Illnesses

Two and a half months of continuous mild illnesses - hay fever, cold, laduzi (diarrhoea) - have finally taken its toll and I'm currently in my 81st hour of having eaten precisely nothing. This pleasant virus - Latin name, biggus bastardis - has the amazing feature of allowing me to continue to be sick and have laduzi after having ingested zero food.

Without wishing to wither away so early in the challenge of learning Chinese, I went to the campus hospital yesterday. It struck me as quite Chinese - functional and dirty. The guy doing the blood testing insisted on spitting on the floor, mid-prick. Then they gave me some glucose drips to keep me going. But this morning, after facing the awkward bathroom problem of desperately needing to empty out both ends at once with only one toilet, I thought I should go back for some more glucose goodness. The doctors seemed to think I was bit wet, requesting more glucose, but I need something, damn it!

Why the illness(es)? I think it's a combination of China-related factors. Incredibly hot, stuffy weather with ever decreasing air quality. Recently the pollution really has been bad, everything is grey from dust. I've been reluctant even to go outside.

My frame of mind may also be a contributing factor. Along with the weather, the language is just crazy. It's so brain-mashingly hard. The realization that I will almost certainly never be able to read a book even remotely like I can in English is depressing. I'm still making good progress, but it's fraught. I can almost feel the words, characters, pinyin, sayings, all pushing and shoving for space in my memory, ejecting previously known things, such as 'What was the first major battle of the English Civil War', for ever.

Also, one Chinese characteristic has, for some reason, been driving me nuts recently. It seems a great deal of people here don't know how to think. The whole education here is designed to teach people what to think, not how to think, and it really shows. So often you'll see people doing things, and it just makes no sense. The main example is the traffic - a simple, well thought-out, thorough, system would make things so much better. But instead they opt for the 'do whatever we think of first' approach, which leads to predictable results. Even at university, students are expected to memorise page after page of information. If there is a problem at the flat, my Chinese flatmates just do not know how to deal with it. Then you suggest something, and it's treated as the best suggestion ever (it usually isn't). Our teachers are bad at this, as well. I wonder if, after a 2 hour speaking lesson in which the teacher has spoken for an hour and fifty five of those minutes, they ever stop to think 'Is this really the best way to teach?' Somehow I doubt it. This article here could possibly be considered an extension of this - money and short-termism. http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,2100622,00.html

So tomorrow I'll go back and get more energy in a drip, and hopefully be able to eat some solids later on. As Homer Simpson once said, 'but I love solids'.