Adam made french toast, which we all enjoyed.  I had lunch with my student Sydney.  Adam, Ben, and Ben's girlfriend visited a church, an experience which I will not do justice to in the retelling, so I would encourage people to look at their blogs. We exchanged Secrete Santa gifts.  And we had peking duck for dinner along with four Chinese friends.  Our conversation traveled quickly over some very dark or dirty topics, but the atmosphere was warm and light.  We got to watch our duck being carved.  We bemoaned the fact that there are no longer any sanlongche.^**  We retired to our rooms.  

And I found myself looking at the past, as if the years are layered on top of one another like stacks of paper or a folded blanket.  It was as if I could remove any number of sheets and see whichever Christmas of my past I should want – as each day is connected to itself in the past.  I have done this with other days, not only Christmas, but Christmas is special since so many of us look back then.  I remembered fragments of things I remember writing which have since become lost to cyber space.  I feel content, nostalgic, and a bit restless all at the same time.  And it is this feeling, this nostalgia mixed with restlessness, a restlessness I can explain, while feeling at the same time so lucky to know the people I know, it is this that I want to share with you, dear reader.  Merry Christmas, dear reader, even if you don't celebrate Christmas.  Merry Christmas from two countries that have embraced the trappings of Christmas without ever absorbing its religious meaning.

*There are several videos and photographs from this time which are on my facebook page, including a video of the illumination in Osaka.  I no longer have the hard copy to upload here, but I would encourage family and friends to watch it.  On an unrelated note, though these memories all happened within a few days of each other, I don't remember the order.  I know for certain they did not all happen the same day, though I realize the phrasing may make it seem otherwise.

** Sanlongche are three-wheeled motorcycle cabs which have recently been banned in Kaifeng and replaced with a more tourist friendly but available bicycle version.  For more details, including a song about them, please visit Eaaf or Ben's blogs, as both have written very good posts on the topic.

Unorganized Thoughts and Updates!

This here is a little bit of an amalgam of thoughts and stories and bits and pieces of things that I originally wrote out while my reading class was taking a test.  For reasons I won't go into, the notebook I wrote it in is now in someone else's room and though I have every intention of retrieving it soon, I would like to update before doing so.


First, I would like to tell everyone that we had a real Thanksgiving in Kaifeng China.  Ben ordered a turkey off of taobao (a cross between amazon and e-bay), but otherwise most of the ingredients we collected here.  We had mashed potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes, steamed broccoli, carrot pennies, stuffing, gravy, bread, and baked apples.  We invited one of the Australian teachers, the German teacher, and the Japanese teacher and his wife as well as several Chinese students and one of the translators who works for the international affairs office.  It was quite delicious.

In other news, it is that wonderful time of the year when professors start working on finals and students start studying for them.  We have about three weeks or so till the end of the semester.  Conversation finals start early so that everyone will have enough time to have oral conversations.  Ben and I have worked together to design our final and it looks pretty, I think.

My confidence about my Chinese oscillates between being very proud to slightly embarrassed.  However, I am certain that my ability has definitely been improving steadily.  Occasionally I wonder if I studied the wrong language in college, or in high school, but it is too late.  And in all honesty, with the workout Japanese grammar gives your brain, I feel like there's not much grammatically that can intimidate me.  (The exception is Russian.  Scares the Dejesus out me.  Strangely, I still insist to myself that French would be impossible to learn.  Guess I'm going to draw the line somewhere.  Spanish however would be fun to go back and work on....)  That was a bit of a tangent.  But back to Chinese!  I am studying for about two hours a week with a student of mine, and that keeps me somewhat honest even during these intensive weeks when I spend a good deal of time reading and writing things or otherwise working.  The more time I spend working, the more time I spend using English.  And when I'm exhausted from said work, I relax by reading or watching things in English.  It is a vicious cycle.  But, my TV works fine and I have watched Chinese TV if not regularly then enough that I can talk to people about 那是我妈码 (That's my mom!), a reality show where young men go on and answer questions about their mothers' preferences and traits.  And Mona, or 豪杰(Haojie) keeps me honest by giving me and quizzing me on vocabulary and grammar.

I have been eating lunch with my students more regularly, and I am quite enjoying it.  I feel in need of a break from teaching, but the actual classes are going well.  My conversation class, which at the beginning of the semester I had no clue how to run much less make active and fun, have gone quite well the last few weeks.  I am proud of where I am now, though I somewhat wish I could go back and start the class from the beginning without the bumbling and missteps I made the first month or so of the semester.  But that was the price of growth. I know I am going to be teaching the same students next semester, though it is currently up in the air as to what I will be teaching them.

It is cold out, though not enough for snow. We had a flurry about a week ago, but no more.

This was surprisingly organized.  I did not expect it to be so.
Oh, one final note: I have been talking to my Reading classes about Native Speakers and bad grammar.  What it means about a person or character if they make certain grammar mistakes.  You can call this a conversation about dialects, or classes.  The thing I want them to remember is simply one's education level.  If someone has poor grammar and speaking skills it is assumed that they are not educated.  So, on their test I had a set of 10 sentences, which they had to mark as being said by someone well or poorly educated.  All the sentences were taken from Pirates of the Caribbean.  I'm quite pleased by how it turned out.

A Long Expected Party

It has been a bit longer than I usually post, for which I apologize.
I have not been having the greatest luck these last few weeks.  My computer first wasn't working.  Then it worked, but wouldn't connect to the internet.  Then it connected to the internet, and a day latter stopped working again.  My camera has developed AI, and knows now when I'm testing it to see if it's working, or if I'm someplace I really would like to take a picture, and will work in the former situation but not in the latter.  I've also been sick.
It has reached that point in the semester that I remember from when I was a student, when classes were no longer new and exciting and I wanted to do other things.  As a teacher, I can't quite slack off like I might have before.  My main dilemma is whether to stick to the boring text book, or run around and find interesting stuff to teach.
I have written some things on paper about my observations on various subjects, but have not typed them.  These include television, news, and the Nanjing Massacre Memorial.  So those will be coming.

In the meantime, I have not talked about Nanjing at all!  Nanjing (南京) was beautiful.  Since there were many people visiting for the holiday, we ended up having to book rooms at two different hostels, which worked out well because we got to see some very different parts of the city that way.  The main place we stayed was right next to the Confucian Temple, and seemed like the place all the hip people like to hang out.  The other place we stayed was near Zhonghuamen (中华门) and had some places with lots of money that were very western, and some places that clearly had less money but very delicious food.  Will and I saw the Confucian temple and the Nanjing Massacre Memorial together, but otherwise explored on our own.  We also saw Marta, a Beloit alumni who taught in Kaifeng for two years and is now going to grad school in Nanjing.
The photos I'm posting are from the Confucian temple and from Zhonghuamen, where they were flying kites the day I visited.  After Zhonghuamen, my camera decided to not work at places like the Nanjing Memorial, etc.
Tada!  I know these aren't very polished posts, or frequent, and I apologize for that.

Train Station 

Downtown, right next to our first hostel

First night in Nanjing

Confucian temple.  There was one night they were having a disco party in there.

Inside the Confucian temple

Looking out on the back street

The best trash bin ever!

Zhonghuamen

Nanjing skyline from Zhonghuamen

Getting an octopus kite off the ground at Zhonghuamen

Zhonghuamen city wall

Much Obliged

Last night we were taken to a celebratory dinner commemorating the 62^nd anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.  The dinner was held by the regional government in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan, and our school decided to send in addition to our school's president, Eaaf, William, Mrs. Ma (who works for the international affairs office and can speak very good Japanese) and myself.  Mrs. Ma's English is limited, but the four of us are able to communicate pretty well, with William using Chinese, and Eaaf and I using Japanese.  I am able to somewhat follow the conversations William and Mrs. Ma had, but usually I could only answer in Japanese.  We were seated with the vice-president of Zhengzhou University and four of their foreign teachers.  One of them, who sat next to William, was an older gentleman who has been teaching for seven years.  I was sitting between a Russian teacher from Zhengzhou University and the Zhengzhou University vice-president.  The Russian teacher, who has very good English, has been teaching for three years, and is from Moscow.  She came to China because her husband is Chinese and from Zhengzhou.  I got the impression that she misses Russia very much.  The vice-president of Zhengzhou University had a very good sense of humor (he would laugh a little whenever they would announce the Yellow River Friendship award going to a representative of the Coca-cola company) and he taught me the word for shrimp (xia1 虾) and oyster (bi, which I can't find in Chinese dictionaries, so maybe it refers to some other kind of creature).

Last weekend, we went to the Yellow River National Park with the other teachers (except for William who decided to sleep instead).  Once again, it was the school taking us.  This time however, it was only for us.  Among other things at Yellow River National Park was an enclave of peacocks which we got to feed and take pictures of.

I have started this week working on my Chinese with one of my students.  I told her I'd exchange one hour of English conversation for one hour of working on Chinese.  We covered holidays, parts of your face, furniture, and the phrase, “I didn't understand your meaning” 没有听明白你的意思.  This next week we are on vacation, and I am going to Nanjing.  So next entry will include many pictures from Nanjing.

This may be a habit I am forming from my classes, but I would encourage you to ask questions about these pictures and leave comments.  Though I am only posting once every two weeks, I can respond to your questions via e-mail or it may get me started on other posts.

Also, this just in right after I wrote everything else and saved it and my pictures for today onto my flash drive, my computer is broken!  Fortunately, everything is backed up on my external hard drive, and just about all of my pictures are still in my camera's memory card, so I don't think I've lost anything.  Except a working computer.  So... I will have to figure something out there.  I'm not panicking.  There's a city to visit.

Tatiana, Ben, Eaaf, Aikawa-sensei, Aikawa-san, Mrs. Ma and a friend of Mrs. Ma in the parking lot at Yellow River National Park

Several restaurant river boats on the Yellow River.  We ate lunch at the one with a red roof on the left hand side of this picture.

So many peacocks!  So many shinny blue feathers!

Zhengzhou, the newer part of the city.  As you can see there is lots of construction.

Our fancy table.

This is a great picture.  It really captured the essence of that number sixty two.

Night time when we left there were so many lights!  It was so beautiful!  And I had drunk more wine than I usually do because of all the toasts.  Mrs. Ma pointed out that my cheeks were red, but she said a little red made them look pretty.