Daily Life

So, as I have for the last two years, I'm going to really try to be more frequent about this. I think if I didn't write 8 page posts I'd be less loath to update, so I'm  going for short and sweet here, which is not really my forte.

I just wanted to give some glimpses into my "typical day" here--well, trypical sunday. Mr Wang, an older professor who is a friend of mine, asked me to go swimming with him. Swimming is very popular here now--I actually also went last night with my friend Maggie, who has a membership at the hotel across the street from her. Her place has just installed a sauna, which I'm already looking forward to when it gets chilly. I thought Wang (and my friend Jane, who he also invited) and I would go to our school's pool, which is a full sized pool. It's open a few hours each afternoon, and wall to wall student, so it's more of a cooling bath than a swim. Instead, we went to the yingzhou municipal pool, where jane and i had gone earlier this week. It's a nice pool and fairly uncrowded, with actual lanes for swimming. the mother of a little boy Wang is tutoring drove us, which is nice--jane and i walked earlier this week and it's a good 40 minutes away. We all had a great time at the pool--wang and i raced (he won, by a hair), jane raced with the little boy, and wang and I tried to teach jane and the little boy to dive rather than belly flop. There were a surprising amount of laowais there, which I said to jane quietly and she affirmed to me in a loud voice in the dressing room as two were standing next to me

Jane and nina and I then got together  for lunch. we took the bus downtown to a lebanese ("muslim," for jane and nina) restaurant we'd been to before. It's pretty good, though the olives are canned. I like that I'm the food expert there as opposed to chinese places, where i kind of just trust what others order for me. Btw, the chinese for hummus is hummus.

We ordered a ridiculous amount and then nina, according to jane, was very unladylike in telling the waiter to hurry because she was dying of hunger. This led to a discussion of metaphors. Apparently, a euphimism for death in chinese is "riding the crane to the western lands," which i love. Also, breasts can be called "mantou" (fried buns") or your "career line." So you can see our conversation ran the gamut.

we staggered out of the restaurant at 2 pm and wandered around for about 15 minutes, stopping in stores and going through the old market, where it appeared every teenager in Ningbo was out (the old town is now filled with lots of tiny shops selling cosmetics/clothes/stationary/general cute things and is anchored by a mcdonalds and jackie chan fast food place). Nina wanted to go to a place that sold food from shanxi, her home province, for dinner. While Jane and I insisted we were never eating again, when we got to the little storefront (they had about 6 tables and sold from the open window in front of the store) it looked so good, we made nina get us some too. There were cold noodles (rice or wheat) with bean sprouts and cucumber and spongy tofu. They mixed a sauce in a seperate plastic baggie with lots of vinegar, chili sauce and some other components--you dump the sauce on the noodles when you are ready to eat it. I also had what was basically a sandwich--with a very long chinese name-- with a chewy flat bun and chopped lamb inside. It was very good and very different from typical ningbo cuisine, which tends to be ricy, salty and pickled vegetably. I was reminded how regional chinese food is--i've barely scratched the surface of its variety.

Taxi home and then a big nap before eating my shanxi dinner. Btw, i love that every single one of my colleagues, when hearing my schedule (i teach 9:50-12:15) has nodded their heads and said "that is good. it means you have time to sleep in the afternoon"

and this is my version of short and sweet