Today was a good day. I have no scheduled classes on Wednesday, but I was busy despite that. I got up early and headed to the grocery store. Because I'm still such an inexperienced shopper in the Chinese supermarket, I always try to avoid the masses at peak times. I usually wander through the store for quite a while. Today I bought a heap of vegetables and some staples, like rice, noodles, oil, salt, sugar, etc. You have no idea what a triumph it feels like to walk into a supermarket here with a list of things to buy, and then walk about having gotten most of what you wanted. Salt! Pepper! Hooray! I say "most" because I still can't figure out if they really have walnuts here that aren't candied. The mystery continues...

My trips to the supermarket lately also double as exercise, because I haul away so much stuff. I took a taxi back up the mountain from the city, but they stop at the gate of the school. So with four bags, plus my backpack full of stuff, I trekked up the hill and four stories to my kitchen. I then spent the next hour or so bleaching and scrubbing vegetables and then feasted on a vegetable salad for lunch. It was awesome; it was the first time I'd eaten raw vegetables since July. I'm not sure if I've explained this point already in this forum, so at the risk of being repetitive: unless I want some guests taking up residence in my intestinal tract, we are not to eat raw vegetables/fruits without bleaching or peeling them first. One of the reasons Chinese farmers have been able to farm the same land so successfully for so many millennia is that they use night soil as fertilizer. "Night soil" is actually human manure. And no one wants to eat that. Let me tell you, after two months, I can peel an apple/peach/pear in no time flat.

The rest of my day: I took a healthy nap. Like my beloved Spanish siesta, Chinese people have a built in "rest" around their lunch break. From noon til three every day, everyone eats lunch and then has a little snooze or just simple relaxation time. This is done throughout the country, except in Beijing, where business moves too quickly to allow for a three hour rest at midday. Yet in this sleepy corner of Sichuan, the tradition is alive and well. I think from 11:45 to 1:30 are the quietest hours in the entire city, because people aren't out driving/honking or hammering in the almost 24-hour construction frenzy. And while I don't have a lot of love for my current living situation, I can say that my mid-afternoons are great. A quiet city and a view off the balcony of trees falling down the mountainside to the city.

After copying my handouts for tomorrow's lessons, I again set off down the mountain (instead of saying "going shopping" in Luzhou, locals say "going down the mountain") to pick up some more household essentials. Coming back up, I stopped at a fruit stand and discovered that what I'd taken for limes are actually green tangerine-like fruit. Next to the fruit lady was a shoeshine lady, so I just stepped left and sat for a shoeshine--my first ever. I quickly became the star attraction of the street, as I answered the questions they fired at me. I understood most of them, I think--are you a teacher? Where are you from? Do your mother and father miss you? Will they come visit? Three older Chinese women--the two fruit ladies and the woman shining my shoes--were my questioners, and they were very patient (and insistent). Passers-by became the audience. My shoes look better than the day I bought then, and best of all, I practiced Chinese for 15 solid minutes. It was really fun to speak Chinese again, the struggle to understand and communicate. My whole English department speaks English to me, and it is my job to speak English to my students, so opportunities to practice are lacking in my professional interaction. Needless to say, my social life is still a little lackluster, but I think that'll pick up in time. In the meanwhile, I think I'm going to make a point of having a weekly shoeshine.

More class with sophomores tomorrow, starting promptly at 8 am. Then my weekend begins--I don't have class on Fridays either, but I'll need all that time to get my three course syllabi laid out.

That's all for now. Until next time...