School trip: Tiger Park and Polarland

Well, just when you thought it was safe…

… to tred into the water or the ice-turned dust bowl of Harbin…

Polar bears - in Harbin???

Polar friends - we missed the ice-sculptures so Polarland
was a welcome escape from 31C windy dustbowl

The Life Aquatic returns

Never too old (44!) to go on a school outing and have some fun. In fact I was mesmorised by the fishes and really missed my boys (Milou and Moritz) as we drove round the Tiger park.

Lao Hu

Domesticated Tiggers

and their semi-wild Siberian cousins

Tiger tourists

Big kids

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!

The long march: preparing for Student Sports Day

Spot the foreigner: the overseas students relay team
the waiguo, 2 Malay students and my Cantonese classmate

The latest form of exercise

This week's "life as a student in China" event was the award ceremony for hard-working students. I also discovered what the study of politics entails: reciting fluently a given text about the wonders of the country and the party. Interesting that questioning, argument and debate is not involved. My Kung Fu classmate had a crowd-pulling solo slot in the wushu (Chinese martial arts) performance which I now realise is the closing finale most student "events". 

Two days later we were summoned to the office to pick up our green "aodidas" (fake addidas) tracksuits with "zhong" and "guo" (central + people = china) on the front and our fashion faux pas silver sequined baseball caps!!! We were then lined up in order of size, but lines went rather tangential as the most western people (Brits, Hungarian, Slovakian) were placed on the exposed/leading end row and another classmate Alex has the unenviable task of holding the foreign students placard. As we're having our own little Zhong Yi Yao Da Xue (Chinese Traditional Chinese Medicine Uni) olympics there's no need to return to London for the real thing. We have one more marching rehearsal before the real thing on Sat 19th May. Ooops, forgot to mention to my 4x100m relay Malaysian women that a running practice might be an idea - or at least baton practice.

I finally found out where my unruly taiji group practices, so I was doing 4-5 hours a day midweek with my morning standing in my room, the "communist taiji" that I get taught at part of the course and the night time group practice in the park. They practice the same style that I've gravitated to in London, Chen, but it was modified by the last generation's master who went to Beijing. The originator of Hunyuan ("primordial chaos") is Feng Zhi Qiang who combines qigong health with taijiquan, focusing on circling Qi.

So, I'm circling chaotic qi and running a quarter of a circle as entertainment. Lucky that our essay deadline has been extended to 21st July. Study has not featured greatly in this week's agenda, but I've borrowed a cartoon version of Huangdi Neijing (The Yellow Emperor's Internal Classic) which is great bedtime reading, with gems such as: "Be cheerful. Don't be angry"; 

Spring is a time when all living creatures grow.

People can go to bed late and get up early 

(I live in perpetual Spring, much to my mother's anguish)

Take a walk in a courtyard, loosen your hair, relax your body and get excited.

Let things please your eye and mind, don't let anything harm your body

Just as you treat all budding creatures, let yourself grow. 

Wanting: my classmate & Chinglish student-teacher

Park life

Qigong clinic has been hard work, but worthwhile this week. As I'm the last foreign student still "gun fa"-ing (rolling technique unique to tuina) the doctor has transformed me into the fire-cupping queen (I had to experienced it first hand from a student - it was a fad at the Oscars in Hollywood a couple of years ago!). And I've learnt a lot from students who show me the odd tip. The gentle giant Chang Yu Xin explained how to incorporate some taiji circling moves into various massage techniqes today. I'm going to introduce him to my taiji teacher here. They all looked shocked when I cycled past them on the way to the pool in the Forrest Uni. They were heading back to clinic after their lunch break. While we in the west furrow our brows in (over-) analysis, the Chinese are happy to watch and wait and learn a little bit more experientially through absorption.

Alex and a Malaysian student

Simone's cupping experience in Chengdu (?)

Don't worry, it's a red tag from my t-shirt. Not blood letting!

Now I look like a dotty local!

 

Guess who Simone saw in Chengdu

Simone maybe staying a bit longer in Harbin depending on Cornelia's Russian visa. They're off in the morning to the outback of Mongolia sleeping in yurts. We've decided that Dalian (China's seaside) near Korea is a better option than the north pole which is a 22-hour train ride as apparently the aurora borealis is better seen in Norway. The (Korean) seafood is more enticing than outpost Russian/N China cuisine.

May Day

No, this isn't a call for chocolate! Though I'm giving up on China post as the choc and Thai curry paste still hasn't arrived… 

Mimi and the fruit seller mum

Liu Ying's mother making dumplings

It's been a great weekend, coinciding with the end of our 2nd neurology clinic block. Panic is on as our assessments are piling up and we're bemoaning the fact they are putting an end to the natural enquiry of study and narrowing our experience onto topics for assignments that we have come to dread. A lot is to compare east and west and there is a world of difference between the two. My case study is a 14 year old with Bell's palsy (facial paralysis) and she has been coming to the clinic every day for 3 weeks for a face full of needles! She's so brave and so sweet. My other favourite patient is the "ge ju" = opera singer with the lovely purple "maozi" = hat.



Our weekend entertainment this was a trip to town to hear our Chinese classmate's dad play the "er hu" in the Peking Opera musical Saturday afternoon session. He also invited us to lunch, which was the best food so far... or on a par with my Chinese language teacher's husband and mother's dumplings! The opera really is acquired taste and in an afternoon we didn't develop an appreciation, just saw ears or tinnitus! But the atmosphere was great with all these old characters singing, playing, watching and sleeping.

After that Wanting took me to 18 street to buy a second hand bicycle. I found "heiselee" (hei=black se=colour + swiss diminuitive -lee=little) with wobbly wheels but pretty good brakes and then peddled off ignoring or missing all the directions that Wanting showed me on her googlemaps. My phone doesn't work without wifi, so I had to stop half a dozen locals, including a traffic policeman to ask for Heping Lu (street) and my uni Zhongyiyao daxue. The 30 minute ride was interestingly doubled.

I had a few days off to rest my cycle gluteals and then today got back on that donkey - but not the one in the photo I saw pulling a cart on the city street! After a very late and leisurely taiji session with the old Chen teacher and group I decided my mission was parks and blind massage schools. I was very successful on the park front. It being May 1st everyone was out. I was going well off the map but was drawn to the second park by the sound of festival music. Two characters on stilts towered above a flurry of fan and cap wavers in bright colourful outfits. This went on for well over an hour as I made a round of the park and the environs in search of a "bing" (pancake or egg McMuffin equivalent). I ended up with a chocolate ice lolly which hit the spot. Every corner of the park had a different activity, chinese ballroom dancing, taiji with a small tennis bat and ball(!!! a first for me!), opera singing, table tennis, swan pedalos, giant sized hamster balls rolling on the little artificial river with children rolling around inside them, crowds gathering round mahjong tables with serious betting going on...

I managed to find a massage place, or at least the characters looked the same as on my chinese-english translation iPhone ap, but there was just a dusty stairwell and closed doors with bright chinese good luck characters stuck on them. I did eventually find a very professional and clean massage institution, which I'll return to on another day.

So, after the break I'm ready to start the next block - Tuina Chinese massage. The doctor needles really deeply, even the whole shaft of the needle disappearing into the skin on a point "jian jing" = shoulder well that western books give a shallow needling only warnings due to the proximity of the lungs! In fact the horror stories you hear of lung puncturing is in fact GPs and osteopaths, not qualified acupuncturists!

So. I'm looking forward to the next 3 weeks…

Two weeks later....needles and noodles

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.

 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)
 

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.

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!

Flavour of Harbin

To get away from the group and campus and feel that I'm in China I plan to disappear for a few hours every weekend. Just get on a random bus and get off somewhere and wander around. Yesterday I found myself on the 209 and jumped off at Heilongjiang University campus and was invited to go bungee jumping with a group of fun-loving students from various local universities. Don't worry, it wasn't just the 8.30am on Sunday start that put me off. Simone was astounded "they asked you? Didn't they know you were 44?" That's why I love her! Say it how it is! No couching of the truth in British bush beating circumnavigation of the harsh truth.

Last night we went out for an amazing Korean meal in a restaurant that was like someone's living room. An upturned wok was lifted to reveal the fluffiest omelette, wonderful spinach and peanuts, bulgogi beef (bulldogee was on the menu - not these puppies or any other poor old dog for me!). The fermented tofu soup was a bit much too, but I'm still waiting to sample the "stinky tofu" and to suck marrow from bone soup with a straw... not!

Yesterday after clinic at 12.30 the weekend began. I joined the Chinese girlies in my group who were going for lunch with their Malaysian "boyfriend" for Harbin hotpot. I had already said no after the first BBQ poisoning but I thought it would be rude not to... (see pics). Plates of raw lamb, pork and veg fried at our table. I followed Guye and placed a glass of vinegar in front of me to dip the food into to drain off the globules of fat! Afterwards I felt rather "bu shu fu" (uncomfortable) and my afternoon of writing up case studies went out the window.