This is visa extension week! Monday I was summoned to the
Dean's office. Miss Wang told me I needed to see Mr Tong at the Foreign
Students Hotel and he'd take me to the police station. The process was
fairly quick and painless. Two days later I was driven along with two
Chinese-Hungarian expats to the visa office. The two sisters are in fact
cousins and their grandfather was a famous doctor who emigrated to
Hungary after writing an important commentary on an unreadable ancient
treatises on acupuncture. I await another phone call from Miss Wang to
tell me that my passport stamped with a 6 month passport has been picked
up. I also await with impatience an Easter parcel that is located
somewhere in the university with Lindt chocolate, Thai curry paste and
dental floss!
Spring has finally arrived and I will be staying on til the autumn. I noticed a stripey squirrel skipping up a bare tree last weekend and on Tuesday the first flowers – yellow forsythia – caught my eye as I was practicing taiji in the park.
The class of 2012 has suddenly realised that we're not on holiday and Luke has calculated that he needs to write 1000 words a day before leaving Harbin at the end of May. My deadline is end of June, but as Simone's coming over for almost 3 weeks at the start of June (if she can get a train to Ulaanbatur, Mongolia, and back) I'd better get cracking too. So, a hold on the bus trips for a while, though I have got an invitation to go to my former Chinese teacher's house to look at her new bicycle as I want to get one here now the ice has melted.
Spring has finally arrived and I will be staying on til the autumn. I noticed a stripey squirrel skipping up a bare tree last weekend and on Tuesday the first flowers – yellow forsythia – caught my eye as I was practicing taiji in the park.
The class of 2012 has suddenly realised that we're not on holiday and Luke has calculated that he needs to write 1000 words a day before leaving Harbin at the end of May. My deadline is end of June, but as Simone's coming over for almost 3 weeks at the start of June (if she can get a train to Ulaanbatur, Mongolia, and back) I'd better get cracking too. So, a hold on the bus trips for a while, though I have got an invitation to go to my former Chinese teacher's house to look at her new bicycle as I want to get one here now the ice has melted.
Alex models my scalp acupuncture creation
Spring makes a reluctant appearance
Student's tug of war competition on campus
It's been a funny fortnight. Group dynamics came to a head and the holiday honeymoon bubble has popped, and at times my calmic retreat loving kindness wore very thin. However, there is truth in the saying:
物极必反
wùjíbìfǎn
when things reach an extreme, they can only move in the opposite direction (idiom)
wùjíbìfǎn
when things reach an extreme, they can only move in the opposite direction (idiom)
My return to the swimming pool after a week's absence due to dusty sore throat cold and a new 'peng' energy sensation whilst practicing taiji in the dusky dust of the famous doctors' walk has helped to shake the malaise.
While we were out bowling last Sat night, my classmate had a call from someone from the Confucius Institute asking him to sing a Chinese song. Having said yes, they informed him that it was in London for the 5th anniversary celebrations of the 1st Confucius Institute for Traditional Chinese Medicine based at London South Bank University. Seven hours later he was on a place to London via Shanghai!
That is quite reflective of the erratic decision-making process here. I thought it was just the way my patriarchal Chinese uncle operated during family trips to Penang, but since my arrival in the motherland I've encountered endless situations where deviations for the normal path of events is par for the course and events will be announced minutes or a few hours before. We Europeans get flustered but it's run-of-the-mill for the locals.
We also got caught up in the Confucian-confusion drama and were summoned to the main building to rehearse with our newly bought white Dr coats for a skype link with London South Bank University. After running though it for a couple of hours and failing to memorise our script we were told it was going to be scrapped, then they took a recording as the internet was too unreliable.
We've completed our second week with a new doctor. I was surprised that after four days he let us put a needle in a patient. However, our technique sucked - we're used to using guide tubes in London (for hygiene reasons, so that the tip of the needle remains untouched) - and so I now have 20 needles in my feet, legs and abdomen in an attempt to make me feel more confident. However, when doing the rounds, I break into a hot sweat of panic, just standing in front of the patient who has given me their labelled test tube of needles. I have to take two sugical spirit-soaked balls of cotton wool. One I have to unmesh into a rectangle and then turn the test tube so the tip of the needles fall into the cotton wool. These I then have to feed to the doctor as he adeptly threads them into the patient's scalp, torso and limbs. Today he left me two needles saying, "neiguan". I was glad he went on to the next patient and left me to persecute the French sister. Luckily she was too polite to scream and just grimaced. There are these two sisters with tattooed eyebrows and lips, one with a husband in Windsor and this one with a husband in Cannes.
Poor Yang Yang (the Canadian-Chinese post-grad scholarship student who has kept us all sane) had to do blood letting on the doctor's son's mother-in-law to be - stabbing her with a thin needle on the back several times and then fire cupping the area. She was less than quiet in expressing her agony. Along with Monica, a Hungarian student, I have become the Queen of moxibustion (or Mock Sebastian as my godmother guinea pig in London calls it). I did try and hide from the doctor as I have had to do the moaning mother-in-law a few time and the smell of burning moxa (or mugwort used to warm the needles and get the qi moving) is too much for my dusty sore throat. So Monica got the short(est) straw. A few minutes later Dr Cheung was on to the lumbar pain patient and turned round calling for Xining.... oh, that's me, damn.
Actually it was great. The others all went off to lunch after a while and I sat down and chatted to two patients with the help of a very sweet Chinese first year student who stepped in with her mobile phone translator. Later I managed in Chinese to change a white coat for a size bigger and also attempted to find out about trains from Beijing to Ulaanbatur for the Swiss twins.
We also got caught up in the Confucian-confusion drama and were summoned to the main building to rehearse with our newly bought white Dr coats for a skype link with London South Bank University. After running though it for a couple of hours and failing to memorise our script we were told it was going to be scrapped, then they took a recording as the internet was too unreliable.
We've completed our second week with a new doctor. I was surprised that after four days he let us put a needle in a patient. However, our technique sucked - we're used to using guide tubes in London (for hygiene reasons, so that the tip of the needle remains untouched) - and so I now have 20 needles in my feet, legs and abdomen in an attempt to make me feel more confident. However, when doing the rounds, I break into a hot sweat of panic, just standing in front of the patient who has given me their labelled test tube of needles. I have to take two sugical spirit-soaked balls of cotton wool. One I have to unmesh into a rectangle and then turn the test tube so the tip of the needles fall into the cotton wool. These I then have to feed to the doctor as he adeptly threads them into the patient's scalp, torso and limbs. Today he left me two needles saying, "neiguan". I was glad he went on to the next patient and left me to persecute the French sister. Luckily she was too polite to scream and just grimaced. There are these two sisters with tattooed eyebrows and lips, one with a husband in Windsor and this one with a husband in Cannes.
Poor Yang Yang (the Canadian-Chinese post-grad scholarship student who has kept us all sane) had to do blood letting on the doctor's son's mother-in-law to be - stabbing her with a thin needle on the back several times and then fire cupping the area. She was less than quiet in expressing her agony. Along with Monica, a Hungarian student, I have become the Queen of moxibustion (or Mock Sebastian as my godmother guinea pig in London calls it). I did try and hide from the doctor as I have had to do the moaning mother-in-law a few time and the smell of burning moxa (or mugwort used to warm the needles and get the qi moving) is too much for my dusty sore throat. So Monica got the short(est) straw. A few minutes later Dr Cheung was on to the lumbar pain patient and turned round calling for Xining.... oh, that's me, damn.
Actually it was great. The others all went off to lunch after a while and I sat down and chatted to two patients with the help of a very sweet Chinese first year student who stepped in with her mobile phone translator. Later I managed in Chinese to change a white coat for a size bigger and also attempted to find out about trains from Beijing to Ulaanbatur for the Swiss twins.
I had a funny moment tonight. I told this man in the noodle shop last week that I had a husband and 2 children back in England (I know, it was a little white lie but he was sitting drinking a bottle of rice whisky and beer and I thought it would be safer to say that). Then I went back today and he was there again.... and I realised he was the husband of the noodle shop lady and their 11 year old daughter was there. Silly me. The man joked that he wanted me to pay for my noodles with my iPhone, and the lady asked me to see a picture of my children. Well, I found the pic of Anna and Katie, my eldest neices. Then the man wanted to see my old man (husband). I found a picture of Jo and her kids and husband and he was the lucky man for me for about 2 seconds!
