I know, I know, I’ve been slacking on my blog lately. It’s been a busy couple of weeks. On weekdays I spend my mornings in class and much of my afternoons doing homework, which is insanely time-consuming when I have to read a long passage full of unfamiliar characters. Since the Chinese writing system is pictographic and not phonetic, when you run into a character you don’t know, you not only don’t know what it means, you don’t even know how it’s pronounced, so you need to look it up twice – first to find out how it’s pronounced, and then to find the definition. It turns a simple homework assignment into a long and arduous task. When I feel like writing, I don’t have time, and when I do have time, I’m really not in the mood to spend it writing! I’ve had a good couple of weekends, though.
The weekend before last I climbed Jinyun Mountain again. I went with a few friends and we walked all the way from the school to the mountain and took a longer route up, stopping every half hour or so to rest and have some snacks. We stopped at a farmhouse that had an orange orchard and I had my first-ever fresh orange, straight off the tree. I even got to pick them myself! A little further on, we stopped again at a nice picnic spot for a snack, and while we were eating a vendor carrying large two large cans on either end of a bamboo pole over his shoulders appeared and started hawking his wares. In the cans he had noodles, hot tofu pudding, disposable bowls, chopsticks and cutlery, and various sauces and toppings, so I was treated to fresh Chongqing-style tofu pudding topped with chilli oil, salt, green onions, preserved vegetables and crunchy yellow beans. At the peak we met a group of girls who turned out to be from Southwest University, and we spent the rest of the afternoon walking and talking with them. On the way down we stopped at a different Daoist monastery, even more beautiful than the one I visited last time. By the time we got back to the school it was getting dark, so we stopped at a dingy little family-run restaurant for dinner, where I quickly caught the attention of the students at the table next to us and spent the evening talking and downing beers with them. By the time we finally left the restaurant around eleven o’clock, we were all carrying on like best friends. Though I never did hear from any of them again.
Early the next morning, slightly the worse for wear, I dragged myself out of bed for a trip to the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute to see their huge 70th anniversary art show with my friend Xu Bixi (许碧溪), an art major I met through my friend Benson. After an hour-long bus ride through Chongqing’s crumbling, rubble-strewn, pothole-riddled suburbs, we finally pulled up outside the school. It took us almost half an hour to find the exhibit, but we were looking at art the whole time; the entire campus was covered in it. A 20-foot high statue hung by its knees over the railing of the school canteen, arms trailing to the ground. Being a Sunday, the art seemed to outnumber the students; large silver human heads, mosaic archways, antique wedding beds, salvaged stone archways, and abstract sculptures were scattered all over the place. The place is worth a visit even without the art show; it’s like a giant playground of art. The art show itself was in a series of long, narrow buildings all squeezed together with just a narrow corridor of space between each, with each room opening off the corridor filled with art. We spent the morning walking from door to door down the corridors, stuffing our eyes with art, and then we went to the student village just outside the gates of the campus for lunch. The village was awesome; not only was it full of great little shops and snack stalls, it even had a few midway rides!
After lunch we went back to the art show, but we were tired and I wasn’t feeling great, so we just checked out a few pieces and then caught the bus back. By the time we’d rattled and swerved our way back to campus it was clear that I had more than a hangover. By some miracle, I made it back to my room without incident, and it was a couple days before I left again. And I’m never eating at that little restaurant by the campus again.
Anyway, this post is too long already, so I’ll have to post the next weekend’s adventures as a separate instalment. Oh, and I seem to be having trouble writing accents on my computer right now, so instead of standard Pinyin I’ll just write the tones in as numbers (1=high flat tone, 2=rising tone, 3=dipping tone, 4=falling tone, 5=neutral tone).
Chinese word of the day:
食物中毒
Shi2 wu4 zhong4 du2
Food poisoning
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