YWCA Courtyard Hotel/Jing Yuan

The place I am staying-- I've described it briefly before. It does have paying customers. They are generally around for 2 or three days; I am a longtimer here. Rooms of various sizes and levels of luxury range around a courtyard; it is not square since there are various other buildings. There's a covered colonnade where one can eat in the shade that bisects the courtyard and various flowerbeds. A flowering pomegranate! Severely trimmed roses. And general greenness that makes a calm refuge inside this frenetic city. But many of the arrangements are inscrutable.
Roger, the young man who runs things, is always a bit on edge. There is a host of other people who live and work here-- certainly more than there are guests. There is they boy with the bird. He feeds it several times a day, lets it out (the bird is a fuzzy baby and doesn't yet fly; and it can't pick up food from the ground or even take proffered food held at mouth level; it has to be dropped into the back of its open gullet. This bird is very friendly and easily sat on my hand, hopped up my arm, and settled in my hair. There is also a canary, which seems to be primarily decorative. And a tub with a large and small turtle, who are not particularly gregarious.

 Right next door to me there is another boy of about 18 whose room has at least three computers and a number of screens. I know he plays games sometimes, and does something on the computers most of the time; what, I cannot say. There are a couple more boys who I think are camping with the bird boy. And several girls as well, who are maids, servers, and receptionists. There are many fairly invisible nooks and crannies-- places you don't notice until you see someone emerging from them.These various people make Roger anxious, since he seems to set great store by propriety and having things work as expected. The whole business with playing with the bird had him very agitated, and the bird is now banished.

Aside from the daily domestic drama, these people all have stories and I can't know them or talk to them. Of course, even if I spoke Chinese, I would not likely discover their stories. And the waitress and her—mother, the cook?-- at the greasy spoon down the road? And the guy who powers up his 6” by 4' grill every day around 6 to grill skewers of lamb to serve along with edamame and peanuts and beer to the local guys; the boy and mother who make dumplings every morning; the girls impeccably dressed making their way down the alley in the morning; the old security guard at the construction site who recognizes and greets me each morning on my way out? Hard enough to do it in Waynesboro! In a way, perhaps it is easier for everyone to be nice when we know we have an impenetrable wall of privacy that works both ways.

When I got home yesterday after the food walk, I found that a couple of American teachers had checked in, part of a Jesuit program to spend 6 weeks in Xi'an teaching higher order thinking and writing to high school students. We arranged to meet the next night for duck after they got back from the Great Wall at Simitai. Alas, it was not to be; Simitai is far, and they were away for 15 hours, getting back too late. My ambition dashed!

The canary met a bad end via the cat who slinks around. In the morning, nothing but some yellow fluff and overturned water bowls.