Tired...So tired

The first week was crazy busy, with lots of catching up and character memorization, an editing job for an MD trying to get his article published in a US medical journal, late nights (not going out) and a long weekend of later nights and not enough sleep. Sunday night I finally got a good 7 hours of sleep but all week i've been working with 5 or 6. yesterday i had a great ride to work, where i had a chat with a student of mine as we biked along yi huan lu, saw the owner of jia bar, who told me to be careful, and then explained the american name for coca-cola to the dude i buy a bottle of coke from every day before work. it was pretty funny explaining that it basically comes from two nuts. his daughter was also listening, helping him out when my putonghua failed me and i needed to gesture in order to get the idea of "nut" across (i pointed to a package of peanuts). it was a short sequence of events that really showed me that i live here, this is my home, and i'm, in a sense, a local. i regularly explain where restaurants and bars are in my neighborhood, talk about the best restaurants and dishes in chengdu, give taxi drivers directions when they don't know where to go (this is rare), etc.
after work i went to my girlfriend's house, we went out for seafood, had a great time, my face hurt from laughing and smiling so much. i've also tried to speak more and more chinese with her, now making it more of a routine than an exception. so yeah, a nice long relaxing dinner, then stayed over at her place, got up and made it to class early today, talked with a movie casting-director looking for foreign actors for a movie, gave him my number, chatted for like five minutes. class was alright, listening is really hard as there is quite a lot of vocab and precise words that i don't know, like when to use "just (now)" when it means earlier than expected and when it means later than expected. gotta love little nuances like this. chinese is efficient though - they just add a word to differentiate. after class, i went home, chatted with sam, we went over to alex's and woke up rick, who got in from HK last night. we had lunch at green dragon, then i got a haircut, went to the bookworm and had a coffee outside, studied chinese for like 45 minutes, then went to edu's roof, where we did some muay thai training for like an hour and a half. then i biked to work, where i'm writing this now. i'm looking forward to a few beers after work, celebrating the imminent arrival of friday. i love being in school, even if it is hard as fuck.

Beginning of Term / End of Winter

I suppose winter officially ended about a month ago (apparently on Feb. 4), but its still cold. I got up early today for class, attended, then decided i wanted to skip a level. so i went to the next 3 blocks of reading and writing, held my own, and will be working hard in a large class to do well. my friend andrew, who is now learning to read and write, will be with me in class, which will be good as our strengths balance each other. after class we got the rest of our books, went back to his place, ordered some chuan cai and studied for a bit. i reread the text aloud for him and he worte down the pinyin (another advantage of this class - almost no pinyin, meaning the absolutely necessary knowledge of all the characters), then we played some pes and i went to work early. i just prepped my social class and wrote a couple emails. my books arrived today, which is just awesome. so yeah, prob. a quiet night of characters and reading. i'm already pretty tired, but just have to push through a bit of teaching then back home. tomorrow: speaking, listening, maybe a muay thai lesson. we'll see.

Weekend Madness

A quick breakdown: friday i went out to coffee with my friend Andrew, we caught up, chatted about our respective girls, then i went home and had a fried rice before work. After work, I went on a date with an awesome Chinese girl and went home early, caught a few hours of sleep before I went off to the train station at 7 am. On arriving, my friend Arnaud handed me a beer, the madness began. We played cards and drank beers on the train to chongqing, hanging out with four other members of our football team (jeff hu, mark guan, melon and peter, an american). we grabbed cabs to the university when we arrived and arnaud and i kept trying to get melon to have a beer with us but he was far too hungover from the night before, a going away party for one of our teammates who is moving to shanghai. we had a quick lunch on the street outside the university then hiked up. chongqing is really hilly, perhaps moreso than hong kong or san francisco. the whole city was covered in mist and raining intermittently, the temperature around 10C. we climbed to the top of a hill into a massive construction site, tramping through mud up to the pitch, which was a potato field, sandy and clay-ey, with nice big puddles of water. i watched the first half, got warmed up, and played 10 minutes in the second half, made a few tackles and picked up 4 serious scrapes, 3 on my left elbow and a big patch on my right knee. next time i'll wear more clothes. after the game we tried to play football for like half an hour, then piled into vans and went to our hostel to shower. a new friend, fred, introduced me to the technique of army showering (passing the soap and showerhead over the curtain separating us). it was pretty hilarious watching 15 guys between the ages of 15 and 45 showering withing 2 minutes. then back into the vans and off to golden han's, a brazilian bbq chain that brews their own beer. our host was the former chinese ambassador to france, who gave a nice introductory speech. we chatted and drank and ate, reveling in the tackles and the fraternal sentiments. we returned to the hostel and went to bed around 11, woke up at 10 am in massive pain, went downstairs and had a coffee with arnaud before getting some noodles for breakfast. i bought a couple souvenirs, then we took the train back to chengdu. my recent girl came and met me at the train station, we went back to my house, she gave me a much-needed massage, showered, treated my wounds, then we went to dinner with eli, his gf coco, sam and his gf yin yin. we went back home after dinner, then went to jah bar for a beer. i took the girl home, then met up with eli, sam and callum at hemp house, where we chilled until about 2, then came home and went to bed. another great weekend, further solidifying my love of this place, of my friends, and of the chinese language. other than the constant pain i am in from my rugby injuries, its been pretty great recently. next week the semester starts, and back to the grind. im looking forward to the structure.