all the things you haven't heard

I can still feel the humiliation of the kindergarten cafeteria scene in which my friends discovered (to their dismay) that I did not know who Elvis Presley was, so I tried to go gentle with my astonishment when we found out FR had never heard of Adolph Hitler. GX was watching the propaganda film that he said was guaranteed to make even a Jew love the man. I wasn't so convinced - maybe it's related to all the propaganda I was raised on (and I mean this in the best sense) - the shivers I get from military marching tunes and videos of soldiers marching to them are much more horror than awe-inspired.

Anyway, I tried not to laugh too much, and told her to go baidu "hitler." I don't know if she has, but this morning she was baidu-ing away about the train wreck reported on the front page of the newspaper. She showed me the article and the website that provided a little box with a simulation of the accident. One train was going too fast, fishtailed a bit, collided with another passing train. 7o people died, just like that. Most of them were probably asleep.

Then we talked about how we always feel like trains are so safe, but was it ZX that said that you're safer on a plane? I think this is what my students meant when they wrote that news should be "close to my life." Tomorrow evening we take the train to her hometown (or to the closest town) for the labor day holiday. We ain't comin' back 'til Sunday.

Yesterday evening I reunited with my Chinese tutor after a strange three-week break. I brought him a bottle of water. He brought me a flower that he picked from a vine. At 5:45 we left the picnic table where we always meet near White Horse Park, and I headed towards the yoga place. When I ducked into a Lanzhou noodle place for supper, a young guy was reading a headline from a newspaper aloud to his two friends. Something about the US and Spain. I never did understand, but my curiousity won me some new friends (we exchanged telephone numbers, I invited them to English Island next week) and a gifted lamb skewer. Another guy waiting for his take-out order said, "Look at her shoes, look at her pants, they have a Chinese flavor. She's lived here for a long time." I told them that I bought the shoes in the US, and the pants in Cambodia.

My taiji instructor had met the Italian monk who lives in the monastery across the street and invited him to come practice with us. When he arrived, the middle-aged woman leaving after yoga was excited to tell him that she had read about him in the newspaper. BAO-ZHI! she said, real loud and distinct, even after being told (when she asked right in front of him) that he spoke excellent Chinese. I'm pretty sure the China Daily article that I read about him pointed out that he could speak Chinese, and I'd bet you a hundred yuan the one that she read had too.