Much To Say

I have much to say, and little desire to say it. 

It's Saturday afternoon, and I might start doing Monday's homework.  A lot of my classmates have gone to Shanghai for the weekend, others took the bus down to the Westlake.  Me, I'm spending quality time with my best friend, Kong Tiao, also known as Air Conditioning. 

There's some stories I could tell. Mostly I'm going back and forth about the job. 

We went to dinner at a restaurant outside the university gate; I wanted to order the same thing I had before.  Of course, I can't read the menu or remember the name of the dish, so I try describing it to the waitress.  She is totally lost; another waitress comes over to rescue her, and while we're talking to the rescue waitress, our original waitress is failing to mask her laughter with her clipboard.  Go away, you idiot, I wanted to say.  A lot of Chinese people don't look at the language barrier as a problem they can solve, they just see it as a hideous, absurd embarrassment to themselves.  Anyway, screw her.  I got the dish I wanted (dan huang niu liu) along with some qing cai.  E ordered mala doufu and some eggplant.  It was delicious.

Last night, after E and I got done interviewing students for our practicum, we joined a majong game on the first floor.  They were pretty excited that I knew how to play, but I wanted to watch the first round, because some of the customs were different.  The tile distribution is different, figuring out whose turn it is is different, using the flowers is different.  Not so different I couldn't play, though.  It was funny because the Chinese people played it their way (as noisy as possible), the Americans used American manners (calling out the tiles they were throwing), and I tried to play it the Filipino way, as best I could, with the distracting banter, the guessing.... I couldn't use any of the Filipino vocabulary, though.  First of all, in Mandarin it's "majiang, peng, chi" instead of "majong, pong, chao."  When you're waiting, you say "ting le" and when you've got majong, you say "hu le."  The best is when you pong skip a bunch of people, we said "ride airplane!" meaning your ass just got skipped.  I understood what "ride airplane" meant immediately, and had to explain it to the grammar teacher.    The worst though, was when the person across from me threw the tile I was waiting for, I grabbed it and said, majong a!  But then they all said, no no no, some places you can do that, but not in "Hangzhou Majiang."  So from then on, we said "Hangzhou Majiang" every time something crappy happened. 

Last story:  my roommate and I were walking home from lunch, and, if I haven't told you before, this campus seems to be all getting new plumbing at once.  So all the walkways between buildings are either torn open or are being prepared to be torn open.  This means we now have a) open sewers, and b) crazy detours we're too impatient to take in the heat.  Well, it seems there was a car (don't ask me how it got here) stuck on our side of the construction, and there was a giant rubber pipe blocking the road.  So instead of going around, the driver enlisted two bony young uniformed security guys to help him lay down the street barriers over the top of this huge rubber pipe, that must be a foot in diameter.  I thought, wow, it looks like he's going to use those barriers as ramps to get over this rubber pipe, but no, that's too stupid...  Chinese people, when they see something stupid happening, like to stop and look; me, I like to get distance between myself and stupidity.  I told my roommate, I think he's crazy, and my roommate looked around, and said, yes, I think he's crazy too.  We heard a big bang, and when we turned around, the car was on the other side of the pipe.  It was totally absurd, even in success. 

So should I take the job in Shanghai?  I really really like the climate in Seattle, I really really like to be comfortable.  But am I going to be a high school teacher all my life?  Not sure yet.  The principal gave me till Monday to inform him; I'm going back and forth.