Sichuan again

Now that I'm paying four kuai an hour every time I want to go online, entries will be spread out a bit, but meatier. You have been warned.

Yesterday I went to a talk by one of the second-year teachers about her vacation to Sichuan and Yunnan. It turned out to be mostly photographs, but they were enough. I have a plan now, and although I'm not much of a lass for travel (hello and welcome to my travel blog) I am pretty excited.

I think I'm going to teach.

There's a school in Sichuan that has about fifty children and one teacher, and they really need help, especially with English, but with everything, really - math, even Mandarin, since this region has many ethnic minorities who speak their own languages, so their Mandarin isn't always the best. My teacher says I can go down and work with the kids there for a couple of weeks. How perfect is this? I've been worrying so much lately about whether joining the Peace Corps - my plan since I was in middle school - is really what I want to do, and here out of nowhere is this opportunity to actually give it a try! There are a couple of problems, however, mainly this: I have to give a Chinese person a phone call.

I hate using the phone even at home, where I can use English. Here, every time the phone rings I quake. Usually it's just my roommate's mom or something and I can speak English, but on the rare occasions it is a Chinese person I panic and mess up. My listening ability is not very good. The thought of calling a total stranger - who probably has a Sichuanese accent - is giving me a slight headache even as I'm typing this. (No wait, that's just the internet cafe's Avril Levine.)

Also intriguing: On my way to the school I will be stopping in Shangri-La, a place which I thought was made up, like Utopia or Reeva's house. Apparently not. It has crossed my mind that they might have given the place that name in order to attract tourists, but I choose not to believe that. Much more exciting to think it is The Real Thing. Free association test: for some reason, Shangri-La makes me think of Barca Loungers and Kubla Khan's stately pleasure dome. (I recently bought a DVD of Citizen Kane which, since it turns out to be dubbed into Chinese, will have to be returned. Very disappointing.)

I am very relieved to have some sort of plan - the teacher even recommended a hostel in Chengdu, which I would have already booked but I forgot my passport. After a couple of weeks at the school I can head south to Yunnan, then back to Beijing for a few more months of language boot camp. Lovely.

One way in which I take after my mother is in my fondness for both sales and free things. There are several opportunities to earn a couple kuai coming my way: on Saturday, ACC is having tryouts for some would-be teachers, and we can earn 30 kuai an hour attending review sessions with them. This is a no brainer. I signed up for two hours. Then there is a graduate student from Oxford coming to interview us on our language-learning experience: that's another 30 kuai, I think. Finally, and inexplicably, a survey on English shortbread will earn me 50 kuai and some free shortbread. That comes to 140 kuai, which is easily a week's food. Score.

Saturday was China Night, a very big deal. Lili somehow or other got me to do a performance with her: a game show featuring two teachers from each grade. We had questions like "Who was the first president of America?" "Which film won 'Best Picture' at this year's Acadamy Awards?" and "Who is this song by?" (It was "Thriller" and they all knew it immediately.) My favorite part was when little Hao laoshi, one of ACC's four male teachers, rose and sang a line each from a Backstreet Boys song, a Brittany Spears song, and a Ricky Martin song (we allowed him to count Ricky Martin as an American). I think Lili's reason for choosing this performance was as revenge for last week's "Chinese Carnival," a competition in which all the ACC students had to form characters with their bodies, answer questions in Chinese, and, for some reason, perform a relay race in which students paired up and raced holding balloons between their shoulders ("This is the sexiest contest," Yi Weida drawled). Incidentally, my team won and were presented a prize - Chinese bootleg DVDs!

When I return to the States and want to be reminded of the feeling of Beijing, I will watch Shower, today's movie lesson. Like Eat Drink Man Woman, Shower is a very sweet story about family. I strongly recommend it.

I am so tired of baozi that when I eat them I have a mantra: "You must eat food to live. You must eat food to live." So today I bought a small roll and a jar of Kewpie brand strawberry jam (why?) and made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I already had peanut butter, although there's rarely anything to put it on (although you can buy Ritz crackers here, and I've become slightly obsessed with them. You can even by them on the Great Wall). My sandwich was very delicious. I followed it with yogurt and an apple, washed in boiling water. It's important to have these breaks in routine, I find.