Roasted Chestnuts, Learning So Much

Greetings dear ones and strangers too. I am very tired after an overflowing sort of day, but I thought I should at least post some of my recent photos and say a few words about things before I get too far behind. First, I forgot to mention that yesterday for the first time there were people roasting chestnuts and selling them. They have a giant wok over a flame, and the wok is full of shiny black gravel, which the vendor constantly turns and stirs, turns and stirs. (The shine, I think, is a sort of oil.) In the gravel are chestnuts, each with a long slit in the skin, and slowly roasted to perfection. When you buy them, they are still very warm but the skins come off easily. This picture was taken by pointing the camera down into the little brown bag. Aren't the chestnuts beautiful? I love their smooth brown glossy chestnut color, too. I think I got something like half a kilo, and I ate almost all of them in one afternoon. I am sorry I did not get a picture of the person roasting the chestnuts. I will try to in the future!

This photo is of the opera cast receiving their flowers. It was quickly snatched and not perfectly in focus, but somehow I rather like it.



The other leftover photo was another quick illicit shot down into the courtyard of the National Library. Do you recall I mentioned the tacky old yellow dragon that had clearly been demoted from a major courtyard ornament to a piece of rubbish? Well! It just so happened that on Thursday when I visited again, they were in the process of smashing the dragon to pieces with a sledgehammer. It is mostly intact in this picture but it was an unrecognizable jumble of metal by the time I left. What luck that I was able to snatch this photo before it was too late!


Moving on to today: I can't believe it's already Friday again. Sometimes the time has dragged here in Beijing, but this week has flown by. I suppose it's because I have been rather busy. In any case, I had my Chinese lesson this morning. After a long internal debate about the relative merits of bus or bike, I decided on bike. I would leave plenty early this time, I promised myself, as I had yet to be on time to a Chinese lesson! I left early, and wonder upon wonder, everything went very smoothly. So far, it is a 45 minute bike ride, but my teacher insists that if I choose the route properly I should be able to get it down under 30. I allowed an hour, and so arrived at my Chinese lesson not only on time, but actually early.

While I was waiting for ten o'clock to come, I wandered out the side door of the building and took this picture from the landing of the backstairs. It's of the high wall of the apartment building opposite, which looked kind of grimly marvelous to me despite also being so ramshackle.

My Chinese lesson was really helpful as always, but not quite as smooth as before. I was just having a bad talking day. Those of you who have been in foreign language immersion situations I'm sure can understand this feeling very well: there are good days and there are bad days. You can tell when someone is feeling tired and strained trying to understand what you are trying to say! But at least I pay her for her patience. Am I a freak, that I feel so much more comfortable with someone I have hired than with someone who is just a friend? Yeah, I thought so. Well, I learned a lot of things despite my inarticulateness.

This is a picture I snapped on the way home, while waiting at a red light. It is a house-wares vendor. I think they have a very hard job because their wares are so heavy!

Back at home, I put some of my new learning to use in brushing up my presentation notes, relaxed for an hour or so, and then headed back to campus. I printed out the presentation and had some time to spare, so I went to the History Department and (finally!) got all the requisite stamps and seals and signatures on my department change application. Hurray! I was afraid if I brought it to the next stage in the process I would be late for my 3 PM appointment, so I shall do that on Monday. But I think the hardest part is behind me. After all, it's the department you are leaving that is likely to have hard feelings and make trouble. The department you are going to must feel fairly well-disposed toward you? At least I hope so!

My three o'clock meeting was with Professor LGs, whom I have mentioned before. We spoke for some time about the information I had gathered, and he discussed with me his ideas on the most efficient way to write a research paper. He is a greatly experienced advisor of many graduate students, and one definitely did get a strong sense of venerable wisdom emanating from him. He is a small man and very thin (I am taller and heavier by almost 10 kilos, as it turns out!), but in talking to him one gets a sense that his mind is enormously full of things: texts, ideas, thoughts, arguments, disagreements, associations, more texts, more and more texts. When he talks about having an idea, he says it is in his stomach, which I find incredibly cute and funny. "In my stomach I have a lot of thoughts and ideas…" I think he feels the pressure from his grandly distended mind and his aging body: he wants to get his ideas out there, to express them, at once! He is nearing eighty years of age, both he and his wife are fond of saying. He wants to see things written! published! now! (Meanwhile, his wife wants him to conserve his energy and think less of scholarly immortality and more of extending physical mortality as long as possible.)

The sense he gives off, of driving force, is very good for me. I am inclined to be a very slow and plodding researcher, wasting lots of time on tiny tangents and writing at a snail's pace. But now when I am tempted to be slow, I think of LGs and how old he looks, and how I should use our time well. It is a good inspiration for me.

He is very positive about collaboration and suggested an initial plan, an article of limited scope, perhaps to be followed by others if it works out, and published both in English and in Chinese. I am sure it must be possible to accomplish such things. He, of course, can publish anything he wants here in China, but shouldn't I be able to use my connections to do the same in the US? I don't know, because I've never really had anything that seemed worth publishing. But I will find out. At the very least, it will be a great exercise; it has the feeling of a sort of apprenticeship.

I stayed on to dinner. I am hoping it wasn't trouble to his wife. She was clearly in a rough mood today, and quarreled with LGs in the kitchen in the interval between our talk and dinner (door closed). But I think it was not about my being here because we concluded early enough that she didn't absolutely need to invite me. I think she had had an upsetting phone-call, or perhaps there was something else, but in any case she was warm and laughing at dinner, and the two American girls were friendly too. One is very smart and one is very young. They are like (but aren't actually) a quiet clever older sister already on her path and a rowdier more awkward younger sister just getting her bearings on life. They are cute.

For some reason, we got to talking about weight and kilograms versus pounds, how kilograms are completely meaningless to us Americans because we don't use them, and then LGs got inspired and pulled out a scale from under the couch. A public weighing! It was a bit like a public execution! But dutifully, dutifully we went to be weighed. The younger girl had to be strongly persuaded. Hey, the scale was in kilograms (was my thought) and didn't mean anything to me. I was the heaviest, though. The girls found it hilarious that I was laughing and bragging about it. I can, though, because I have lost enough weight here that I don't feel overweight anymore. (I just did the conversion.) Okay, I haven't lost that much weight. But it has been redistributed to muscle or something, because I feel more husky than fat!

We set a time for another meeting, much hard negotiating with the wife ZWx. She is protective and doesn't want LGs to wear himself out. I hope I won her trust by saying that I understood completely and that she is the boss. She grinned at me then and said approvingly that I was an obedient child. I felt bad to have come on an afternoon when she was in a bad mood, but at least I made myself useful when, sometime during our discussion, a man came to receive their old desktop computer. I hated to see such venerable people carrying the big components, so I and the man carried the big bits and they followed with the little cables and cords and accessories. I hope I am learning. I think that relative to other people of their status, they are very patient with cultural mistakes and awkwardness. They host exchange students every year, after all, so they know our ways. So I am hoping very much that I have done right things without being utterly terrified of the thought that I might not have!

And now I am so tired I can hardly contemplate resting. It is cold in the apartment, very cold. I am wearing my red sleep-sack. I have reason to believe that the heat won't be on until mid-November, and I felt cold during my Chinese lesson, and cold in my meeting with LGs too. They wait as long as they can before firing up the heating system. As long as you're not actually freezing TO DEATH, they'd rather conserve resources! I'm very glad for the cozy enveloping warmth of the polartec sleep-sack. Thanks Aunt J! Okay, I'm going to go curl up with a book now, a guiltless blogger.