Catching Cold, Pronounced Healthy, Adventures in Eating

I woke up as usual at 4 AM yesterday, but this time with the strong feeling of inevitable discomfort that means I will be catching a cold. I drank some water and actually went back to sleep for a few more hours, for a total of 10 hours' sleep, an unusually long and restful night. Nonetheless, I woke up with a cold for sure. I felt thick-headed and slow and weak. But I drank quite a lot more water, had some vitamin C, and looked out the window.

What a clear and beautiful day it was! Why, I had almost forgotten that my window has an incredibly lovely view of the western hills--when it's clear. Yesterday it was so clear that things seemed to sparkle and be colored a shade brighter than on overcast, polluted days. It was the rain, apparently, bringing down the particulates, clearing the air. It was the most handsome sky I'd seen since I moved in here.

I was not feeling very strong, so I put most of my to-do list on hold and took my time with things, puttering around the apartment. Around mid-morning I finally went out, walking very slowly and deliberately. Given that the main activity today was to go to the medical center and be certified healthy, it was rather bad timing. But oh well, they surely wouldn't pay all that much attention.

On campus, the first thing I did was buy a little messenger bag. I had been thinking of doing so for some time, but had been intimidated by the pushy salesgirls at the campus Mini-mart. The salesgirls, if they saw you looking at the bags, were quite determined to choose one for you. They had a nice selection and reasonably priced, but I hate having my stuff chosen for me. I like to look at things and deliberate. They like to get the customers in and out as fast as possible, with minimum disordering of their display. Today, though, I decided this was a silly reason to keep putting off this particular errand. Besides, in my weakened state I was willing to be pushed around. I specified the size and let them choose the bag, a dark blue shoulder bag with a soft strap and a lot of zipper pockets big and small. It's not bad, in fact, for just little expeditions--a book, a water-bottle, a notebook, small items, a lunch, a camera (when I get one). For bigger stuff, like groceries or my computer, I can just take my backpack. So I felt pretty satisfied.

I also bought a temporary meal-card and a couple of oranges. The oranges here have green skin like limes, and taste very different from oranges at home. (I made double sure to ask if they were sweet or sour, though, just in case they really should be limes. The fruit-stand guy looked at me like I was off my rocker, but said in an injured tone that of course they were sweet.) Anyway, these green oranges are less acidic but also less juicy and sweet than the ones at home--something like the difference between cantaloupes and those yellow Korean melons. Anyway since it is so difficult to find orange juice here (Snapple-like sugared orangeade predominates), I thought oranges would be a good substitute. (At home I always drink lots of orange juice, the most tasty and expensive possible, when I have a cold.)

After this, I explored some of the cafeterias, but they were so mobbed, and I so ignorant about food, that I was intimidated. Finally, I went to the foreign student cafeteria, which was much less populous. There, while I was waiting in line, a middle-aged Chinese woman came up very close to me and looked me intently in the face. "You aren't--are you from England?" she asked in Chinese. I said that I was from America, and she laughed with embarrassment and said she had mistaken me for someone else. Then I wondered who, but she went quickly away. So somewhere out there I have an English twin.

At the cafeteria, I picked out an intriguing vegetable dish I had seen on other people's plates at the other places. I have no idea what vegetable it was. Thin stalks of something, or something that seemed to be thin stalks and no leaves. They were cut into inch-long segments, cooked in a thin brown sauce with little scraps of meat. They tasted a bit like green onions but weren't. Perhaps they were Chinese long-beans but they didn't have the right texture. The tougher ones were very much like the bottom of asparagus stalks, so maybe they were some sort of very thin asparagus without any heads. But they didn't have asparagus flavor. Oh Chinese vegetable mystery, how I like thee! I would have been very happy if I could have taken a picture of this interesting lunch, but even without that, I was pleased at the new taste.

Then I sat quietly and waited for 1 PM to come. We had been told to assemble at 1 PM, and I had got the sense that they would take us over to the medical center for our examinations. Not that they came out and said this! A lot of things here work by intuition; fortunately mine is good and I am also patient. A big tour-bus was parked nearby for quite a long time, no sign or announcement, but after a while I decided maybe the tour-bus was going to take us to the medical center. I asked someone who was getting off, and--despite a very garbled language-barriered attempt at communication--my hypothesis seemed to gain support. It is rough talking to international students who don't know English, Chinese, or Japanese! Perhaps I could get by with French, but the French people all seem to speak English; and the Koreans all speak Chinese. It's the Eastern Europeans who are rough!

Anyway, got on the bus. Being a nice person, I even made a quick call to a fellow I'd met the day before, Jason, who remembered me from the FB orientation. (I hadn't remembered him.) He was more clueless about the registration process even than I was. Information here is dispensed on a need-to-know basis, and sometimes not even dispensed when you need to know. Case in point, the lack of any identifying markings or announcements regarding the bus and its destination. If you were snappy enough to realize that the bus was for you, you got to ride the bus. Otherwise you could cab it or make your own way!

There's a Chinese saying, "Mention one return three." It comes from Confucius' praise of his best disciple Yan Hui. Yan Hui was the one who (figuratively) when shown one corner of a square could come back with the other three. In other words, a truly good student can take a very small amount of information and derive a great deal from it. The registration process seems to be sorting people like that from the others.... Or possibly everyone but me just has a much better source of information. I'm not sure. I just watch everything intently, wait patiently where I hope I'm supposed to be, and ask in polite Chinese when all else fails.

The medical center: we were there en masse, so that its main distinguishing feature was that it was flooded with us. International students of all sorts, including Asian-looking ones from Korea and Japan, even Chinese-speaking ones from Hong Kong and Taiwan. But also a lot of plain ol' white (and black) kids. Us by the hundreds. The signage was confusing, and I asked several times about which line(s) I should stand in, dutifully disseminating the information to panicked-looking kids with so-far non-existent Chinese. I know by not coming to China at that stage, that I have learned my Chinese the hard way rather than the easy way. No doubt I have a lot of bad habits those kids will never pick up. But it certainly is a boost to my confidence to come here already able to talk and do things (more or less). I think I would be quite terrified if I came here, had to do things, and also could hardly speak a word.

Many kids had brought their chest x-rays. I had already ascertained, by earnest study of the medical form they had filled out for me at registration, that the Princeton doctor's notation regarding my chest x-ray was going to be adequate, as was the negative HIV test they had done there. So while other people had to risk dubious Chinese needles and x-ray machines, I got off lightly with an ECG and a brief check-up (blood pressure, height, etc.). The doctors were of course quite overworked, with all of us lining up for their services. I got yelled at for not understanding which pieces of clothes I was supposed to remove for the ECG, and so forth. But it was all quite painless and quick, once the waiting in line was over.

Then I waited for a long time on the bus for everyone to get done so we could go back. All this waiting was made quite tolerable by my recent addiction to audio books. They are freely downloadable, for example from LibriVox, which has a quite decent collection. I have been listening to The Secret Garden, unabridged, and remembering with nostalgic pleasure my childhood fondness for the cassettes of it I'd got from the Springfield Public Library. The lady who read those had a better impression of Yorkshire speech, but they were abridged, excluding the repetitious details, the wandering through strange and wondrous rooms, and the un-P.C. speculations about the "blacks in India." So it is fun to listen to the unabridged version (of course I read it once or twice as an adolescent too, full of the same fondness for those wonderful long-ago library tapes). Listening I can suddenly remember some of the very words and phrases as they sounded read out loud, even before the LibriVox reader says them. I must have heard those tapes over and over again! I guess I have always liked hearing stories out loud, even though it is much slower that way. They are more lively and magical, also more vanishingly ephemeral, also cheaper--given the difficulty of finding English books around here! I mean, there ARE English books, but they are a motley selection, and expensive (relatively) as imported things tend to be.

Back on campus, I found myself with a little cluster of new acquaintances: the FB fellow I'd called before, a girl from Belgium, a fellow from England. It was the usual sort of accidental ex-pat group, the sort of group that also sometimes forms on the first day of school. You may have nothing in common at all except being new to the place. But we decided to all go for a snack together. Ended up at a Papa John's pizza, can you imagine! It is less than half a block from my house. There are also a McDonalds, a Pizza Hut, and two KFCs. But the Papa John's was the first Western food I'd had so far in China. It was less sweet and saucy than Papa John's in the U.S., but it really hit the spot after the light lunch of Chinese vegetable and all the fraught medical center queuing. Pizza and Sprite. I still had to laugh at the cost, which came out to about $4/person. At the Chinese food court next door I could eat four meals for that! Etc.

It was not stressful getting to know my fellow foreigners because it seemed...well, somehow less consequential that things go right. It's kind of a bad thing to say, but there you go.

We all exchanged phone numbers. There's a clever way to do this with cell phones. One person says her number out loud, and the other three type it in. Then they each call the first person in turn. Now that first person has all three of their phone numbers, and all three have hers. The first person is then left out of the next iteration (since she has everyone's and everyone has hers) and they repeat the process until everyone has everyone's. It is the work of a moment to add the numbers to the cell-phone's address book, quickly labeled with a first name. (Of course I had to be taught how to do this, but since everyone's phone is practically identical to mine, that wasn't a problem.) Exchanging numbers seems a much smaller deal using this process--just an obvious thing that everyone does. And then you automatically have caller i.d. too. I wonder if cell owners in the U.S. do this too and I just didn't know because I didn't have one, or any occasion to meet a lot of people at once?

Anyway, after this I confess I went home and had yet another quiet evening, listening to The Secret Garden and resting. The important thing seemed to be shaking off this miserable cold!