Welcome to Da Chong

When I first got here, I was definitely a little in shock.  It is dirty, smelly, and difficult to breathe. Living on the edge of the Da Chong market, I see A LOT of gross meat and animals about to become gross meat (including chickens, cats, dogs, and fish).  There are dead rats on the street, and poop, and a lot of super nice cars which I still don't understand ha ha.  Anyway...it took a while to get used to, but now I love it here. Living in the market means I have fresh fruit, vegetables, and spices literally on my doorstep.  The hole-in-the-wall restaurants serve some of the best food I've ever eaten (usually for less than two U.S. dollars), the vendors and the schoolkids know us and say hello when we pass (sometimes in English, sometimes in Chinese), and we've found our place here.

SO THIS IS HOME...

Da Chong skyline at sunset

buying fruit at the market

our street (and the lovely Rachel)

the view from my window

a glorious (and rare) blue-sky day

color-selects taken from my porch

If you're squeamish, don't look at the rest...

A turtle being chopped to bits

Just a bucket of snakes

The covered section of the market

It's hard to tell, but those are chicken feet

And of course, the dog butcher...If you look closely on the left you can see the skulls (also for sale) and on the right you can see the tails)

I Will Arise and Go Now

The Lake Isle of Innisfree  --William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

In my awesome Literary Analysis class last year (which I hated at the time, but looking back it was one of the best classes I've taken) we studied this poem and after pulling it apart for a while we decided that the speaker of the poem is kind of pathetic.  He talks all about going to Innisfree, but never actually does it. The theme of our class was characters who are trapped by physical, social, or mental circumstances, and I really took to heart the idea that people are largely held back by their own fears. So when I was walking around the streets of Shanghai and saw this sign...

I got really excited! Because yes, I had talked about traveling and seeing the world but then I had actually gotten up and done it.  I had made it to Innisfree!

China has been quite the adventure so far!  I finally got a proxy server so now I can blog while I am here and I'll be throwing it back to all my favorite moments in the past month and a half.  And I still have two and a half months left! Woot!