Here's my very rough, tentative itinerary for the next nine months:

now - Jan 15, 2002: Guilin Jan 15 (plus or minus a week) - train to Beijing, a few days in Beijing, fly to Seattle Jan 18ish - Feb 21sh: Seattle. Maybe go home to Alaska for a week. Feb 21ish: Fly to Hong Kong. Spend a few days in Hong Kong. Feb 25sh: arrive in Guilin for spring semester end of June, 2002; Go home to Seattle

Read online at: http://aufrecht.org/content/article?id=8566

Friday

The train pulled into Guilin around 11 am, still on schedule after nineteen hours. I was very much out of schedule, and stumbled through a phalanx of hawkers to the bus stop, where I found the number 1 but not the number 10. On the bus, I quickly picked up a new friend from the Guilin Institute of Tourism, a sophomore. By "friend," I mean someone impervious to my I've-just-been-on-a-train-for-19-hours-and-I-didn't-sleep-much-so-leave-me-alone-and-no-I-don't-want-whatever-it-is-you're-selling vibe, so I tried to chill and make polite conversation, steering it in the direction of the number 10 bus; and where its route might now go; and the certainty that I could find the stop by Walking Street without trouble, thank you; and inquiry towards the nature of the relationship between the rest of the number 10's route and the train stop; and my personal beliefs about what that relationship should be and could, in an ideal world be; and the undesirability of having to transfer from the number 1 to the number 10 after a long train ride.

Guilin is still pretty warm and humid.

Saturday

I woke up around nine am. Out of drinking water. No electricity. Finished off the propane while shaving in the shower. Foreign Language department is closed. English language section of the library is closed. The sky is sprinkling. Nothing to do but go shopping downtown. Made my first purchase from the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press series, the same series that fills two shelves at the bookstore (in English!) and includes the eight-hundred page grammar of English for Y99. I bought a linguistic analysis of English dialects. Now I'm learning which accents are rhotic and which are not. Alex, that weird thing you started doing last year with your r's means that you are losing your rhoticism.

I took the number 10 to the very end and discovered that it goes all the way to the train station - the West, back side of the train station. There's always a next time. I went walking south of the train station in search of a rumored DVD consumer nirvana, but found only a freeway overpass under construction and a bunch of little shops and mud. I'm sure it will be a beautiful boulevard in two months.

I bought Bjork and U2 CDs. I don't really feel like a pirate, paying $4 for four CDs, because most of the music I'm buying I already own on CD back home. I do have a list of Chinese singers and composers I want to find, but that's going to require more help. I also bought a bundle of Chinese books for small children so I can practice writing characters. Y25 for music, Y60 for books, Y6 for bread.

I also swung past the Sheraton Guilin, mostly just to use the bathroom. It was a perfectly normal bathroom, not quite clean but not bad. Then it struck me - I was using a urinal. And the sink didn't scare me. You must understand that the meaning of "Bathroom" in China is so utterly different from its Western meaning that it's probably a mistake to use the same word. The "Bathroom" I'm familiar with is a place that you go to do your number one or number two business, but also to wash your hands, take care of simple personal hygiene issues such as blowing your nose (number four), maybe checking your hair or teeth in the mirror. You come out in better shape than you went in.

A Chinese Bathroom is a small, smelly room (no water-filled toilet bowls, no water traps in the plumbing), probably without a sink, certainly without paper towers (and without paper or cotten towels it's really not a Bathroom, is it?), most likely without a mirror, assuredly without toilet paper (bring your own), and in general a place to seek refuge from rather than in.

I didn't check for toilet paper, and there was a blow-drier instead af paper towels, but in all other respects the Sheraton seemed to be a bona fide Bathroom. Just part of the five-star criteria, I suppose, along with a New York clock that was adjusted for Daylight Savings time. I was lured upstairs by the sign for a coffee bar, and when I was a few yuan short of the Y40 ($5) for a hot chocolate, and so canceled my order and got up to leave, the two hovering your staff ladies were much more embarrassed than I.

Sunday

The weather changed today. It rained, and the sky was much more vivid and interesting, and I could see mountains that I'd never seen before (much like on Pomona campus, where Mount Baldy and its foothills, four miles away, are invisible all summer and emerge only in months with an R, and even then only when the omens are auspicious). The air was cool and pleasant. At night it actually got cold.

Monday

More rain.

Another Tai Chi lesson today. The lessons have steadfastly refused to obey any schedule; usually I get a phone call an hour in advance and happily I've been able to make all of the lessons. This lesson was less educational than the first few. We watched a tape of a demonstation at the master's University, where he and his students put on a lengthy demonstration during a school talent show for Beijing muckety-mucks. The demonstration unfortunately consisted mostly of those sorts of stunts based on physics tricks, which reduce the apparent force of a weight, punch, spear tip to the throat, or sledgehammer blow to a cement block on your head; and pain tolerance to endure the considerable force that remains.

Then we reviewed, again, but still piecemeal, with lots of interruptions. We on't practice beginning to end, so it's a little bit tricky to remember the entire sequence. And just as we were getting to the new material, I had to leave to go meet the propane guy. Which leads, if you have the patience, to an interesting discovery about the second and eighth senses.

Zhang Ming and I switched propane tanks and took the empty one downstairs. When I came upstairs there was a distinct smell of propane in the air. After much fiddling and opening of windows, not necessarily in that order, I got the hissing reduced considerably, and decided to attempt a much-needed hot shower. The water heater ignites automatically when the water is turned on from within the shower room, so I figured that the pilot sparked an explosion, at least I'd be in the next room, separated by a (flimsy) wooden door.

Human beings are traditionally accorded five senses, but even without resorting to superstition we can identify at least eight distinct senses, all with clear biological causes. Sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste, of course, but also: Balance, from the nerves in the inner ear, and also from the stomach; the sixth sense. The kinesthetic sense, the feedback from nerves and special cells embedded in our muscles and tendons that report back to the brain the position and motion of our joints; the seventh sense. The sense of not being dead yet, the eighth sense, derived from an as-yet undiscovered source which will surely be called the Descartes nerves when finally isolated. Arguably the sense of hunger could be a distinct sense. A lesser case can be made for the sense of direction; in birds, it's probably powered by a real organ with actual nerves, but in humans it's most likely a virtual sense, derived from memory and cognition. (If you are interested in other pioneering work in the field of biomedical enumeration, I direct you to a seminal work in the field: http://aufrecht.org/content/article?id=8117#8118, on modern developments in the standard descriptive model of excretory functionality.)

Just after I turned out the hot water, precisely as I listened for the foomp of the igniting water-heater, the wind slammed shut the door in the next room. I know now that the eighth sense, the sense of not yet being dead, sent a message to the brain which just beat out the auditory signal, and I correctly interpreted the sound as a door slamming, not an explosion. I know this because I didn't crack my head open involuntarily diving for cover behind the toilet (incidentally, another advantage of the sit-down toilet over the hole-for-squatting variety: better hard cover).

After the shower, I turned off the gas for the night.

Tuesday

I realized while helping the kids with their Jeopardy questions that the Answer and Question style is not entirely syntactic sugar. When topic adequately constrains the question domain, it works as originally intended. For example if the topic is Qing Dynasty, then the right question for "1911" is obvious: "What was the last year of the Qing Dynasty?" And for the answer "Beijing," the best question is clearly "What was the capital of the Qing Dynasty?"

Cold at night, cold in the morning, just right all day.

Lu Dan took my absentee ballot on her trip downtown and faxed it for Y16.

Zhang Ming got another valve assembly in case mine had gone bad. The new valve assembly had a washer that I didn't remember seeing on mine. I took the washer and reassembled mine using it, and now it doesn't seem to be leaking at all. I guess my old washer is decorating the empty tank.

Wednesday

Cold at night, cold out this morning, abruptly got almost hot during lunch. Had another Tai Chi lesson; bigger, this time, with all of the American students plus Art, Li Xu, and Zhang Ming. After lunch I talked to Li Xu about a bunch of things that have piled up. I told him that I'd like to come back in the spring, and when I asked about course load he quickly replied that it wouldn't include any middle-school classes. I'm quite confident that we're communicating in full duplex mode.

Zhang Ming and I went to get Hepatitus A shots, but the clinic, which has been completely empty for two months, was very crowded and had run out of vaccine. I didn't mind as I got very nervous visualizing the needle. So we went to the mail room to see if my Amazon books have shown up yet. No mail.