With the Summer most certainly now with us and holiday fever beginning to break out around the city this week, helped of course by the Dragon Boat Festival gliding onto the calendar, it was nice to start off on a Monday with a siesta and a picnic. There is a good spot in Qu Jiang that has a Ma Jiang table housed within a Chinese Style gazebo, surrounded by trees, a pond and a boardwalk, and very few people: perfect for a take-away (dàizǒu-带走) picnic. It does always amaze me actually that it is often so quiet and peaceful there, given the intensity of the masses gathered in most other areas of town at the same time, but hey, happy days.
Tuesday was a bit more active, with a Yellow River Soup Kitchen trip to a mountain village in Lantian to distribute donated clothes, toys and Zòng Zi (粽子). With these trips occurring a bit more frequently recently, due to the increased levels of donations and contacts on the ground, the process is getting smoother, though it is of course still reliant on the good will of a number of volunteers to supply vehicles, drivers, friendly faces and helpful hands.
The weather was great, the people in the villages appreciative and welcoming, and the landscape really quite beautiful. What is maybe lacking in material items and income is certainly not lacking in nature, whether the environmental kind, or that related to character and spirit. Those good contacts that have now been made in this particular area mean that another trip will soon be forthcoming, and this time it is going to include a sports day program of fun and games at one of the local schools. All is well.
However, with Wednesday being spent back in the city it was time to make moving an air conditioner to the bedroom a priority. One of my girlfriend’s friends has experience of doing such things and was happy to help. At one point during the day he was to be found straddled over the external fan unit, four floors up, welding a couple of copper pipes together, two bed sheets tied between the two of us to help stop him descending quickly towards an early demise. Though with him being a bit larger than I am, I did have a recurring image of me just shooting out of the window after him as he fell. Fortunately, we managed to haul him back into the land of the tiled floor, although of course only once he had made sure the air conditioner was successfully installed.
Woke up Thursday morning… freezing! However, the day wasn’t going to stay cold for long, a mate of mine and I were set to get on the bikes and get out of the city again. Just one and half to two hours of peddle power, straight out of town on Tai Bai Lu, is enough to find a tranquil mountain valley ravine, with a river pool waiting for us to swim off the ride. Amazing! Which is also what a couple of passing ladies seemed to think when staring goggled eyed at our pale and hairy chests, as we plunged in, one almost pushing her friend out of the way to get a better look. Quite amusing, though their boyfriends seemed less impressed.
However, out of bravado or simply just having a shared desire to benefit from the cool offerings of a swim on a roasting hot day, they did take our example and follow us into the clear water. We continued by partaking in a bit of boulder hopping up stream before retiring to a local Nong Jia Le for a baked fish lunch, which set us up nicely for a siesta. Unfortunately, the reality of such a luxury was a couple of hours of cycling away and was not actually to materialize, as the very real need to show willingness around the house upon our return was obvious, as our girlfriends finished days of work and baby sitting respectively. Hey ho, it’s a hard life.
Friday started slowly, though having met up with a friend of mine earlier in the week who had persuaded me of the advantages of using Skritter to improve my powers of Chinese character retention, I did check it out. He may well also be right that the Wacom Bamboo Pen Tablet is a preferable method of writing compared to the elongated movement of my mousemanship. In the process however, and with a newly purchased iTouch tucked in my pocket, I realized it is time to re-engage whole heartedly with my Chinese studies, and to do so for the first time with some of these very useful technological tools firmly worked into a new regime. Pleco, Skritter, Anki and nciku are actually terms that have some meaning and relevance to me now; time will tell how much of a role they end up playing. Pleco for one though has already stolen a place in my heart and has superseded my previous paper and pen based system of flash carding.
The afternoon was however to take a turn for the hotter, as a couple of us met up at the Soup Kitchen store room for a bit of re-organisation; heavy and light, large and small boxes and bags were to be moved. Hot, dusty and sweaty best describes the process, though it was actually quite good to do a bit of manual work, a break from the cool and rarefied air that flows around the foreign expert in the English classroom, or something like that. My girlfriend and I finished off the week with a bit of tennis practice, amazingly again we found ourselves on a beautiful evening surrounded by trees, with blue sky overhead and nobody on the courts. All is well amongst the masses here in China, while the holiday season is also in rude health and well on its way. Great!
Though let’s not talk about the football.
西安