This drive was just what I needed. Lately, things haven’t been going according to plan. I’m not teaching, I’m not living in the city limits (rather, I live in the suburbs), I haven’t moved to Atlanta or Seattle or San Diego, and I haven’t been doing theatre. Not only that, but I’m in the middle of attempting to buy a condo (still in the suburbs), which is a big step, and can sometimes sound like a jail door.

As I laughed (a bit crazily) to myself last night, I felt a sense of comfort. What I’d really been missing was some kind of travel adventure. I missed getting on the back of a moped taxi with Aimee in Changsha, with the two of us holding on to all my luggage for dear life. I missed going out for jiao-zi in a bank parking lot at 2am in Xi’an and talking to the random late-night diners. I missed walking through street markets in every city I went to, eating lamb kebabs and dried fruit.

Getting in my car to drive and just going wherever the road took me was exactly what I needed to reasonably satisfy my wanderlust for the time being. Of course, I can’t waste a half tank of gas every day or week or month, but at least it was good to know I can get the feeling back, if only temporarily.

On another note entirely, here’s an ABC news video about teaching English in China; it’s not entirely accurate to the situation outside of the big cities, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/learning-english-china-12155885

This is via Two Americans in China, a blog written by two new Buckland teachers.

I miss being an outsider in a culture where I’m supposed to be an outsider. In China, I didn’t really have issues of self-esteem, and being cool or liked or fashionable on a daily basis wasn’t a concern. Of course, I spent a lot of my time alone and didn’t have many friends, but even that was alright. I liked being on a bus or a train and being alone with my thoughts while the other people carried on with their lives around me. My inability to understand the language made me a bystander by nature, but even if I’d understood Chinese, people were unlikely to talk directly to me. They stared, of course, but few directly addressed me (except in Tibet). If I wanted to be left alone, I would be left alone.

Of course, that’s not saying that people are bothering me here; but I am much more actively involved in daily goings-on in America than I was in China. I didn’t realize how much I would appreciate having no schedule or obligations until I came home and had to interact with other people’s schedules again.

It boils down to this: I spent my life from ages 5 to 27 getting increasingly busier and more involved. From 2000-2009, I was in various colleges, involved in classes, extracurricular programs, fundraisers, student organizations, majors, double-majors, minors, part-time side jobs and social activities. I was going non-stop. I had homework and side work and personal work and I was just so busy all the time.

I have always chalked it up to my own preferences; I say, “If I didn’t have something to do all the time, I’d go crazy.” And in China I complained about having nothing to do; but now I’m starting to think that was a knee-jerk reaction, and it was just me adjusting outside of my comfort zone. Since my return, I still haven’t been able to get myself back on a real schedule. I forget things. I missed an appointment (something that’s not happened in about 5 years). I keep misplacing lists. I can’t seem to get myself back on the schedule or rhythm that I had before I left. And I miss not having to be on a schedule. I miss being able to decide at the drop of a hat to go to Sha’anxi province on an overnight train.

I’m starting to feel like the decision to leave China was not the best one; I think I panicked and left. It’s okay that I did that. But I should acknowledge it for what it is. It was scary to be without a schedule or a plan from 7am to 10pm every day. And now that I’m back to social obligations and work obligations and family obligations and all obligations, things I always said I couldn’t do without, I’m finding that I really did enjoy not having them for awhile. I’m not saying I want to go off the grid and be a solitary nomad for life; I’m just saying that I should be taking advantage of it now.

I still don’t have a teaching job for the 2010-2011 school year, and I’m going to be applying abroad if I can find an international school. Unfortunately, many international schools require two years of teaching experience, so I might have to wait until I’m a littler further in my teaching career. Given the terrible state of teacher’s jobs right now, though, it may be easier to go abroad again in two years, especially if I get a job in a district that fires and re-hires first-year and second-year teachers to keep them off of tenure. It just means I have to get a teaching job, no matter what.

Either way, I want to go back to China, or to another country, and try again. I’m not homesick anymore; I’m abroadsick.

Days spent in China: 201
Days spent on vacation: 75
Classes taught each week: 15
Hours of classroom time each week: 12
Students taught each week: 825
Number of days before I got used to spicy Hunan food: 4
Number of days before I started to prefer spicy Hunan food: 7
Cities visited: 13
Sleeper bus rides: 1
Plane rides: 7
Bus rides: 9
Train rides: 23
Highest ground altitude: 5079m
Total attempts to see Mao or his birthplace: 5
Successful attempts to see Mao or his birthplace: 0
Books read (including audiobooks): 13
Balls of yarn purchased: 80+
Balls of yarn lost (and then hand-delivered to me in Changsha): 8
Socks knit: 7
Stitches knit onto my sweater by a Chinese woman: approx. 100
Number of days I went before eating McDonald’s: 176
Number of times I ate McDonald’s after that: 20

I’m still processing about everything. It was weird to get dimes back as change in the Seattle airport (the common Y1 coins in China are a lot heavier). It was weird to see people waiting to get on the airport tram until after everyone else had gotten off. It was weird to see people driving in the lines on the streets (when I picked up my car, I was worried I’d forget the rules of the road; I didn’t). Things are just…weird right now. As is to be expected. I’m going to go into full-on job hunt in the next few days. I need some serious cash to pay my credit card bill, student loan payment, car insurance, and cell phone bill. I’ll also be applying for teaching jobs for the 2010-2011 school year. Wish me luck on that. More news as I really start to interact with America again.

Also, Chengdu pictures have actually been added to the photos page; I had uploaded them to flickr, but didn’t put them in a set, so they weren’t showing up. Sorry for that. Also, all the videos I’ve taken (8 total) have been added to the “China Videos” set, as well as the set for the location where they were taken, so if you want to look at those, you can find them both places now. There are videos from Chengdu, Lhasa, Hanzhong, Yangshuo (the Return of the Laowai set), Changsha (the Round 2 set), and Shimen No. 1 Middle School. enjoy!

Waiting in Beijing – surfing the internet. Can’t go see Mao’s preserved body tomorrow (as was the plan) because they’ve closed it for maintenance from 3/1 to 3/20. Blast.

Uploaded all the photos from Chengdu. Photos page is now up-to-date with all my photos. When I get home, I’ll upload the rest of my mom and Josh’s photos from our trip.

Now I just have to remember where I put the box with all my clothes in it…oy.

People lied down in the motorcycle lanes on the streets to do prostrations on their way to Jokhang Temple and the Potala Palace. I saw a statue of the Buddha that some Tibetans aspire to see once in their lifetimes, and make great pilgrimages to see. I spoke in depth with our young Tibetan tour guide, who muttered Buddhist prayers as we entered temples and chapels, and fiddled with his cell phone headphones, unlike his elder counterparts, who all carried strands of 108 prayer beads to count their mantras. I was physically touched by several smiling Tibetans, who wanted nothing more than to say hello, or to tell me my bracelet was beautiful, or to shake my hand. I was greeted with, “Tashi delek,” by dozens of Buddhists who were swarming the temples and monasteries to celebrate the Tibetan New Year.

Part of me knows that I must be romanticizing Tibet, as is so common for Westerners. I can’t help it. I’ve posted up the pictures and I think for awhile I’ll just let them speak for themselves.

I took a 34-hour train from Xi’an to Lhasa, then a 44-hour train from Lhasa to Chengdu. I’ll start my real touristy-stuff for this city tomorrow. I went on a huge yarn crawl yesterday and bought my weight in wool (washable and other). I’m pretty excited about that. I think I just need a few days to process Lhasa before I really comment on it.

I’ve updated my Location map to include the places I’ve been recently, and Suzhou and Shanghai, which apparently weren’t on there from my National Day trip.

I’ve updated my Destinations page to include a bunch of new places I want to see the next time I come to China (largely influenced by UNESCO’s World Heritage Site list).

I’ve updated my UNESCO Sites page to include the places I’ve been in China.

I’ve written a post at the lostlaowai.com blog called “The laowai relapse,” which recounts some of the craziness of having my parents visit China.

Lots of updates!

I slept really fitfully, because the food I’d had right before I went to bed was really spicy and didn’t agree with me, and I’d had a few beers, and the room was really overheated again. I was pretty much sick all night, but I made it out of the hostel in time to get to the train station with only a few minutes to wait to get on the train. I’m really not sure what I ate, because I was sharing a dish with my friend Rob, the bartender at the hostel, but it was home-cooked something. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but boy was it not. Once I was on the train, I was sick a few times in the bathroom, but I managed to get to sleep around 8am. I slept for most of the day and through the night, to wake up this morning feeling much better.

This particular train ride from Xi’an to Lhasa is about 34 hours, and we haven’t stopped very often. It was nice to just be able to sleep. I also started drinking a lot of water to try to help stave off altitude sickness, which is common for people traveling to Tibet, because the elevation is so high. Altitude sickness is essentially what happens when you don’t have enough oxygen to breathe. If you don’t take medicine to help relieve the symptoms of altitude sickness (which I didn’t because I didn’t have any medicine to take), you’re supposed to drink a lot of water to help your system process as much oxygen as possible. There are some oxygen tanks on the train (I saw one person using it earlier this morning), but I’m trying to avoid that – a lot of the things I’ve read say that if you use oxygen you’re just making it worse, so you should only do it in an emergency. Anyway, I’ve only had a few moments where I was short-of-breath, and I’ve had more water in the past 24 hours than I’ve had in the last 3 days. Other than that and some very mild nausea (but not actually getting sick), I’ve been alright. A few deep breaths also seems to help.

I arrived in Lhasa this afternoon around 4:30pm and met up with Donovan, Taylor and Sarah for a few days of exploring Tibet. Sarah’s been sick from the altitude, but Donovan and Taylor are fine. We’ll see how it works out, wish me luck. Touring starts tomorrow!

The next day we went to the Terra Cotta Warriors on a tour through the hostel. Our tour guide, Raymond, was awesome. It turns out he studied history a lot, mainly Qin and Han Dynasty, and he had a ton of information for us. He’d tried to get into graduate school the year before but didn’t score high enough on the exams, so he’s trying again this year. We had two Colombians, a mother and son, and a Korean on our tour, and they were all pretty cool to talk to, so that was good. When we got back, we ate at the hostel again and then headed out for the Great Mosque with Laura. We took a bunch of awesome pictures (including one of Josh and an old man with the same beard as Josh’s), and then did a little more market shopping in the Muslim Quarter. That night, we ate with Laura and Laura’s friend Tiger, who she met in Hanzhong (he’s a university student there, but he lives in Xi’an). He helped us order some good Chinese food. Laura and I thought it was only mediocre, but my parents liked it, so that was really more important.

We got up early the next morning and took a bus down to the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. There were some people dancing in the plaza next to the pagoda and Mom took a lot of pictures. Then she and Theo did a little dancing, too, and I got some pictures. There were more booths to shop at there, so we did that for a bit, then watched a dancing water show they had in the park. We ate Papa John’s for lunch (there were no Chinese food restaurants outside the park except fast food places and I’m not such a big fan of Chinese fast food). Outside the Papa John’s, there was a woman selling baby chicks that were dyed different colors. We took a bus to the east side of town, and visited the Temple of the Eight Immortals, a Taoist temple that was really interesting. There were some ceremonies going on, and a lot of people were burning incense and praying. It also had a lot more buildings and gardens than the one I visited in Suzhou in September. After that, we went to the East Gate of the city walls, climbed up to the top, and walked around to the South Gate (near our hostel). It was really interesting to see the city from that high up; it gives you a different perspective. There are a lot of economically poor areas right near the walls, and we saw some houses that looked like they were just 15′x8′ cells with a garage door. I don’t know if they opened on another part of a house or something, but it certainly just looked like a bunch of storage cells that people were living in.

We went back to the Muslim Quarter one last time, and then headed back to the hostel. We stopped for dinner at a hotpot restaurant, and it was delicious. We each had individual pots with our own kind of broth. Theo got tomato soup broth, Josh and Mom got plain broth, and I got the spicy broth, which was burn-your-face-off spicy and so good. By the end, Josh and Mom were taking spoonfuls of my broth so they could give their broth a little flavor. We had beef, chicken, pork, bok choy, tofu, spinach, noodles and potatoes. It was really awesome.

The next morning, we all just packed up our bags and played a little cards, and then my parents left for the airport. I went to a market near the South Gate with Laura, because I was looking for another bag to use, since my backpack didn’t have wheels and I wanted something bigger and on wheels for going home. That market didn’t really have anything, so we went back to the Muslim Quarter (with a stop at Haagen-Dasz, mmmm), and I finally found a good, big, rolling bag that’s also a backpack. The lady started at Y375 and I got her down to Y160. We went to meet Tiger at the big walking street where he works, and he told me I shouldn’t have paid more than Y120. Oh, well – I’m not an expert bargainer yet, I suppose. I met Tiger’s parents, who were visiting him at work, and they were awesome. They were nice and tried to talk to me in Chinese a lot, which was great. I was sad that I was meeting them the last day I was in Xi’an.

The real fun happened later when we walked out of the lake and people were lighting wish balloons (essentially paper lanterns that work like hot air balloons), so we lit one together. The people gathered there were explaining to us with big arm motions that the balloon would inflate and float, which we thought was pretty funny, since we’d been standing there watching for about 5 minutes and had already figured it out. A little further down the street, a man was selling fireworks off a cart, and we walked up to look at the boxes. He was smoking a cigarette (awesome). I asked him how many fireworks were in the biggest box and he said 100. We asked him how much it cost, and he said something like Y380, which works out to about $55. Then, to give us the full effect, he made noises like fireworks going off really fast (like a tommy gun). It was classic. We ate dinner at Pizza Hut because Theo was curious about it; I’d explained to them that Pizza Hut’s a really fancy deal here in China. They have calamari and escargots on the menu. My family was sufficiently impressed with the food and the atmosphere.

The next morning, we took the subway to the Yangzi River Bridge that established the first direct rail link from Beijing to Shanghai in the 1960s (I think). It was big and impressive, but the viewing platform was pretty much right on the highway, so it wasn’t someplace you wanted to linger too much. Then we went to the Fuzi Miao (Confucius Temple) market and went to the Imperial Examination museum. This is a part of Chinese history that I know a good bit about, thanks to LK’s classes, and she had told me I should go to the museum because it was hilarious – and she was right. In Chinese history, up until the end of the Qing dynasty, the only legitimate way to get a position in government was to take the imperial examination, and it was a really high-stress test. Examinees were essentially locked in a cell about 3′x4′ for 9 days to take the test, with only their writing implements and a table that could be converted to a bed. The museum had these cells on display with some really ridiculous mannequins of the examinees doing random things, like trying to fight off snakes that had crawled into their cell, or trying to cheat. The best part is that the English translations were probably the worst I’ve seen in all of China, so the labels on the display made no sense.

We went to the Confucius temple after that, which was really interesting (but filled with really tacky fabric lanterns for the annual lantern festival they hold there), and then we made our way to the hotel to pack up and leave Nanjing for Xi’an.