Morning in East Lansing

It's not so often that I see the sun rise anymore. When I first met Pocket of Bolts, our apartments both had east-facing views (we were practically neighbors!), so we saw the sunrise very often, nearly every morning. None of the places we've lived in since have been like that though.

East Lansing must be very far north, because I had showered and dressed and gone downstairs to an expensive "continental" breakfast in the hotel restaurant, and come back to my room--and only then was it rising. Lazybones winter sun, early to bed, late to rise.

Here's another picture of the sunrise, with me in it because of the reflection. Pity about the window frame, but oh well. Still it gives a sense of the colors involved.

I must say I'm quite fond of this little hotel room. Everything here seems very solid. The wood is actually wood. It feels solid, like it was built to last. The walls feel solid too, and the wallpaper is a tasteful fibrous sort of textured stuff that reminds me of expensive writing paper. I have yet to turn on the flat, wide-screen TV, but it certainly minimizes the amount of space the TV takes up.

Oh and I forgot to mention the shower thing--it worked a lot better than I would have expected. It turns out that a wrap-around shower-curtain pretty much keeps all the water it. A separated-off shower stall turns out to be an unnecessary luxury. Despite my trepidations, the process went pretty much as usual, without a hitch.

But of course what you really want to know about is Y, my friend and professor from Beijing whom I was here to meet. She came to my room sometime after nine. I was a little nervous, but as soon as I saw her again, we both were very warm and friendly. Fortunately, the room was tidy enough and we each perched on one the beds and had quite a long chat. I bit the bullet and described my dissertation project to her. She seemed to think it was interesting, though she remarked on what a departure it was from what we had been talking about before. But not in a bad way.

She described the way she feels here surrounded by an academic culture very different from her own. It's such a shock, she said, and makes her doubt the worth of her own work. How well I understood that feeling!! I had felt exactly the same way in Beijing. Having at least some sense of both sides, I talked with her for some time about just how those differences in academic culture played out, some of the ways I had found of conceptualizing them, and how she might reconcile what she's doing to "our" way of doing things. We talked about her current research (I thought it was fascinating, and totally beyond anything I'd be able to do in half a lifetime, probably!), and how she might present that to a Western audience.

Finally, we got to talking about the project at hand, the translation/book proposal I had come here to help her with. But here I must leave you for now, because I want to do put in some more work on it before I get too tired. I leave you with just this picture of me lounging around in the hotel room. Many more pictures and thoughts from this afternoon still to come in the next post.