... I landed back in CQ on the 15th ... my ganma (godmother) and I were on a mission for an off campus apartment which was accomplished within 20 hours of landing o_O ... I recall two weeks of stressbag before leaving TO on account of having no clue about how bloody easy this would be with the help of my CQ mama and a chance encounter with a couple of girls from my school who had studied with a couple of my brit. council colleagues two years previous ... I landed, went to mama & baba's, ate and drank and was put to bed ... got up the next morning in 40+ steaming degrees ... and a very few hours later it was done. Mama said, "It's stinking hot. Call your boss and make sure it's okay to go back to Guizhou with me and hang out with grandma..." ... so I did and it was.
... we were lodged in the top left ...
jet lag sunrises are glorious when you have naught to do but marvel ...
... one morning on an early hunt for Chinese medicine in the form of a flowering thing, we stumbled upon a random herd of cows ... cowbell in abundance
I joined the morning swimmers ... an instant habit took hold: breakfast, tea & tobacco, then a half hour walk uphill for a swim ...
... no sooner did the habit set, one morning, straggling behind with my camera, I saw a smaller branch of what I'd taken for the usual swimming crew veer off and descend into the green ... towards a farm house and right past a friendly boy whose father offered us walking sticks from a heap of bamboo ...
they were hunting the hard to spot tian ji huang ... a flowering thing destined to be steeped for tea that I was soon being taught to pick out of a green August riot of tree and brush and wild everywhere ... I was awful and blind about it at first, but I eventually got better at it or else we'd stumbled on a fat patch or two - either way I saved gatherer-face and picked my mama quite a dense fistful of the stuff
...
... and then we went back for a victory lunch of all good things and many cold beer.
I can't wait to get back to Guizhou when the heat is on.
