Well, really, I'm going to try, in the upcoming weeks, to be a little better at maintaining this journal . . . I feel like I've been very busy since we got home; on the Monday after we arrived, we started working again. A week after that, classes began, and now we're midway into the 4th week and things are really heating up.

As you might suspect, my sinophilia is still at fever pitch. A few of us are taking Chinese class at LCC, which is fueling the fire . . . and although it's very uncertain whether LCC will be sponsoring a trip to China again next summer, it's pretty clear to me that I want to find some way to get back there myself. (There are many ways - it's just a matter of putting something into place at the proper time.) The person who organized the original trip thinks there's about a five-year window, here, where China will continue to be receptive to having English speakers come in and teach the language, and I want to jump squarely through that window.

In the meantime, I'm working hard at trying to build a virtual community among our former students, and having some small success. We've got about 20 people (out of 60) who have joined an opt-in discussion list; so far most of them are lurkers, but we do hear occasionally from some of them and I'm sure they all read the dispatches. I've got about four people with whom I'm corresponding off the list, too, which is great fun. I'm getting lots of tips about Chinese cooking (steam the eggplant before you fry them! :) as well as a few photographs and some nice discussions about the differences and similarities between our two countries.

August 14 was the Mid-Autumn Festival in China, so here's the missive I sent to the list about our weekend:

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Hello, friends,

Well, our Mid-Autumn Festival moon will be lost under layers of clouds this evening, I fear . . . It has been raining constantly for the past 36 hours, and the rain is not supposed to let up until some time overnight tonight. There's a pleasant feeling to this rain; we have all the windows in the house open, and we're listening to it fall as we go about our daily activities. It's pleasantly warm outside - 17.6 degrees C, according to www.wunderground.com - and it feels kind of like I imagine a rain forest might feel. Does it ever rain like that in Harbin?

Yesterday my husband and I drove to Ann Arbor (about an hour's drive from Lansing) to see our daughter and to do some shopping there. We went to the Asian market there, and were astonished at how big and comprehensive it was. There was even a store across from the market that was selling Chinese pottery and ceramics. I think that place is going out of business because there were signs saying "Everything must go!". But it was hard to tell; I felt caught between cultures there. The vases had outrageously high price tags on them, and then the woman who ran the store (who didn't seem to speak any English) would come running up to me with her calculator, and show me the price there - always a fraction of what the price tag said! (I wanted to ask, "Okay, and if I buy it at the cheaper price, will you give me a gift?" - but my Chinese isn't that good yet. :)

We did eventually buy a vase. Here's a picture of it on our dining room table:



Afterwards we went over to the grocery store. As I have mentioned to some of you, I'm trying to learn to cook Chinese dishes, and so I've been looking around the for ingredients at stores in Lansing and the surrounding areas. I've been surprised at the things I've been able to find. (I do have to say that yesterday they were running low on moon cakes.) There's meat sliced thinly for hot pot (I never expected to find that) and smoked beef tongue, tripe, octopus tentacles - and so on. I've gotten many packaged items (such as dumplings and various kinds of sauces), and the packaging is very similiar to what we saw in the supermarket on HIT's campus - except there's a little more English, which I appreciate.



(One time in Harbin I thought I was buying mushrooms, but I actually bought seaweed. :)

I listened to the music playing in the store to see if I could hear any words that I know. I heard an awful lot of "shi." And I actually heard the clerk say "shenme" to one of the custorners. Of course, that's all he said, and it was clear from context that the customer had asked for the price of an item, and the clerk didn't know which item. So it's not like this was a great linguistic feat. But still. I heard the word used outside the boundaries of my Chinese class, which made me very excited.

(As for cooking: I am pleased to say that I now can cook at least one dish that I know will always be delicious: I can steam or fry vegetables in the wok, add some Guilin Chili sauce, and know I will love every bite. And I can usually make something tasty out of black beans and noodles. My other efforts have been mixed, but I am improving.)

On the way home we drove through countryside that reminded me of the countryside between Harbin and Changchun:



(You can see the rain on the road in that one.)






And here's a sideways (sorry!) movie of my daughter's boyfriend playing with his Chinese hacky-sack . . . He says it's a lot harder to predict where this one will go. I was happy to hear that he was using it.




Now it's time for me to quit playing and get back to work . . . I hope everyone in China (and all over the globe!) is having a pleasant 3-day weekend.