Searching, Taekwondo, wandering

(Sorry for the delay, this is about a week old. I was having trouble getting the images to upload.)

I spent the day shopping for supplies and tools in Fenghua. This isn't a 'go to Ace AND Lowe's type trip, even for the locals, you go to certain parts of town and look for stores that might have what you're looking for. As expected sometimes I get a little distracted, or should I say I go into stores where the chances of finding something on my list are pretty slim. This is an exampe of that: For the first time I went into a huge two story market not far from my house. It has everything, a huge assortment of seafood, eels, squid, stingrays, crabs etc, etc. They also bring in halves of cows and pigs and other whole animals and butcher them to order. It's kind of gross, but kind of cool. All the animals still have their heads. I would have expected this in Guangzhou, around Hong Kong, but was surprised to find it here - dogs. I went out the back entrance where there were live pens of chickens and other poultry and saw a few freshly killed dogs hung up, as well as a couple in the process of being butchered. I guess it's no worse than killing a pig, if it's done humanely, but it's still kind of revolting.

I'm feeling pretty beat today. A little frustrated by my inability to make progress on projects in this first month and a half. I'm doing allot of front-end work on several projects but I can't make progress beyond that stage and further develop a cohesive brand until I get at least one project beyond renderings. This afternoon I requested that Weiwei, a friend who is leaving in a few weeks, be allowed to spend a day helping me find some supplies etc that I still can't find. I walked all over Fenghua trying to find, among other things, aerosol auto-body style primer. It took an hour for me just to figure out what it was called, dictionaries don't have many of these words such as 'epoxy' though a couple of stores understood what I meant, just didn't understand the need. That's a big frustration. I ask people for something, and instead of telling you if they have it or not, or can order it, which is really all I want to know, they want to tell me how I can get around using it etc. It's tough enough explaining what I want and how I use it without explaining something that they wouldn't even understand if we both spoke the same native language. I guess everywhere I go that I have to educate people on my process etc is challenging, but to have to explain and defend it in another language to people that I just want to take my money is especially aggravating. It's definitely helping my Chinese, but it's exhausting. I found myself in the middle of a long couple of sentences chiding an especially unhelpful shop owner today and realized I was making some progress. I couldn't understand why he couldn't just order it, and stop pushing me to buy his other painting equipment when I made it perfectly clear why I wasn't going to buy the other stuff.

The weather has finally turned cool, it dropped into the 60's (frigid!) the past two nights. Everyone has on their jackets and asks me if I'm cold riding in my T-shirt and shorts. It feels great to me. There's some physiological difference between me and 'them'. I notice in Taekwondo class that wherever I've been working out there's a wet puddle and everyone else is barely breaking a sweat. The instructor tried to tell me last night that I shouldn't drink so much water in our break because it would make me sick, he must have noticed me parked by the drinking water tank. I started to pretend that I didn't understand, then realized that I needed to say as respectfully as I could 'thank you for your advice, but no thanks'. I think he's accustomed to students that don't have any other athletic experience. Just as when he pushes my legs a little further apart during stretching, tells me to run differently, I'm often tempted to say "look Zhang, this isn't my first circus, I know how to stretch ( or drink water etc)'. But I'm sure everything except my insolence would be lost in translation. Overall the class is progressing well despite the language difficulty. Allot of the silly games and exercises I only understand by watching, then understand his instructions, but I'm learning many words in the most primitive way. I hear it and the resulting action enough that I understand it's meaning, but unlike most of what I learn, I have no idea what the individual syllables mean, or who to write them. It's comforting to hear other classmates say "wo ting bu dong", which means "I hear but don't understand".

This is from the left, my Taekwondo instructor, the pingpong instructor, the gym owner, me, the roller blade instructor, and Shao (a good friend who is there all the time, but I can't figure out what he does). Quite a friendly bunch.










I found a small tool shop that had some forged carving chisels. The only problem was that they didn't have handles. It looked like the metal had been formed over a cone shaped mandrel so, while I knew I'd end up doing the handles myself I negotiated him installing the first set. It took over an hour, part of which I sat on a stool nearby and tweaked the handles and chatted with his kids and answered the usual questions. His son seemed to like me when I realized he had his arms wrapped around my calf or his chin resting on my thigh, male to male body contact isn't taboo like it is in the U.S. It's quite common to see two men wallking hand in hand, or when one arm draped over the other's shoulder while holding hands walking down the street. Actually, I see members of the same sex holding hands, though open displays of homosexuality are unheard of, more often than I see male/female couples with body contact. So, I tolerated it until he started stroking the hair on my calf, I had to shoo him a couple of times before he understood, I finally said, which he seemed to take well, 'pet the small dog - not my leg'.




























While trying to find some automotive primer I visited this fine establishment. They aren't amateurs! (Maybe I should post this on Engrish.com.