fried eggs, no ham

for reasons i have mentioned at least three times on this blog since i came to beijing, i try not to eat ham, or cured meat in any form, on a regular basis. it's not that it tastes that bad, or that i don't trust that it's pork or chicken or whatever it claims to be. i just don't like the colour, and the few times i've steeled myself to look past the ghastly pink and nibble a little at it, it has been unbelievably salty.

rachel once told me that when you study overseas eggs will become your best friends. that hasn't quite turned out true for me, but the smell of fried eggs in an enclosed space with nowhere to go does bring back fond memories: aunty lena's house in sydney, the time we first visited, when i was eight; scrambled eggs and fresh, fat white mushrooms, added in slices, made by my mother one breakfast time when we first visited london. i was twelve, and it was winter and dreadfully cold.

i think it has to be cold for the fried egg smell to bring back these memories.

i've never been much of a late-riser, and i'm thankful for it now. my favourite part of everyday is waking up before everyone else in the house, wrapping myself in my quilt, looking out of the window and daydreaming for a bit, then reading my bible.

some wounds do heal

sometime in the year i turned thirteen, tanya and i were skating around the neighbourhood in our new roller-blades when we decided to try our hand (legs?) at skating down the steep hill behind her house.

she ended up on her bum. i was less fortunate, falling on my hands and knees and skidding some distance on the rough, stony road.

i fell about six more times that year, and each time, like the first, i landed more heavily on my left knee than my right. one of the more memorable times was during a skit in english class, where i played a bear begging a hunter to spare my life and i had to fall on my knees as i did so.

inevitably, a keloid formed. it stood out on my left knee, angry and red, and i used to tell my mother mournfully as we sat in front of the tv year after year laughing at the contestants on miss singapore universe, that i would never get past the qualifying rounds. not that i actually wanted to, you understand. i was just attracted by the pretty clothes and prize money for doing what seemed like nothing.

what's more, i fell on average about once every year, and the keloid would invariably split open and form afresh, a squishy bulge which began to harden after some time as the number of times i fell a year lessened.

i thought it would never disappear, and was quite prepared to live with it - except for the time i found some silicone ointment in the medicine cupboard and applied it faithfully for a while, with no results.

this morning while i was stretching i idly looked down at my knees and realised that the keloid was practically gone. the skin on my left knee looks almost normal - there's a slight protrusion, skin-coloured, but it looks like it's going to become less obvious, given a bit more time.

remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. behold, i am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? i will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert - isaiah 43:18-19

keeping the dream alive
after hurling abuse at shangren for daring to suggest that i descend to his and paul's level by ordering 外卖 (wai4 mai4, take-away) for lunch, i succumbed: for dinner, i ordered a very nice pork cutlet with japanese curry from the cosy little restaurant about a 15 minute walk from our apartment. because i think i'll have to eat porridge almost every day next week - it's cheap, and easy to make and clean-up after, and i don't have to keep transferring food out of our only pot like i'll have to do with pasta. but i've already bought a pack of pasta so i'll have to cook it next week before weevils get to it, if there are even weevils here.

as it's started being Rather Cold again. i'm not very sure about the habits of weevils.

i'll keep you posted once i make something other than porridge.

and i don't think i've quite descended to paul and shangren's level yet, because they even order take-away from subway which is less than five minutes' walk from our apartment complex.

diplomatic relations

a few weeks ago one of our university friends took me back to look at her apartment on the back of her bicycle, and i asked her if i could be the one cycling and she be the one sitting at the back when we went back to school.

she refused at first, but she finally let me try to cycle myself around, while she stood by and kept laughing and telling me that she didn't think i'd be able to make it.

i told her to stop laughing and get on - she did, and i moved off, but then i realised that she was running alongside me and still laughing. however, when she saw the look i gave her she hurriedly tried to put on a straight face and said, pleadingly, 不要宰了我，这对新加坡和中国的外交关系不好 (bu4 yao4 zai3 le4 wo3, zhe4 dui4 xin1 jia1 po1 he1 zhong1 guo2 de4 wai4 jiao1 guan1 xi4 bu4 hao3) please don't strangle me, this will not be good for diplomatic relations between china and singapore.

ah well, she was a lot bigger sized than me anyway. i couldn't stop laughing when she said that, and i let her take me back to school again.

this morning i was running for the bus because i didn't want to be late for church, and i overtook a man on a bicyle - i could feel his surprised gaze as i went past, and heard him start to pedal more furiously. because men are just like that, i think.

but all the bicycles here seem to be able to move only at one speed, which is slow. which isn't a bad thing, really. that way the chances of people getting hurt are much less.

so of course he couldn't catch up.

i was almost at the bus stop and was speeding up to get to the bus when i heard the tinkle of metal striking the pavement. looking back, i saw that my house key had fallen out from my bag and i heard the man on the bicycle say, in a rather pleased tone (maybe it was my imagination), 你的锁匙掉了! (ni3 de4 suo3 shi2 diao4 le4) you've dropped your key!

he finally managed to cycle past me.

one more thing about church services here - at the very end, the choir will sing peter lutkin's the Lord bless you and keep you in chinese, and if you're sitting in the overflow hall, while they're singing it, an extremely garish and highly-coloured picture of Jesus, complete with a flickering animated candle, will be displayed on a huge screen.

you can even pick out the pixels.

chicken feet haha
the girls on exchange in shanghai have descended upon our household, with cannis in tow - except that he's residing in paul and shangren's apartment, of course.

anyhow, they appear to be rather more adventurous food-wise than we are, and i thought i was pretty garang already. we went to the great wall today, and with six girls in the house and one bathroom, we didn't all quite manage to grab something to eat before we left. because we had to split up to cab to the bus station, when i got there yenfang was already standing with the others in the queue eating a fat sausage from a pack of four vacuum packed ones - what's more, they were of the spicy variety. everything that's highly seasoned has ingredients listed on the packaging in chinese, and either we can't identify what it is, or generic terms are used which don't tell you much about what's in the seasoning.

we've never quite wished to purchase meat products of the vacuum packed variety, and there are a lot of them: chicken feet, chicken drumsticks, chicken wings, eggs (which can be found in singapore), donkey meat, dog meat - usually all highly seasoned and, as we've been assured, ready to eat straight from the packet. although the chicken drumsticks i've seen looked pale pink and like they needed to be cooked before they were fit for consumption.

the sausages didn't taste too bad, rather like those canned spicy pork cubes your mother makes you eat with plain porridge when she's too lazy to cook proper food. but i don't think i'll be trying the other products anytime soon.

if ever.

***
about three weeks ago paul asked if we needed anything from the supermarket, so i asked him to buy some chicken breast and thigh meat.

you can't go wrong with chicken breast meat, so i don't think he deserves that much credit for coming back with that; he definitely does not deserve credit for the chicken drumlets.

how is that chicken thigh meat?

i suppose it is in its own way, but still.

and he confessed that before i messaged to tell him to do so, he had put the chicken in the chiller and not the freezer compartment of the fridge.

men.

my mother couldn't stop laughing when i told her that story.

***
happy birthday jon wrong. i miss all of you very much.

it's really not that bad, you know?

the security guards at our apartment building have exceeded all our expectations: yesterday they stopped jolie from coming up to our apartment directly to hand us some leftover korean seafood pancake from dinner with her father, and insisted that she call us over the intercom first to confirm that we knew her.

i was in the kitchen when the phone connected to the intercom rang. jinni expressed surprise from the sofa, as did i as i walked out from the kitchen, because jolie hadn't told us she was coming, so we weren't expecting anybody - and when i answered i said 喂 (wei2)? it would have been very strange to say hello, don't you think?

anyhow, we weren't surprised at all when the security guard said 对不起，打错了 (dui4 bu4 qi3, da3 cuo4 le4) sorry, wrong number. i hung up and went back to heating up leftover porridge from lunch when our house phone rang, and it was jolie checking to see that she'd got our unit number correct.

she thought she'd gotten it wrong because i answered the phone in chinese and she thought she had called the wrong house.

how my chinese has improved, jolie thought i was a local.

but that's just one word. i'm not too sure how i sound when i speak in longer sentences.

of hoping

i've finally crawled out of bed, cooked some lunch, and am feeling less Miserable and Homesick.

still, a part of me wishes that i could be back in singapore watching harold and kumar go to guantanomo bay with yalan, and again with jon - though now i can borrow the dvd for half the price and watch it with both of them. and another part of me would give anything, anything, to be there when jon wrong turns 22 tomorrow. however, i doubt the guys have planned anything (liz!) and anyway he's been moaning about how he's sick.

but you get what i mean.

EDIT: jon wrong turns 22 on SATURDAY. i always get these twenty-something dates mixed up, for some strange reason - he's not the only one.

after all, it's supposedly the eighth wonder of the world

shangren's got more stamina than i thought, haha!

acting as zombies in the tomb of 武则天 (wu3 ze2 tian1)'s son,
paul's Very Lame idea which i took to immediately.
and i believe shangren's surprised that we haven't been struck dead by lightning yet

this is the place you see in those documentaries about terracotta warriors
i popped into the photo at the last moment to save myself (and shangren) the trouble of posing again, and do check out paul's Very Cool faux leather jacket

from our very first trip to chengde, that's me blowing freshly fried chou doufu, that's kuek foo stealing a piece, and that's jinni and xiaoyun debating whether a box of it is worth enduring the smell for (it is)

***
i had an Utterly Miserable Homesick Like Anything Can Die day. it started out with me talking to adele on skype, which i thought would make my day, but it grew progressively worse - just because. i was walking along, alone, listening to faye wong and a*mei, on my way to the public security bureau to settle problems which my visa decided to give me when i wanted to just squat down by the side of the pavement and cry.

but i shook myself and collected my passport with my renewed visa, only to find out that they only gave me until july 1 in china when the school administration had requested for july 10.

earphones plugged in, i managed to make it back to the subway station and thankfully got a seat on the train.

i got off the train and held my hands to my face and blinked back the tears and tried to stop feeling like my heart was going to break any moment because i wasn't back in singapore; i suddenly felt sick and tired and exhausted by the sheer number of people and cars on the streets everyday, everywhere. went to my favourite supermarket only to be stopped from entering by the security guard because i was holding a box of olympic mascots which i'd purchased for cherissa, and i had no idea why he stopped me from going in, no idea at all. and then i got stopped on the way out by the lady manning the olympic goods counter and was accused of not paying because she didn't tell me to go back and give her the receipt after paying so of course i didn't.

i ended up going to another nearby supermarket in a capitaland mall, which still didn't make me feel like i was in singapore, and then i walked home with my purchases and sat down on a bench on the way because i was so overcome by sadness that i couldn't breathe. and i looked at the sunshine coming down through the trees and thought about how kuek foo had (very grudgingly) let me ride his bicycle down that street and how thrilled i'd felt once i'd overcome my fear of being part of the noisy mess, the mass of traffic that is that street leading to 五道口.

i felt vaguely better, and came home to xiaoyun placidly eating potato chips in front of the television and a four-stick pack of dark chocolate kit kat which she'd bought to replace the one she'd accidentally squashed on our trip to xi'an.

now i'm sitting on my bed telling you about my day and i'm going to curl up under my quilt and hopefully i'll go on feeling better.

eternity is

don't believe the perfume and jewellery advertisments, or the poets and philosophers, for that matter. maybe the bible, and therefore saint augustine's concept of eternity as timeless existence - but that's a different story altogether, you think?

eternity, really, is sitting on a hard bench for three that's covered with a thin layer of cloth and made with a recline of barely more than 45 degrees, on an overnight train whose number plate begins with 'T' for 特快 (te4 kuai4) or extra fast, yet slows to a crawl for long, endless stretches of railway track with the air-conditioning turned off in a bid to save fuel.

it is being unable to fall asleep sitting on that bench in a hot and stuffy carriage on that train at two in the morning after an entire day of sight-seeing, having to listen to toddlers yelling for respite and your fellow passengers chattering away because they're also unable to fall asleep. it is standing in line for the toilet beside people curled up and sleeping on the floor of the train on sheets of newspaper whose headlines you can still read, only to find out when the train attendant finally walks by again that the sign above the lock is red and reads 有人 (you3 ren2), occupied, because it is spoilt: there is only one toilet for three carriages worth of people with 硬座 (ying4 zuo4), hard-sitting tickets, and there are men squatting directly outside it smoking.

it is the smell of cigarette smoke which cannot dissipate, from cigarettes being smoked in the cramped space of the carriage connectors, and it is the feet in black socks of a fat man, the kind you find at sleazy ktv bars - curly, wiry hair, wearing a white polo shirt tucked in over a huge belly, trousers held up by a belt with a large silver buckle, sports jacket hung on a hook next to the window - sticking a little too far out into the aisle which separates your seat from his.

but eternity is also declining to visit 4 of the 7 museums scheduled by the travel agency, and exploring the area alone while waiting for tours of those museums to finish: walking on a muddy track running through the middle of a farming village, looking at people chopping firewood and washing clothes by hand, sitting in groups outside houses knitting, chatting, playing with their children and grandchildren. buying a bunch of sweet bananas and a stick of pineapple, tasting bread with an odd, olive-vinegar spread spread between huge white layers of it.

it is listening to an 阿姨 complain in heavily-accented chinese about a naughty child whilst you nod and make sympathetic noises although you don't understand a word of what she's saying, and it is watching another one making delicate paper cut-outs in red paper, demonstrating a little to you how it's done. it is catching your bus driver mopping the floor of your bus, not squatting by the road with other bus drivers and smoking - it is sitting on damp grass outside the final museum, amongst bits of melon seed shells and cigarette butts (and other peoples' spit as well, probably, but grass is grass) reading psalm 103 in paul's chinese bible, occasionally looking up into the sky.

and finally, it is a hot bowl of porridge cooked with some unidentifiable, delicious grain, called 小细米汤 (xiao3 xi4 mi3 tang1), eaten with the best potato and carrot shreds and beansprouts i've had so far in china, served by a smiley mother-and-daughter pair in an alley on a cold sunday morning in the 西安 (xi1 an1) spring.

***
xi'an was pretty, and the farmers there looked happy. there was contentment in their eyes, happiness with their simple, comfortable lives. more like the peasants of the sing to the dawn ilk. the fields were green and yellow where flowers used for making oil grew, well-tended and neat, beyond which houses with plain brick walls stood in orderly rows. i think people in clean places are just happier, and 秦始皇 (qin2 shi3 huang2) did leave behind a cash cow for his descendants to milk. having such an enormous ego had its uses, i suppose.

since the terracotta warriors are supposedly the eighth wonder of the world, i will post some pictures once shangren uploads them on facebook. which might be quite some time more, since he's still sleeping off the eleven hour train ride all of us endured. stay tuned.

***
jinni and i spent some time the other day discussing possible causes of my food poisoning. as i listed off the street food i'd eaten, we decided that it couldn't have been the 臭豆腐 (chou4 dou4 fu4) even though i ate it twice on two consecutive days. besides, i make it a point to eat one portion at almost every chou doufu stall i come across only because jon loves it and he's not here with me. such an act of devotion couldn't have such horrific results, could it?

i tell you, it was that piece of barbecued chicken which looked like it'd been lying out for some time. i was too lazy that day to cook any meat.

it's finally spring
and the air in the park near our apartment smells marvellously fresh, all cold earth, new leaves and freshly grown grass. birds flutter through the air and amongst the leaves of the trees which line the streets, twittering merrily, no longer blown off course by strong winds.

bits of cotton fluff throng the air, so you cannot take deep breaths or open your mouth too wide because they will get caught up your nose or in your throat. it is a most uncomfortable feeling, and i imagine cats feel that way just before they cough up hair balls.

jinni thinks they look like falling flakes of snow.

having a good run along the streets of beijing (to the park) depends a lot on the time at which you begin your run. the plus side to leaving earlier, like i did today, is that there are less cars on the roads and more pedestrians and cyclists, which greatly facilitates the crossing of major junctions. i do believe i've become more adept at crossing roads, but just to be on the safe side, i wait for more people to join me at junctions and roads where i have to jaywalk. that way, even when cars honk impatiently at us, the right of way is technically still ours.

you can judge whether it's a good time or not by the number of people on the buses. it's a good time when there are about the same number of people as you would find nus students on a 151 to kent ridge at around 0845.

the down side to leaving earlier is that the toddlers aren't usually out in full force in the park.

it's quite something watching them toddle about, especially since all of them look like 馒头 (man2 tou2) mantou on legs. does it then stand to follow that all mantou look like babies? if there were multi-coloured mantou, perhaps. during winter and the period of time i shall grudgingly admit was early spring they were bundled up in many layers, usually topped with a brightly coloured sweater - which outfit looks to have been replaced by a single sweater, now that it's finally warm.

what hasn't changed about their outfits are the pants they wear. these pants aren't joined at the middle, meaning the pant-legs are both attached to the waistband so there is a gap at the crotch and seat. when it was cold, as they toddled about, their butt cheeks would show, skin red where the wind had rubbed it raw. the purpose of having pants not joined at the middle is to make it easier for their parents or grandparents (usually the latter, in the park) when they need to go shh shh.

i have no idea how you're supposed to spell that word.

anyhow, doting parents and grandparents alike simply bid their respective charges squat by the pavement, or at the drain holes in public toilets; in full view of everybody, they are encouraged to pee.

i can foresee this sort of pants being banned in singapore for the same reason chewing gum was banned.

the park also has many elderly folk doing aerobics and tai ji quan, or learning a dance done with a small drum worn at the hip, dutifully following whoever's in charge. they also walk about, swinging their arms to improve circulation, singing chinese opera. i've chanced upon an old man playing the saxophone, as well as others practising martial arts, complete with fake swords and nunchakus and various professional grunts of the HAH and WOOH nature.

they also look rather alike though, after a while. dark red, dark brown and dark grey coats were favoured in winter, and sweaters in similar colours are favoured now. glaucomoused eyes, or dark glasses; some walk with their spouses, some alone, and these make me the saddest. on the run before today's i saw a solitary old lady with yellowing teeth walking to the park from a roadside food stall, moving slowly against the rush of young, busy pedestrians, biting fiercely into a 煎饼 as if daring it to say something back to her about her aloneness.

***
i've just put lunch on to cook, and it's chicken porridge again. i was supposed to attempt cream of _insert vegetable_ soup this week, having bought anchor butter last weekend (refer to previous post), but was too weak to do so following monday's food-poisoning episode. the mushrooms at the fruit and vegetable co-operative downstairs are very nice, just that xiaoyun doesn't seem to eat mushrooms so maybe it will have to be cream of potato.

oh, and if you had to go all the way to the tenth floor of a neighbouring block to borrow a mop to mop an oily floor, you wouldn't be too tempted to fry food in your kitchen either.

twirling
i realised today that i'm not really doing the whole exchange thang properly. you think? maybe you're right after all, and the real reason i'm on exchange is to learn how to be a housewife. some people seem to think so.

jus. says:
ok wats the food like?
cannot be better than singapore rite?

growie chroeie (the plant version) says:
the food is v good
and i generally eat alot of veg/porridge which i cook at home haha.

jus. says:
haha.
boring.
u cook porridge?

growie chroeie (the plant version) says:
yup

jus. says:
i see ur training for ur future life as a wife

growie chroeie (the plant version) says:
yup im training for life as jon lau's wife...
poor jon lau...
he has to eat porridge and vegetables
AHHAHAAA

jus. says:
nvm
he likes bland food
ur perfect for each other
HA

your boyfriend, andrea :)

***
i was shamelessly excited last sunday when jolie's cousin brought us to a supermarket in 朝阳区 (chao2 yang2 qu1), chaoyang district (a.k.a District with Many Foreigners), which had shelves upon shelves of groceries all labelled in english.

and a chilled food section containing pats upon pats of butter, from lurpak to anchor (cheaper than in singapore!) to irish butter and president (no scs though), sold in 227g blocks. not that i'm a big fan of butter, but the mainland chinese seem averse to dairy products in general and butter is impossible to find at any supermarket near us. the mini-mart downstairs only sells it in sad 100g blocks, wrapped in gold foil with a picture of a cow on the front, the words 黄油 (huang2 you2) and BUTTER printed in large red letters. turn the block around and there is a haphazard description, in chinese, of where it was manufactured.

it was exciting and oddly comforting all at once, being in jenny lou's (name of abovementioned supermarket) - honestly, nothing that i've seen so far on my travels in china has come close to inspiring such strong feelings in me, besides maybe a weird number flashing as my phone rings, indicating that jon or my mother is calling me - and then there will also be feelings of dread and worry as i answer the phone, because once i'm out of beijing i have no more free incoming international calls.

some of the best times i've had on exchange so far, i think, are during my thursday law on international sales, finance and carriage classes. each class is four periods long, and each period is 45 minutes. which of course means we are Extremely Bored, Restless and Distracted by the time the first period ends. i will invariably end up sitting next to jinni somewhere near the back of the classroom, and while john shijian mo ploughs through the convention on contracts for the international sale of goods, article by article, in his heavily accented english, we will talk nonsense and write notes to each other and doodle and complain about how we're very bored.

for instance, thursday was my go-out-with-adele day before i came to beijing, so today i was thinking about how if we were both in singapore we could've gone for a movie and a cheap $10 manicure. so i held up my nails for jinni's inspection and whispered eh my nails this length can manicure or not, or need longer?

which prompted jinni to write vain! queen! on the piece of paper on which we were carrying out a conversation, and to start a List of That Which Indicates that Chloe is Actually Secretly Very Vain. i then proceeded to draw a crown for myself, to which she added a face and hair, and then she started drawing on the piece of paper with my cool green pencil highlighter, the usual flower-cloud-heart-smiley-face combination.

it's just like being back in secondary school, and there's even a bell for us to count the minutes off one by one, and they are everlasting.

in case you were interested, i cut my nails last night, so, no, as of now they have been judged as unfit for a manicure.

also, i've only ever been for one pedicure in my entire life and that was only because there was a foot-shin-calf massage involved.

furthermore, paul usually volunteers to buy milk tea with pearls after the first period. if he feels like it, he'll even cross the road to get it from my favourite franchise, 街客 (jie1 ke4) - i previously mentioned that i braved a sandstorm to purchase a cup. i'm already on hello-smile-how-are-you terms with the server there.

i treasure every long bus ride home from school, my mp3 player at a volume which can be heard just above the roar of the bus engine, faye wong and a*mei playing over and over again, and again. singing honestly and heartbreakingly tenderly about life and love, songs you can get lost in because they're real in all senses of the word; produced in an era when technology was less advanced and midi tracks uncommon.

none of the others like window seats, so i'm free to take them and stare out at the suddenly-green trees and wide expanse of sky. the trees really did turn green very suddenly, just last week they were still rather bare.

there is nothing like it, and i think that must be the best and nicest thing that's happened to me on exchange so far.

another nice thing, among the other nice things, is that i'm Owning jon at text twirl. you can also challenge me on facebook if you wish.

i am the walrus

falling asleep after one of the most severe cases of food-poisoning you've had in a long, long, time is an extremely trying process, to say the least. i had my room door closed because xiaoyun and jinni were watching tv in the living room, and i was lying on my bed in complete darkness when all these strange memories suddenly started coming back to me.

like singing the lion sleeps tonight in jc and jingjie coming in with a lone LION! after in the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight.

actually, that's the only thing i remember remembering. the rest of the time i was forced to listen to traffic and to the sounds of a jackhammer, at two-forty in the morning. who uses jackhammers at that hour, i ask you?

i'm now sitting on my bed finishing a bowl of cold oatmeal, thankful that i feel better. still a little strange tummy-wise, but better.

and i've changed my flight home to july the 8th :) what a difference a week makes.

church on sunday

this morning, after xiaoyun stepped out from the bathroom, i made to move towards it so i could use the toilet but she stopped me.

cannot use! it's flooded! she held her arms up as if to prevent me from going in.

sure enough, as i made to move towards the bathroom door, i could feel the top (fake parquet) layer of floor shift, and bubbles appeared at the part where it joined to the frame of the bathroom door. there were even bloop bloop bubble sounds.

***
paul and i have been attending the government-run church, 海淀堂 (hai3 dian4 tang2), which is about five bus stops away from our apartments. i think it's a presbyterian church, and the service isn't much different from a traditional church service back home, except that it's in chinese, and the congregation is extremely enthusiastic about saying amen.

after every sentence of prayer, and sometimes after every verse of the responsive reading (depending on which verses we're reading responsively), there will be very loud AMENS! resounding left-right-in-front- behind us.

i sometimes wonder whether everybody knows what they're saying amen for, or whether they say it because they think it's the correct and right thing to do, and everybody else is saying it. it's almost as if they were at a communist political rally, cheering for everything a political leader standing on stage says, regardless of whether they've properly understood it or not. . .

. . .but then i think about how china's experienced a spiritual vacuum for such a long time, and it is heartening to know that her leaders are becoming more open to the idea of religion, and some of her people's lives have been filled with the joy of the Holy Spirit.

perhaps it's no wonder they say amen so loudly and so often.

yesterday was a momentous day: i managed to understand the entire sermon, and take notes, all in chinese.

a nice way to start the day

i woke up this morning to a Veritable Avalanche of facebook wallposts to and from shumin, a longish private facebook message from abigail, and, finally, to shannon being online and on skype - although i had no webcam so he had no chance to laugh at my just-out-of-bed hair. he had one though, so i got to take one look at his hair (before i decided to close the webcam window).

he recently won a competition where the contestants had to make dresses out of bedsheets, and his creation is currently still on display (i think) at centrepoint. go visit it if you have the chance to.

and i KNEW the guys wouldn't meet up without SOMEONE continually harrassing them to do so. quents if you're reading this it's time for some island creamery. though guys eating ice cream together seems the teensiest bit gay.

***
last night we had dinner at a cosy bar called lush, and we were waiting for happy hour before ordering drinks so paul couldn't quite bring himself to finish his burger at the speed he wanted to because he was feeling thirsty.

happy hour finally rolled around, and after our frozen lime margaritas arrived (probably the best i've seen and therefore the first i've tasted, it didn't disappoint) he took a few sips, and proceeded to give his beef burger a few pats before picking it up and taking a few bites out of it.

he put it down again when he realised we were all looking at him in amusement.

err, paul, why did you pat your burger? jinni asked.

he looked rather shocked that we'd noticed, then he just shrugged and said err i just patted it lah.

after taking a few more bites from the burger, he said after all, it's a beef patty right?

***
every friday night at 五道口 (wu3 dao4 kou3), the happening centre of our district (海淀区 (hai3 dian4 qu1)), an entire stretch of pavement will be filled with people selling things illegally, wares displayed on canvas sheets, ready to be packed up in an instant if the police come.

jinni and i have already contemplated helping xiaoyun sell off the clothes she bought on a whim and doesn't quite like anymore in this manner, except that we're lacking a canvas sheet.

there will also be people selling puppies, and i saw kittens being sold for the first time last night. they were so small and cuddly and furry and cute (a girly response, after all). we keep wanting to bring one home because we don't want to think about what will happen to them if they don't get sold, but we're leaving in three months or so so it wouldn't be a very wise idea.

i like cats. meow meow.

prison break

the plates and bowls used in the school canteen are of the aluminium variety, and every so often (about once a month) during lunch, one of us will make a comment about how we feel, rather, that we're eating in jail. i also feel the food's become more oily since we came, or maybe it was always so but i was too set on eating in school to save money to mind much, then. because we hadn't gotten our water dispenser up and fridge properly cleaned when i first came, remember? so cooking at home wasn't too convenient.

everytime i eat rice with dishes in school, now, various bits of food which i leave behind seem to be wading in a pool of oil, albeit a shallow one. one of the worst dishes must be the celery fried with slices of sausage and smoked ham which are a lurid pink. though i must say that it looks rather appetising, because the celery is all shiny green and complements the pinkiness of the sausage, which also has white flecks in it, and the smoked ham, rather well.

i've been eating a lot of noodles in school - over here all the different types of noodles are hand-made, and we pay so much for those in singapore - but unfortunately i think i'm going to exhaust the different toppings soon.

the hotel we stayed in at taiyuan was very clean and quite prettily decorated (there the word pretty goes again) with a window seat and a vase filled with tasteful orangey-yellow fake tulips. but we went for the free breakfast on the first morning we were there and were greeted by a sullen, sleepy 阿姨 who handed us each an aluminium tray with compartments, and gave us each a single hard-boiled egg.

which turned out to be the only thing we ate for breakfast that day, because over here they seem to like to fry things and leave them to go cold before eating them. especially for breakfast. 凉菜, they're called. though we get some of the coldest temperatures during the mornings, so i don't know why people don't like to eat hot food.

my heart will go on
at a quarter past four in the morning, after surviving a traffic jam on a street lamp-less expressway, a ride on a bus which really Wasn't All That Dodgy but had rather cramped seats, doing a load of laundry, sipping a cup of milo and receving a phone call from jon, i sat on my bed applying moisturiser to my feet and listened to jinni and xiaoyun, who were on the sofa in the living room, chortling heartily as they recounted my antics.

like how i practically sprinted from the bus, which stopped at a small, dark and badly lit bus station at 0238, to the row of waiting taxis because it looked like there weren't enough to go around - as it was, ours was the last available licensed one. and how i looked like i was ready to brutally knock our front door down because it wouldn't open the first time we tried to unlock it (it miraculously clicked open on our fourth try).

after chuckling quietly to myself and allowing them a few more moments of enjoyment, i called out i can hear you!, and when jinni replied yah, we know! i came out to the living room and reminded xiaoyun of how, when i had gone ahead of her to check whether there was someone hiding behind the drawn curtains of the laundry balcony, i'd turned to check if she was following behind only to be greeted by the sight of her brandishing our fake magiclean wiper like sun wukong must have brandished his cudgel in journey to the west.

we, however, had just returned from a journey to the south.

***
we set out on friday morning, the beginning of the 清明节 (qing1 ming2 jie2) weekend holiday, to catch our train to 大同 (da4 tong2) in the province of 山西 (shan1 xi1), and i must say that before going to the beijing west train station, i'd never before seen so many people gathered in one place at the same time, unless you count the national day parade.

but the people at the national day parade are usually singaporeans dressed in red waving miniature singapore flags, not singing the national anthem or the pledge when they're supposed to, just like us at assembly when we were in school.

the people at the train station ranged from the very rich, clutching tickets for soft-sleeper (软卧 ruan3 wo4) carriages, to the very poor, clutching tickets indicating that they had standing rights in the aisles between the hard seats (硬座 ying4 zuo4). those who need to catch trains at the last minute and are unable to buy sitting or sleeping tickets usually also have to buy standing tickets, and then they pray like anything that people with sitting tickets will get off along the way so they can squeeze themselves onto a seat. we had 硬卧 (ying4 wo4), hard-sleeper tickets.

perhaps it's poverty and the lack of education that makes people unfriendly, or more accurately, unable to be, or less considerate and aware of others. i used to think that farmers and peasants were happy, carefree people who led simple, contented and uncluttered lives - an ideal no doubt encouraged by books like sing to the dawn. but there was something in the eyes of the rural migrant workers we saw that put paid to that. i initially thought they were going home for the holidays as well, but i had my doubts after reading about the shanxi brick factories.

an ongoing struggle to keep themselves, and maybe their families, alive. desperation, and a hollowness behind the clouds of cigarette smoke and yellowing eye-whites: they've seen and suffered too much. the knowledge that after the short reprieve of the train journey, they're going back to the coal mines and the factories, back to an everlasting pitch-black darkness, coal dust, and chemical pollution which poisons. dreary, mind-numbing work, but it pays for and provides some warmth for their cold lives, in the form of beer and cigarettes, a cheap coat, boots. getting by in the chilly spring, which seemed to be later in coming in those parts. it was Grey and Depressingly Dirty, and even the green on the trees didn't seem to herald her arrival, not like in beijing.

yet, i don't think any of them actually consciously think about these things. nor do the people who stay on farms in the middle of nowhere and struggle alone with cows as they plough the ground, with no street lamps or neighbours and only the distant rumble of passing trains for company, think about those things.

they just do what they have to.

sunburnt skin, callused hands, crooked and stained teeth, dirty dark-coloured jackets; coarse hair sticking up every which way from being stuffed under caps or from not having been washed for a long time, the ubiquitous huge cloth bag slung over a shoulder, with a strap or without, or sat upon as they waited for trains. they are why we can live the way we do. faces, but still no names, to everything that's Made in China. can we have it any other way?

i think the others thought that i wasn't enjoying myself on the trip because i said so little, and truth be told, i don't think i can say i enjoyed it as such, because it was Really Rather Painful having to see all these things. and i said so little because i was too busy looking at everything, which i found interesting and amusing. not in a smiley hee-hee kind of way, you understand, but in a
wondering-at-our-determination-to-survive-and-exist kind of way.

***
having taken more taxis in beijing than i ever have in my entire life (it's pretty cheap when there are three or four of us, the minimum fare is about 60 singapore cents a person), and having been ferried around in taxis on saturday and sunday, i think i can safely confirm that taxi drivers are three things: strange, opinionnated, and cheerful. and they're usually opinnionated about politics, particularly in china. they seem to think that one day china will take over the world and the renminbi will be the currency of choice, hate the japanese despite drama serials and clothes from japan being immensely popular among the younger generation, and sometimes sound terrifyingly like chairman mao.

take our taxi driver in datong: he suddenly pulled to a stop at the pavement just before the entrance to a petrol station, his reason being that we couldn't stay in the car whilst he pumped petrol, and he had to cut the engine, so we were all to wait until my heart will go on finished playing on the radio because we were all to enjoy the song together. he closed his eyes and swayed to the music, occassionally spreading his arms out during the musical interludes, like kate winslet as rose, 真的有像在船上飞的感觉 (zhen1 de4 you3 xiang4 zai4 chuan2 shang4 fei1 de4 gan3 jue2) it really feels like you're flying on a ship!

he seemed to like it so much that i wrote out the lyrics of the song in english for him (eh, don't tell me you didn't love it when you were 12 or 14 or however old you were when titanic was released), and made what i thought was a rather good attempt to translate it into chinese. to have translated my heart will go on as 我的心会继续 (wo3 de4 xin1 hui4 j4 xu4) would have turned it into my heart will continue so those bits ended up as something like 你存在在我的心，我的心永远有你 (ni3 cun2 zai4 zai4 wo4 de4 xin1, wo3 de4 xin1 yong2 yuan3 you2 ni3), for and i know that my heart will, my heart will go on and on. i even did my best to translate it so that he could sing it to the original tune. do let me know if you want to see the fully translated version, or what i can remember of it.

and because i couldn't think of anything else, near, far was really 近，远 (jin4, yuan3).

please keep in mind that the entire thing was done as we were travelling on a pot-holed country road in an old, dirty taxi, its interior coated with cigarette ash, after we'd braved a tour around a very pretty temple 悬空寺 (xuan2 kong1 si4) set into the side of a mountain, supported only by long and rather thin wooden beams over a thousand years old.

we travelled to and reached 太原 (tai4 yuan2) by bus on saturday night, and sunday when we travelled from there to 平遥古城 (ping2 yao2 gu3 cheng2) was the first real day of spring we had. it started off pleasantly enough, despite taiyuan being Another, Rather Depressingly Dirty town. our taxi driver there acquiesed to our demands that he teach us how to say various phrases in the taiyuan dialect, and even brought us for breakfast at a dirty, rundown market, where the food was freshly cooked and good, anyhow (the word of the trip must be dirty).

i can tell you that swear words in the taiyuan dialect sound like swear words in standard chinese.

however, that taxi driver eventually showed himself up to be a rat-fink-weasel-fox kind of man, but that's just life for you. in spite of everything i still thought he was a rather cheerful person - he even sang us some traditional shanxi songs when we told him we hated chinese techno - i was asleep but jinni said she had to sit through an excruciating five mintues of 老鼠爱大米 mice love rice in french, sung by a guy, backed by a heavy disco beat.

maybe he was just hoping we would eventually cave in to his dishonourable demand that we pay him extra for having taken what he insisted was much more than the time he had agreed to wait for us.

he did have a very nice, new, clean, shiny and cigarette ash-free taxi though. so that was alright.

***
video game machines crammed into a house built sometime in the 14th century during the ming and qing dynasties and bored teenagers with frizzy, dyed hair and gaudy clothes loitering about outside it, lazily snapping gum; children with wind-chapped cheeks, runny noses and clothes covered with a fine layer of dust, giving them a greyish tinge, playing in the dust, sitting around, disconsolate and alone, eating ice cream. that's what i'll remember of pingyao, what the unesco website describes as an exceptionally well-preserved example of a traditional Han chinese
city.

for all of china's potential for growth and supply of natural resources, much of the culture, charm and elegance it once had have been destroyed. traces of it are present everywhere, my deepest impression of this being from our previous trip to chengde, where i saw a traditional-style wooden gazebo atop a hill overlooking a canal filled with waste water from factories and sewage, surrounded by a mist which was smog.

i think the people of ancient pingyao would turn in their graves and fight to get out to change things if they could see what's happened to their once beautiful city and what their descendants have been reduced to. it was, and will go on being painful to see such pleading in peoples' eyes, hear the hunger in their voices as they entreat you to buy this, that, or take photographs which they will print on the spot, for a small fee. stalls upon stalls offering the same trinkets, drinks, ice cream, soft drinks; copies of ancient relics, gathering dust under faded umbrellas.

we would like to leave our mark, wherever we go in the world. whether it's a hasty, secret etching of our names on a famous statue, or writing such beautiful calligraphy that generations of people born a long, long time after you've passed on will whip out digital cameras when they see signboards with words in your handwriting. posing, pointing, shooting, uploading. we go to such lengths to be remembered, and to remember, although we know in our heart of hearts that some things are better left as descriptions and to our imaginations.

***
for interest's sake, we also went to the yungang grottoes 云冈石窟 (yun2 gang1 shi2 ku4) in datong which reminded me greatly of angkor wat, and the 晋祠寺 (jin4 ci2 si4) in taiyuan which i enjoyed immensely because it was pretty and too far away and not significant enough to attract as many tourists as the other places. also to 乔家大院 (qiao2 jia1 da4 yuan4) on the way back to taiyuan from pingyao, a pretty house where zhang yimou filmed raise the red lantern. which would have been much, much prettier and enjoyable if there had been less tourists.

the other word of the trip should be pretty.

which would make the WORDS of the trip pretty and dirty. and so it was.

***
i went to school yesterday on about three hours of sleep, and because we started on a new series of cases, the vice-dean called on me to answer about five questions. my brain entirely failed me on one particularly tricky translation, and he couldn't catch my chinese on another, much to the amusement of my classmates.

saved

i ought to have mentioned this earlier, but better late than never:

a few afternoons ago (yes, when the sun's supposed to be shining merrily and you're supposed to be feeling warmer, even in this cold beijing spring) xiaoyun and i were sitting in the living room, slowly but surely freezing to death, when i pointed to the huge white contraption in the corner of our living room and said, hey, isn't that a heater?!

surprise, surprise. it was right there in front of us and we never even bothered examining it carefully.

it has a poster with pictures and names of different animals and fruits and things stuck on its front; and on top of it, as if in tribute to the god of warm air, is a bowl of dusty, pink silk flowers.

it works beautifully, though the first time we turned it on i kept telling xiaoyun i smelt burning plastic. we were also afraid to leave it on through the night - but desperate times call for desperate measures, and the burning smell seems to have disappeared along with our fears of our entire block getting blown up by an exploding heater.

a walk to remember
yesterday i went for a walk in changping park with two girls and one guy from my university class, holding cups of warm 珍珠奶茶, and it was a very nice walk. the two girls and i linked arms for part of the way, which i found comforting, and nice - just like when they say 出去玩玩 - and we spent some time trying to identify the different flowers which were starting to bloom.

we came to a tree which might have been covered with cherry, or peach blossoms, and since none of us knew what they really were the lone male amongst us said we should just call it 那个毛毛虫树 na4 ge4 mao2 mao2 chong2 shu4, that caterpillar tree. the flowers were positioned in rows on branches (no camera, no photo) and really did look somewhat like caterpillars.

trust boys to come up with such unromantic names.

if the flowers are starting to bloom for spring, why isn't the temperature following suit?

***
i haven't been blogging for some time (is two days very long?) because the other day i felt so bad about downloading songs from baidu that i went out to the shops and bought original faye wong and zhang hui mei cds. they're very cheap, between S$4-S$6 for one, and despite the fact that some of them look Rather Dodgy, they're really originals - except for one which i bought from our movie uncle at a shop near school. he kept telling me it was original, and boy, did it look original.

upon closer examination, however, we found that it was not. original cds have a code imprinted in the small inner circle and can be identified by online tools for ripping cds as well as windows media player. if it's original all the song names should appear when you insert the cd and begin ripping it.

anyhow, those were extremely boring technicalities that i felt i had to explain to you. since i bought the cds - two days ago - i've been ripping music to my trusty zen stone plus and have been Absolutely Lost in faye wong and ah mei's songs. the sound you get from cds, whether original or pirated, is also much better than anything you can download, which way of getting music is more of a luck of the draw thing and depends on the quality of the sound file uploaded.

jinni and i were at a cafe opposite our apartment studying on monday, the day after i got my cds, and after a while i just left my work and sat staring out of the glass wall at the street, listening to song after song, some more than once, looking at people living their lives on that short stretch of pavement.

chloe you're so dreamy la jinni said. i told her she should have tried to manipulate me into doing more things with her, like going to school with her for a night lecture, which would've meant leaving at 1630 and we would've been caught in rush hour traffic, and staying back another night in school with her to listen to some talk. things like that, which i'm normally too lazy to do.

for some strange reason i really like faye wong's cantonese songs, even though i don't understand them. except, of course, the bits which sound vaguely like mandarin.

i think chinese is a very pretty, unpretentious and descriptive language, chief adjective being unpretentious. maybe that's why i like these songs so much.

just to be annoying, bet you haven't thought of this song for some time:
BAD BOY, BAD BOY
你的坏让我太无奈
我要和你说 bye bye bye bye bye bye byeeeee