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Published: January 7th 2011
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Chinese village school - One of the nice ones (some are pretty shabby) Greetings once again,
It's getting mightily cold here...and by cold I don't mean chilly. If you take chilly and go two steps below to cold, then go three rungs below that to really pigging cold, two more down to bloody freezing then go another three steps below that you'd be somewhere in the right vicinity. I'm walking around my my lips smeared in vaseline all day and we live in thermal vests and long johns covered by about 5 more layers. The solar powered water heater (that's fairly standard here) is not as effective when it's cloudy, and so usually I have to shower with a giant thermos full of boiled kettle water, utilising a big plastic bowl as a delivery method. It's getting down to about minus 20 this week and the sun has finally been swallowed by a inpenetrable veil of grey/white cloud. The snowfall is pretty regular, though a considerable amount of unshakeable lethargy means that we are yet to join the hordes of snow sweepers and shovellers who get up at the crack of dawn every morning to clear the streets. They sweep the snow into heaps, bags and boxes then it is thrown or shovelled
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Our translater (Li), Mr Jang and Mr Tie. Every school has coal stoves like this one in the rooms, which we huddle around every morning. Everyone wears their coats all day indoors. into trucks and driven away. All the women wear face masks here (not for religious reasons, just cos your face gets well chilly). Now, some of the men are doing so, and I even saw a middle-aged man in pink fluffy ear-muffs yesterday.
It's well icy on the pavements all the time, so sometimes you have to slide along. There are special gangs of people employed to chip away at icy areas on the roads with little pick axes...it's all people power here!
Our house seems to be on funeral corner, and we've already witnesseed about 6 funeral ceremonies here. Some may be for the same person though, as apparently it is traditional to recite prayers for the dead at seven day intervals for up to 49 days after a bereavement in China. The local folk custom for funerals is quite fascinating though. They have a big bonfire in the street in which they burn some items. Male members of the family seem to dress up in white costumes and parade around the fire, the leader of the procession holding some kind of standard. Whilst the props are really colourful, the accompanying music comes from a laba player,
a musical instrument which is a kind of suona. It's quite haunting and evocative.
There was another little festival day a couple of months back, which was the ancestors sacrifice festival. All along the streets throughout town, families had built tiny bonfires where they crouched and burnt paper money to buy the way for their ancestors in the afterlife. The shops must make a roaring trade in exchanging real money for paper notes...what a great deal! The night was quite atmospheric though, with millions of tiny fires everywhere and people crouched, whispering in hushed tones.
I've got used to the attention now to the point that I don't really notice it so much. Yesterday we went out for lunch to one of our favourite restaurants (i.e one of the ones in in which we have learnt to part-decipher the menu!) and half way through the meal the owner of the menu asked us to come and take photos with all the staff, and then individually with him, the chef, the family, his friend from over the road... It's unavoidable being high profile. Every time I stop to buy something in a shop or the market, I'm immediately surrounded
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Mural on the school wall. This is Li Feng. Chairman Mao said he was a model comrade, one of the great 5 who were so loyal to the cause that they would put out a forest fire at the cost of their own lives. We should all try to be a bit more like Li Feng! by a circle of spectators. At times this can be very helpful, as if the vendor fails to understand my hit-and-miss weirdly pronounced Chinese, someone in the crowd may turn out to have a better interpretive abilities.
Elderly people seem to rabbit on endlessly without the slightest inkling that perhaps you may not be able to interpret the blistering whirlwind of babble that overpowers you. Not so long ago, Sarah got accosted by a local eighty-something who started grabbing angrily at her trousers (which characteristically had a 2 inch mud stain at the bottom of each leg where they were trailing in the slush) and pointing upstairs towards an apartment. I do believe that this may have been kindness wrapped in an iron-glove of mothering, and she merely wished to get Sarah in said apartment and whip her kecks off (in the nicest possible way). However, she has now made it onto Paterson's hit list, along with the Junior High School girl who stalks her on the main street, occasionally dragging her into the photography shop so that they can get their photo taken together professionally.
Vendors sell kinds of bread, buns, and all kinds of weird food
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School sports field. Every village school has exactly the same facilities (plus some concrete ping-pong tables). from wheeled glass boxes in the street. Yesterday I bought some kind of whirly bread from one old woman, which last time I bought it was called 'shouhaza', but she then started arguing with me about the name of the bread. Then she started trying to get me to buy something else instead, and started rabbiting on incomprehensibly. When the language gets beyond my very basic comprehension, I've taken to just repeating what the person says followed by 'ma?', which turns it into a question like you're pondering what they've just said. In this way, you can survive in a conversation for some time, without the faintest idea of what is going on...a stubborn and clandestine attempt to learn the language through immersion. I sealed the deal with the rather complex line, 'I like this one', and suddenly the rays of sunshine burst through grim clouds of her apparent wrath we could complete our transaction.
Whilst the Spring festival is approaching, we're due to be doing a lot of training courses, firstly for University students who are about to start their teaching placements next term; and secondly several courses for primary school teachers, to help build on their English
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Reminder to make sure you always exercise...playground wall. skills, as many of the teachers struggle to understand and pronounce the language in the text books. Thus, our lives are largely going to be taken up with planning and delivering training. I don't mind so much though, as the courses are kind of fun to do and we get to prepare all the material ourselves at home.
We've got 15 days off in the middle of Spring break though, so have booked a holiday in Yunnan down south, which is a darn sight warmer. Looking forward to hanging out in a couple of popular traveller haunts, dali and lijiang, and meeting some international folk.
All for now, big love to all...family n friends.
Dave.X
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Angus
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Cheerystuff
Dave that looks absolutely amazing, you are clearly enjoying yourself. The weather is obviously challenging, can't imagine Esther coping with that, not to mention the hung dog meat! Keep it coming, its inspirational and hilarious. all our love to the both of you.