4 p.m. Tuesday. I'm in soft sleeper, which is the best class. Four berths to a compartment. Cleanliness is roughly motel level - not bad at all. The only exception on this car is the bathroom, which like all train bathrooms is simply a hole in the floor leading directly to the tracks. So the bathroom is closed when the train is in a station. The other problem is the musak, which is utterly Western and utterly banal. There appears to be a volume knob over the head of the guy snoring in the other lower bunk; I guess I'll wait until he goes for a meal.

Wednesday. We're cruising south at a steady clip; hopefully we'll make up some of the lost time from the extra hour we stayed in Zhong-whatever, for reasons unknown to an ignorant foreigner like me. On top of the hour we were already behind, and the half-hour difference between the destination time I was told and the one in the timetable, I hope there's still someone waiting for me in Guilin.

I'm feeling pretty good, though, despite the delay and an upset stomach - no obvious culprits - and an incipient sore throat. The sore throat probably comes from my sister, who said, "don't eat my noodles; I think I'm coming down with a sore throat."

Anyway, watching the rice paddies roll by and Guilin looming closer by the hour (maybe six more to go) and with my remaining suitemate (new passenger from Zhung-whatever, and much younger than the original suitemates, who all disembarked at Zhang-whatever) enjoying a snore-free mid-afternoon nap, it seems like a good time to jot down exactly why I'm doing this, why I'm moving to China to teach English.

I don't know, of course. An opportunity came up and I said, hey, why not? "Why not?" is a question with sadly numerous answers. I don't like strangers. I'm a fairly picky eater - I get by okay in the US, but here I've added meat to the verboten list (for health and safety reasons, mostly), so my dietary borders exclude: meat, mushrooms (they're creepy, and I don't like the smell), seafood (part of the meat exclusion), raw fruit (just don't like the texture, though I can manage in a pinch). Add to that list long-standing non-Joel-comestibles: alcohol, coffee, cigarettes - if you somehow observed me for some but managed to miss the occasional expression of independent thought, you might mistake me for a Mormon. And one note in my defense - most of the things on the won't-eat list, I have tried more than once.

Ok, hardly able to eat anything (though I do like tofu quite a bit), don't like strangers, don't like crowds, don't speak Chinese and don't like feeling helpless. What am I doing here? Maybe I'm just reconnoitering beyond my comfort zone, in order to go far enough to reassure myself that my boundary markers are indeed in the right place. To make sure that, before ossification is complete (probably around age 29 at the current rate), I'm not missing out on anything I might really like if I just tried it. If so, do I want to be proven right or wrong? A few goals: I want to learn Chinese. That won't happen in six months, probably not in a year, so I'll have to find an intermediate goal. I want to warp a generation of Chinese students. (Everybody tells me that Guilin doesn't attract the cream of the crop, so I may be misdirecting my efforts.) I want to be not miserable. I want to shake up my stable, placid life.