上课, Teaching.

I taught my first class today, and it was great. I’ve learned that the more I perform and make a fool of myself, the more students enjoy the class, and the better they feel about participating. Lots of running around and pantomiming got my students all speaking, and despite a girl who looked like her eyes were going to pop out of her head every time I called on her and a guy who refused to make eye contact, I think everyone had a pretty good time. The game that we played at the end of class (I wrote “true” and “false” above boxes on the board and had kids answer questions I asked them by racing to the board and touching the correct box first) had everyone excited and other classes that got out a little earlier than mine watching through our doors. My students are all “Radio and TV Directing” majors, and they have all taken English before, but most of them are very hesitant to speak. I had each one fill out a survey, and some of the best answers to questions are below:

What is your English name?

Lucky

Bluce Liu

Hao Long

Toxic

Enlighten

Star

Bunny

Wing

Cherry

Grom

Remiel

Cairn

Sorrry

What do you hope to learn in this class?

First: Grammar

Then: Rap off

“I hope to learn thinking better”

I wrote the above part after my first class, and now I’ve had a little time to reflect on my teaching job. I teach one class of art majors (described above) and four classes of freshman English majors. Here are some observations in no particular order.

Students are really shy. Their written English is much better than their spoken English, so one of my primary goals is to get people speaking as much as possible, and it’s a challenge. Some students refuse to talk. Some students talk at barely above a whisper. Some students ask their friends for the answer to whatever I asked them every time I send a question their way. I try to have one competitive activity in each class so that people are really motivated to speak, and those who are reluctant to speak or speak too quietly usually get easier questions or have to deal with me running to the other side of the room and shouting “WHAT?” respectively. These things seem to be working, but slowly. Another thing that I’m trying to do is speak some Chinese in each class. This works because I inevitably make some (or a lot) of mistakes, which I’m hoping shows students that it’s ok to make mistakes. As my Chinese gets better, I’ll try to speak more to help explain directions and to help people feel comfortable.

Students pick really silly names sometimes. The above names are a good sample. I have students called: Voltaire, Tubaha 1900 (your English name, not your WoW screenname), Rain, Sky Fire, Stone (all four elements), and many more. The students who don’t have English names I either think of an English name that sounds like their Chinese name, give them a name that seems suitable (but they usually manage to do this on their own: Cairn is huge and built like a pile of rocks, toxic looks like a gothic punk rocker) or name them after one of my friends. This last one seems odd at first, but it helps me remember their names, and they can be happy knowing that they are named after someone who I like.

Some of my non-major students never bring their stuff to class. For the first couple classes I had to hand out 5 or 6 pens per class. After a little while, I threatened to make people buy pens when they forgot to bring one. Then, I had a better idea and found a giant pencil and now I give it to students who forget their pen. The embarrassment has kept the pen-forgetters from forgetting frequently, and now they at least ask for a pen from their classmates when they forget.

At the start of my class, I took pictures of each of the students in the class below their English name on the board. This helps me study their names in-between classes. Without fail, the first time I tell students that I want to take their picture, I get absolutely bug-eyed, mortified looks. “You want ME to go up THERE in front of the whole class so you can take my picture??” Really, the bug-eyed mortified looks are not too uncommon. I’ve started using a badminton shuttle-cock 羽毛球 to call on people (and have them call on each other) to help randomize who I call on, and when it lands in front of someone or hits them on the head as sometimes happens, they look absolutely terrified. The other look I get from students on occasion is pure vitriol. I sometimes move students from the back to the front of class, or call on students who have been playing games on their phones, and they always look both horribly wounded and pretty angry.

Playing games is great. I play lots of games that I used to play in Spanish class, like “race to the board” where students have to race to the board and write the answer to the question I’ve asked. The first to do so scores a point for their team. I like to play hangman, but if I use the vocab words from the book, students count the number of letters in the word and guess whole words with the same number of letters rather than guessing individual letters. I played a game last class where I post a story on the wall and students work in teams of two. One has to go look at the story, then repeat it in parts to their partner who re-writes the story. The students loved the game, but it wasn’t a great success because:

Students cheat a lot! More than you would believe. In the story game, several students just stole the story off the wall to copy. Once I stopped that, some students just took photos of the story with their cell phones and then copied from there. The team that won cheated a lot, as did the 2^nd place team, so I refused to give them the promised prize for the game. I think maybe the next time I play that game I’ll make anyone who I catch cheating re-start.

Pretty much all of the students are stoked to have a foreign teacher. I handed out a questionnaire to all of my students on the first day of class, and my last question is for them to write one thing that they would like to ask me. I answer pretty much all of their questions on the next day of class. I get a lot of the same questions: Why are you in China? Do you like it here? Do you like Chinese food? What’s your QQ number? Do you have a girlfriend? How long will you stay here? Who’s your favorite basketball star? What’s your favorite color? All of my students say hi to me outside of class, and when I’m out playing basketball or tennis, my students love to join in (for basketball) or watch (for tennis).

In all, I’m really enjoying teaching so far. I think that if I walk out of a class and think it was fun for me, it probably was for most of the students. Classes where I come out going “ooh, that was painful,” the students probably think the same thing. I think I’m going to show a movie in my class, right now I’m thinking “Cool Hand Luke” because the English is pretty easy to understand, and it has a lot of American culture. Let me know if you have any other good ideas for American movies to show to the class. Off to go lesson plan for this week.

Raising the bar.

I was thrown out of a club in Chongqing this weekend. Not for anything that I did—rather because I was unwilling to purchase a bottle of cognac priced in the thousands of yuan (and probably because I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt too). I ended up at such a place because my friends and I were looking for a “bar.” We asked some random passerby where we could find a bar, and ended up in a club straight out of “lifestyles of the rich and the famous.” After wandering around for a little longer, we went home, barless. This is not uncommon in my experience. Either I end up at a western style bar full of expats, or I go get a beer at the convenience store. As I wandered home, I wondered: why aren’t there more bars in China?

First several reasons that could be true but probably aren’t:

1) There’s not a drinking culture in China. This certainly isn’t true, as anyone who has been to a banquet can attest to.

2) Maybe it’s that there isn’t the same kind of drinking culture that makes bars popular. This seems a little more true, but banquets seem like the type of social drinking environment that appears in bars, and the piles of bottles I see on peoples’ tables while eating shaokao also supports social drinking. Also, drunk driving checkpoints all over Chongqing around midnight support the hypothesis that people are getting drunk somewhere other than at home.

3) Bars are popular, you just don’t know how to find them. Plausible, but I’ve asked quite a few locals and have only ever really ended up at foreign bars (except in Chengdu, where there is “bar street” next to the east gate of Sichuan University. More on this in a bit) or KTV or night clubs.

4) KTV is the Chinese version of bars. This seems more likely than any of the above, but KTV doesn’t really offer a situation where you meet other people—you go to a room with your friends to have a good time. However, KTV might be the closest Chinese equivalent to bars. I’ll mention this later.

Now, I’m writing this not because I really love bars (I only sort of like bars) but because it seems indicative of something that I’ve read a lot about but haven’t directly experienced: that a middle class in china is largely lacking (less than ¼ of the population), but growing quickly. I think that bars are a really middle-class thing. If you’re poor, you can’t afford the cost of alcohol at a bar (generally double what you can find across the street at a convenience store) and if you’re rich, you end up buying an expensive bottle of cognac at the club. If you’re middle class, you go to the bar and meet other middle class people. At a bar you’re paying extra for your alcohol to subsidize the cost of the experience; you’re paying for the atmosphere, not the 哈尔滨 beer in your hand. In fact, the middle class is willing to pay a lot for atmosphere. Look at shopping malls, suburban streets, movie theaters, etc. Incidentally, those are all interesting things to look at in China. I have still seen very few suburban developments (more apartments—there’s a higher premium on space in China than in other places where suburban expanses abound), but lots of new shopping malls and movie theaters.

Lots of new fast food restaurants that cater to the middle class. In the US, fast food is something that is more popular among lower classes. It’s often cheaper than making food at home, and especially in our health conscious world, those who can afford to eat out in a more healthy way will. In China, fast food is more expensive than the noodle shop around the corner, but it offers AC, booth seating, someone to clear your tray of food, and a distinctly western atmosphere. I just had a Big-Mac in Chongqing, and it tasted just like a Big-Mac from Denver, CO. Because I’m a big fan of the big mac index, I had to see if the cost-taste relationship is a factor in the index. The proliferation of donut shops is another indicator of China’s emerging middle class.

Back to bars. In Chengdu, there’s “Nine Bar Street” next to the 川大east gate. This street is populated by 9 bars overlooking the 锦江. These bars appear to cater to a Chinese crowd rather than the largely expat crowd present in other Chengdu bars (like Shamrock). I can’t be sure, but I think that most of these bars are relatively new (less than 5 years) and are getting more popular. Evidence of a quickly growing middle class? I think so.

Back to KTV. If KTV is the Chinese middle class alternative to bars, then it’s rise in popularity over the last five years means that it has become a middle class staple. The KTV-as-bar theory suggests that people go to KTV as a way to unwind after work or on the weekend. Gesang Zeren of Sichuan University agrees, saying,

"Our culture values the cultivation of self-restraint. People are not encouraged to be aggressive and show individuality. But, in KTV clubs, they can unleash themselves and perform anything they want. It's a way to relax. Chinese people also tend to shoulder pressure internally instead of turning to others for help. It's a good way to vent their emotions, whether it be depression, pressure, happiness or aspirations. Singing can help express various emotions."

So probably, the general lack but growing popularity of bars is both attributable to a general preference for KTV and a small-ish middle class. However, KTV and a variety of other factors help to put a face on what we’ve been told for the last five or ten years: that China’s middle class is on the up and up.

峨眉山 (Emeishan)

Emeishan

峨眉山

On our second day at the University, our waiban told us that we have a week off before we begin teaching, and asked if we wanted to do anything before classes start. We all decided that we would like to go to EMeiShan, one of the four most important Buddhist mountains here. 峨眉山 is a couple of hours from Pengshan, and the peak is at 9800 ft. (Pengshan is about 1500 ft.). Our waiban decided to arrange a trip for us to go there for two days. The next day she said we could go on a tour with a group of other Chinese tourists for 500 kuai ($80) with transport and lodging. Our group decided that was a little too rich for us, and that we wanted to go on our own. After hearing this, our waiban petitioned her department to send one of the foreign teacher assistants with us as a guide (probably to keep us out of trouble). Our assistant’s name is Emily, and she’s really nice and helpful and speaks really good English (and hikes really fast). It took us several hours and 4 or 5 busses to get there, but when we did the air was much cooler and the sky was a very pretty shade of blue. Our first stop on the mountain was the monkey zone, a pleasant 2 hour hike past some neat stone sculptures, up a canyon to see Macaques. Each of us was armed with a bamboo stick just in case the macaques got unruly. The monkey zone was unlike any other monkey experience I have ever had. Basically, the paths herd tourists into a little area where the monkeys steal anything not strapped to your pack. To make money, people sell “monkey food” (hard corn kernels) in packages that the monkeys steal as soon as you’re near them. Then, there are several park people who have trained monkeys to sit on your head if you pay 20 kuai for a photograph. The same people try to keep monkeys from sitting on anybody who hasn’t paid so that they can get their photo money. This ultimately results in monkeys jumping all over people (because they are trained to do that) and then getting chased away by park people with sticks. Total mayhem. There was one good scam going where one monkey sat in the middle of the path out of the monkey zone and grabbed onto people and wouldn’t let go unless you fed him. Right next to him was someone selling “monkey food” at double the price. Brilliant. I was less interested in the monkeys (I’ve had enough monkey “encounters”) but really excited by the mountainous terrain surrounding me.

From there we took a bus up to the highest road-access point on the mountain (about 2000 feet from the top) where our group split up. Penny and Robin and Emily (mom and daughter and our guide) decided to stay at the base and take the gondola up to the top in the morning. The rest of us decided to hike to the top of the mountain in the dusk and try and find a place to stay so that we could see the sunrise from the top of the mountain the next morning. On our way up we passed a group of Chinese university students who spoke a little English. I hiked with them the rest of the way up, and found out that they had begun at the bottom of the mountain that morning, climbing about 8,000 feet. When we made it to the area where we could stay, they helped us find a hotel and took me out to dinner (which was instant noodles, the only offering on a mountain where the only way to get food up there is having porters bring it). Our group had 5 people in a room with 3 pretty small beds, and our friends who helped us had the same sized room for their 7, so one of them came to stay in our room so that everyone could stay 2 to a bed.

We all got up at 4:30 the next morning to climb to the top and see the stars and then the whole sunrise. At 4:45 someone from the hotel came and knocked on every door to get everyone up to see the sunrise. We joked that the checkout time was 5 am. My Chinese and American friends all hiked to the top together (another half an hour) and secured a spot at the railing of the monastery to watch the sunrise. It was beautiful watching the sky grow steadily lighter, and fun to listen to everyone cheer as the sun breached the horizon.

However, my favorite part was watching in the West where the Himalayas appeared in the clear morning air before disappearing in the clouds.

There were hundreds of people at the top of the mountain to watch the sunrise, and many many more once the gondola started running. I became an instant celebrity and had my photo taken with tons of people, including what seemed like all of the possible permutations of my 7 friends. A couple people took the gondola down, and Matt and I decided to try to make them wait as little as possible, so we ran down the mountain. I wish I had gotten some better pictures of all of the stairs. We made ourselves even more visible than we already are by running past all of the people slowly making their way down the mountain.

You should be able to see all of my pictures from Emeishan here:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.554467321362.2051968.48101395

Leaving Shanghai and beginning in Pengshan

The Shanghai institute was over before it really began. We had several notable adventures with the institute—going to the Chinese circus, going to a famous Chinese garden, visiting the Bund, going up to the top of the Shanghai World Financial Center, and visiting a Buddhist monastery in Shanghai. I ate tons of good food, bonded with fellow Shanghai institute friends over everything from being really tall to reading Nietzsche, got lost, got found, practiced Chinese, and lots else. Despite the institute seeming much too brief in retrospect, it seemed to last forever when I was there, probably as a result of all of the stuff I did. By the end, everyone seemed to be getting the hang of China, and most of us seemed pretty excited to move on to our respective universities and settle down.

While pictures explain much of the above better than words, there were a couple of experiences that are worth writing about (because I didn’t take any pictures). On our last night in Shanghai, our group went out to KTV. KTV is Chinese karaoke, where your group rents a room with several karaoke screens and a few microphones for an hour or two and belts out whatever English songs you can find on the KTV register. This is unbelievably fun. I had a great time singing: whatever backstreet boys I could find, “Since You Been Gone,” “Lose Yourself,” and many more. I discovered not too long ago that I love playing rock-band (thanks cousins) and KTV is kind of like that, but with a group all singing and no scores to tell you how bad (or good, in some people’s cases) you are. I learned that at my university there are a couple KTV rooms provided specially for teachers, where they bring you snacks and drinks for free. I plan on making this a part of my weekly routine for sure.

The other experience was playing some ultimate in Shanghai. I found out about a pickup game online and emailed the organizer about times, and decided to go play with the team. Thanks to Jeremy, Matt and I both had China Ultimate jerseys to wear. A couple days before the game we decided to go to (it was a 2 hour trek on the subway to get there) my friend Phil from the China team that went to worlds contacted my because he saw that I was in Shanghai on facebook. He and I had traded jerseys after our game at worlds. At the game, I was surprised to run into a bunch of other people who I know from ultimate: Matt Knowles, Miranda Roth, Jia Xie, and this guy called John who I played against in Fort Collins when Matt and I played for The Worst Team Ever. After practice Matt and I were invited to play on the Shanghai team at any tournaments that we can attend. The first one was too expensive, but hopefully we’ll get to go to one in Hong Kong in October.

四川大学(Sichuan University)

Well, I made it. After two weeks of trying just about every day to get internet set up, it finally happened. After being told that it was impossible because I have a 聘过电脑（apple computer), and then buying a wireless router to have it sit in my room for a week and a half, then being told to just change my operating system, and finally, having every conversation end with "we'll look at it tomorrow." Ultimately, it took a bunch of ethernet cords, a modem, a router, wire strippers, several handheld testing devices, and 5 guys to get it set up.


Stripping some wires
testing 123
Hacking into the wires in the wall directly

And the result: I now have pretty fast wireless internet. Woohoo!

Here is what my apartment looks like now:
Desk

Living Room

Out my front door.

I have a lot written about the last few weeks which I will start uploading. Stay tuned.

早上好 (good morning) from China!

It has been almost a week that I've been in China so far, but it feels like much longer. I speculate that this is because we measure time internally by the number of memorable events that occur rather than the number of seconds that occur--and moving to a completely new place with a completely different culture and a new(ish) language yields lots of memorable events. My last post (or email, I guess) was written from India over a year ago, so I'll write something a little later telling about my last year of frisbee worlds in Prague, Jordan, tutoring, skiing (a LOT), the Grand Canyon, and other stuff that has happened recently that I'm generally excited about.

For now, I'll start with the here and now. Here is Jiading, Shanghai, where I'm currently living in the PanYuan hotel next to the Shanghai University campus in Jiading. I'm about 2 hours outside of Shanghai by metro, which I think is the fastest way to get there (definitely the cheapest). I just got back from class where I learned about teaching to different learning styles. Yesterday I taught my first class on Storytelling--I played getting to know you bingo (thanks Jim) and Mad Libs to make some funny stories for the class, and we all practiced reading aloud and learned some new vocabulary. Each day I take a chinese class for an hour and a half. The class focuses on spoken chinese and identifying the words that people are saying (in other words, not being completely overwhelmed when someone says any sentence longer than 5 words). It's working pretty well to activate my buried chinese, and I feel better and better about talking to people on the street each day. I stay here in Shanghai for a little over one more week and then fly to Chengdu where my actual work starts.

I left Colorado about two weeks ago now. I packed up all of my most important possessions (mainly shoes), said goodbye to my family and friends in Crested Butte and the Front Range, and flew to Seattle for a couple days to visit the horde of friends I have who live there. I managed to see almost everyone on my list, and ended up spending a lot of time with Jeremy and Jon. From there, Matt and I drove up to Vancouver on a bus to catch a flight to San Francisco, then to Shanghai. Immigration came within minutes of making me miss my flight for a reason they wouldn't tell me (they made me wait in their back room for a while, then I got questioned for a while, then they scanned my bags, then I ran to catch my flight). It gave me a scare that I was in trouble for something I hadn't done, and gave Matt a scare that he'd be on his way to China without me. In the end, my bags caught another flight to SFO and met me in Shanghai when I got here. The flight from SFO to Shanghai was really long, but because it was east to west the sun stayed in basically the same spot in the sky the whole time so it felt as if I was suspended. The airplane didn't have personal entertainment systems so I read for most of the flight and slept a little. Bryce and FP Magazine both recommended the Game of Thrones series, which kept me pretty enthralled for the whole flight. After that, I arrived at the airport, met up with the rest of the group, drove back to our hotel, went out to dinner, and collapsed onto the rock hard beds here (but I camped all summer, so it felt like home).

I did lots of exploring in the first couple of days, and became pretty familiar with where to get food, where to go hang out, where the supermarket is, where the best tea is, etc. I have a cell phone (which you can call from skype). The number is One five two two eighteen sixteen four one seven. Now I have a place that I go to every morning for vegetable buns, and another place for something that Matt and I call "chinese breakfast burritos" and "chinese egg mcmuffins." I've gotten pretty good at ordering food now (the first couple days, and still to some degree the game plan was to find a picture and point at it, or point at something someone else had in the restaurant). One night a few of us met up and went into downtown Shanghai to see the Bund at night and to go to a tea shop in the French Concession. It was a fun trip, and we stayed a little too long--the subway had shut down 15 minutes before we got to our last connection. We had to take a taxi home which was about an hour and 15 minutes and ended up costing about $5 each.

I'll leave it there for now, but expect more posts soon with some pictures.

Luck

India is Awesome

I'm sitting in my hotel room at 9pm of my last night in India, and I'm sad that I have to leave tomorrow. I had a fantastic time in India for the last 4 days, despite the setbacks of spending waaay to long stuck in traffic, waaaaaaaay too long sitting in the Sri Lanka High Commission, and spending a day vomiting with a migraine as a result of the first two things. People say Chennai is a bad place to visit in India. I reckon (I've started using that word because my Australians do) that any place where people live has interesting things to do. Though Chennai is not known for its ancient temples or landscape, it is still a pretty cool city.

I'm not going to write about my time in Sri Lanka before Thailand. It's been too long for me to write about it in a way that would be very interesting. In this email, I'll tell you about: my trip to India, my time on a colonial tea plantation in the mountains of Sri Lanka, my work, and some other random anecdotes that I find interesting. If you want to know more about the month that I'm not writing about, you can call me on skype (lukesanford). This would also make my day to have any of you call me, and I could hear about how you're doing.

India first. India is awesome. I spent this afternoon riding around Chennai on a motorcycle with a guy who I met on the beach. I'm getting ahead of myself again. Starting at the beginning...

I arrived in India on the 30th of March with an official purpose: get a Sri Lanka residence visa. This allows me to stay in the country for longer than one month at a time and allows me to get paid for my work, get a drivers license (no thanks), rent an apartment, and do a variety of other things tourists are not allowed to do. My unofficial purpose was to check out southern India. Here were my very first impressions of India:
Indian people are the worst people at airports and in airplanes. It is one of my travel policies to aim to arrive at the airport 3 hours before an international flight. This gives time for traffic, long emmigration/customs/security/check in lines. This trip, I was through everything except gate security 2:45 before the flight was supposed to leave. at 2:00 before departure, I looked up at the board to see "Jet Airways Flight 281 to Chennai, last call for boarding." So, I got up and tried to board the airplane. "Sorry sir, you cannot board the aircraft at this time." Huh? Did I miss my flight somehow? "We put last call now so that people will start to come to the gate. Otherwise our flight will leave 1 hour late. Sure enough, nobody was at the gate when they started boarding. At 10 minutes to takeoff, I was on the plane, and then people started all rushing on board. Then, they refused to sit down. Everyone just milled about in the aisles. It took 2 announcements from the captain and a lot of shouting on the part of the flight attendants to get people to sit.
One of the things that annoys me on airplanes a little is when people rush to stand up when the plane stops moving. You know you can't get off the plane yet right? On my flight, people were standing up as soon as wheels touched pavement, starting to grab their bags from overhead compartments, and push towards the front of the plane. At least checking in 3 hours early and being 193 cm tall usually gets me a seat with extra leg room in an emergency exit.

Before going to a new city I try to figure out how to get around by public transportation. I discovered that I could take the train straight from the airport to my hotel (one of the reasons I chose that hotel was the proximity to a train stop). After fending off at least 10 auto-rickshaw (auto for short) drivers who insisted that they were much cheaper than the train at only 200/- to get to the city (40 indian rupees to the dollar) I was on the train from the tirisulam station to the kodambakkam station. Indian trains are sweet. They have open doors, so all of the guys my age hang out them to get wind in their faces to ease the heat of south india in the hot season. I quickly joined them, and drew some bemused looks from other passengers. I had seen no other white people in the country yet, and I got the impression that white people generally don't ride the metro trains in chennai, preferring AC taxis instead.

The auto drivers at my stop were much more helpful than the ones at the airport. I asked one of them how much for a ride to the address of my hotel, and the guy told me he would charge me 40/-, but that I should probably just walk. Surprised by his honesty, I thanked him and walked to my hotel. There I was also pleasantly surprised. For $20 per night, I got AC, hot water, free high speed internet, a flat screen TV with cable, and (the best part) a free south indian buffet breakfast. They also had room service meals for about 60/-. I opted to wander around in search of food, found some place that was busy, watched what others ordered, and got myself that. South Indian food is some of the best food in the world, especially when you include their tea. There are tea stations everywhere, and they mix the concentrated tea with hot milk by pouring the mixture back and forth between two cups, but when someone who is good at it does this, it looks like he's throwing the tea back and forth (and they don't spill any).

I woke up the next morning and headed down to breakfast, where I was helped by a guy by the name of Ashok (easy to remember because half the buses in Sri Lanka are made by Lanka Ashok Leyland) who taught me how to pronounce some words that I was learning (yes, no, where is, how much, thank you, hello, etc.). I was joined at breakfast by a woman of about 30 who I started talking with. She asked me where I went to college. "um, Whitman College?" is my normal response because people usually haven't heard of it. "No way! Me too! When did you graduate?!" What are the odds of meeting another Whitty at breakfast in a random hotel in Chennai? We both had errands to run, but we decided to meet back up that afternoon to go explore the city a little.

I headed off to the Sri Lankan High Commission for visa battle round 1. When I arrived at the gate, the guard told me I wasn't allowed in because I had short pants on. Damn. "Also, we close in 30 minutes." Not enough time to go back to the hotel. Instead, I sped off to the nearest clothing shop. After convincing the guy working there that I didn't want a pair of tailored pants, and I didn't want them hemmed to fit me, and I didn't want to try on a bunch of pants, he handed me a pair of jeans, which have turned out to be maybe the most comfortable pair of pants I've ever worn. Back to the High Commission. I sat next to a 21 year old animation student at the commission, who filled me in on how life is different in India and Sri Lanka. He told me about how he had learned sinhalese so that he could avoid the police as a tamil kid during the war, and how his whole family has now moved to India. After an hour (I thought they closed in 30 minutes?) I got to meet with the high commissioner. After asking for my “good name” and speaking with a constant head-bobble, the high commissioner shot a few questions at me, and then told me the cost would be 8700 /-. I didn’t have the money with me, so I agreed to return the next day at 9 am.

I headed back to my hotel, got a delicious lunch delivered to my room by a very nice guy who forgot to bring a bottle of water the first time (apparently this comes with lunch), and then rushed back into my room with a fork after I was nearly finished eating, informing me that he forgot that western people “don’t know how to eat with their hands.” I assured him that I did, and showed him my almost finished lunch to prove it. After lunch I went to the Pondy Bazaar with my Whitman friend, which I thought was going to be a bunch of street shops. It turned out to be a 6 story air-conditioned building that mostly sold saris and other clothing. I picked up a new wallet to replace my falling-apart old one. The new one is fake Gucci. Score.

We then hopped on the train to the beach, which I had heard was enormous. It did not disappoint.


It's a little hard to get a feel for it from the picture, but its a flat stretch of sand that is over 300 yards wide, and about 5 miles long. We wandered around there for a while, and then started walking back into town towards the train station. I had noticed a few signs encouraging good driving before, but this time I started to write them down. Here's a picture of one of them:



Others were:
Drive slowly and you see the world, drive quickly and the world sees you
Slow down, speed arrester ahead
Please obey lanes
Please drive carefully
Please obey traffic rules
These were almost everywhere I looked. Perhaps the strangest one was a sign in the same color and font as street signs was a sign that said "Please Collect Rainwater." The really funny part about all of these signs is that people in India are by far the craziest drivers I've ever seen. They never drive slowly, swerve into oncoming traffic to avoid "speed arresters" (speed bumps), completely ignore traffic lights and lane lines, and generally don't believe in traffic rules at all. One guy I met told me that he doesn't follow traffic rules because there's not way the police could catch him if they did see him breaking some rule, because they don't have cars.

It was really interesting talking with another Whitty who is traveling the world. We had dinner together and were served by the same charming guy from lunch, who again forgot water and eating utensils (in that order again), and then she jumped in a taxi and flew back to the US. I feel like I see Whitman people wherever I go.

The next day, I woke up early to go get my visa finished. Unfortunately, my auto driver got really lost, and it took almost 2 hours to get there. Fortunately, when I did arrive the high commissioner recognized me, ushered me into his office quickly, and we got down to business. He said "welcome back to my office good sir, I can see that you are wearing a very nice blue shirt today, you are looking very smart." I thanked him, and told him he was also looking very smart. He asked about my degree, and then said that he is also a student of political science, and that he is very interested in US foreign policy because of its effects on Sri Lanka and the rest of the world. Just as I felt us on the verge of a fopo discussion, he said "well, I can see that you are in very much of a hurry, so I will let you go. Thank you very much good sir for your time." Ok. He also instructed his secretary to get me through the rest of the process very quickly, so whenever anyone told me to come back at 4:00 that day, or tomorrow, or in one week she ran over and told them to just do it now. After an hour of waiting, I was handed my passport with a nice big stamp in it that makes me an official resident of Sri Lanka. Woohoo!

I got back to the hotel, and immediately was afflicted with a headache and stomach ache. I drank a litre of water, which didn't help. I lay in bed, fell asleep for a few hours, and woke up with a migraine. I hugged the porcelain toilet for an hour, and then finally began to feel better after emptying my stomach. Weird. I opted to stay in that night, and start writing you this email. (Aside: I'm in Sri Lanka finishing this email, which looks like it will need to be in 2 parts because its already too long to read over breakfast, and a HUGE thunderstorm just hit. It was the most intense lightning storm I've ever been in, with lightning bolts visible at a frequency of greater than one per second. I unplugged everything, and went downstairs where two dogs and two cats all tried to climb into my lap. Cheyenne of the dogs is a great dane:
)

The next day I resolved to go make up for being sick, so I headed out early to check out what was touted by wikitravel as "the second largest mall in India." I think that you can learn a lot about the character of a place by its shopping malls, so I opted to spend an hour there. Spencer Plaza was not what I was expecting. It was smaller than most malls I've been to in the US, though it did have 3 stories and 3 "phases." It was sort of air conditioned, but still hot enough that everyone was sweating. In Bangkok, there were multiple malls that dwarfed even the biggest malls I've been to in the US, and were much more high end too, with multiple Gucci, Prada, Armani, etc. stores that I was too intimidated to go into. Sri Lanka only sort of has malls, and when it does they are usually dominated by one large store that fills more than half the area of the mall. I was expecting a mall in Chennai (one of the financial capitals of India with a population of over 6 million people) to be much more like Bangkok. The best (and largest) shop in Spencer Plaza was a bookstore called "Landmark." I decided to check it out. I quickly discovered that whatever section of the store I was in, I would always find self help books or books about business that barely matched the description of the section. I found only 1 book by Salman Rushdie (this was very surprising to me), but hundreds of copies of "The 4 Hour Workweek" and other books about how to do well in business, how to market yourself effectively, and many other areas. Even the "Classic Literature" section had these titles alongside books like "Ulysses" and "Sherlock Holmes."

At the bookstore I remembered that it was my Aunt's birthday, so I made my way to the greeting card section and began searching for an appropriate card. I found the perfect one: larger than an 8.5X11 piece of paper with an apologetic sounding birthday congratulation.


I then went to the food court, because someone had advised me that they had excellent food. I sat down and ordered my favorite south Indian dish: a paper masala dosai. This is what came:



It's again a little hard to get a feel for how big this thing is from the picture, but it was over 3 feet long. After a 45 minute battle with it and all the curries that came with it, I surrendered, leaving almost a third of it left on one of the three plates it was served on. Next stop: the beach.

Almost. I went outside and bargained with an auto driver to get to the beach, but quickly discovered that being white and leaving a mall puts you in a bad position for bargaining. After failing to reach a consensus on a price, the driver offered a solution: if I go inside a touristy wood carvings shop for 5 minutes, he'll get a commission, and I won't have to buy anything. This will offset his cost, and he'll reduce my price by half. Perfect. I wandered around for a bit, and then asked about the price of some large wooden statue. They told me, I said that was the only thing I was interested in, and that it was about $150 out of my price range. Then I left, despite their best attempts to keep me around. Problem solved.

After wandering around the beach a bit, I sat to watch the waves break for a bit, and was soon approached by a group of three Indian guys about my age. They asked why I was sitting alone, didn't I have a girlfriend? I said no, I don't have a girlfriend, and that I was visiting India alone, so I didn't have anyone to sit with. They all sat down, and after a brief conversation asked if they could take their pictures with me. I agreed:


and


They decided to take off, and I asked if I could come hang out with them for the rest of the afternoon. They agreed, and I hopped on the back of David's motorcycle, and we sped off. They first decided to show me St. Thomas Basilica, and on the way there I realized that it was Good Friday. St. Thomas was one of Jesus's disciples, and he was buried in Chennai after going to India to spread the word. It was interesting to be at the Basilica on Good Friday and listen to sermons and see St. Thomas' grave. We then cruised onwards to the City Center Mall, where these guys wanted to hang out and look for the ladies for a bit. David (guy in red shirt) told me that Vasantha (guy in brown shirt) has lots of girlfriends. I told them that I could see why, which made them laugh a lot. I made it a running joke for the rest of the afternoon, which the other two guys thought was really funny. While we were at it, they decided to interrogate me about my love life. They were shocked that I had 0 girlfriends currently, and that I haven't been in a long-term relationship. They said, "but you look so smart [this means good], how is it that you cannot have a girlfriend?" I rallied off the normal set of excuses-- "I'm too non-committal, I'm too picky, I travel around too much, I'm too interested in other things right now, etc." They told me that it's good to not have a girlfriend, "in our culture, girlfriends are bad. Wives are good." "Then Vasantha must be a very bad man." Laughs. They offered to find me a girlfriend tomorrow if I wanted, but I told them I had a morning flight back to the US. whew. In Sri Lanka and South India, guys who are close call each other "Machong," which is sort of like "bro" except without the fratty connotation. It's a way to address your close friends. By the end of the evening, we were all "machongs," which made me pretty happy. As we left the mall, we spotted a crowd of people, and decided to investigate. Some TV channel was doing a contest where you had to unwrap candy bars with cricket gloves on (like hockey gloves). The host saw me and pulled me in to participate, so I strapped on the these cricket gloves which were way to small, and started unwrapping candies with my friends cheering me on. I unwrapped 2, and the announcer told me that I'd probably be on TV sunday at 3pm on VR plus. Unfortunately, we don't get that channel in Sri Lanka, so I'll never know.

We headed grabbed a cup of tea, then headed back to the beach were we played a carnival style game where you shoot balloons with a bb gun from about 10 feet away. My friends were amazed that I got a balloon on every shot (thanks for getting me that bb gun for my birthday mom and dad). After wandering around some more, they decided that they had to go home, and took me to the railway station, which was right by the Chennai Super Kings cricket stadium. You could see the game from the top of the railway platform, so the three of us watched for a bit before my train came. I said bye to my friends, and hopped aboard. I had to take a train to the central station and then a different train out to my hotel, and when I arrived at the station and asked which was the platform I should wait on, and my train was already there. So I sprinted off, and my train started to roll away. I managed to catch up to the train right as it accelerated to faster than I could run, and I leaped through the door of the last car. The car was packed with people, so I spent the rest of the ride with a foot and a hand inside the car hanging on, and the rest of me flying in the wind outside the door. Woohoo!
I want to include one more thing in this email before I let you go off to do whatever you're undoubtedly procrastinating on. India just passed a law that gives its citizens a universal right to education. This is really cool. The bill passed while I was there, and newspapers and television were immediately filled with advertisements informing people of their new constitutional right (a constitutional amendment passed earlier that year). Here's a picture of a newspaper advertisement:



I thought that it was really cool that India was able to do something like this, and that it was being advertised in this way. One of the provisions of the law is that private schools have to have 25% of their students from low-income families. What's more interesting is that the conservative party did this, and the liberal party is criticizing the act for not being enough! If only politics in the US were like this...
I have lots more to write about, but this email is already too long, so I'll let you go for now. Write me back, please.
Namaste, (they don't say this in Tamil Nadu)
vanakkam,
Luke