Adventures in Guangzhou!

I'm not talking about t-shirts with sharpie written on them either. These jerseys are waaaaay nicer than the ones my team has plus the students' are all personalized. Okay sure I didn't pay a dime for mine, but still. I inquired further as to whether each class bought new uniforms every year and the teacher said yes, with a couple exceptions. I can't remember if it's Class 2 or Class 3, but one of them consists entirely of the smartest kids from outside the city. Apparently they have a reputation for being extremely competitive inside the classroom but somewhat less capable on the athletic field. Given that they tend to come from families with much less money, they don't have high class uniforms like the rest. I couldn't help thinking to myself though--if there's a Chinese equivelant to "that's alright, that's okay, you're gonna work for us someda," these kids are definitely all over it.

One thing that is sort of cool about the school system here is that there is a healthy intra-school rivalry between all of the classes. Since interscholastic sports don't really exist like they do in the states, they get their competition within the school walls. It seems like every other week there is a schoolwide competition in a different sport that all classes have to participate in (at least in some capacity). They do swimming, jump-rope, basketball, soccer, track & field, and who knows what else. Very cool.

I mentioned that I was running around the track as this was all happening. Having written in a previous entry about the upcoming faculty-staff track meet on December 4th, this should not come as a surprise to anyone. What did come as a surprise to me today was finding out that it was moved to this coming Saturday the 26th! Oy. I had a whole workout schedule planned and everything (especially after finding out David did fifteen 100m intervals that day) but this sort of tosses that out the window. Oh well. I'm going to do my best and hope that I don't spontaneously combust after racing a 400m. It being a solid two or three years since I raced anything, I have no idea how my body will react. I have a sneaking suspicion it is going to be violently angry with me for putting it through that kind of pain. We'll see.

Besides the track meet, I witnessed an interesting conversation today between Steven and one of my football buddies (who doubles as the computer expert). The desktop computer in our study has been "acting up" so we called in the troops to deal with it. As he was reloading the system software, he was shootin' the breeze with Steven and it came up that Steven studied Japanese and lived there for a year in college. Our computer expert started going off in Chinese and I didn't catch it all at the time, but I did recognize "enough," "English," "Japan," "China," "Hitler," and "war." Wow. Not exactly chatting about the Yankees there.

After he left I asked Steven for a recap and he told me that the guy was explaining how he wants to learn enough English in order to tell all the westerners that they should hate the Japanese because of what they did during WWII; that what they did to the Chinese is what Hitler did to the Jews. Geez. I find this particularly interesting given the front page article that was in the NY Times over the weekend about the overwhelmingly popular comic books in Japan right now talking about all of Asia's problems are China and Korea's fault. There's a heckuva lot of hostility around and I tend to forget about it. What that tells me is that unless it's addressed there is bound to be a pretty serious conflict in this part of the world in the next decade or two. Scary.

On a happier note, I continued to receive birthday emails and cards which is fun. I suppose one of the benefits of being so far away (and thus in a completely different time zone) is that people are both unsure of when your birthday falls and that they're willing to just send greetings in the ballpark of the right time. Works for me! Birth-day can easily become birth-week and I'll be fine with it.

It occurs to me that I should ruminate a bit on hitting the quarter century mark. I have heard quite a bit about people even having a "quarter life crisis" upon turning 25 (which is funny because statistically our quarter life mark was probably a few years ago). Come to think of it, I even know a couple people that went through it. I can't say it's not legitimate but I think I managed to pass right on over anything like that. I am perfectly content in my life right now and have very few complaints. I am privileged enough to be exploring a fascinating part of the world, teaching excellent students, playing tons of sports, eating incredible food on a daily basis, and learning a cool new language.

I think part of it is also that I'm so far away from the familiar. In this way, it feels like out of sight-out of mind. I've never had a birthday in China before so it's very new and doesn't quite feel like a regular birthday. Like I said, shorts and sandals on my birthday? Unheard of. In the same way, I thought I'd really miss the New England autumn but I really didn't. That's not because I didn't want to experience it but rather because it's so far away and so different here that it doesn't feel like it actually happened over there in Boston or West Hartford. Sure my calendar says November 22nd, but it still feels like August or September to me! I guess that's both comforting and disconcerting at the same time. I'm not sure I can explain that any better. Regardless, life is good and I am excited for what will hopefully be a legendary Guangzhou Thanksgiving feast on Thursday night. More on that later...