hollerback@you

Food! Fried youtiaos for breakfast every morning. With soybean milk. Butcher arrives at nine in the morning with a pig nailed to chopping board at the back of his motorbike. fell inlove with the local porridge. Ate it for my first three consecutive meals :D fridges hardly existed. televisions too. First weekend some people had some lovely street dumplings and gravy noodles that i was too sick to consume. oh! i fell sick on the first weekend over at the hotel. food poisoning which gave me dreams of vomiting during the night, and woke up at three in the morning and puked my mushroom laden dinner out onto the carpet. i cleaned up everything myself (with excessive trips to the janitor's trolley outside at the far end of the corridor) in the dark while not waking two others up ;Dvvv

the village! so pretty. i'm a sucker for handmade mud terraces. thankgod for electricity or gas heaters. most villagers farm, otherwise stuck in workshopes with authentic nerd glasses doing steel work or moulding wire frames for furniture. geese, ducks, chickens, dogs running around everywhere. all part of the recycle any-&-all-waste-on-the-floor process. river sooo pretty with green/blue water. the litter in it was like that multicoloured sprinkly thingy on sundaes (which i so fail to recall the name). all locals wore long pants. only saw like, ONE teenage girl in Xiamen in shorts & stockings. majority of us wore berms & got stared at. yippee.

the Kids. OMG. THE KIDS. attempted to teach the PrimaryONEs with TiongYee! complete fail, chaos, massacre! they were like, seven/eight/nine? seven boys and two girls. all loved to yell. used alot of hokkien. i only understood the insults D: loved to scream. couldn't scream back after the second day. one boy kept touching me, damnit! but he'll run away after i turn around. i think i was the only teacher getting molested. got used to it after a while, but TY got highly disturbed during one lesson when the back of my legs became the canvas to the boy's chalk fantasy. watching him flip was highly amusing. watching TY getting massacred after handing out excessive lollees was extremely painful. some other kids were so sweet to me. they are all soo rosy. they all loved cameras and the peace sign. and their peace signed has the two fingers stuck together. i enjoyed intentionally pulling their little fingers apart when they posed for photos. :Dv all the kids were extremely attached to us even on the first day. Mr Lee identified it as a consequence of the China's One-Child policy. such an interesting side-effect! girls, learn from it and aspire to have three kids! ;Db the school was small, simple. one kid stays back everyday after lessons to sweep up the classroom with his huge broom made out of twigs. that broom was like, twice the height of some of the kids in my class.

homestay was, strange. dinner with lots of meat, beer, adult company. THANKGOD FOR WILSON & SINMING. without them Wenqi would have just DIED with the chinese since i would be dumb & dumber. the house was only inhabitable on the first floor, while the second is still brick walls completely propped up on wood piles. flat cement roof with a wonderful view of the valley were we had steamed sweet potatoes which is the BEST PART OF CHINA. hands down. no competition, at all. maybe filzah might argue about barbequed ones. but STILL. mine were as big as my palm. think the Statue of Liberty and her torch. gawd i should have posed. Shared a maritial bed with Wenqi heeeee. she woke up with her face swollen with insect bites while i had only half of my bottom lip potruding weirdly. rushed down to school & waited for a few hours for the swelling to subside while Wilson's homestay boy hijacked my phone camera and took like twoo hundred MB of photos of himself, his cousin, and nonsense around him. Camwhore baby! i got to walk in the mud terraces! wonderful wonderful soft mud that floats around in the water. i wondered about leeches but didn't see any. some farmers had sweage collection pits with dark brown depths and smelt potent. i heard abt some people throwing stones into the pits and green liquid spilling out along with a STINK ATOMIC BOMB, fast & furious.

momma! was busy before & after dinner weaving these basket things. which were collected by the people who provided her with the strings & the wire frames to do so. she got 1.5 yuan for each basket she weaved.
the female discrimination was painfully obvious during homestay. women didn't sit on the main tables. granny was ignored. eventually all the ladies went outside to eat & help feed the younger kids. realised the weird sex ratio in the school classes and how some girls didn't play with the boys at all.
other pics on facebook. i don't feel like looking through the photos again. i feel sad because i miss not being joined to the hip to the computer, miss not be so selfishly self-centered, miss learning new things, miss being awed at the scenery every single morning, miss watching the kids arrive in school from the rooftops at seven in the unearthly cold, miss having crap hair & not caring cos everyone had new hair too, miss time flowing by slowly & the constant wonderings abt the next meal. i also miss watching others (like filzah HEEEE) be busy, and just watching them after they say no to your offered help with a smile. so little politics, for such a big place.

and thankyou for all the lovely birthday wishes, cards, and cakes.