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.