World's apart

Sarah and her fantastic daughters Anna and Katie
with Mum and Roy the day I left London

I'm on the other side of the world and trying to make understand the new reality of my jiejie’s (older sisters’s) life. She has just been diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer that has entered the lymph. Next week - 4 weeks after going to the GP - she will have a mastectomy and then start chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

My role us to stay in Harbin and write my journal article assignment on cancer and in doing so research the ways in which acupuncture, massage and Chinese herbs can help. ... l'm looking forward even more to Simone's arrival next week. My classmates have been very supportive but I need family around me.


I've gone into exercise frenzy mode after a night out hitting the not-happening USA bar and the buzzing free-booze-for-foreigners Russian bar 

Yang Yang didn't look foreign enough so I gave her my
free bud and vodka.. no I haven't taken to the bottle

 

and 1.5hr sleep before skyping. I did a mini triathlon, cycling to the pool for a swim and then going for a jog to the forrest uni with Alex. The good news is I now can locate my 'primordial chaos' Feng Zhi Qiang Chen style taiji-ists and have been savouring taiji in the lilac-scented obscurity in the evenings and at 6.30am this morning for the first time. Unfortunately they can locate me, the foreigner, even more easily and I get little time to practice my own forms of taiji.

Alex leads the march to the stadium

Foreign students in Green preparing to march

The other distraction has been the marching and baton practice for the sports day which for us 'liu xuesheng' (foreign students) started off on this bright and sunny Saturday at 6.50AM at the office. Decked in our green 'aodidas' tracksuit with 中国 (Zhong guo = China) on the front, Guye my Cantonese classmate and I  joined up with 2 Malaysians in the 4x100m relay. For some reason they didn't include us in either of the two heats and we ended up running against our men's team and a rocket male team from China. As I was the 4th runner, it wasn't until after the boys crossed the finish line that I got the baton and had to run the last straight on my own.

Guye and I with our earnings - we got a snickers
choc bar and double money for running

Hehe, the cute grey-haired lifeguard with gold teeth has just walked past. Just as I was leaving the pool he asked me to explain what 's i n' meant. That really was above and beyond the limits of my Chinese. I tried heaven and gestured praying but luckily he auto corrected and wrote out on his hand the letters 's p e e d o'. Phew! I pointed to my chest and the logo on my costume. Luckily having put our lives in the hands of crazy car drivers I knew the word 'kuai' for quick!

Today we moved to Rehabiliation department and fortunately the woman at the office said we only needed to stay there a week as it was like tuina. Then we could spend more time in other clinics - internal medicine, inpatients, skin, gynaecology. I felt a bit demoralised as when we walked in the doctor was spouting lyrically about hating the Koreans and Japanese. Guye my classmate and translator was having a hard time translating his rant. He didn't give us much of the information we needed about the tongue, pulse, pattern differentiation and diagnosis. However, I saw some great massage techniques and his skill and non-patronising way of communicating with patients, especially the sweet virtually mute guy (who the doctor seemed to be having a conversation with, and all I could here was grunts - even less discernible than the lazy Harbin accent! There was a female doctor or post-grad student who was massaging a teenage young man who'd had an accident 3 month previously and now had paraplegia. It was amazing to see how tuina massage can actively put movement into the body that was previously rigid.

Tomorrow we have a day off - on a jolly to the Siberian Tiger Park and the aquarium - no inmates to be used for Chinese medicine I hope!