A New Family Member

This has been a crazy week out here. On top of language study and everything that goes with that I have been helping a friend move for most of this week. Between all of the moving and the crazy weather, it has been raining nonstop here for the last few days, it has left little time for getting to do fun things like play basketball. We do, however, get the NBA playoffs here on TV every morning. I have had some opportunities to have guys come over and watch games with me, and while I was working out in the gym on Friday I ran into my friend that I met last week on the bike ride. He invited another foreigner and myself to go watch basketball with his family on Saturday and since I didn't have anything else going on at 8am I figured it would be a good idea.

It turns out that the weather yesterday was awful. It was raining almost all day which made it a little rough meeting up on bikes. We made it over to his house though and spent the morning getting to know his father and watching a not so great basketball game. We ate a pretty good lunch and then after lunch just sat around and talked for a while. My friend's father is a local author who writes a lot of history about our area and we had a good time learning some things from him. I started asking him some questions about his beliefs and he said that he didn't have any. He started to ask us about some things and my friend who was with me started to share with him. Our local friend who is a believer also helped to clarify some things that we couldn't get straight with our limited language. My friend who was with me did really well though, for only being out here less than a year he spent about fifteen minutes explaining things to this man and he understood every word. Towards the end he said that he believed and we spent some more time talking to him about everything. His wife was also in the room for most of the conversation and I asked her about what she thought about everything and she said she wasn't sure and wanted a little more time to think about everything and for someone to walk through somethings with her. My plan is to go back later in the week with one of the girls and have them talk to he some more.

The trip to my friend's house took up most of my morning and afternoon on Saturday. The rest of my afternoon was spent trying to dry off. Saturday evening I met up with a couple of friends out here and we went and ate some Mexican food. You know you are in a good place when you can live about 8,000 miles from Mexico and still get some decent Mexican food. It isn't quite the same as back home, but I'm not going to complain. The lady who runs the place is from Mexico and spent some time in the Metroplex and some other places in Texas, so most of the food is pretty legit. There isn't much better than Mexican food on a cold rainy night out here. Other than that it has been a pretty down week. It has been busy. This next week I am planning on hitting the books pretty hard and finishing up my intensive language study. I only have four days left and then I will move on to working with a new tutor and doing more conversational types of things. The language here is a long and slow process, and I am ready to move on to the next stage.

A Long Week

So if you want to talk about a random week… this has been it. There have been all sorts of crazy stuff happening this past week. There are lots of great things starting to happen out here but at the same time it has been very draining. I’ll try and give everyone a rundown so they know what all has been going on:

Wednesday: I got an invite to go out swimming with the guys to this large pond/small lake that is on the northern edge of town. It has been pretty hot out here lately so I figured it would be a nice chance to cool off for a while. The water was actually really clean and FREEZING. There were about eight or nine of the basketball guys all out there hanging out and going swimming. It was a fun day, and as random as it is to be in an Asian pond with a bunch of little guys in their undies, it actually seemed fairly normal. I don’t think a lot of the cultural things really phase me anymore. Don’t get me wrong, every now and then there will be something and I just have to go ‘huh?’ but a lot of the random things out here are starting to seem normal. I’m pretty sure I’m going to have a great dose of culture shock coming back to the states.

Thursday: I ran into another friend from the states in the gym and he invited me to go get massages with him and some other friends that night. I still got all my basketballing in but it was nice to just get to hang out with some English speakers for a while. While we were getting massages he told me that he found a shop in town that sells basketball nets, and since our court didn’t have any we decided to go out and buy some. They were only a few dollars but they pretty much made us rock stars. All the guys were very excited to see them and it is helping to build up some of relationship. Things out here operate a lot on a relationship currency. If you have a good relationship with someone you can make all kinds of things happen; however if that relationship isn’t there you aren’t going anywhere. It is the same idea with buying things here. You basically have four prices for anything: the stupid white person price, the smart white person who knows how to bargain price, the local price, and the good relationship price. Everything is negotiable and totally depends on your relationship with the person. So while basketball nets seem like a small thing they might end up paying off with helping to establish some relationships.

Friday: I spent most of my day Friday up at the hospital. I wasn’t sick (thank goodness) but one of my friends from the states was. He had been traveling down south and came back with a lot of symptoms of Malaria. But after five IVs and about six hours in a sketchy hospital he was up and moving again. I’m praying that I never have to go to this place for treatment. I’m pretty sure it would be like going to an American hospital in the early 1900s if you took out sanitation. At one point I had to go and hold the IV while he went to the bathroom and other than being filthy there was no sink (or soap) in the only bathroom in the entire hospital. It was pretty gross. At least one of my friends out here is an American nurse and she can help make sure that everything gets taken care of.

Saturday: On Friday night I went out with the basketball guys to play some games and on the way home one of them invited me to go with him and a friend on a bike ride out to a mountain lake. I figured that it would be fun and he is pretty much my closest friend out here (since he is the only one that can speak English) and so I agreed to go. We left early in the morning it took us a little over an hour to get out to the lake. The bike ride was pretty intense. We basically rode up the ridge of the valley to the other side to this alpine lake. It was a beautiful ride, except that I couldn’t enjoy it because my legs were burning the entire time. It was good to get to meet the other guy who went on the trip with us. He is home for the summer from working on his master’s degree in a big city and he also speaks pretty good English. We got out to the lake and, like a lot of things out here, most of it ended up being a tourist trap. There is a new wetland preserve that has just been built on the lake and so we paid the couple dollars to get in and walked around for a while. Eco-tourism isn’t really a big business out here so we had the entire place to ourselves. The environmental manger side of me was freaking out about this place because of how many things they did wrong. Like so many other things out here, nothing is spared at the expense of making money, so a lot of the ‘preserve’ had been paved over, construction was everywhere, there were new huge buildings and conference rooms, and there was even a local art museum. While it doesn’t seem like a lot, there was a pretty good environmental impact. While we were walking along the paved roads it looked like there were thousands of bugs moving around on the ground. It turns out that they were actually very small frogs and they were everywhere. We went inside the museum/conference center and looked at a lot of local ancient religious art. I asked the guys about it and then said that I didn’t know a lot about all of that because of what I believed. The friend who was studying with us also told me that he was a believer and then he started asking me all sorts of good questions. He brought up the subject throughout the day and we had a lot of good opportunities to talk and also to talk to the other guy who was with us. After lunch we went back to my house and played around on the guitar for about an hour. I had a few opportunities to share with them more while we were playing. Both of the guys wanted to get together again soon and hopefully I can start a weekly study with the new guy that I just met. It was a very tiring day but worth all of the exhaustion.

Sunday: So on Sunday we were supposed to have our basketball game but the other team didn’t show. A few of us were out at the court and it started to rain. We were about to go inside when the man who is a former pro-basketball player called us over, put us in his car and drove us to his workplace. He is a big shot in the local gov’t here and he took us up to his office and let us hangout, made a phone call and then a small army of men showed up to cleanup the court and play. We sat around and watched his team play a match and then played the other team after they did. It was a good chance to get to connect with this guy and he and I had a good chance to ask each other some questions about family and things like that. He seems like a very good guy to invest in because he is always looking out for all the other guys and he is very patient with his son, which is a very rare thing out here. Hopefully I can get some more opportunities to get to talk with this guy.

Monday: Today we had our makeup basketball game. I’m pretty sure the guy I was covering was about six-three and two hundred forty pounds. He was a big guy. He was one of the guys on our team’s former sports teacher and he wanted to lean on me the entire game. Between that and not getting to sit out the entire game I was pretty worn out afterwards. We won though. After the game all the guys went and got dinner and then wanted to come back to my house and play guitar for a while. I had an opportunity to play some songs for them and used that as an opportunity to share some. We are supposed to all get together again later on in the week and hopefully we can make coming over to my house a weekly thing.

So that’s been about it for my crazy week. Needless to say it has been hard keeping up with my language study because of all of the random things that keep coming up. I only have a week and a half left on my initial stage of language study and then I should have a little more free time with it and it will be more conversational. I have had a lot of good opportunities to speak the language and I think moving into the conversational stage will be helpful because I can still spend a lot of time with the guys I have met and also work on language at the same time. I’m also hoping that I can find some downtime in the next couple days to relax a little bit. I have been going pretty hard over the last week and I’m looking forward to taking a break for a day or two.

Karaoke

Monsoon season has officially begun out here. It doesn’t rain all day every day, but there is usually a pretty good rainstorm every day. It hasn’t changed getting to play basketball yet, but I have a feeling that over the next couple weeks it might. So our big activity this week was going out and singing karaoke at a local place. It is a pretty high tech set up. You go into this big building with neon lights and walk down these long hallways to a room that your party has all to itself. There is a big screen TV, a touch screen computer with all the songs, and the whole rock band lighting set up. We were planning on going swimming, which is what I wanted to do, but the weather didn’t cooperate. So karaoke it was. It is kind of a weird thing that twenty-year old guys with tattoos and who like to play sports also love to go and sing karaoke. And man, do they LOVE to sing karaoke. So four of us went and spent the afternoon at the karaoke place. Most of the time we were there I just sat around and listened to them sing these random songs that I’ve never heard before and couldn’t understand. After three and a half hours I was starting to go crazy. At least one of the guys, who had never done karaoke before, was also dying to get out of there. I did end up having to sing a few songs. The had a lot of English songs, and I found a few by Coldplay and some other decent bands that I stuck in there; however there was this option to basically take a song and stick it in front of all of the other songs, so… none of those songs ever came up. The only English songs that ever did come up were ones by the Backstreet Boys or Avril Lavigne. I’ve heard them before but they would not have been my first choice of things to sing. After about the third hour of songs I had one of those intense thirty-seconds of culture shock. There was just this sudden feeling of ‘where am I and what is going on?’ It passed pretty quickly but for those thirty seconds I was freaking out.

After our karaoke party we walked back and the guys wanted to eat. It sounded good to me; however after seeing the food it didn’t look so good. We stopped at a small hotdog stand and picked up some hotdogs. I don’t know how hotdogs can be more sketchy than they are in America, but they are. It didn’t come with a bun; just a toothpick and they put some kind of spicy seasoning on it. I’m glad that they added the seasoning because it covered up the weird taste. Actually the taste wasn’t near as bad as the texture. It is hard to describe but it was crunch outside and kind of squishy on the inside. I managed to put mine down though. After the hotdogs we walked a little farther and one of the guys paid a street vendor for some ‘fish’ on a stick. The only think worse than fish on a stick from a street vendor (actually I’ve found out there are a lot of things worse) is when the fish has a tentacle on the end of the stick. I’m about 90% sure it was squid, but there is that 10% that still has no real idea what it was. Don’t get me wrong, most of the food out here is great, especially the stuff that I order for myself. I just think most of the locals have different tastes. So that pretty much was my Sunday. We got back and went and played some basketball and I called it a night. Other than the weekends basically I study all week long. I’m on my sixth week of intensive language study and I only have two left. I don’t really know what the game plan is after that. I think I will get another tutor, possibly one of the basketball guys, and we are going to start working on conversational kinds of things. I’m looking forward to getting to start something a little different.

Shao-Kao

So this week has been more language study. I know that everyone thinks that being over here is this huge adventure and is always exciting, and in many ways it is, but in a lot of ways it is a lot of studying. There just is not a lot you can do until you get the language down. So once again, most of my week has been spent learning the language. Well, that and playing basketball. That is about the one social outlet that I have. I had to take a few days off this week because I kind of jacked up my back a little bit. Some would say it is because I'm getting old, but I'm blaming it on the fact that the court we play on is super slick and the fact that I ran into the most solid guy I think I've ever seen. I was driving to the basket on Tuesday night and this guy kind of jumped into me. Normally it wouldn't have been that big of a deal except this guys was solid (and really good, it turns out he is a professional basketball player that lives in our complex) and when I landed kind of funny i slipped a little which I think thew my back out of whack. A few days of stretching and taking it easy and I'm back at 100%.

On Tuesday I went out to an area of town that I'm going to focus on. It is only a few blocks from where I'm living but if you walk about a mile it starts getting into a village and it is a little more rural. The area just seems like a very dark place. It is very dirty and there are a lot of apartment/hotel types of places, except very run down. We walked around for a while and eventually came to a more rural section. We saw a Buddhist temple and it was packed full of people. We had an opportunity to talk to a couple monks for a while and it was just a strange place. We visited some folks that were parents of a friend of a friend and sat and got to share with them for a while. They invited me to come back anytime and gave me their phone number. They offered to take me out to some different villages for some culture, so one of these days when I get a little more language I'm going to try and follow that up.

Other than that this week was pretty low key. I spent a lot of time hanging out with the guys I've met playing basketball. They took me to lunch on Friday and we went to an internet bar and shot zombies on computers for a couple hours. One of the guys had to go to a class so I decided I could better use my time doing something else and bailed with him. We played some basketball that night and then grabbed some dinner and then went and played a little pool at a place close to our complex. Last night we I told them that I would take them out to dinner and so we went and ate some shao-kao (pronounced shaow cow and roughly translated as 'fire food'). You basically sit around a little metal table with a fire pit and a grill in the middle of it. It is great food if you have a lot of time and want to do some hanging out. I made the mistake, which I will never do again, of letting the guys order. They got some normal stuff like dumplings, grilled potatoes, sliced beef, and egg plant. They also got some not so normal stuff. We had some pig brain stew, which actually wasn't bad (except it was hard to get over the texture). We also had some some blood sausage, which wasn't good. And last but not least we had some stinky dofu. I've eaten a lot of bad things in my life but this is pretty close to the top. It smells like distilled gym socks and mold. Oh yeah, and it has hair. Lucky for us it was the second thing brought out to the table and the last thing that got totally eaten. One of the guys dropped one in my bowl and they all watched to see if I would eat it. I did and I'm pretty sure they got the show they were looking for. I almost choked on the thing but I managed to eat it. I had to brush my teeth twice last night to totally get the taste out of my mouth, and sometimes I think I can still taste it. I think the flavor is burned into my brain. I've been regretting it ever since; not just because of the taste but because I have been sick to my stomach all day today. It has been over twenty-four hours and I'm still not feeling so hot. It probably could have been any number of the things that I ate that has done it but I'm going to blame the stinky dofu.

The Away Game

So this week has started my intensive language studying. I've got at least eight weeks of learning language between five and six hours a day, six days a week. I basically study three hours a day on my own and then meet with my tutor for about two hours. I'm learning a local language which is only oral so we do a lot of pointing at pictures, I write down how I think it sounds, and then reviewing the audio recordings that I've made. I'm studying with the guy I stayed with during the first village trip so I've been out to his house a couple times this week. It is a little far but they usually feed me while I'm there and it has been good to get to see them and spend time with Grandpa and the baby. As strange is it sounds, it is a lot like visiting friends (granted they are friends I can't really talk to. . . but they are still friends). I've also discovered the gym in my apartment complex. My apartment is right behind the basketball courts and the gym is right next to that. It is actually very nice! I mean, I've been working out in the Anson Field House for the last four years, so I'm not very picky, but this place is way nice for being out in a small rural town. So I've been going up there every day.

Basically my day looks like: wake up and read/eat breakfast/read, then study for an hour or two, go work out, lunch, meet with my tutor, then study a little more and then basketball at night. I've noticed this week that there are a bunch of guys that play basketball every evening from about 6:45 until it gets too dark to play (around 8:30). So I've been out there and played with them a few times this week. They are actually pretty good for being out here. I've played a decent amount of basketball in this country and most everyone here is horrible. Most all of these guys have some concept of how to play though, and a few of them are actually good. I kind of have an edge being a good four inches taller and forty pounds heavier than most all of them, so that helps with getting picked on teams. One of the guys I played with one night picked me on his team and we won a lot (it helps that he is one of the better guys out here). After playing together for a couple hours he starts talking to me in English. I was thinking 'You speak English! Why didn't you bring this up sooner?!?' It turns out his English is actually really good. So he is kind of my first friend out there. We played together over the next few nights and he told me that we have an apartment complex team that plays on the weekends just for fun, and I got an invite to play with them this weekend.

So today was our big game. I got a text last night telling me that we were meeting at the basketball courts at 2 pm and taking a taxi to our game. It turns out we play away games, and our game today was in a town about forty minutes away on the other side of a mountain. So we load up into this really nice Jetta and drive out to this big complex with a large iron gate and an armed guard (which kind of jumped out at me since guns are illegal here). I'm quickly told that we are playing a military base. We go out and start warming up and then this whistle is blown and about sixty men in uniform come marching out in formation chanting and carrying stools. My friend who speaks English says 'look, we have an audience.' It is a little intimidating being the only white guy at an away game against the military (especially of a country that you're country doesn't always get along with) and then having a pretty large audience all packing heat. But once the game started it all kind of faded away. Both teams had coaches, however I didn't understand any of what mine was saying, refs and score keepers. We jumped out to an early lead and were winning 23-10 at the end of the first quarter. I'm pretty sure I had the most muscular guy out here I've ever seen guarding me. Then in the second quarter some other guys showed up and my guy was replaced with an even bigger guy. We were about tied at half time, then were down in the third and pushed ahead in the fourth. We ended up losing when the other team started hitting a lot of threes at the end. I think the final score was 100-94 but I'm not totally sure. They used some kind of weird scoring system and wrote it in chalk.

I did okay in the game but constantly had about three guys guarding me. Their basic game plan on defense was to stack three guys in the paint on me, have one guy guarding the ball, and then have another guy waiting down court for a long pass and an easy fast break basket. For some reason our team could not figure out how to defend this. It also didn't help that they didn't keep track of fouls and when you got fouled there were no free throws, you just got the ball out of bounds. So I got fouled. A LOT. I think it averaged out to once every two trips down the court. So I had some kind of messed up stat line. I think I had a couple steals. I had three or four blocks, including one where I chased a guy down on a fast break and threw it out of bounds when he layed it up (all the military guys yelled). About eight points (remember the foul thing...), and at least twenty-five rebounds. The team we played was pretty good though, so I'm not too worried about anyone else we'll face. And I honestly think if we played them again we would win.

After the game we left pretty quickly because all the military guys dispersed and later formed a line. I noticed that they all had guns and my friend who spoke English said 'look they are about to shoot their guns.' That was about the time I got the hint that we should leave. The coach and five of the guys were taking the car back to the school to study so that left the four older guys and myself to find our way back to our apartment complex. We had to walk about half a mile back to the main road and then were going to hitch-hike back to town. We were about to get in the back of a cargo truck when a minivan taxi pulled up and we all jumped in that instead. It is funny how sports bonds guys together. After the game it was like we have all been best friends forever. We joked about the game and how the other team played dirty and how we should have won. After we got back the guys took me out to dinner at the front gate of the apartment and we spent a couple hours hanging out. Somehow I always find myself in these random kinds of situations when I'm out here. Don't get me wrong, it was a great day. . . just random. But since these guys are about the only ones I know in this country I'm sure we'll all be hanging out a lot over the next few weeks.