Quadruplets, Hair Adventures, Eating Bitterness

Wednesday: History and legend class again, yet another presentation. The girl was a better public speaker than the last one, so superficially she sounded like a professor. However, there was no real direction to her presentation. She was just putting a bunch of passages about seasonal regulations together, reading them out in a slow clear voice, and then explaining them in modern Chinese. Again, possibly my slowness of comprehension, but I didn't get anything out of it that I hadn't known before. To my great surprise, one person did ask a question. I'm guessing she put him up to it. The whole thing was exceedingly tedious. I am thinking about stopping attending this class.

After class I went to the Farm Garden and had BE's favorite "lion's head" meatballs and a tofu thing. I guess I was craving protein. Unfortunately, the tofu thing was very heavy on a certain Chinese spice, tentatively translated as "prickly-ash," I think? Which causes numbness and buzzing in your mouth. It is an interesting flavor, but I have decided I don't care for it. It just feels too much like poison.

Slowly I am learning to get a sense of what dishes are good. ZY says the dishes have not changed for the past ten years at least, so hopefully this body of knowledge/experience will continue to come in handy.

On the way home, I saw these high school (or younger?) kids. I wish I could have got a good picture of them, but they were in constant motion and there were lots of interfering factors. I think you can get a sense of it though: walking four across they looked like scary blue Siamese quadruplets.

High school uniforms in China aren't as sexy as Japanese ones (which is probably for the best) but they do look more comfortable, being some approximation of sweats.

I went home and spent the first part of the afternoon finally wrapping up my chapter two to send to my advisor. I wrote the first 90% of it over the summer, ran out of time, came to China, was too scatter-brained to work on it for weeks… Even yesterday, I only finished it by leaving out two sections I had been planning to write, and writing the conclusion like a stream-of-consciousness free-association thing. I told this to Colin, lamenting, and he said, "Ah, now you sound like you're really writing a dissertation."

Well I sent it off. My advisor will be here in three days, and probably won't have time to look at it, but I thought I'd give him the option.

Then I spent some time working on e-mails and translations. Finally, in the early evening I went to get my hair cut. It was getting kind of scruffy. I went to the place I had gone before. The massage was much less hard and more lackadaisical this time. I think I prefer it hard. Also, since when am I fat enough to elicit the comment (from the massage girl while she was rubbing my back): "Hm, how to say this--It seems to me that Americans tend to be on the heavy side." Grr. But I answered politely enough, saying that we think the opposite, you Chinese tend to be on the tiny side.

Then I narrowly escaped getting a perm: it was one of those cases I've mentioned before where someone asks you if you want something and you don't understand quite what. Although I thought he just meant some kind of layering or something, which I was about to allow, but then I had a clever impulse and asked "if it would take very long?" Not long, he said, only 40 minutes or so. Then I pondered some more and thought about what he'd said, and decided it meant "curl". It was the same word that's used for sushi and scrolls--sounds like curl to me. "Oh no," I said. "I'm…in a bit of a hurry you see. I haven't eaten dinner for example." He was disappointed--perms are expensive?--and cut my hair just the way I'd asked but kind of hastily. Not so good to tell your hair-dresser you're in a hurry, but it was the first excuse that came to mind. Actually, I have zero desire for the kind of thrashed-looking curly hair women here get conned into! Or any curly hair, really. "Just a little, you know; it'll look very natural," he coaxed. But it's not natural cause my hair is not naturally curly. If it were, I wouldn't get a "very natural" straightening either. I want my hair not just to look natural but to actually be natural. :P "Well, next time then," he said enthusiastically.

I'm thinking next time I will be trying somewhere new. Still, I like the cut a lot. This picture isn't too good, but it kind of gives a sense.

After this I went to the rice-porridge restaurant. After all the protein for lunch, I thought light, hot rice porridge with maybe a vegetable side dish would be just the thing. I got almond and chicken again, and then ordered a vegetable that looked interesting. I forget what it was called, but it was green and fleshy and came with lily bulbs and pineapple. Doesn't that sound exciting? The waitress looked startled (always a bad sign). "Are you here all on your own?" she asked. "Yes," I said, worriedly "did I order to much?" I once happened to me that I ordered enough for a family of four by accident. "Oh no," she said, and bustled away.

The vegetable dish smelled pretty good. But when I took a bit, it was shockingly bitter. I got the sense that the wait-staff were covertly watching my reaction so I choked down at least have of the brutally big pile of the stuff. It's funny how hard it is to eat something that tastes very bitter. Our bodies tend to tell us that it's not good for eating, and try to get us to stop. Chinese people do sometimes eat bitter things, though, because they are thought to be medicinal. Not me, man! Next time I go to that restaurant I am totally checking to make sure what that stuff was so I'll never try ordering it again.