Late November to Dec 3rd 2007....

Yet another couple weeks have flown by, and I’ve been getting complaints as to the lack of news, so here it be!
Classes continue to go well, individual students are beginning to stand out from the throng, and I even have quite a few names down. Most Sunday afternoons I spend with one group of students or another, and last Sunday I went off with a group of girls to paly badminton and volleyball at a sports ground on the outskirts of town. Well, theoretically we went to play, in reality we played for about an hour, and sat chatting for two! I think having a female foreigner in the school has been particularly good for the girl students,
As they are really shy in class, but off by ourselves, they chat up a storm, something that they were less able to do with the previous male teachers. Makes a change for me too from teaching in the monastery where my whole world was male.
This past weekend though, I took off and went to Chengdu to meet up with an old student and friend who came down from Xining to visit me en route to Beijing. Lhungrik was probably my best student in Dharamsala, and it’d been about 10 years since we’d met, so
it was lovely to catch up on all the latest gossip in each other’s lives, and to hear about mutual friends. Who’s doing what, with whom, and where! I left Santai after classes on Friday morning, and stayed in Chengdu til Sunday afternoon. It was a weekend full of coincidences as well, met a guy called Jamyang, a friend of Lhungrik’s, who, after chatting for a while, turned out to have met me in India, and had been a roommate of one of my best friends in the school.
The small world phenomenon continued as I met an American girl called Yeshi Dolma, whom I’d met in ’99 in Majnu ka Tilla (Delhi) when I’d been there making masks for the monastery, and ran into her on the street, newly arrived and lost as to where to go or stay. Helped her out, we had breakfast together, saw her off onto the bus to D’sala, and never heard from her again til this weekend. Met some other friends as well, Nyima, who’d been in Loseling years ago, and who knew several of my friends, and a few foreigners, Lisa and Fiona.
Wandered around Chengdu with Lhungrik and Jamyang, amusing ourselves with some lifelike statues of tourists, and chatting endlessly the entire way, until it was time to go back Sunday afternoon. Still enjoy the bus ride to and from Santai to Chengdu. As Sunday was relatively clear, and the sun was actually visible for a change, several shops had tall racks of noodles hanging to dry in the sun, and outside every teashop were groups of people soaking up the sun’s feeble rays and playing cards or mah jong.
As I’ve had more comments on the culinary delights I’ve mentioned in my blog than anything else, I figure I’d better keep them up to date. One of my latest ventures was deep fried chicken feet soaked in chilli sauce. During the course of wandering with some students, this was their idea of a snack, and I couldn’t refuse, bless them. Not one of my favourite dishes though, I have to admit. A bit like eating sticks covered in hot sauce.
Have been out for several more hotpot dinners, (huoguo) and though I have stopped asking what kind of meat I’m eating, there were several suspiciously tentacle-ish looking bits at the last one, and I was told that another bit, with a rubbery texture and lots of short spikes on it was the stomach lining of a cow. Ah well. At least I never get sick from anything I eat and most of it is pretty tasty! The pictures alongside of the hotpot dinner are from a party for the teachers of the school where I teach on Saturdays. The girl sitting on my right I’ve given the English name Kerry, as she calls herself my little sister!

The Saturday classes are still pretty chaotic, as I’m not at all experienced teaching little kids. My strategy now is to run them ragged until they have to sit still! Problem is, that I’m absolutely knackered by the end of the class as well…
And on that note, I’ve ended up getting myself into yet another event that I know I’m going to regret. Not only am I still preparing frantically to be the guest speaker leading a teacher’s conference on December 22, but I also agreed for some unfathomable reason to do a class demonstration for a junior school in Xiping, a town some distance from Santai. It was only after agreeing that I found out it was to be an exhibition class for the parents and other teachers to attend, and is to be a class of 100 primary students. Madness.
100 highschool or adult students, no worries, but primary kids!
And it’s December already. Hard to believe that all of you out there are preparing for Christmas, when it couldn’t feel less like it here. Having said that, there are the occasional signs of it around, more in Chengdu than here in Santai of course. In Chengdu, many of the bigger shops were decorated with Christmas trees and wreaths. I don’t think we even have a day off for it here, though I might go to Mianyang for Christmas with some of the foreigners there. See how things evolve. I am looking forward to travelling north to Xining for the New Year in mid January/February.