Space

Being gone for over a month gave me new perspective on my life here. It's funny how taking time away from something can actually make it clearer, make you more perceptive. You get lost in day to day routine, in day to day exposure to the exact same things. You forget that what you eat is spicy, because you don't sweat anymore. You forget that it's unnatural for you to agressively yell out your lunch order and that you can never get to the front of the crowd if you're still trying to wait in a nonexistent line.

I got an abrupt picture of my progress. Coming back on the exact route I took over a half year ago when I first moved to Lanzhou, I could feel my cluelessness reawaken like deja-vu. But this time I could suppress it - I knew what I was doing. I knew how to check in at the airport, get to the University, how to find food and groceries, how to talk to my roommate and classmates. Returning to Lanzhou after having been away for a while I was startled to realize that I did actually live there. Last semester I struggled with making my life coherent in my mind; it felt like a bunch of pieces, made up of things I did in disparate places with very different intentions, almost like I was a new person each place I went. And it doesn't help that all the people who don't know me, no matter how long I live here, will look upon me as a visitor. But as I welcomed the newcomers, recommended places to eat and buy clothes, shared stories from the holidays, and picked up my old routines, I got a bigger picture of the life built here. I don't know everything, by far - the city holds many unexplored corners and I'm still constanty learning new secrets from friends and strangers. But I live here, I know here. I can see when things change. I can make plans for weeks ahead and I can talk about last fall. This isn't travel, this is life.

I can see my Chinese improvements a little clearer too, and since that's a big reason I'm here, that really is big. I was a little scratchy at first, having not spoken much at all back home, but it came back swiftly and smoothly, again in stark comparison with my first arrival in Lanzhou. Even writing characters flowed more fluidly than I remembered, easier and more natural.

The weather changed immensely since I left. In January I was wearing long johns and using an electric blanket; in March I was back on the tennis courts and sleeping in shorts. Construction projects were finished (a new cafeteria has opened right next to my class building!), and new ones were begun (the pavement has been destroyed between where I live and the nearest gate to the street, with scraps piled 10 feet high. this segment had also been of interest to me because it previously was broken or chipped in many places such that you could see evidence of at least 5 layers of different cement or tiling patterns. Now they've all been removed by workers sledgehammering them to bits).

Having that gap in space and time was nice - I discovered that I live in Lanzhou and that I speak Chinese, even if both in a rather strange, abnormal way. Things aren't perfect, and after a few weeks some of that shock has turned back to the view of the road ahead, which is still steeply uphill. Maybe we need to take vacations and weekends more seriously.