Krysztov In China!

So as some of you might have heard, the department I was substitute teaching English for finally got their regular contracted teacher in, and so I was out of work.

Rachelle had been going to Pilates classes and had been talking to the instructor about various things, and she mentioned she was thinking about bringing in a new instructor.

I think you see where this is going.

Over the last month or so I’ve been learning Pilates and getting myself back into shape, and today was the first day of the first weekend of instructor training.  And since the owner of the studio, who was leading the training, feels it’s official enough to tell everyone else at the session, it’s official enough to spread on a blog:  I will be teaching Pilates at Ying’s Authentic Pilates studio in Guangzhou.  Following the instructor training, and a certification exam, of course, and then there’s a period of apprenticeship and then I can lead classes at the studio and hell, run my own show if the fancy strikes me.

So, y’know, progress.

I’ve decided to write more about the various food items one might encounter in China.  So, when the fancy strikes me, I shall cast my spotlight upon whatever I find worthy of such attention.

This evening, I am inspired by the loquat.  In Chinese, that would be 枇杷 (pi2 pa).  They seem to be in season around this time of year, so you will see street vendors and market stalls stocked with twigs bearing a multitude of these smallish, oblong orange fruit.  The texture reminds me somewhat of a very ripe nectarine or apricot, maybe, and the ones I am eating are very mild and sweet, with just a touch of acidity.  Inside you will find a cluster of large seeds (I think 4-6 of them), which are very bitter and contain a bit of hydrogen cyanide.  This is important to remember because some people use the seeds for various purposes, and consuming too much of that will kill you.  But hey, what’s life without a few risks?

Anyway, there were some loquats in the fridge, and now there aren’t so many.  They’re said by some to have a mild sedative effect when eaten in quantity, so we’ll see if I sleep any better tonight.

I remembered to take a picture of one of the last ones as an afterthought. They’re just so tasty!

The rainy season has come.  Last night and this afternoon we had pretty much torrential rainfall with our thunderstorms, with some drizzle in between, and a couple conveniently placed clear moments which coincided with my run out to get Rachelle’s bus ticket, and my travel to and from Pilates class this evening.

With the rain, of course, comes the humidity.  It was pretty brutal when we got here in September, but I’m not sure I can ever really get used to it.  The air might not be all that hot, but if you so much as walk briskly, you won’t be able to cool down until you find an air conditioner.  Our three dehumidifiers and our air conditioner are going to be running damn near full-time.

Rachelle is in Zhuhai until tomorrow evening–she didn’t want to take any more two-hour plus bus rides than she absolutely needed in this weather, so that leaves Rigel and me free to do what we please.  Which isn’t much, given our budget constraints.  On the plus side, Rigel’s hormones seem to be winding down.  He isn’t stinking up the house with body odor or pooping everywhere as much as he was for a while, and he seems to have mostly gotten over his temporary dislike of me.  Now we chill together like bros.  Knock on wood.

Yum.

Shortly after we arrived in Guangzhou, we met a doctor friend of Rachelle’s friend we replaced.  He introduced us to the wonders of vegetarian Buddhist Chinese food at a restaurant called Yixin, near the rail station.  It was a refreshing change from our previous experiences with Chinese and especially Cantonese cuisine up to that point, which usually involved our food staring back at us, or playing a rousing game of “Guess Which Organ This Is.”  In addition to various veggies and bean curd, as would be expected, there were also quite a few textured vegetable protein fake-meat dishes, most of which were surprisingly convincing, and all of them super-delicious.

Fast forward.  One of Rachelle’s colleagues’ friends owns another Buddhist vegetarian restaurant, right next to Rachelle’s gym and the campus.  And, we got a cookbook, each with two weeks’ worth of recipes for each season.  It’s in Chinese.  I think I can figure it out.

This is going to be great.

Or terrible, I’m not sure yet.

Rachelle assures me it will be great. She’s the best.

Cookbook cover!

Sample page! It appears to indicate which colors you get from which dishes.

Rigel and I have both been exiled from the kitchen while Rachelle is cooking.  In other news, rabbits reeally hate posing for pictures.

Things in China seem to happen at a different rate than they do elsewhere. People, for example, tend to be slower. I’m not just talking about the people in front of you on the sidewalk who can’t seem to manage any speed faster than “arthritic statue” while walking seven abreast, although that certainly jumps out at you (though slowly, of course). Punctuality does not seem to be a virtue. Any time you plan on meeting someone here, they will show up no less than fifteen minutes after you. Even if you’re also late. I have since come to never expect anyone to arrive on time.

Other things, however, seem to progress much more quickly. For example, most of Guangzhou’s central business district, now towering high-rises on top of shopping malls for as far as the eye can see, was not twenty years ago an expanse of remote farming villages. To this day, one can still see cranes dominating the skyline, as though somebody decided the skyscrapers weren’t nearly dense enough. In a city of 40 million and growing, as more migrant workers arrive daily from the countryside, they might be right.

The other day, my wife wanted to go to a small grocery store on campus to buy some new notebooks. We had not been by there since before the Spring Festival holiday. The store was no longer there, and there seemed to be no explanation for its removal. Likewise, tonight I planned to take her to dinner at our favorite Sichuan hole-in-the-wall. Again, it had been a little over a month since we had been to that area. We walked along the little road outside the Little North Gate, until we were certain we had walked too far. We turned back. Rachelle was frustrated that I had led us right past it. When we reached the place I was sure it had been last time, I stopped, and realized our favorite place for spicy deliciousness was no more. The sign had been changed, but more surprisingly, the entire layout of the building had been remodeled. The food was still plenty spicy, but they didn’t have our favorite dishes, and everything seemed more expensive. It seems everything’s getting more expensive. The Irish pub and restaurant we frequent recently did away with their daily specials and replaced their whole menu with a selection that was almost identical, but much more expensive. We can’t go there as much nowadays. In the same part of town, the lady Rachelle bought oranges from every week stopped showing up, and none of the other vendors are a suitable replacement. Nothing seems to stay the same around here for very long. This isn’t all bad, though. My time as a last-minute replacement English instructor ended last semester, and now I’m training for a new career as a replacement Pilates instructor.

Only a few things stay the same around this city: The heat and humidity are back, the meat-on a stick vendors still sell their yummy wares, no matter how many times the cops make a show of driving them off, there are still random couches on street corners and people napping on them at all hours, and the haze of pollution never leaves the air for long. Ah, Guangzhou!

This was a triumph…

…Er.

Hey, I’ve been meaning to post for weeks now but I’ve been alternately really busy and really apathetic.  Quick catchup, hopefully to be covered in more detail:  We went to Macau with Jenny and Sebastian for the weekend before Christmas.  It was a lot of fun.  I didn’t think I would enjoy it as much as I did.  There were lots of pictures since we enjoyed both the gaudy vegasy parts and the historic old parts.

We also have a new family member.  We adopted a Chinese…lagomorph.  Yes, we have a new baby bunny.  Our current goal is to get him to stop peeing everywhere.  Or at least not on everything we care about.  It’s nice having another little source of chaos.

I’m done teaching, since the teacher I was filling in for finally managed to get his paperwork in order.  This gives me more time to study, but also less money.  So we’ll have to tighten our belts a bit until I find a way to make up the difference.  I don’t happen to have any readers with more money than they know what to do with, do I?

NEXT WEEK.  Vacation in Thailand.  Rachelle has a friend in Bangkok and we’re going to spend over a week there and on the beaches of Koh Samet, and in a little town on the River Kwai.  Yes, THAT River Kwai.

There will be lots more pictures and hopefully lots more words.  HOPE YOU ENJOY.

Last night Rachelle made some delicious lentil soup and we had Jenny and Sebastian over for dinner and Cards Against Humanity.  While Rachelle finished up dinner preparations, I downloaded the game and ran it down to the little print shop next to the Dig’n'Shop, across the parking lot.  I returned back and Rachelle and Jenny spent some time cutting out hundreds of little pieces of paper while we waited for Sebastian to arrive and the soup to finish cooking.

The soup was delicious, but the wine we had was not so much.  China does not have a long-standing wine tradition, and even the oldest vineyards are very…industrial? so pretty much every bottle of domestic wine I’ve had tastes at least a little off, with some flavors that don’t quite belong in wine and the ones that do belong still being slightly off-kilter.  I joked that the best way to enjoy Chinese wine is to already be drunk.  Fortunately we had plenty of beer as well to wash it down.

I don’t think much more needs to be said about Cards Against Humanity, other than that Sebastian got a crash course in the seedy underbelly of American culture.  He still managed to win a few points by playing cards he didn’t fully understand, though.

I thought I would have enough time to sleep last night, but I forgot to tell you that Chinese wine, in addition to its sub-par taste, also has a devastating effect on my battle-scarred intestines.  Lordy lord.  I woke up at 5:30 in the morning and ended up having to skip my Chinese class for the day just so I could try and get some rest.  I finally managed to drift off for about fifteen minutes before my body said NOPE, time to piss!

Grumble grumble.

So I was going to try to fit in a little more sleep before I had to seriously finish preparing for the class I teach in the afternoon, when China decided to thwart me again.  I get the feeling that the enthusiasm most Westerners feel about watching sports, or having sex, or both at the same time, pales in comparison to the way most of China feels about noisy construction activity.  I closed my eyes, and a hammer started pounding downstairs.  Then another joined in.  Before long a whole chorus of hammers were pounding away beneath me.  At first part of me worried someone was at the door (Rachelle was out at Pilates, and she wasn’t quite supposed to be back yet, but you never know), but eventually drowsiness overcame disturbance and away I drifted for the next hour.  By the time I had finished hitting my snooze alarm, my headache was less terrible, my guts had mostly settled, and I was ready to get on my laptop with its annoying colorful stripe down the middle of the screen (that’s another story, for another day) and finish my lesson.

On a positive note, the new double-edge razor I ordered (well, had someone order for me because most of Taobao’s payment methods require Chinese citizenship), and hopefully I will not turn my face to hamburger in the process of removing my November beard.

I may have said a thing or two, either on this blog or elsewhere, about how China seems to follow different laws of physics.  For example, there is a stick of deodorant that I KNOW made it to China.  I used it the first week or two after we got here.  Now it is nowhere.  I don’t want to buy a new one, because fuck Parknshop, and I have resigned myself to occasionally using my wife’s.  Sure, I smell a little dainty, but it’s better than beef stew (don’t get me wrong, I love the smell of a good beef stew, just not when it’s emanating from under my arms).

I would also like to introduce the phenomenon we have come to know as ‘softbrick.’  Soon after we arrived in Guangzhou, my wife stopped on a sidewalk in the middle of Zhujiang New Town and announced that she thought she had stepped in something squishy, and possibly fecal in nature.  Upon this declaration, Jenny and I joined her in searching the area to find the offending pile, only to conclude that there was nothing in the immediate vicinity apart from ordinary paving bricks.  The only logical explanation was that one of the bricks had briefly changed consistency, most likely just to fuck with us.  One month later, it happened to Jenny.  Fucking softbrick, man.

I don’t think I need to go into much detail about the winding alleyways that are somehow longer than the blocks of buildings they cut into, yet never emerge on the other side…or emerge on the other side of the district, facing the opposite direction…or reach a dead end, and when you turn around you find you are on a different alley than the one you came in on.

And don’t get me started on the seemingly limitless amount of phlegm an average Chinese man can produce and distribute on the sidewalk.

Man, this shit just ain’t natural.