where have I been?

Ack. I was doing a reasonable job of updating the blog until the last couple of weeks. I have a pretty good excuse for week 1 - I spent it in Inner Mongolia doing our social study report, as per HBA mandate (I feel like the longer I'm here, the clunkier my prose becomes...apologies). Without much advanced knowledge of any sort, I decided to do my report on Mongolian (the language, that is) because it's the sort of topic I've always been interested in, and I thought that my background knowledge on language preservation was enough that I might be able to produce something whose importance extended beyond exceeding the word length.

But really, for all the talk about producing the report, that's not what the week was about. Writing 1200 characters isn't really going to be that much of a challenge - I think a lot of people took two or three hours. I had to handwrite mine (remind me to explain sometime while my computer is still broken) and then type it up, but that probably took...6 hours total? Beyond that it was just an unbelievably fortunate week where I had the chance to explore somewhere beyond the boundaries of what I had ever encountered before. And it's not that Inner Mongolia should be exaggerated as some distant ultima thule (see nabokov) because it's really very much like the rest of China in lots of respects, which is a lesson in itself. But I also saw the most remote terrain I've ever seen in my life, inhabited only by shepherds and goatherds. I have the pictures if I ever find a way to put them on the internet - but maybe a better description is that I'm pretty sure I could pick most directions and then walk for a hundred miles without encountering another human being, except maybe for a flock of sheep or two. overlying the rapidly desertifying grasslands you can see distant, jagged red-purple mountains, which we crossed once on a somewhat terrifying return trip to the citified part of inner mongolia.

The experience deserves to be better described, and I hope that it will be in more detail at some point, but it stacks up with any of the most fortunate experiences of my increasingly inexplicably fortunate life. I'll go as far as saying that it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that I was lucky enough to stumble open. I hope I get to go back some day.

Currently going through somewhat of a Chinese music binge, again tricky given that I don't have a computer. Ends up leading to a lot of frustration most of the time as I turn on V, china's answer to MTV, and hope that they'll play a decent song or two. For now, check out here for what's currently on my mind. Actually, I normally don't have youtube at my internet cafe, so I'll take the opportunity to link up to this as well (watch the whole thing...although I promise the lyrics are very moving as well if you don't speak any chinese)

I seriously have at least 8 topics for blog posts in one of my coursebooks right now, but just no time to write them down at all. Shawn (a.k.a. 少华） is consistently unbelievably friendly in letting me barge into his room and monopolize his computer for long stretches of time, but even so I barely have time to keep up with whatever happenings are in the outside world. the blog is high on my priorities list, but so are the other things I don't have time to do. As of right now I'm already neglecting a particularly challenging new lesson. Probably another hour and a half tonight to memorize, and then wake up tomorrow to review/复习...so, that's it for now. Pictures could be coming if I ever get around to taking up weimin on his offer of loaning his computer so I can start uploading.