General update from my home away from home

I haven't been as good about writing this trip. I regret it now because there's so much to tell, but at least I've got a little time to catch up now that I'm "home". I'm going to start in this post by explaining where I am now, and then as I get around to it I'm going to fill in a few of the more interesting gaps from my really awesome month wandering around China. That's the plan anyway.

Since I've stopped moving around for the winter, it's time for a little perspective on where I actually went. I remember well the days before I was too familiar with the geography of China. Actually right up until I got on the plane to come here, all I had was a vague idea of the location and general shape of the place. The rest was just a black hole. I'm assuming some of you are still in the position I was in back then, so for your sake I'm going to put up a map of China showing the places I've been. Hopefully this way all the random Chinese place names that crop up in future posts will have some frame of reference.

Thick blue lines are my train trips, really thin blue lines are flights, and red dots are places I stopped for a look around. If you want more detail, compare it with a real map of China because it's way too tough to get the place names clear on here.

I know most of you have been reading this for a while, but just as a refresher I'm studying in Harbin, that's way up in the northeast. On this map, it's the red dot that's the second farthest from the top. The northernmost red dot happens to be my current location, my home away from home.

My home away from home belongs to the parents of Jin Chao, my roommate in Harbin. It's been in the works for quite a while now that I'd be spending the spring festival, also known as the Chinese new year, with Jin Chao's family. This happens to be really great for a few reasons.

First, traveling would be really difficult during and around spring festival. It's the most important holiday for the Chinese, something like Thanksgiving and Christmas on the same day. The upshot is, almost everyone in the country packs up their things wherever they happen to be and hop on a train to go home. This happens in the week or two leading up to the big day, February 18th this year (the date floats around depending on the old Chinese calendar). Everyone stays home for a week or more to celebrate the new year, then heads back to wherever they were. With so many people on trains, it becomes extremely difficult to get a ticket and very cramped on the trains. I've heard horror stories that scared me out of even considering it - loooong rides, standing room only, so many people it's impossible even to move to the toilet. Buses are the same. Plane tickets are relatively easy to get due to the cost being too high for your average college student or worker, but that makes them a little on the expensive side for me as well. All this means that I need a place to hunker down during the rush, dubbed "chun yun", or the spring movement, and reported on heavily by the Chinese media.

Second, who wants to be traveling when all the action is happening on a single family level all over China? This stuff is way more interesting than some historical landmark or unique mountain. This is real people doing what they do to celebrate their most important holiday. I'm going to watch ancient traditions mesh with pop culture and local customs. Based on Jin Chao's excited accounts of previous years festivities, we'll be lighting fireworks, watching the new year's countdown TV program featuring China's best entertainers, and making jiaozi to be eaten at midnight.

Third, Jin Chao's family makes wicked good food all the time, not just on the new year. I know that first hand. We were greeted by a real feast when we got here. The table was covered with all the northeastern dishes I've grown to love, each as good or better than any I've eaten before. Amazing. This is my third day here, and all three I've been stuffed with similar fare.

I definitely felt like I'd be imposing by staying here so long, maybe three weeks, but Jin Chao assured me over and over that it would be great to have me. I'm doing what I can to soften the impact; I bought gifts in Yunnan for his parents, and I'm speaking a lot of English with Jin Chao and his cousins. I feel like I'm giving them something valuable with the English, trivial as it may be to me personally. I'm not able to speak it in Harbin with Jin Chao because of the language pledge, which doesn't apply now since we're between semesters. He is a great sport about it while I'm not allowed, but like every other Chinese student he really would like to improve his English. I can take the opportunity of this lengthy stay to even the score a bit. His cousins are the same way. Their parents love sending them to hang out with Jin Chao and I. Foreign English teachers are rare and valuable, and me just hanging out with them is even better. One of Jin Chao's cousins is 17 years old attending a top quality high school of more than 1000 students. The whole place just has one native english speaker, and here I am with just the few of them talking about whatever they want to.

I can't remember what I've written in the past about Jin Chao. He's great. I have a hard time relating to many Chinese people. On bad days I feel like the cultural gap is more like a chasm filled with frustrating misunderstandings, endless questions, and gawking Chinese faces. Jin Chao is a very important bridge over that chasm. There's a tradition in China of hiding true feelings behind a mask, saying one thing while thinking another. This mask can be impenetrable, but it seems Jin Chao never had one or at least takes it off for me. I find him to be wholly Chinese, yet extraordinarily perceptive about Western ideas and attitudes and willing to accept and adapt to them. He is a great listener and an endless source of insights about all things Chinese. We've had some surprisingly deep conversations, both of us (I think) revealing our true thoughts about life in general and the chasm we both recognize. It's a great exchange, neither of us giving up our own roots but always hungry for and respectful of the other's perspective. Perhaps the most important aspect is the willingness to be absolutely frank. Maybe it's an unfair bias, but I feel like a lot of Chinese are uncapable of this type of connection with me as a foreigner. I'm just too...foreign. Jin Chao and I have gotten past that. I guess there's a simple way to describe our relationship. We're friends.

Most of Jin Chao's great qualities extend to the rest of his family. There's a big extended network of uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents who all live near each other and spend a lot of time together. Jin Chao's parents are doing well financially, which makes me feel a lot better about staying here so long. They own and live in a commercial facility which offers a bathhouse, massages, rooms for the night, and meals. His dad also owns a factory producing coal blocks and is a partner in another factory.

I'm staying in one of the rooms with Jin Chao and another friend of ours from Harbin who came to visit for a week or so. After the feast our first night here, we cleaned up in the bathhouse area. I took a shower and spent time in the big soaking tubs. The whole place is separated male/female so everyone was completely naked, including us and some other customers. I was a little taken aback at one the services offered by the bathouse. As I showered I saw a customer lay down on a table in the middle of the room. A thong-clad male attendant produced a special cloth and gave the customer a thorough, cleansing, probably exfoliating rubdown from head to toe. As I finished up in the tub I was encouraged by Jin Chao's father to take advantage of the service myself. In response to my initial reluctance, Jin Chao's dad went on and on about how comfortable and relaxing it would be after so much traveling. I'm sure he was just trying to overcome my politeness, thinking I didn't want to take advantage of his hospotality. I couldn't help chuckling at how far off the mark he was. After my continued rebuttals he gave in to Jin Chao's explaination that us foreigners will say what me mean, and I wasn't just being polite. I'm pretty sure he wasn't convinced though, and never lost that puzzled look. Why wouldn't I want to partake in something so luxuriously relaxing, especially when it was free? It truly was beyond his comprehension; laying naked on a table getting a rubdown from thong-man would be slightly uncomfortable for me. To be honest, it would probably feel great and maybe I should just get over my un-Chinese inhibitions. I'll think it over.

I hate to leave everyone with that story, but I need to wrap this up. I'll try to get back to the internet cafe soon to write about a few of the interesting things that have happened in the last month. Even if I don't, the pictures are up so you can go see them if you're curious. I've started using the google version of online photo posting because the yahoo one was giving me trouble, so now there's two links to photos after each blog post, one for the early photos before my winter break and one for more recent photos. Don't worry, my camera wasn't with me in the bathhouse.