I'm still alive

and living in Guangzhou, sort of. I have a temporary apartment in a 'serviced residence' which means it's like a hotel but with apartments in it where I can live for short lengths of time, in this case about 12 days in total before the sublet I found becomes vacant. That will happen on 1/25. Both of these places are within a stone's throw of the Chinese language school at which I began classes this past Monday. The classes are all in Chinese and it's at least good that I understand most of what the teacher says. Some of my old aversions to classroom study have arisen however, in particular reading vocabulary or sentences in unison with the class. I just feel like I'm in The Wall. That being said, I will probably learn a lot there. I've been working on the vocabulary from the book they gave us and there's a lot of new words in there that are useful, and plenty that are useless as well. I try to prioritize the words I learn so that I spend time and effort memorizing ones I will actually need sometime in the reasonably non-distant future since they're hard enough to remember and brain space is limited. I'm sure someone out there can use that to have a joke at my expense. There are 5 other people in my class at the moment. Four Korean ladies and one girl from Mexico. They all seem to read and write better than me but speak maybe a bit more tentatively at times. They've all been studying for longer and in universities or schools so I guess that makes sense.

Anyway, so I'm living in the Tianhe district of Guangzhou which is the business center as far as I can tell. Lots of skyscrapers, many of unusual and interesting design, wide streets, lots of stores and a few malls. There is a bit of park space here and there surrounding a large nearby stadium so it isn't too urban but it does feel quite a bit at times like midtown New York though I mean that not in a pejorative way. Certainly if there was a Village I'd be living there instead though in this case I figured as close to the school as possible is good since I know myself and avoiding class would be that much easier if I had a long commute. I have been cooking and preparing my own meals again which has been nice after 3 months or so of eating out every single day. Actually now that I think about it, it'll be 4 months very soon since I left New York. I'm going to take the classes for 3 more weeks and I have the sublet until 3/9. Everyone wants to know when I'm coming back and what I'm doing next. I don't even know what I'm doing today. I went to one music store to try to buy a guitar. I figured now that I'm sitting still and not running around on trains if I can hook up a cheap guitar to keep in my apartment it would go a long way towards my peace of mind. The first store I went to only had electrics so I'm going to try another I just found online which perhaps has acoustics. I figured I'd try to get one of those small ones. I saw one in another city in China once for something like $20USD. Doesn't have to be fancy, just needs to make sound. In an unrelated note about how cheap things are, last night I bought a large bottle of water, a pack of like 10 or so oreos, and a pack of cigarettes for $1.50USD. So cheap, and all the food groups represented.

I've been reading more lately ever since going through a novel this guy gave me in Yangshuo. That was The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. Then Anne Frank's Diary which I'd never read before. Now I'm reading Made in America by Bill Bryson who everybody seems to love. There is a giant book store with a large English sub-section and many books are reasonably priced, particularly in the 'literature' section so I was thinking about going through a few of those since they're only like $2-3USD each. If only I'd had the same interest back in high school when these books were assigned to us. It only took me 15 years more plus traveling to a country 6000 miles away before I decided to read a few of them.

Alright, I'm off to hit this other store and hopefully they'll have a guitar for me, otherwise I'm going to end up with an Erhu or a Guqin or something more unusual. I wonder if my neighbors would mind if I got a drumset. Take care all of you, see you one day soon.