A couple of weeks ago I had my first trip to a hospital in China. Idiot that I am, I'd fallen up the stairs (yes, UP) on my way to the computer room at the school. I didn't think much of it at first, but then it started hurting worse and worse when I got to the city that night, so the next morning my friend who was visiting from Japan convinced me to go get Xrays. We took a taxi to the best hospital in town (湘雅医院) and the driver told me to just go to the emergency room area because it would be quicker. He ended up being right about that, but not because he dropped me off at the ER!

No, that's not a typo- it was a monk circus! Yesterday I got to witness one of the more bizarre performances that I've ever seen. On Wednesday I heard some students talking about some monks looking for a place to stay. I wondered if they were like the Hindu sannyasin, renouncing material wealth and living an ascetic life, wandering the countryside. Last night, I quickly discovered that that wasn't the case.

As the month of holiday break nears an end, I am almost dreading the next semester starting, going back to the village and maybe having to start from scratch getting used to life there after my month of luxury and convenience in Changsha. I think I'm getting some insight into why the urbanization rate is so high in China and why so few people choose to go back to their rural homes if given a choice... But then again I always dread leaving the village once I'm settled in, so it's like I get to experience the best of both worlds (and I really feel like the countryside and city are two different worlds here!). One of the things I'll really miss is constant access to the massage clinic down the street from the apartment.

In the states I would never consider getting a massage on a regular basis because of the exorbitant costs, but when you can get a 1 hour professional massage for 30 yuan ($3.75), it's a different story! It's funny how an extravagance like a massage can be so affordable for people in China -- it's the same price as getting a mug (shotglass-sized as it is) of coffee or a meal at a fast food joint... Massage parlors seem almost as ubiquitous as restaurants here, and I pass 2 others in the few minutes it takes to walk to "mine." Most of the people I have met there are at least a couple of decades older than me and are there for specific aches and pains. Massage therapy is a common profession for blind people in China, as standard blind schools offer training and certification.

Anyhow, whenever I left the village to spend a weekend in Changsha, I would come to the clinic and get a massage. At first, it was just like any other place, loaded with the same questions about age, marital status, income, and why in the world I was getting a massage if I wasn't old and falling apart, but since I asked for the same massage therapist every time, it became the ideal place to develop a real relationship: 60 minute chunks of time with the same person (Miss Chen) each time so you can build on what you discussed the last time (or snore in appreciation in case of dozing off!), and no people walking down the street gawking from a bus window, and only a few other patients staring, which quickly wears off as the massage does its magic! After awhile, the massage therapists even started answering curious customer's questions for me, which was great, and they always teach me some of the Changsha dialect when I'm there.

Although I’ve gotten comfortable with my lazy lifestyle in the city, I decided to accept an invitation to spend the main day of the Lunar New Year at a student’s house back in the village. I didn’t realize this until lately, but this is a special New Year for me since you only celebrate your zodiac year本命年 every 12 years, and it’s my 24th year, the year of the Rooster! Apparently you’re supposed to wear red undergarments every day for your zodiac year to ward off bad spirits… I had always ridden the train to a nearby township and taken a half-hour motorcycle ride back to the school, so this was my first time trying the bus from the city to the village. I ended up at a station that didn’t have a bus that day and had to hitch a ride with a van of travelers that dropped me off at the bridge to the school instead of the market, so then I trudged through the muddy path to the market for 30 minutes (all uphill- haha) and was almost 2 hours late.

Having grown up in a Midwestern suburb where there’s no such thing as a traffic jam (well, now with that crazy Super Walmart that’s not the case any more…), it’s been crazy getting used to the traffic here, both in the city and the countryside. In both places it seems like the official traffic rules are obsolete, and neither pedestrian nor driver is willing to yield to the other, but people seem to get where they’re going all the same, so I know there’s method to this madness, but I have yet to crack the code. I’m sure that if I were from New York City I’d have gotten used to it already.

One of the first times I was staying at this apartment in the city, I wandered into a small 'baozaifan 煲仔饭' restaurant in the neighborhood, and the owner, Mrs. Zhou (I call her 'Auntie Zhou'-pronounced like 'Joe') had immediately warmed up to me, and she kept putting more and more food down for me and then said it was on the house! Then I found out that she has a young boy who struggles with English lessons at his school, and she wanted me to help him out. 'not again,' I thought. For some reason, strangers ask me to teach their children (or them) English all the time, even in line at the market or on the bus, and I just felt all 'taught'-out from work. So instead of a simple no, of course I said okay and smiled and left, grumbling about it as soon as I was out of sight. So from then on I always went around the back way to the apartment so she woudn't see me and call out for me to teach her son... sneaky me!

It's been almost 2 weeks since the semester ended and I came to the city. If things had gone as planned, I would be in Guizhou at my friend's house spending the holidays with her family, but with the Spring Festival rush, I couldn't even get a standing ticket on the trains, so I've been in Changsha the whole time instead. At first I hated the idea of spending time in the city because it seems like this huge impersonal, polluted, noisy blob, where the village is familiar, layed-back, has clean air, and the noises consist of dogs barking and cockadoodle-doos....

But after a conversation with Wuna's brother (I am living in his extra apartment/ office while in the city) the other day, I realized that I've really gotten the hang of living in the city. He was asking why in the world I wasn't using this time to get out and see some sites in the surrounding provinces, but after telling him how I've been keeping myself entertained and enjoying my freedom, he exclaimed, "DingNa (my Chinese name)! You're really in your element here in the city!" Actually he said I was like a fish that got water (如鱼得水), but I'm assuming that's what it means...

At that moment, I big thought bubble appeared above my head as I pondered how I've become a fish who got its water...

First of all, I want to explain a little bit about how I ended up teaching at the Phoenix School in Little Stone Village (Xiaoshicun). Originally I had just come to the village for the 2005 "China Summer Workcamp," a camp where a group of Chinese and foreign volunteers teach language and environmental awareness to about 200 kids from the Tall Bridge Township (Gaoqiaoxiang). To make a long story short, I decided to stay behind and help start up a school for young rural women. I only discovered bootsnall travel blogs this past week, so I'll want to backtrack a little bit and write about some of my experiences up until now in more depth, but in short, it's been an adventure-filled 6 months so far! Below is a picture of the school and an excerpt from the China Summer Workcamp webpage about the opening of our school.

It's been years since my little obsession with Japan began, and I had a chance to live there for a year as a high school exchange student back in '99, then decided to seal my fate and major in Japanese, so if someone had told me that I'd be living in Hunan now, I'd have been shocked and depressed that my little dream world of Chrissy-becomes-Japanese-and-the-whole-country-loves-her wouldn't come true! :)

Anyways, after studying Japanese for a long time I was really interested in learning about where the kanji all came from and also thought that Chinese sounded so cool with all the tones, so I signed up for some Chinese classes and was hooked after the first semester. I ended up going to Beijing the next summer to take more Chinese. We had absolutely no free time to explore the city because the study load was so intense (it only took a week or so before the PIB program stood for "Prison in Beijing"), but what really made an impact on me was seeing the mixture of extreme wealth and poverty in the city, with immigrants from impoverished areas coming to cities to serve the new wealthy populace. I was shocked to find out that the waitresses at our favorite restaurant actually lived in the restaurant on little cots, and I often saw the myriads of construction workers just sleeping on the street or in makeshift tents with plastic sheets. That memory kind of stuck in my mind the next year and I researched about some poverty issues in China, but the more I read, the less I felt I understood...