Cleaning off the dust, and the Xining saunas.

I came back to Xining a few nights ago to find my door locked. My. God. Locked out again.
Over the last few months I have developed a reputation of locking myself out one way or another, leaving my house keys in Beijing or using magic to lock my inner door ("It has a lock?"). This time though, my key simply wouldn't open the door.

Fortuna smiled, the next morning the final turn of the key released the bolt. I entered. A former student of mine had crashed at the place for an undisclosed period during Losar, and the whole place reeked of subdued debauchery. Traces of party were scattered like clues at the scene of a crime. Some cigarette ash here, empty beer bottles neatly placed back into their boxes and hid behind couches, playing cards snowed all over the living room, disposable chopsticks in piles: what went on here? I opened the windows and allowed a breeze to carry out the stale air; I had told Bryan to keep clandestine, in case this would be an issue with the University. Now I was eating my words, the place smelled like my late Grandfather's apartment - he was taken by emphysema - in which, by the end, the curtains were so tarred they could serve as table legs.

Only a few days remained to plan classes. Throughout my vacation I reviewed lesson plans in my head, previewing myself delivering them to skeptical students. Some of the ideas weren't so bad, and I encouraged myself to write them down, but I couldn't be bothered to reach for my bag for a pen and paper. Luckily, my schemes weren't so complex, and most of them rushed back to me once I got here. One syllabus now stands planned, one ready to be typed, one to be dug up from last semester and recycled, and one has yet to take any shape at all (that's the first class of the week, tomorrow morning!).

A few major changes will take place: 1) No more poetry for the Chinese students; trying to teach Ozymandias (it's in the book!) would be like forces them to whittle chess pieces out of dry sand. We wasted enough of our time with archaic, confused rhymes last semester. 2) No more homework writing assignments. Unless I come up with a really enigmatic idea, all writing will be done IN class. Last semester ended with flawless end-of-term papers. I grew skeptical at their technical perfection and ended up googling sentences from many of the papers; at least 1/3 were plagiarized.

About the sauna. One of the luxury hotels here has a bathhouse I won't hesitate to call Roman. You descend a pseudo-marble staircase and walk onto a mosaic of centaurs eating grapes. Before you lie three giants baths of naked frolickers, framed by plaster columns, stone basins, and flatscreen TVs. The sauna is hot, and a motion sensor shoots jets of water onto a fake stove heated by fake coals. Sinks with giant rococo mirrors stand in rows around the baths. You let the water run, shave, brush your teeth, and lotion your face. Everything is disposable. A waste basket nearby brims with single-serving toothbrushes, razors, plastic cups, and all of their wrappings. Totally decadent. You can get a gown and go upstairs, where overpriced drinks, massages, and prostitutes await.

Meanwhile, my home and everyone else's in the city is a patchwork of concrete, plaster, wood and steel. The refrigerator freezes the vegetables, the water heater hardly supplies four minutes of hot water, the furniture is shabby, the windows streaked in dirty and misapplied paint. The culture worries itself sick about unpolluted women. The land is slowly drying into crumbly dirt, the clumps of which are crested with the oily excesses of medival factories and energy plants.

This week I will be teaching Lord Byron (in the book!) to a choir of blank faces and one word answers, hoping that someday, these kids too will have the chance to piss away their livelihoods and their world just like the Romans did not so many centuries ago.