IN OBSCURE URBAN CHINA EVERY DAY IS A CELEBRATION

The kitchen is clean. I repeat. The kitchen is clean.  After eight or ten hours (I am not exaggerating) of concerted work, we have transformed our miniscule kitchen from place in which food would instantly become inedible into a place in which food can be prepared!! Quite a change, to be sure, and it was not easy: WE HAD TO CLEAN EVERY SINGLE ITEM. And once we have gas in our stove, we will be IN BUSINESS.

Let me rewind. There have been a lot of changes in the past two weeks, so I have constructed a HELPFUL GRAPHIC for clarification.

So last time I wrote, I was on the long train ride from Beijing to Hong Kong, where, as you already know (thank you, HELPFUL GRAPHIC!), we spent 10 days in teacher training. 

Hong Kong was pretty sweet. For one, I finally met all the fellows on the program. There are twelve of us this year, split into three sites: Changsha, Hong Kong, and a small town in Anhui province. Each site has two second years and two first years, which is an awesome system, because all of the clueless newbies (who can't always manage to read street signs, order food, deal with the post office, or lock bathroom doors) get to move in with wise, competent, wonderful people who have lived our new lives for an entire year. They know what is up, and that is a crazy thing. As you'll see, this post's photo has captured all of the fellows (minus photographer extraordinaire Sabrina!) having a nice professional meeting in business attire. Sorta.

We stayed at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where four of the fellows teach during the year, and, um, turns out it is the most beautiful place in the world. The campus is on a hill, and our dorms were at the very top, so we could see out over the water, which has grassy mountain islands emerging out of the mist. Yeah. For the ten days we were in meetings pretty much nine to five (real world, I do NOT remember giving you permission to enter my life), but afterward we were FREE TO EXPLORE HONG KONG. 

Sadly, we did not explore Hong Kong.

Truth be told, I have never spent so long in a major city of the world and seen so little of it. But before you get all judgey on me here, let me inform you that learning how to be a teacher is hard and at times little stressful (we each had to give two 20 minute practice lessons, using each other as our practice students, and if you think that it trying to explain what the word "direction" means to your friend who speaks perfect English and is maybe definitely just messing with you is not stressful, clearly you have never tried it), and we were tired. And even if we did not go in search of Hong Kong's finest cuisine, THE CAFETERIAS AT CUHK WERE PRETTY DARN TASTY. And even if we did not experience Hong Kong's most renowned tourist attractions, THE SWIMMING POOL AT CUHK WAS PRETTY DARN FUN. I have no regrets.

And in actuality, Yale-China took us on some adventures, including a nighttime ride in our own private trolley through the streets of Hong Kong. This was pretty awesome, not least because we were served AVOCADO sandwiches on board. Plus I sat next to Abigail, one of those wise second-years I was telling you about, who is one of the CUHK fellows. Given that she's lived there for a year, she actually knows things about Hong Kong, and she told me interesting things about the different districts of the city we were passing through like that one of the buildings is supposed to look like giant koalas are climbing up the side of it!! So I learned some things and, better yet, I learned them from the top deck of an avocado-laden private trolley. Not too shabby.

And our last night, we went on a ferry ride to Lama island, where we had a delicious seafood dinner. The food was wonderful, but the rides to and from were even better-- it was dark on the way back and we zoomed by the Hong Kong harbor (including, you guessed it, the building that looks like koalas are climbing up the side of it!!), lit up really beautifully.

And then, the next day, we were off in many different directions. Some of the CUHK fellows stayed put, others went off traveling for the week before classes started, and the Anhui fellows (including, very sadly, Beijing buddies Gabe and Alex!!) peaced Anhui-ward. Hayley and I, accompanied by one of our wise second-years made our way to Changsha. And one glorious overnight train ride later (Get on the train. Go to sleep for 9 hours. Wake up. You have arrived. I think I love trains.), we had arrived at our new home.

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And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of how I have come to live in Changsha, otherwise known as Obscure Urban China. Thanks to HELPFUL GRAPHIC, you already know where in China the city is. And thanks to my hooky in medias res opener (I was an English major, after all)(but actually I just wanted to brag with no context about how clean our kitchen is because it took a long time to clean and is really very beautiful now), you know a little about my apartment. Here are some other facts about Changsha:

1.   Changsha is the capital of the Hunan province.

2.   Changsha has a population of about 7 million, which, if it were in the US, would make it the second most populous city, second only to New York. But, get this, it is only the FORTY-FIRST MOST POPULOUS CITY IN CHINA, which makes it the Colorado Springs of China. GUYS, the Colorado Springs of China has 7 MILLION PEOPLE. And now I am one of them.

3.   Changsha is some big entertainment capital, so the nightlife is supposed to be pretty cray. I have not sampled it yet, and, sadly, I'll be unlikely to report on it here if ever I do. 

4.   The food in Changsha not as spicy as everyone warned us it would be. Or else everyone is just taking pity on the poor clueless waiguoren and toning it way down. OFFENDED.

5.   Not too offended, though, because the food in Changsha is really, really good.

6.   Changsha cabs are extremely inexpensive. Yesterday, a ten-minute cab ride for four people cost 11 kuai, which is less than $2. WHAT? Also, when you get in, a soothing voice says, “Welcome to take cabs in Changsha,” which is oddly comforting.

But, best of all, Steph tells me that Hunan manufactures something like 80% of the world's fireworks. So there is a massive fireworks display every single Saturday of the year. I caught the tail end of this week's, and even partially obstructed by buildings and through unglassesed eyes, it was pretty badass. The hilarious thing is, there are fireworks going off ALL THE TIME here. I hear them at least three times a day. 

HERE IN CHANGSHA WE CELEBRATE ALL DAY EVERY DAY. Why? BECAUSE WE'VE GOT THE FIREWORKS, DAMMIT, AND WE’RE GONNA USE THEM.

I think I am going to love it here. 

I’M ON A TRAIN AND IT’S MOVING FAST AND

(Note: This post is actually from August 12th-- I wrote it on the internetless train and then neglected to post it. Updated updates coming soon!) 

Hayley: It’s like we’re on the Harry Potter train!!

Gabe: Only a lot worse.

It is hard to express how little space there is right now. Currently, I’m in a compartment whose size Gabe has aptly compared to a “slightly-richer-than-average-girl’s closet.” And right now, aside from the two of us, there are five other people in here too. There are six beds, stacked three high on each side of the compartment with just enough space for a person to pass in between them. I’m on my top bunk right now (right about where the slightly-richer-than-average girl’s spare sheets would go), and there is certainly not enough room to sit up, so I am writing this lying on my back, nestled among all of my earthly possessions. 14 hours down (most of them spent asleep, rocked by the surprisingly soothing jostling of the train). 10 to go.

But, really, I'm just happy we're on this train at all, given that I left packing until the last second and then sort of almost made us miss our train (SORRY GUYS). It was raining when we left Beijing, and it was really only due to the kindness of some of our CET buddies (THANK YOU KARUNA AND KELLIE) that we got ourselves and our absurd amount of luggage into cabs and to the train station before our train, you know, left.

To explain: we’re on our way from Beijing to Hong Kong, upon which all the Yale-China fellows, first- and second-year, are converging for teacher training and bonding and merriment before we all split off to our different sites. It turns out Hong Kong is a LONG WAY AWAY. LIKE 24 HOURS ON A TRAIN. We haven’t actually secured substantial food so far this morning, so we’ve been subsisting on:

1.     The three extremely fuzzy peaches we bought off of the fruit cart last night

2.     A small package of dried pineapple I bought last week

3.     Some horrifying crumbly plastic-wrapped sausages labeled only “Muslim food” which Alex brought and I refuse to touch

4.     Gum

And I can’t speak for Gabe, but I am having a great time on this train, personal boundary / hunger issues aside.  We’ve so far been able to take part in some pretty fun train activities OH MY GOD I just remembered I have candy in my bag hang on hang on hang on hang on. OK, ahhhh, much better. Where was I? Yes, ok, train activities. We’ve been passing around The Phantom Tollbooth, best book of all, currently in Hayley’s possession, and soon I’ll get to reread it. Last night before bed the four of us played some cards, to the extreme amusement of the drunk guys next to us, who kept yelling “MONEY!!” out of apparent disappointment that our game of gin rummy had no stakes. And Alex brought forty balloon-animal-balloons with him, so we spent the morning trying to figure out how to make balloon dogs, to the extreme amusement of the six-year-old Chinese girl on the bunk across from Gabe who is endlessly entertained by the waiguoren (foreigners) who’ve invaded her family’s train compartment. We are really killing it on this train.

Thank you, by the way, for the good vibes I received right before my speech competition—I felt an overwhelming surge of fortitude in the moments right before I had to speak, and I have only you to thank. If you’ve spoken to my father recently, you’ll know that I won a bronze medal! What you probably won’t know is that I tied for third out of seven competitors total. NEVER BEFORE HAS THE WORLD SEEN SUCH A CHAMPION, etc. But it was miraculous even to fill 5 minutes with grammatically coherent Chinese, and I’m just happy that I managed physically to get through the experience without tu­-ing (you can probably figure that one out)(it means vomming).  

It’s actually sort of mindblowing to look back on the summer in Beijing—over the past 8 weeks, we made our way through the Chinese textbook I used (and then forgot) over my entire senior year of high school. And then we went through an entire new, longer textbook as well. We’ve learned something like 650 vocabulary words, and probably 1000 characters or more. And, most unbelievable of all, we can kind of speak and understand Chinese. Kind of. Meaning if we are in a familiar situation (cab, restaurant) and nothing is going horribly wrong, we can usually figure out how to communicate what we want.

Some situations are still too hard for us to manage with our dignities intact. Like the post office. Even though there was an entire chapter of our book dedicated to post office vocabulary (at which I scoffed at the time: Post offices, HAHA, who uses them anyway, WRONG), every time we go in there we manage to get every postal employee in the joint laughing at us, as for example, we repacked the entire contents of one of Alex’s suitcases into tiny cardboard boxes on the floor of the post office. We’ve agreed to disagree as to whether whipping out his magic set (conveniently located at the top of the suitcase) made matters worse or better.

But I guess if there’s one thing I’ve learned over this summer in Beijing it is that laughing, sometimes hysterically, at your own incompetence is often the only way to bear it. Especially in a situation like ours, in which incompetence is utterly inescapable. You might get weak alcohol in orange bowls instead of hot and sour soup because you got the characters mixed up. You might ask what time your friends want to eat manure. You might announce to your class that, at your university, you live in a backpack. You might accidentally ask your roommate’s mother on skype if she thinks you are sexy (disclaimer: only 2/4 of these were me). It is a little freeing, for a fairly type-A Yalie, to accept these mistakes and embarrassments as an inevitable part of daily life.

On we go, to Hong Kong, where we’ll be back to zero with the language thing. And I’m going to find some food on this train if it is the last thing I do. ONWARD!