...Means Merry Christmas! In Pinyin it’s written Shengdan kuaile, pronouncing the es as short “uh” sounds. It’s fine weather for it: about 20C (70° F?) and hazy. And by “hazy” I mean “about as polluted as L.A. on the worst day you could imagine.”

Jenny and I have been off work since last Wednesday and have had a slow vacation for it. We’ve decided not to make a big deal out of Christmas which is fine by me. We’re saving our money and festive spirit for Michelle’s visit and its attendant trip to Hong Kong. Where I can finally buy some damn pants.

We went pants shopping the day before last...we particularly went to a Levi’s store in the mall, because I’ve been wearing Levi’s, gosh, my whole life, so I figured I’d be able to find something there that fit. Levi’s jeans are made differently in China. They’re made for Chinese bodies. For small waist sizes (i.e. the size I should wear), I literally couldn’t pull them over my thighs. For large waist sizes (i.e. what I wear here), I could button them up OK. And then them pull them straight off. Without unbuttoning them first. Chinese blue jeans are like two denim tubes stitched together. I bet they sell a lot of belts here. Jenny could find jeans that fit pretty well through the waist and butt, but of course they were 2 or 3 inches too short.

We explained this to our Mandarin teacher: Zai Meiguo, Paul shi shoule; zai Zhongguo, Paul shi pang. (“In America, Paul was skinny. In China, Paul is fat.”) I even know how to write this in Hanzi: 在美国，Paul是瘦了。 在中国，Paul是胖。 This is the kind of linguistic accomplishment I’ve been making lately.

Yesterday we rode our bikes around the east end of the island, and over the hill behind the University. We ate at our favorite noodle place for Christmas Eve dinner, and went to a friend’s place for eggnog.

For 圣诞节 we have no plans at all. The holiday is kind of a curiosity to the Chinese, on par with Cinco De Mayo in the U.S. Businesses are still open and most people don’t celebrate it at all. In some ways it will be a regular Monday for us: the maid is coming, and we have Mandarin lessons tonight. I think we’ll do a little shopping. Again, this is fine by me. I’m reminded of my first Christmas in Oregon (1995). I spent it with Jason Tand in Oregon. We spent the entire day watching Buck Rogers reruns.

Evidence that I am gradually becoming a different person: I have started to carry a murse. Or a man-purse, if you prefer.

I’ve taken to hauling around a bunch of small crap with me: cell phone, camera, notebook, pen, sunglasses, sometimes a bottle of water. On school days I also carry some 汉字 flashcards, an iPod shuffle, and lunch.

Unrelated

After one day of gray weather and moderate pollution, we’re back to sun and clear air. It’s also warmer, almost 20C (about 70° F). School is out for Christmas break. We’re trying to plan a last-minute trip to Hong Kong next week.

Lately it seems foreigners are everywhere in Xiamen. We’ve only been here four (five?) months; how is it possible we missed all these foreigners already?

Maybe we’re victims of what I call the “Audi Effect.” Anyone who’s ever owned an unusual but not rare car (like an Audi) knows what this is like. When you buy your Audi, you think you’re the only person in the world (or your town, anyways) who has one. But now that you’ve become attenuated to seeing Audis, you notice, hey, there are actually a lot of Audis out there. The longer you drive your Audi, the more pronounced the effect. So the number of foreigners isn’t changing, we’re just noticing them more.

Or maybe it’s a local effect. As we settle into a routine, we’re spending more time in the same places. So we’re getting to know the neighborhood around our apartment, Huweishan Park, the big grocery stores like Carrefour and Metro, and Zhongshan Road. (Not coincidentally, these are the places foreigners tend to live, recreate and shop.) As these places become more familiar, they become less startling, and small differences (like a foreigner we’ve never seen before) stand out more.

Or maybe there really are more foreigners for some reason. Maybe Xiamen is becoming Known and now the place will fill up, like Shanghai or Hong Kong, with laowai looking to make a killing on The Next Big Thing.

The funny thing about foreigners is that they are really unfriendly. If you make eye contact with a Chinese person and say nihao they’re likely to nihao right back. Locals are not shy, and unafraid of eye contact. (Frankly, they stare.) But you just can’t engage a strange laowai, even in a comparatively friendly setting like a bar or coffee shop. If you don’t know them already, they won’t say hello or even look at you. You’d think, foreigners being the (still) rare animals we are, that every time we see one we haven’t met, that we’d be psyched: You look like me! And speak my language! I bet you miss hamburgers and good beer too! This never happens.

I think foreigners in a kind of backwater like Xiamen are seeking isolation from other people like themselves. I call this the “Laowai Bubble.” It’s sort of like when you go for a hike on Mt. Hood, and you hike for hours and don’t see any other people...you can imagine you’re the only person on the trail. So when you do see another hiker, that kind of pops the bubble. Oh, there are other people. I’m not so special after all. Laowai in Xiamen form similar bubbles around themselves. We like to imagine that because we’ve “discovered” this pretty little corner of China, where very few people speak English, and that we’ve managed to scratch out a little space for survival in this alien environment, that somehow we’re special. After all, no one we know “back home” could do this, right? So running into another laowai is just a rude reminder that, hey, you're not so special after all.

Cool and clear, mid-50s F, windy. Pollution levels are near zero, especially after the heavy rains last week. Altogether it feels very much like a mid-autumn day in the high lattitudes, except that after the intense heat of summer and early autumn (and given that most buildings are a] concrete and b] have no heating whatsoever) it feels much colder. Somehow this is not helping my allergies, go figure.

I handed the school my resignation this week. This actually triggers a two months “escape hatch” in my contract, so my last day at XIS will be before the break for Lunar New Year (early Feb.) After that I’ll be leading the web work for a locally-based international clothier.

Sorry there aren’t any profundities or funny stories here. It’s just very very nice to have some freaking sunshine for a change. I put some pics of the nice weather and a recent shopping trip on flickr, so take a look there for Life in China thrills.

Ooh wait here’s something fun to think about: the cold, dry weather has given me a wicked case of chapped lips. I seldom get chapped lips and never ever use lip balm. I used to use it all the time when I was working outdoors (doing archaeology) and somehow my lips never healed. So I quit cold turkey and miraculously, after about three painful days, my lips were better forever. I will thus testify:

Lip balm is counterproductive and addictive. It makes the chapping worse but temporarily relieves the pain, prompting you to use yet more lip balm. Which makes the chapping worse. And so forth and so on.

I am not alone in this opinion.

For the past 10 years or so, if I get chapped lips, my only remedy is to not lick my lips. Somehow, in about two or three days, my lips heal themselves.

One of our British friends generated an algorithm for determining the time to complete any given task in China:

“Imagine the longest possible time you think it would take to do [the given task] in [your home country] and triple it.”

Here at 凤凰山庄 we get our propane for cooking from a large canister on the balcony. (This is in accordance with the Chinese principle of maximum decentralization.) We purchased this canister when we moved in (mid August) and it’s started to run dry. So we had a Chinese colleague at the school (the supply requesitions guy, whose job it is to [among other things] run odd jobs for 老外 teachers) call our building manager and arrange for fresh propane.

First a side story: Way back in September, the building management plumbed the building for centralized natural gas. (From a city utility? That sounds suspiciously efficient. My guess is our entire building is intended to share a single propane source.) Of course, this plumbing is attached to the exterior of the building; installation of said plumbing required the construction of comically rickety bamboo scaffolding and took about two weeks to complete. And of course this plumbing was never attached to the actual stove in our actual apartment.

We pretty much forgot that ever happened. After all, we’re still getting the gas from the tank on our kitchen balcony. Which is now dry.

So this morning a guy with a gas company logo showed up, presumably to deliver our new propane tank. He came up to our apartment, looked out onto the balcony, and left. Forever. We asked the guard, Hey, where’d the gas guy go?, and asked him to call an arrange to have our gas installed. He said to expect workmen between noon and 12:30. Which apparently means “around 3:30 in the afternoon.”

So, at 3:30 in the afternoon, no fewer than four guys (and the guard) show up with about 20 feet of gas plumbing, two big bags of tools, and a gas meter. (That a task as simple as plumbing the last three feet of gas pipe takes four workers no longer passes for comment. One guy hangs off the ledge of the balcony to finish the final three feet of pipe, one guy dispenses plumber’s tape, one guy operates the drill, and one guy is an apprentice, or possibly someone’s friend with a slow Saturday afternoon. The guard is there for our “safety.”) The whole operation takes about half an hour — not bad, considering — but when they’re done we can’t help but notice: there is about 20 inches of tubing missing. The last 20 inches.

We point out that all this work has not actually produced the desired result, and whose job is it to connect those final 20 inches?

Oh, they say, that can’t happen right now, there’s no gas in the central line yet.

Well, we point out, we don’t any have gas at all. Mei you meiqi. When will someone be back to actually, you know, bring us a propane tank which is what we actually wanted in the first place?

Two months.