Moving Slowly

This is the first time I've missed my deadline for posting to this blog, and I don't completely know why that is.  It might be that life has settled into such a rhythm here -- wake up, teach, plan, grade, navigate Beijing, be exhausted -- that I feel I don't have anything to write about.

That's so untrue, though.  So many things have happened.  For example, I have an apartment:  a tiny one-bedroom with light hardwood floors in a fabulous, tree-strewn neighborhood.  While every day seems to throw up another obstacle to actually being able to move into the place it feels enormously satisfying to have a place to stay, and when I walk on the streets around my new place I feel the most comfortable I've felt outside of school here.

Subways

I remember the first time I took the subway by myself.  I was nineteen and the subway in question was the Paris métro (you never forget your first love).

I'd taken the métro many times before, but always with my parents.  It was, as previously mentioned, the first subway line I'd ever been on.  When I was eleven, my family and I used it to transfer from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon, a transfer pattern that I would later learn by heart.  When I was twelve, my father's glasses fell off as we were trying to pull our luggage off at a station and in a Herculean feat, I dragged all the bags off as he scrambled for his glasses and leapt off after me.  When I was fourteen and on a two-week cultural exchange program, our group leader asked me to plan a route for the rest of the group from the Louvre to the Eiffel Tower.