Routine and Change

Every week there’s a routine. My alarm goes off and I lay in bed debating whether I should put on my school clothes now or later for 15 minutes before I actually throw off the comforter and face the cold. Sweat pants, then pants, then undershirt, then shirt, then sweatshirt, then jacket, then windbreaker and lastly socks if I can reach my feet. I brush my teeth, smack my forehead, take off my shirts and put on deodorant, put my shirts back on and head out the door. I open the large metal door slowly and quietly but it only closes if you slam it, defeating the purpose of opening it silently. Walking outside into the crisp, somewhat tangible air of Beijing I throw on my hat and gloves. Everyone on the street ignores me, they don’t stare anymore; they’re used to seeing me walking to school at 6:55 every day. I see the same people, the same people on bikes, in cars, at their windows and everywhere else. The one girl who has a basket on her bike for her backpack, the man in the suit and leather shoes biking to work and spitting right in front of the same sewer cover, the same old woman with a crinkled face and tattered black clothes who I say, “Zao,” to every morning. There’s the old man with his white gloves and hat that looks like the Skipper’s from Gilligan’s Island doing his Taijiquan on the sidewalk. There’s the store clerk cleaning his stool, a fuwuyuanr putting the jiaozi and baozi steamers outside to attract customers, and there’s the bike repairman opening his cabinet that resides on the side of the road. There’s the magazine stand men putting magazines in order on the shelves, the same students walking to school and then there are the six flights of stairs to the classrooms. Those 168 stairs took the longest to get used to, but I’ve come to terms with the panting that follows the climb. I am carrying forty pounds of bags up them to boot. I walk to my class and place my bags in the third seat from the door and return to the fishbowl to hear stories from the previous day. There’s always one. And it usually is mine. Every student comes in at the exact time as the day before, and the day before that. Eight o’clock and we are all in our classrooms, the teachers take our homework and then ten minutes later class begins. Tingxie first thing, books at the ready. Two straight Chinese classes merit a twenty-five minute break and enough time to run down the stairs to the street and the local jian bing stand. The chef uses a ladle to drop a creamy liquid, one that looks like cake batter, onto a circular skillet, and spreads it into a circle. Taking an egg from seemingly nowhere, she cracks it and smears it all over the cooking crepe, then uses two spatulas to flip it over and smear a red sauce, a spicy sauce and some cilantro and onions on the cooked side. Then lastly, the chef takes a crispy sheet of bread and places it in the middle, folds the jian bing and puts it in a small plastic bag. I give her my three kuai and she gives me a taste of heaven. Plus it’s warm, and my hands feel like they’re melting the moment I touch it. It’s gone before I get back to the stairs to continue my day. School ends and I return home, watching the people as they do their jobs now. The only person that’s still in the same place is the old woman. I wave and continue to walk home, and begin my homework. I finish around seven and relax until nine when I strike up a conversation with the host family until eleven-ish. I shower, practice some martial arts, do my pushup regimen and then go to sleep, with the occasional banging of a bed board against a wall coming from the apartment above, to start it all over again.
But the routine changes occasionally. It’s not what I do that’s different, but what’s around me. I woke up one day and walked to school when the newsstand had been completely transformed from an old shabby looking thing into a modern web of metal, open and inviting. There was no sign that the previous newsstand had ever existed. A more startling example was when Chris and I were walking home from school one day and I stood there, mouth agape. “Chris do you see that?” “What?” I pointed to a building and his jaw dropped too. The entire building was lime green. “WHEN DID THAT HAPPEN STERLING?! THAT BUILDING WAS NOT GREEN WHEN WE WENT TO SCHOOL THIS MORNING!” And it wasn’t. It was made of bricks and just fine without the paint. An entire building had been turned green in a mere 7 hours. Another change that startled us was one night a grocery store was the same color as the rest of the buildings, and the next morning it was that same ugly lime green color. Chris and I stood in the middle of the street just staring at it and fumbling on words to express our amazement. The day I bought my bike there was a bunch of supplies next to the bike lot, but I didn’t take much notice till I came back four hours later from testing the bike out and there was an entirely new building, already selling sweet potato chips and the like. There was a lot cleared before I left for the Fujian and Jiangsu trip and when I came back there was a skyscraper four stories tall and growing. A crane is now placed on the top of a different skyscraper and an entire bus stop moved 50 feet left in an hour, (which scared the hell out of Gavin when it happened,) but people don’t break their routine as the world changes around them. An entire skyscraper was completed in the two and half months that I’ve been here. It’s taken a lot of getting used to but the changes have become part of my routine too.