Daybreak brought the soggy, humid wet season weather with it.  While the week itself, when we are in theory hard at work but really just when we teachers confined to a narrow orbit of our respective campuses, the weather is warm but gorgeous and clear.  In most countries this would make a lovely excuse to stay home and get a book out or watch some movies.  But in China, many people have but one day off a week, if they’re lucky, so they use it for a plethora of tasks ranging from leisure to life’s necessities.  For my roommate and I, this meant a brunch meeting with a mutual Chinese friend who just found a new job.  That was the only thing that was on tap for the day.  It ought to be noted that in China, once you leave your house and its immediate comforts (think airconditioning and nobody to stare at you), then nearly anything can happen.

Meeting our friend was a straightforward affair.  Cynthia is a really nice girl with great English, partly because she worked four months last summer in South Carolina, and I was sure to tell her my mom has the same name, as such small similarities create instant bonds.  True to the random nature of the majority of my friendships in China, I had met her randomly last November on a train in central China, when my Chinese was worse than it is now and we just spoke English.  Today the three of us found a dim sum place my roommate knows of and I discovered that I STILL can’t get the pronunciation right for the Chinese word.  A simple text message to my phone set the rest of the day in motion.

I parted ways early afternoon, once lunch was over, trying to make it to Bijiashan, a small hill on the edge of Shenzhen’s core.  The idea was to rendezvous with a friend.  In a moment of haste I got on a bus hoping that it would get me there, but the bus driver later informed me I’d have to change at the transfer station.  In theory this is a simple exercise, but in practice it becomes Chinese; needlessly complex for no real reason.  The next bus took me closer but apparently skipped a few listed stops, a victim of an as-of-yet not updated schedule.  So another transfer later and I was at the park gates, waiting for my friend.

One of the nice things about studying a language in a country where its spoken natively is the time you put into studying pays immediate, direct, and tangible dividends.  My friend speaks some English, but my Chinese exceeds hers, so the conversation was carried out in Chinese, though I still have numerous gaps and a hard country accent can send my head spinning, but I have become quite adept at faking my way through such instances.  We climbed the hill, a whopping 178 meters, about 600 feet, and then made our way back down.

Now at this point I thought I’d be on my way home, but instead an invitation was extended to join her coworkers for KTV.  Arriving at the dark room with loud music and cracking male voices, it was clear they’d been there for a while.  Three of the men were red-faced and peppered my friend with questions about me despite her explaining that I could explain myself.  So instead I stumbled through a Chinese song on the mic before I was put out of my misery with a glass of beer and the obligatory Cheers! that comes with it being poured.  After a light-hearted debate centered around our differing bus stations (yes, the mundane concerns of the urbanite), I ended up splitting ways and was back off to my home.

The bus was, once it finally came, blissfully free of people and gave me the chance to set my tired feet and legs down in the warm embrace of orange molded plastic.  A few stops later and the seats had nearly filled, a woman bordering on her golden years took the seat adjacent to my own.  She was gnawing (accurate description) on an ear of corn.  She had a plastic bag between it and her hand, as to touch food directly is considered ‘dirty’ here.  However it is not dirty to then gently drop the finished corn ear to the ground and proceed to pass the next ten minutes noisily picking the kernals out of the teeth and casually spitting them out.  Some would land on her pants, but with typical aplomb, she swiped them to the ground.  These are the same people who stare at me as if I was some backward hick.

All in all the trip home was without incident, and while the day in itself holds no terribly exciting stories, it was filled with all the requisite things I’ve come to associate with China: children with stupid hair cuts, useful but jerky buses, kids pissing on the streets, a woman singing opera to herself while hiking, the crackling churn of cicadas in the forest, the layer of wet air that hovers between the ground and the low clouds, and the general randomness that envelops life here and keeps every day a bit exciting.  Any pictures above are unrelated to the narrative.