Winter moves fast
It's Tuesday. Well, I had my first guzheng lesson on Sunday morning. First the teacher took me to buy a book of pieces and a set of tortoiseshell nails that you tape to your fingers to play the guzheng. Then we spent the lesson learning the names of the parts of the instrument, posture, basic actions and what to call all the strings. The guzheng has notes 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6 of the octave, four octaves. You can get the missing notes by depressing a lower-pitched string with your left hand. My teacher Ms. Korea is a young wife with prematurely creased eyes. She works at one job all week and teaches guzheng at two different schools at the weekend. She says "you can't support yourself on only one income."
After that I went shopping. I hate shopping. I bought a red water-resistant duck-down coat which should do me for most of the winter, for 120元 (€12). That was good, but then I bought a very stupid leather bag for 480元. I went all the way home and then decided it was too stupid and went all the way back, despite it blowing a storm and lashing rain, to exchange it for a slightly less stupid one. I took a taxi into town and had an interesting talk with my driver. He said he was from the country, he said "我说得很土” (I speak like a peasant). We both had a good laugh about that. He talked to me about migrant workers, the state of the countryside and the price of life in Dalian. I looked at the metre and thought, this journey would cost €20 in Ireland, and the metre hasn't reached €3 yet. He dropped me off in the storm and was quickly snaffled by other shoppers. I didn't have the extra change, and he said "forget it."
I hate shopping, but I'm going to have to shop again this week for pretty shoes (pah) and a suitable thing to wear to a wedding. My outstanding Edinburgh friends suggest a qipao, and they seem to mean it. If I wore a qipao, though, it would really look as though I had designs on the Godfather - or just western-crumpet-in-a-qipao aspirations. Another time, maybe...
Interestingly, after I'd changed the bag I bumped into Teacher Order in one of those massive Stuff Palaces (everything except cheese). By this time it was really dark and stormy, but I was wearing my new coat. Teacher Order said it was useless to go for the bus, and he is not a man who is ever wrong, so we went through the taxi-begging procedures. Finally we got into a taxi whose other passenger was a precious-looking, suspiciously relaxed young man. I zipped down my hood and he flicked his cigarette and said "hi". He bore no relation to the weather outside the taxi. I said "smoking's bad for you, you know that?" and he said "your Chinese is ..." but was too suspiciously relaxed to finish the sentence. Teacher Order was in front, talking fussily to the driver while I was in the back seat talking to "people in society" (see the Teachers on 刘凯琴's safety). Not that that guy seemed like "society" to me. He was upper-class and stoned. He looked like the Cheshire Cat.
Yesterday was Monday and I can't remember what I did. Mostly I was in class. I thought I broke Ever Basic recently by not being meek and girly in relation to the exorbitant manliness demands he places on his innocent, sentimental self, but he seems fairly chirpy. For his part he shocked me last Friday by pointing to one of the pretty Russian girls and saying I should wear eye make-up like she does. Laughter from anyone who knows me.
Today was another gruelling reading comprehension class with Teacher Poplar, who's young and unrelenting and wears frilly blouses. Her class is like the Total Perspective Vortex in the "Hitch-hiker's Guide" - right, five minutes, read this entire essay and answer all 20 questions, get ready, go. I lie not. It makes my back hurt, so after school and a long lunch with my outstanding Edinburgh friends I stopped at the Chinese medicine centre on my way home, just to see what gave. The Chinese medicine doctor was in, sitting at a small table in a small room that smelled of rare herbs, where his assistant was sorting bags of dried herbs into wooden drawers and some other patients were sitting around, all being seen to at once. The walls were covered in wine-and-gold embroidered greetings banners (Thank You Doctor Zhao You Rock Here's A Poem About You) and the doctor was wearing a white hat and coat. He looked as though he was kind of making it up on the spot. He said to a man who smoked a lot, "That's because your gall bladder is hot," and patted him on the gall bladder. The man said "if I hadn't been smoking all this time would I not be having this problem now?" and the doctor said "no, you wouldn't." The man said "ah well, next time I'll know."
Next I watched a woman having acupuncture done. I didn't catch what for, something about her mouth being dry. It looked pretty unhygienic - the doctor just kept the needles in a tin and handled them with his hands which he hadn't washed since he patted that man on the gall bladder. He stuck needles in all over one side of the woman's face, and she seemingly hardly felt it. She told me it was her fifth session and the illness had all but disappeared - whatever it was. I was next and the doctor heard my complaints, glanced at my back, had me lie down, gripped each vertebra in turn and tugged it until it clicked. Then he charged me 50元.
After that I went shopping. I hate shopping. I bought a red water-resistant duck-down coat which should do me for most of the winter, for 120元 (€12). That was good, but then I bought a very stupid leather bag for 480元. I went all the way home and then decided it was too stupid and went all the way back, despite it blowing a storm and lashing rain, to exchange it for a slightly less stupid one. I took a taxi into town and had an interesting talk with my driver. He said he was from the country, he said "我说得很土” (I speak like a peasant). We both had a good laugh about that. He talked to me about migrant workers, the state of the countryside and the price of life in Dalian. I looked at the metre and thought, this journey would cost €20 in Ireland, and the metre hasn't reached €3 yet. He dropped me off in the storm and was quickly snaffled by other shoppers. I didn't have the extra change, and he said "forget it."
I hate shopping, but I'm going to have to shop again this week for pretty shoes (pah) and a suitable thing to wear to a wedding. My outstanding Edinburgh friends suggest a qipao, and they seem to mean it. If I wore a qipao, though, it would really look as though I had designs on the Godfather - or just western-crumpet-in-a-qipao aspirations. Another time, maybe...
Interestingly, after I'd changed the bag I bumped into Teacher Order in one of those massive Stuff Palaces (everything except cheese). By this time it was really dark and stormy, but I was wearing my new coat. Teacher Order said it was useless to go for the bus, and he is not a man who is ever wrong, so we went through the taxi-begging procedures. Finally we got into a taxi whose other passenger was a precious-looking, suspiciously relaxed young man. I zipped down my hood and he flicked his cigarette and said "hi". He bore no relation to the weather outside the taxi. I said "smoking's bad for you, you know that?" and he said "your Chinese is ..." but was too suspiciously relaxed to finish the sentence. Teacher Order was in front, talking fussily to the driver while I was in the back seat talking to "people in society" (see the Teachers on 刘凯琴's safety). Not that that guy seemed like "society" to me. He was upper-class and stoned. He looked like the Cheshire Cat.
Yesterday was Monday and I can't remember what I did. Mostly I was in class. I thought I broke Ever Basic recently by not being meek and girly in relation to the exorbitant manliness demands he places on his innocent, sentimental self, but he seems fairly chirpy. For his part he shocked me last Friday by pointing to one of the pretty Russian girls and saying I should wear eye make-up like she does. Laughter from anyone who knows me.
Today was another gruelling reading comprehension class with Teacher Poplar, who's young and unrelenting and wears frilly blouses. Her class is like the Total Perspective Vortex in the "Hitch-hiker's Guide" - right, five minutes, read this entire essay and answer all 20 questions, get ready, go. I lie not. It makes my back hurt, so after school and a long lunch with my outstanding Edinburgh friends I stopped at the Chinese medicine centre on my way home, just to see what gave. The Chinese medicine doctor was in, sitting at a small table in a small room that smelled of rare herbs, where his assistant was sorting bags of dried herbs into wooden drawers and some other patients were sitting around, all being seen to at once. The walls were covered in wine-and-gold embroidered greetings banners (Thank You Doctor Zhao You Rock Here's A Poem About You) and the doctor was wearing a white hat and coat. He looked as though he was kind of making it up on the spot. He said to a man who smoked a lot, "That's because your gall bladder is hot," and patted him on the gall bladder. The man said "if I hadn't been smoking all this time would I not be having this problem now?" and the doctor said "no, you wouldn't." The man said "ah well, next time I'll know."
Next I watched a woman having acupuncture done. I didn't catch what for, something about her mouth being dry. It looked pretty unhygienic - the doctor just kept the needles in a tin and handled them with his hands which he hadn't washed since he patted that man on the gall bladder. He stuck needles in all over one side of the woman's face, and she seemingly hardly felt it. She told me it was her fifth session and the illness had all but disappeared - whatever it was. I was next and the doctor heard my complaints, glanced at my back, had me lie down, gripped each vertebra in turn and tugged it until it clicked. Then he charged me 50元.