The Gray Won't Let Us Go

The only direct sun I've seen in a week came out for a couple hours in the morning on the first day of class, a nice way to ease the new-beginning jitters. The classes went really well, and it was easy enough to complain about the weather as part of my teacher-patter. "I didn't expect Shanghai to be like this," I say, in front of my new students, "this Seattle gray." I annoy myself when I find myself going on about the weather back home, but here, it gets me in my soft spots, it's all new.

In my apartment building they leave the windows open in the hallways, to keep the air fresh in the humidity, I guess, but when it's cold outside, it means it's cold inside, and when it's raining, it echoes. I'm on the ninth floor of sixteen. I'm always feeling drafts, always adjusting the heating units. There are floor to ceiling windows most places I go. Home. School. Work is on the 9th floor, classes are on the 6th. It's a vertical, gray life, for now.

The people here have amazing umbrellas--and not like in New York where just a few colors pop up in the sea of those cheap black ones we all buy every time it rains. Here we've got all sorts of patterns and colors. I saw one today with flowers on the inside, so the guy using it could appreciate his own flair. It's almost as if people don't mind the rain, there's a relaxed flow to all the traffic--cars, bikes, walkers. The motorcycle delivery guys are heroes with their various rubber armors and their hauls. It all seems so unsafe, but somehow it's working.

It's been raining, raining, and cloudy and gray, like we're all submerged in something that doesn't want to let us go. And I've been planning classes and getting massages and figuring out how to use my rice-cooker to make all sorts of non-rice things, like Shanghai Chili, which goes something like this: sautee veggies and tofu and Szechuan spice mix in my nonstick pan on my induction hotplate. Combine in rice-cooker with rice-cooker black beans I made the other day, a can of chopped tomatoes, some crushed garlic. Go email some students, lay on the floor and stretch out my achy back. Come back to the rice cooker and ... yowza.  

They tell me spring comes early here. I can't wait! But I will.