Ode on a Grecian run

Pacing the landing at South Kensington station with a winter coat, a hiking backpack, and a bead of sweat working its way down my spine, I waited.  There wasn't really any choice in the matter.  Follow the timing of the signs, get on the train...which is going to an obscure branch I don't need.  Get off the train.

At this point, there isn't any room for error.  The next one is going where I need, and will take 32 minutes to get to the second terminal.

Online check in doesn't work because I'm not a euro, and my prepaid mobile won't let me call any of the company lines.  I thought back to when I paused to tie my shoe at Victoria station, and how I might have been able to more or less dive into the train had I continued/sped up the run.  Not really much I can do, now.

The rule is 45 minutes; I'm going to arrive with 37 minutes remaining.  Every station stop on the laborious trip out makes me more and more agitated.  Three stations for Hounslow? Inwardly swearing, outwardly sweating. I arrive on time, as far as the train is concerned...and then it's just running.

All people-dodging skills from Asia come back into full use as I pelt up the escalator out of the station, down a people-mover (amazing pace achieved), and up to the top floor, where the check in machines don't work.  To the desk of Aegean airlines, and a man has dipped in front of me.  I theatrically pant while my boarding pass is printed off: euphoria.
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I really should have got going sooner; no excuse.  My own judgement led to the longest sustained period of hustle/wait in my life, as I got from south Brixton to a boarding gate in comical fashion.  As I sat down in my seat it was incredible to feel the sweat darkening my shirt and to know that a trip I had basically considered impossible an hour before was happening.  I wanted wine; I asked for water.

I got to the hostel after some predictable consternation with the inability to read Greek train instructions, and was offered an ouzo shot.  I had that, and a Mythos beer.

This beer featured in every day plan, because I was on vacation, goddamnit.  This is what I got for all of my outright sprinting up escalators, for all the patience exhibited in the face of adolescent ridiculousness...for everything I'd weathered...to say nothing of the weather. Whether or not it would help my heretofore withering health, it was time for beer...and food.  I ate all of it.

I ate things in Athens that I hadn't liked before, and loved them.  Greece is really quite a good place to get Greek food, as it turns out.  My first meal was calimari and a large block of feta drizzled in olive oil and sprinkled with spices.  Game on, weight loss accumulated via weeks of cold dreary misery.  The best thing came a few days later, though:

Grilled fresh squid with a basil sauce next to salad with house-made pita and tzatziki peeking through the background.  I had a nearly-religious experience as I ate the mollusk, based around the idea that I'd never tried to do this myself.  In China I very happily drunkenly ate grilled squid on skewers at the slightest provocation.  What have I been doing in my largely squid-free life in Canada? My god, man.

I also did all the sightseeing things one does.  I'd get up at my leisure, skipping the spartan fare on offer downstairs in favour of a yogurt bar where toasted walnuts and dark pine honey abundantly topped hand-pressed goodness....where was I...right, sightseeing.

It was my first foray into the land of the classics I've had interest in for so long, and it delivered on monumental architecture.  I'd see a sight in the A.M., go for an inevitably delicious and vaguely pricy lunch, have a nap/read up on something for work, then either see a quick sight or wander around.  The Mythos would come back at a certain point, followed by something revelatory (moussaka! delicious!), a bit of house ouzo (inevitably on the house, which was a nice touch) and more sleeping in.

The only thing that made the trip more pleasurable than it already was was the fact that I came so preposterously close to missing it based on my own stupidity regarding choosing a leaving time from where I was staying.  Lesson learned!  I have three (well, two..but almost three..so close to three) more countries to visit in the next month, before I prepare for my new job in a fourth.

Oh..I could have mentioned that I know where I'll be working in the fall.  Another time, I guess.

Faux-peregrination for the win.

What a month.

Actually, that's probably not the right way to start.  I mean, it was a singular month within my personal history of months, but if you really focus you could say that for almost any month.

Anyways, it was crap.  Sort of.  Semi-lucrative crap, anyways; I climbed the learning curve at my school, herding cats (year 7's) the whole time while occasionally considering just not going in the next day...and yet I continued to do just that.  It was odd: I've finished 5 weeks at this job, which was utterly inconceivable when I started.

I had to teach Macbeth (which I didn't know), Of Mice and Men (same), Jekyll and Hyde (still nope), a poetry unit to year 9's who quite dislike poetry (kindred spirits), and an intro to Shakespeare unit to some year 7's that, by and large, have no business attending a school of any kind.  Yet, time has passed, and here I am.

I spent the entire month being cold and annoyed, with a festive zest of being sick for the last 3+ weeks.  The house I live in is spartan, moldy, and still my favourite place to be, because it means that I'm not at work or walking about in the cold.

At least the days have become noticeably longer, which lets me get out after work and still be able to capture stunning frames like this:

This city gets remarkably ropey once you get off the side streets.  We tend to romanticize red brick buildings in western Canada, I find, because there's a look of permanence about them that you don't get with stucco and vinyl siding...but in practice you see a lot of permanent piles of crap.  It could be that a veritable orgy of beautification takes place once spring comes around, but when you walk down the side streets...well, you can see.  At least it serves to highlight the general ok-ness of my cul-de-sac.

Thus I sit on a sunday, reflecting upon the personally remarkable feat that I've continued to go in since the first few harrowing days - with an inordinate amount of work waiting for me to resignedly lean into after I'm done.  I just thought that my literal tens of readers might be interested in some kind of update.

My prize, by the way, for all this drudgery, is visiting a city next week that my brother described in an email as a 'dogpatch'.  While I understood the context of his comment, I still turned to my Chinese friends for affirmation on my vacation choice; it is exciting, really, for most people to get a chance to visit the 'ancient world'...you best believe I'll be taking some pictures.

As a parting shot, here's a parting shot of a remarkably country-road looking lane near my school: just don't take pictures of the old brick houses and things look a bit more elegant...

Faux-peregrination ftw.

New year, new location.

Why not return to public epistolary form with the following:

Hastings is a town on the south coast of England, populated (it seems) largely by old people.  Now, this is based on a small sample size of walking a corridor from the northern outpost I live in (more on this later) to the downtown area....but I feel I can say with confidence that the aged are holding sway. Now, perhaps the young people are all hiding inside next to TVs or some such...I suppose I'll know more once school is in full swing.

I'm here with a job to teach the subject of English to a bunch of English boys; that sounds a bit silly, but there it is.  The school clearly needed somebody to fill a space for them, so why not me?  At least the hiring process was slightly more vigorous than that job in the china.

My house is expensive, populated by expats, and close to the school.  I've been learning about sundry additional expenses above and beyond rent, all of which are depressing and largely unavoidable.  I foresee at least a couple months of serious belt-tightening in my immediate future, which makes me wish I'd had more turkey these last weeks - alas.  The only bit of positive financial news I've received today is there is apparently a gym at my school that is free for teachers to use - if I have the energy to do so.

The other teachers speak dauntingly of how busy they are when things are in session, which I take in with a certain weary forbearance... it's been too long since I've been at work.  Well, it all starts tomorrow.  Cheeri..oh.

What's going on now?

It's entirely possible that some people read this.  I've seen the statistics: some people do.  Now, they might be odd bots that automatically visit any new blog posts that go up, but at least they're electronic company.

What's been happening for the last while? I made a pitch at getting employed in Canada.  It has not gone particularly well - as such I have other magically lucrative potions brewing.  I've really only done one thing effectively since I got back, and it is this:

As the weather turned slightly colder, I've finally found the key to catching trout on Salt Spring Island.  After trying for about a decade, it was as though a switch was flipped and I couldn't keep them out of my boat.  I gave some to neighbours, froze some for later eating...rowing and rowing while taking in lean protein.  It's been a healthy time.

So while I while away the time while turning my wiles towards the job hunt, know that I haven't entirely disappeared.  Get to work, odd presumed bots that scan all new content!

The future?

Recently, I had a choice of sorts.  I could either (saving my money not really being in the consideration) go to Taiwan for a brief period, or completely leave the china for a literal/figurative breath of fresh air before my final home stretch.  I made the right decision.

Seoul, South Korea, is a real place.  This is the kind of statement I can make to anyone who has lived in non Beijing/Shanghai mainland china and they will at least kind of know what I'm talking about.  It has all the hallmarks of Asia - black hair, pointy roofs, occasional sewer smell when you're walking around on the streets - but is a 'real place' in the sense that things are easy to find and do there.  You want a particular kind of restaurant?  Go there.  You're trying to find a palace of some kind? Read the English maps all over the place.

Some people would complain about this level of modernity-baiting, but not me.  There are something in excess of 150,000 expats in Seoul, and you can tell that the accessibility game has been raised as a result; compare that to the less than 100 foreigners (including non-english speakers) in my city which is just shy of half the size of Seoul.  You can tell which place is shittier, without going beyond population demographics.

Is there air pollution in Seoul?  Yes.  Would anybody who has lived in the china laugh at it in a bemused, Santa Clause realizing he just ate pot cookies kind of way? Oh yes.  There are, however, easily visible environmental initiatives...

This is a shot of a river which was reclaimed about ten years ago.  At one point they had an ugly concrete highway over the top of it, but, realizing they didn't want their city to be a concrete hellhole (are you listening china?), they took the highway out, and planted willows/native grasses/etc along the banks before stocking it with fish.  The largest fish are over a foot long, and were correctly predicted by myself as an object for culinary debate amongst my students when I showed them a picture.  Nature isn't always for eating.

I really liked it there, and I'm applying for jobs there.  Will I get to go there?  Maybe...at any rate it was a great visit, and a tantalizing peek at what Asia can be like if it's not corrupt, not selfish, and thinks about the lives of its citizens.

The beginning of the END

Things are slowly starting to wrap up here, which I'm viewing as a positive development really.  My last time has been spent on domestic jaunts, the last being to a place called 'Qufu', famous for being the birthplace of Confucius.

The highlight of the trip, oddly, was walking around in a graveyard:

It was a nice place to be because you had to go off of the path to find the more interesting stuff, and because the people here are afraid of nature that meant a complete lack of spitting/peeing tourists.  I walked around there for hours enjoying the quiet.

Since then it's been a question of going into work each day, trying to get the material covered before the exams next month.  Part of the challenge is staying motivated with a group of students who largely 'checked out' of school quite some time ago, or so it seems, in this increasingly hot time - and I say hot because I've taken to running (thank you expensive Hong Kong shoes) and have done more sweating in the last while than any other in recent memory.

The other thing I've been doing is running a Japanese club, where I teach elementary aspects of Japanese language and culture.  It's a bit of a stunt admittedly (I like the idea of promoting Japan in china), but it's been a nice respite in a semester of 'best behaviour'.  Recently, I even taught 16 kids how to make sushi:

(note: this will be the only set of student photos to exist here, as small revenge for the thousands of photos of myself that exist on chinese microblog sites)

It was a fun, if slightly messy, time, and a nice diversion from the day to day.  As it stands there are now less than 6 weeks remaining, a polluted drop in the grimy bucket, all things considered.  I only have two more trips planned before my soujourn here is over:

Taishan part deux

Seoul, South Korea

Oh, it's go time (almost)

Domestics

It's been nice having company in the china lately, because it has spurred me on to do a bit of domestic tourism that I'm quite sure I would have skipped on otherwise.  For example:

The city of Suzhou might not have been on my to-do list, had I not been told it was a place to see 'old china things'.  However, a few hours on a weekend train later I found myself there, soon to walk down a famous historical street (Unesco also-ran - and proud enough of it to leave a huge stone plaque up).

It's a street/canal system nationally famous enough to be officially imitated at other better known tourist locales, and proved a good choice for browsing oddities - and finding food I didn't particularly want to eat:

I actually have no idea how you are supposed to eat an entire fried crab.

The main attraction of the city was the 'humble administrator's garden', which is a legitimately-recognized Unesco site (more on that as we go).  It offered nice walking about in the pre-spring cold - an interestingly brief period of the year as spring is often skipped in this country (spring festival, of course, falling in the late-middle of winter).  Clutching teas, we gamboled around landscapes like this before returning to the 'city' I live in:

A couple of weeks more of faking my way through being a senior science teacher (who knew?) I was ready to launch out of the 'bo again to see a bit of a world-class city: BeiJING (you must go absurdly high on the latter syllable).

After a requisite trip to a bourgeois grocery store (kettle chips; one more thing I'd missed where I live) we were off to see the great wall.  As it's incredibly likely to be the only time I see it, I made sure to take photographs.  This is a big photo-post...whatever:

As you can see we got rather lucky when it came to air quality...we were at a semi-restored section (a scant day before Michelle Obama went there which would have made it tricky I'm sure) and had a great time knocking around the wall.  I absolutely both had a beer on a decrepit watchtower roof (mild climbing required) and a pitstop out a watchtower window (glancing around before required).

I have to say that the wall delivers, really: it's a giant serpentine Mongolian-blocker of the highest order.  I mean, the ancient emperors could have swallowed some pride and addressed the problem of the keshiks with gold or steel...but building a monumental stone edifice that will take a long time and prove ineffective is just so damn much more chinese.  They are experts at that.

It's been nice to go around to these spots (it being crazy to live here for two years and not see them etc etc), and we've got Hong Kong coming up two weekends from now.  It'll be nice to get out of china.  I might even get a suit made...crazy...

Loooooooooooooooook!