First runs

I didn't post last week for a few reasons, but mainly because I didn't have anything pressing to recount (and yes, I couldn't be bothered...). I don't have a ton to talk about this week either but I promised myself I'd post every week, and missing two would be, well, one too much :-).  I had also committed to stopping smoking, and that didn't actually happen until Thursday just gone, so there's that too. As I'm still suffering from nicotine withdrawal, this will be a short, whiny post...

So much as I love smoking, it is terrible for one's health and so has to be stopped, and stopped as regularly as possible. I have already expressed how I am finding keeping up the pace of study exhausting and in spite of the concentration boost nicotine gives, my energy levels just weren't there. I'm seriously hoping the extra oxygen to the brain will spice it up a bit - I also got some Omega 3 (fish oil) capsules and have been investigating nootropics. A friend (who I won't name) has been on a "brain pill" for a bit now and swears by it... I am very tempted. Even if it is 100% placebo - who cares! I genuinely don't mind paying (lots) for pills with chalk and sugar if in taking them I trick my brain into temporarily becoming more effective at memorising and processing speed. Anyway, I'm not there quite yet.

In the meantime, there is getting over the nicotine withdrawal symptoms. Every time I stop smoking again, and I count 2 months with zero nicotine as "stopping", I am reminded of a book by one of those "70s drug experimenting authors" who likened the withdrawal symptoms from stopping opiods and certain other highly addictive substances to the effects of certain hallucinogenics. Getting off 1 pack-a-day+ of cigarettes certainly does have some strange effects on the brain. And particularly deleterious effects on concentration and focus... I have a month's worth of nicotine patches to ease the most intense periods but alas, it's summer here, and has been approaching 30C. There isn't much Air Con here (at least in places I frequent, particularly my dorm flat) and any sort of sweating and the patches just fall off. That, you can imagine, is most annoying... The other remedy is eating junk food, so I made sure to stock up good and proper beforehand :-)

I have also started exercising, and have had a couple of runs on the hill behind the uni. My body is suitably painful in many, many places but that will all be a distant memory in a week or so. I think I'll be able to get a circuit of about 5-6 kms going, and as there are some pretty steep parts, I may even leave it at that for the foreseeable future. I generally tend to like doing 15 kms+ because that's when you really start to get the heart and lungs working but that is also very nasty on the joints, and I'm going to have to start being a little more careful about that, particularly running on concrete. Sniff, if only they had a rowing machine at the gym...

One of the things that has stuck me here is that the packaging is way overdone. When I say overdone, I mean that you get a packet of biscuits with thick outer plastic, a pretty solid plastic tray which is filled with more plastic vacuum packed individual (or in pairs) biscuits. While you can get something approaching that for some things in France, the plastic is never anywhere near as thick, and it's not that common. Here pretty much everything seems to be that way. A lot of bagged stuff also seems to have gas pumped into it to make the bags look bigger - I got some chippies (that's "crisps" or "chips" for those speakers of dialect ;) ) that literally have about 15g of dried potato for about 10g of plastic - and the bag looks about normal for a "single-serve" bag of chippies.

Another thing that I have been thinking about over the last couple of weeks is the Chinese relationship with "authority" - older, "wiser" colleagues and particularly teachers and scholars. China opened up long ago, and hundreds of thousands of Chinese go overseas to study or work each year. Some of them come back and have attained excellent language skills. So why does no one do anything about the monstrously bad translations on signage everywhere???

Sure, it can be funny but I really don't understand how it's not embarrassing. I would find it terribly embarrassing. Aren't they losing face by having such comical errors everywhere? And it's everywhere!

Where it's not so funny is when it's in a book for learning Chinese. I am using books from (probably) China's premier language teaching university (Beijing Language and Culture University) and there are errors everywhere. Many translations are bad, the Chinese character stroke orders are wrong in many places, and sometimes words have changed meanings to a point where it is very not Ok. Example? The word "xiao jie" (literally "little elder sister") is officially the word for "Miss", as in, "Excuse me Miss, could you tell me how to get to the train station?" Except that now it means "prostitute". I remember it didn't mean that 20 years ago when I was in Fuzhou, because I mistakenly used it to get the attention of a male waiter and my friend Li was very uncomfortable as the poor fellow reluctantly came over to see what we wanted. It does now though, and has for a decade or so. And the books are regularly reissued, because, like, they're supposed to be the best. Of course my teachers are well aware of the errors, as are many, many of the people at the Beijing Language and Culture University. What gives?

The only explanation I can come up with is that no one wants to tell the poor chaps who wrote the books (or signs...) because the venerable and wise people couldn't possibly be wrong. Or at least a young teacher/engineer/scientist could never tell the older teacher/engineer/scientist that it's wrong and needs changing. But what happens when the specs on a high-speed rail line aren't correct???

A friend told me that the ageism here in China's tech scene is even worse than it is in Silicon Valley (so at 30 you are already approaching the upper limit...) and I can see a logic in it. If everyone is 25 then there is no (serious) face lost by telling a colleague he has written bad code and needs to rewrite it. That couldn't happen to a "senior" (so, like a 40 year old!) developer, it would mean losing face. But as anyone who has worked on code that has to scale to hundreds or even thousands of servers (instances, containers, blah) knows - if the code is bad then you MUST tell the dev to fix it. Inefficient, broken code MUST NOT be allowed to get into prod, let alone stay there. So you only hire/keep coders who won't lose face when they are told their code is broken? I have no idea...

Some random picks to end with:

Every morning at first light a couple of squirrels jump from the roof onto the tree just in front of my balcony and hang out for an hour or so

Not just online, Viagra knock-offs in store in a pharmacy near you (well, near me anyway!) 

Chillies drying...

... In front of the (abandoned) Yuxi West train station

Oldies rockin' up the park

I never said I wouldn't post food porn...

The straw that broke my anti-taxi/Didi commitment. It wasn't supposed to rain at all, and rained very hard for something like an hour and a half. Of course I didn't take an umbrella... Now I know how, next time I'm taking a Didi (Chinese Uber)!!!

Last night's light(en)ing extravaganza

Tonight's sunset

 

First strides

I have been exploring the campus some more and am more and more glad I chose little ol' Yuxi for my language learning experience. There are quirky spots everywhere, an interesting and well-furnished (well-booked anyway :-) ) library, and a very nice patch of forest just behind the campus. The more I explore, the more I like it, and I'm not finished yet.

A proper map of the campus

With more water features

And places to get away from the crowds

Careful how you walk though! Steps of more than 75cms are not allowed!

Yes, those are croquet hoops

And that will do very nicely indeed for a little game of pétanque. Mais où sont mes boules ??? :)

We are in China after all...

Here is some more work from the students (that obviously didn't get taken away by a flood)

I started smoking again last October (I know mum, I know...) after finishing the "20kms de Paris" (and hitting the time I wanted!) with the intention of stopping after a month or so - "I deserve it", I said to myself. I did stop for a month back in January and started running again but had to stop running because of a lower back "thing". So, of course, I started smoking again... I am 99% certain the back issue is a posture thing. I can pretty much turn it on by lying/reclining slouched for a few hours and then get rid of it by not doing that for a couple of days. I do love slouching but I guess my aging body will no longer accept the abuse...

But next week the smoking will stop (is that the 15th time already???) and I will start running again. What finally decided me was exploring the patch of bush ("forest" in non-Kiwi speak) behind the uni - it's lovely and is just begging to be run! :-).

Very nice views of town from up here!

Our friendly sponsor's world headquarters. Apparently the Hongta Tobacco Corporation was once Asia's largest tobacco company, and it still dominates the town (i.e, has all the "good" jobs).

The Hongta grounds are for workers only... sniff, their gardens look stunning!

I also finally found the Buddhist temple I have been seeing off in the distance (and keen eyes might have spied on some of the photos), and should be running past it on a regular basis come next week.

There is also a creek (canal?) that I came across that has at least a few hundreds metres of dirt road beside it. At least according to the map it goes for quite a distance and if the dirt road beside it follows it, then I will have a much appreciated alternative to running on concrete. The dirt tracks in the bush are not "proper" tracks, so are not really any good for running on.

I also (finally!) found the campus gym. Unfortunately, like almost all gyms in Paris, it opens well after I ever feel like doing any sport - 09h (until 22h) :(. It is small but pretty well equipped, but is also missing the key piece for me - a rowing machine. Even though it's only about 125€ for the entire year, I decided to spend 30€ on a mat and some dumbbells instead so I can exercise before starting the day. They do have a proper setup for doing squats though (the King of all exercises :-) ), so I may end up joining later on...

And on the language learning and settling in...

One of the big issues I faced over the first 3-4 weeks was "culture shock". Maybe "shock" is a little strong, let's call it "culture inflammation". Though I may have spent quite a lot of time in various different countries and cultures, Yuxi is very different from where I have been living for the last 15-odd years in many, many ways. From simple practical things like all toilets being of the squat variety, to eating spicy food 1-2x a day, to walking down the street and only seeing Chinese faces! It doesn't matter that I am very happy to be here experiencing all these things (or maybe happily challenged for the toilets :-) ), it still adds extra cognitive load, and a dose of stress. As I had quite a bit of stress leading up to my departure from France (thinking about moving to China and all...), it has meant that I haven't really been able to relax for more than a day or so in many months (thanks John & whanau and Sanya & whanau for those precious moments of tranquility!). So I was sitting out on my balcony earlier this week and all of a sudden realised that I was feeling relaxed.

The reason I mention this is because I have been pretty disappointed with my memory since arriving. I seem to be forgetting things (mainly Chinese characters/words) and finding it a lot harder to keep stuff in there than I thought I would. And recall speed is simply atrocious if I do get there. Initially I was thinking that maybe all the studies are right, and the brain doesn't work as well at 40 as it does at 18... I'm going to blame it on the stress and extra cognitive load of arriving and diving straight into classes before acclimatising properly anyway :-).

So in terms of language, where am I at the end of my 4th week? To be frank, unless people seriously dumb down what they are saying and say it clearly and very slowly, I am still completely lost. Certainly less lost than 4 weeks ago, but I'm still not really able to have any semblance of a conversation yet. If people give me a minute or so after every sentence to process (with the context) what they were saying, then a minute or so to formulate a reply then I can get a few things across. But I only get that for a few hours each week with my teachers :-). One thing I think anyone who has learnt a language by diving in the deep end can attest to though, is that you will be listening to the radio or a conversation next to you, and you have mini-eureka moments when you realise - "I know what they are talking about!". I have been listening to a news radio station to have an hour or so of reasonably formal, clear language each day and had such a moment when I realised the radio jingle I have been hearing every 30 minutes or so meant "the world in your ear"!!!

In the beginning listening to real speech requires quite intense concentration but slowly and surely the incessant stream of incomprehensible sounds starts getting partitioned into chunks of first individual words + sounds, then individual phrases + words + sounds. Switch off a bit though and it turns right back into a sound stream. Struggling through this period is vital to pretty much all aspects of spoken language learning though - I am a firm believer in quantity when it comes to learning language, certainly over "quality", if "quality" means listening to educated people or reading "high" literature. That may help you pass language exams but that's definitely not what I'm interested in, or why I'm here.

So for the moment I am mainly slugging away at memorising and revising characters. My plan is to "go out into the world" only when I have at least a basic grasp on the language, so I can actually have a bit of a conversation. I have, of course, been attempting the basics, like "how much for the noodles?" but for the rest I have simply been trying to absorb as much as possible. I befriended a couple of graduating English teachers. Hanging out with one of them means the conversations are mainly (not exclusively) in English but when they are both there then it's mainly in Chinese. It's pretty intense to follow a conversation between two close friends (in any language!) but I can always but in and check whether I have understood something properly, and they are very helpful. They're both off to their new lives next week though!

Actually from next week (and particularly the week after), the university is going to turn into a ghost town. Pretty much everything is going to be closed, including the canteens if I understand correctly. Not that it is very likely I understood though - before meeting the budding English teachers I thought all the canteens closed at 17h30. Actually the entire 3rd floor is open until 21h, and the outside food stalls are open until 23h. And that's just the canteens, just outside the campus gates they are open later still... So I have started eating at a civilised hour again :).

And to finish with, though I haven't been to any strange and wonderful animal markets yet, I have been to Walmart. Yes, that's Walmart with a W, and yes, those are live turtles and live frogs ;).