Digging for China

One Last Thing

2008-06-12T01:17:00.002-04:00

I know I said that the last post would be my last... and it was... for China. For anyone who is interested, I am now keeping a record of my attempts to write a second musical. You can find it at http://fallofusher.blogspot.com/

-Mike

Trip Report and Final Blog

2008-05-01T10:19:00.054-04:00

What humbly follows is the best and most completely comprehensive record of the end-of-semester trip taken in April 2008 by the students of the Beijing Institute for Asian Studies. It begins at the beginning, ends at the end, and, when the still recent memories fail, it makes sweeping generalizations about probabilities of both locations and actions. To assist in the telling, the narrative will be accompanied by colorful photos.

Top right: Will Bottom left: Alice

We took a sleeper train from Beijing to Xi’an. This was the first sleeper train I had ever taken (though it would not be my last) and it was a mostly pleasant experience. Besides the random screams in the night from passengers five stalls down, silence reigned in the cabin and I was able to get a few hours of sleep.

We arrived in Xi’an and were immediately taken to a gorgeous hotel which elicited cheers of excitement from the group. Predictably, a mistake had been made and we were at the wrong “Bell and Drum Tower Hotel.” Ours was across the street, and very nice, but not quite as worthy of our awe.

The layout of Xi’an was a little more open than Beijing, and we were all happy to be in a place that featured grass as a component of the landscape.

Our first major event was to climb up and explore the Xi’an city wall- an enormous defensive structure thirty feet thick and something like five or six miles around. The only logical thing was to bike around it. My friend Han and I rented a tandem bike for the usual ridiculously low American price and got around at least half of the wall in the hour and a half that we were given to explore. We even got a very unsafe but very cool video of biking down the wall that can be viewed here.

Han and I taking a break from trying to kill ourselves
with a tandem bike

For the trip, in addition to teams of seven, we were also assigned into two buses. After the trip to the Xi’an city wall, I accidentally got on the wrong bus. Will, who was on the correct bus, kindly pointed out my mistake.

(The paper says FAIL and then has arrows pointing to two
buses with the captions "right bus" and "you.")

How do you know that Will is a math major?
He points out something that is absolutely true and, at the same time, completely useless.

You don't go to Xi'an without visiting the terracotta soldiers. Located in a series of three enormous aircraft-hanger-esque buildings, the soldiers were neither as plentiful nor as impressive as we had been expecting. When something is hyped as one of the wonders of the world, though, awe-failure is practically mandatory. Everything seemed old enough, but after hearing so much about the individually carved soldiers and the glorious individual personification of each one, they seemed a little too cookie-cutter.

Jesse, Maria and I still had a fun time looking for
abnormally shaped soldiers.

After Xi'an, our next step was a flight to Chengdu; a part of Szhechuan. You know- where the spicy comes from. In its infinite kindness, the program saw fit to get us a hotel with an awesome view of a park in the downtown area.

Just out of the frame, on the left, is a thirty foot high statue of Mao.

We enjoyed wandering through this park and seeing the fountains and gardens. It was late, and we were hungry, so a big group of us went out to find someplace to eat. Will, Jesse, and I found an establishment which we believed to be cheap and suitable, but the others felt that it was too "sketchy" and went along their merry way. It was really too bad for them, because they weren't able to enjoy our delicious pot of...

...random meats and vegetables soaked in unbearably hot mystery-sauce.

I won't go into details, but the next morning was the first of two times on this trip that I was nearly incapacitated by foodstuffs. The above picture fills me with more fear and dread than I could have previously imagined.

When the sun rose, I rolled out of bed for the only thing that could have possibly motivated me at that time: cute and cuddly pandas.

We arrived at the Chengdu Panda Research Center right around 9:00AM, so that we could see feeding time. Pandas, let it be known, are EXACTLY as cute as you think they are. They even have little opposable-thumb-like-things so they can eat bamboo like they're holding an ice cream cone. Then they rip into the stalk with their extremely powerful jaws and you remember that, while they are cute, it's probably best that there is a wall and a moat between the two of you.

There were photo opportunities that allowed you to spend 500 kuai ($75) for a picture with your arm around a big panda. I could get within twenty feet for free, so I passed.

After the Panda center, we had some free time with which we went to Jinli Street. It was here that I purchased my first Chinese instrument, the Hulusi. It literally translates as "silk gourd" and combines the tone of the clarinet with the drones of the bagpipe. My perfect instrument, really.

The next morning we went to the Wenshu Monastery, a Buddhist temple built over 1000 years ago. It contained quite a bit of history, Buddha sculptures, and buildings, but we were mostly occupied watching the turtles in the turtle pond.

Turtles.

It seemed as though the only object in these turtles' lives was to climb to the top of this rock and stay there for as long as possible. When hundreds of turtles are trying to do this at the same time, it makes for some interesting slow-motion fights and plenty of epic tumbles into the merciless waters below. I think that the turtles taught me far more than I could have learned by actually looking around the monastery.

After lunch, which was entirely vegetarian but made to simulate the taste and texture of meat (which was interesting), we boarded our bus to travel to Leshan.

This is the garden behind a Chinese rest-stop.
Like, a gas station. Seriously.

Now, the only reason that one goes to Leshan is to see the biggest Buddha in the world. As the story goes, in the early 700's a Buddhist monk called Hai Tong decided that people needed protection from three rivers converging tempestuously at one point in Leshan. He spent twenty years wandering around gathering money for a project to carve a Buddha out of the side of a mountain in order to protect the area. After he had raised enough money, corrupt city officials came to him with an eye to take the money for themselves. When Hai Tong saw this, he defiantly told the officials that they could sooner have his eye than the Buddha's money. With that statement, Hai Tong actually tore his own eye out with his bare hands and handed it to the officials. The officials were justifiably scared out of their minds, and they ran off, allowing Hai Tong to begin the 90 year process of carving the Buddha.

And thirteen-hundred years later, the Buddha still watches over the rivers.

And he is enormous.

Just as impressive, I think, is the complex of parks and temples that surround the Buddha. Nell and I got lost trying to find the way out, and we stumbled upon some 14th century defensive works built along the side of the mountain, just in case the Buddha decided to drop his watchful eyes for a moment.

I have an inexplicable urge to take this picture with every cannon I see. I might have around twenty pictures of me with my head in a cannon. One of these days, that's going to be a bad idea.

Nell and I finally caught up with Ben and Hillary, and we insisted on having pictures taken in front of the most immense sprawl of greenery that we had yet witnessed in China. Looking at this picture back in the US, the effect is perhaps less impressive.

Coming down from the mountain of the Buddha, we passed a sugar-cane vendor. This is, you know, normal in China. What we didn't know is that you're supposed to strip off the diamond-hard green part of the sugar-cane to get to the sugary stuff inside. So immediately after this picture was taken, I was in a great deal of pain.

We went back to Chengdu that day, and the next morning flew into Kunming, in the Yunnan province. In the airport we were greeted by this sign:

Well... good.

Kunming is famous for its nearby stone forest. There were initially plans to go to this forest, but those had to be abandoned due to a sudden onset of laziness and trip-fatigue.

Our only scheduled stop in Kunming was at Yunnan University, China's equivalent (so they told us) to our Stanford. Because of the great ethnic diversity in the Yunnan province, we were to be treated to a lecture by a leading anthropologist about some of these minority groups.

The actual lecture is painful to recall, but here is what I took away from it: hooray for the American education system, and three cheers for academic accountability. We were privileged enough to listen through about ten minutes of description for each of Yunnan's 26 (the number is listed at 28 in the downstairs museum) ethnic minorities (though they prefer to be called "national minorities" since they are part of China and there is but one China). To paraphrase:

The Naxi tribe number 36,431 people. They live in the northwest corner of the province. They have a pictorial written language. They have a primitive religion. They enjoy to sing and dance.
The Bai tribe number 12,554. They live in the southwest corner of the province. They are called "bai" because "bai" means "white" and they are generally light-skinned. They have a primitive religion. They enjoy to sing and dance.

At the end of the lecture, we were allowed to ask questions. A (paraphrased, again) sampling:

Question: How easy is it to get to the island of the (insert national minority here) people?

Answer: Oh, it is very easy. It is very close to here. I do not know exactly, I have never been there.

Question: With all of these minorities living in such close proximity to one another, were there ever any conflicts in this region? Or do conflicts arise now with the Han majority?

Answer: Oh no. There is no problems. The national minorities all love being Chinese. All of them. There have never been any problems.

(silence)

Question: Is the government doing anything to preserve the languages of any of these groups, as their numbers shrink?

Answer: No. The government does not see a reason to do this. After all, we are all Chinese. We encourage the groups to maintain their heritage by wearing their traditional clothing and singing and dancing. This is how we maintain diversity.

Sometimes there are just no words....

The next stop on our trip was Dali, the cradle of culture for many national minorities in China. After another overnight train trip, we all climbed on board a tour boat to putter around Erhai lake for a while.

Jesse and I point out that we are, in fact, on a lake.

It was a pleasant ride, even if we were all still extremely tired from the train. The highlight was a stop at a small island in the middle of the lake: an island filled with waterfalls, beaches, and warning signs...

"Child's beard have results to show a person to lead a square..."
Well duh.

Finally, a place in China that was just pretty and green and blue.
That's not a gigantic and scary person in the water, by the way.
It's a statue.
And Nell is in between.

We stayed in Dali for one night, and had great fun with the holes in the ground that were our only toilets while we were there.

Our final destination was an ancient town called Lijiang, where we were to stay for three days visiting happy national minorities and watching them sing and dance, just as we heard they love to do. Also on the itinerary: a giant mountain called "Yulong Snow Mountain" and two relatively free days to adventure as we pleased (and we certainly did).

Our hotel was located right in the ancient town, so right outside our door we were able to buy pineapple halves and other assorted fruits, as well as wander down the skinny pedestrian streets and look at the ubiquitous shops and restaurants. At one of these restaurants, Will, Jesse and I stopped and dined on the finest braised eggplant (still my favorite Chinese food). Afterwards, Will and I went to another restaurant and tried, apprehensively, some Yunnan province red wine. To our complete and utter surprise, this wine actually tasted like wine, and so we happily remained there for several hours.

(Note: in retrospect (retrospect=America) I have realized that the Yunnan wine was pretty bad itself, but in comparison to the other wines of China, it was downright amazing.)

The following morning (April 22nd, for those who are keeping track), it was time to visit the Yulong Snow Mountain. On our way, we stopped at a Naxi village to see some...

...national minority singing and dancing. Figures.

We had two options for going up the mountain. Option one involved taking a short gondola ride up a nearby mountain in order to get nice scenic pictures of the Yulong Snow Mountain. Option two involved going up the Snow Mountain itself. It also involved oxygen masks and an insurance waiver. While I would have normally chosen option two, option one was fifty kuai cheaper (which, while only $7 American, seemed like a lot more at the time) . Plus, we ended up in a field full of Yak.

And Yak Yogurt!
(Caitlyn and Me)

And actual Yak! Incidentally, if you find yourself in a field of Yak...
Don't stand near one. It may charge you.
Not that that happened.
I was perfectly safe.
Sort of.

Jesse, tech wizard that he is, changed the settings on my camera to make for some more artsy shots of the mountains.

Yulong Snow Mountain- Pretty Darn Big

The next day I have no photographic records for, yet the memory burns in my mind like an a terrible terrible sunburn. I will try, as best I can, to recreate (in a thousand words, to give you a good picture) what happened on this day. I might start by saying that this day, though it seemed so ordinary at first, would soon turn into my favorite day in China.

Moments after I awoke at the crack of noon-thirty, I stepped outside my room and was harassed by Maria, who wanted to know if I would care to take a short bike ride through the ancient city. I had nothing else to do, so I said OK.

Maria, Ben, Chris and I walked down to the bike rental store and secured bikes for the day for $2 a piece. Oh the extravagance. We then immediately proceeded to stand there for twenty minutes as Ben attempted to figure out where we were going. I didn't realize we had a goal, so I asked him why we didn't just ride around the town until we found something cool.

"Because we're going to visit monasteries," he said.

"Oh." Then a policeman arrived to help us out. We (Maria and Ben) asked him, in our best (semi-comprehensible) Chinese where the monasteries were. He showed us a map of the ancient city. Then he pointed to the top of the map. Then he pointed somewhere vaguely off the map. "Around there."

There was a contingent (Ben) who wanted to ask more people about the whereabouts of this monastery, but every now and then the majority does rule in China, and the other three of us were able to convince him (by riding away) that, since we had a general direction, we should get started.

It was a lovely ride through the ancient town, if you forget the times we almost crashed into pedestrians. After twenty minutes, we came to some sort of park and a stream. This is where the old town ended and the new town began (and where the map ended). After eating a couple of pineapple halves, we decided to continue north. After all, how far north of the ancient town could the monastery be?

We biked through city streets until we found one very large street leading towards the mountains on the east. There were mountains in every direction, forming a bowl around Lijiang, so at the very least- it would be impossible to get TOO lost (by more then ten miles or so).

Every so often, we would stop and ask directions. A shopkeep, a businessman, a gas station attendant, a man chopping wood. They all seemed to be pointing us in the same general direction with the comforting thought that "it is very near." We left the city and started biking through farmland. We reached another ancient town that competes with Lijiang for tourists. The monastery remained "very near." We managed to shake off the people trying to sell us things and continued on through more of the beautiful farmland. The farmers themselves were often out in the fields, harvesting or planting or whatever with just their bare hands and a few smaller tools. If one of them got a hold of a John Deere tractor, China would overtake America in a matter of years.

Two hours later. Hot, dehydrated, and on the other side of the mountains, we were once again "very near." We arrived in the smallest, most stereotypical Chinese village imaginable. The man we asked directions from was actually laying layers of mud to build a sort of wall. We couldn't understand his accent, so Maria called Dr. Sun and handed the phone over. When she took the phone back, Dr. Sun simply said "His mandarin is very bad. I can not understand him." and hung up.

What we got, in the form of some sort of charades from hell, was that the monastery was just up this large mountain, but we had to walk it. Since we had dedicated three hours already to this adventure, we decided to go for it. We chained our bikes together in the most theft-proof method possible (against the warnings/profiteering of an old lady who wanted us to keep them at her house) and started our hike up the mountain. And, of course, up the mountain was synonymous with "through the graveyard."

Chinese graveyards are very different from American ones. It seems as though they have parties up there and light fireworks on graves of loved ones so that they can celebrate too. Everywhere we went, shells of spent fireworks littered the ground. Also, in what was an entirely disconcerting moment, we picked up what looked like money on the ground. Printed in English, oddly enough, was "Bank of Hell Currency." Later, I found out that it is tradition to burn hellnotes for your relatives to spend in heaven. Or hell. Or whatever. I never really understood that part of Chinese culture.

We climbed on and saw no other people for half an hour. Then... hoofs. A clip-clop coming our way. It had been so long since we had seen anyone, we hid like Frodo from a Ring-wraith and jumped to the side of the road. On a parallel road, coming up, was what could have easily passed for the Chinese Marlboro Man, smoking astride his horse and, in a modern twist, listening to his ipod. He didn't see us, and we're pretty sure he didn't hear us, either. We followed him and his horses up the mountain, hoping that he was on a pilgrimage to see the monks. Another half an hour later, we had lost the scent of the horses and given up hope.

Then, suddenly- over the next ridge we climbed- we saw it! More trees and graves! Oh...

So we turned around, and I promised Chris, Maria, and Ben that when I told the story, I would end it like this (and ignore the part about taking another excruciating two hours to bike back): We may not have found a physical Tibetan monastery that day, but we certainly found the Tibetan monastery within ourselves and within our friendships, and THAT made the whole trip worth it.

That evening, after we returned the bikes and hobbled to the nearest dining establishment, I pulled out a pre-paid calling card that I had purchased in Beijing and started to call my girlfriend, Liza, who was in Spain. It was her birthday, and I had saved this card especially for that moment. The card did not work.

I tried again. It still didn't work. I looked at the small print on the back of the card. "This card will only work in the municipality of Beijing." Great.

I pulled out my best Chinese and started asking where I could buy a phone card. "Just over there," they would reply, "it is very near." I knew enough of that statement to become very sullen, and I trudged along. Eventually I found a phone store, and, after explaining exactly what I needed, they told me that they didn't have anything like that. "You don't have phone cards?" I asked. And again, the answer was no.

At least, I thought, I could catch Liza online. So I went back to the street with the internet cafe and... all the power in about four blocks of the city was out. Which, you know... figured.

Drunk with a mixture of exhaustion and incredulity, I ran down the streets of the old city, looking for someone... anyone... with a computer and an internet connection. When I saw lights again, I swerved into a shop where a young woman was using a computer. What I tried to say was "hello, could I please use your computer? I will pay you, I just have to talk to someone very quickly to say happy birthday. It is very important."

What I actually said was more like "Hello. Is that a computer you have there? It is imperative that I use it. I must speak. It is very famous that I do this. VERY famous. Here is money."

The woman offered me the computer and tried to politely decline any sort of compensation, but I simply put it on the table and said "no, you're being very nice to me. Please, take this." I caught Liza right before she was about to get offline, so I considered the adventure a success.

THE NEXT MORNING

Over the course of the previous day, Ben (fearless leader) had been plotting with some of the other group leaders to charter a bus and go to Shangri-la. Yes, THAT Shangri-la. So we did exactly that.

The trip to Shangri-la was long. Five hours each way, to be exact. To break up the monotony, we took a pit stop at one of the largest gorges in the world: Tiger Leaping Gorge. It got its name because, according to legend, a tiger once leaped across the gorge with the help of an extremely large rock in the center.

Will and Me at Tiger Leaping Gorge
I apologize that the extremely large rock is not in this picture.
But I swear, it's there, and it's extremely large.

At the end of our visit to the gorge, I purchased some tasty walnuts. I'll explain why I mentioned that later, but let's just say that, as I type the word "walnuts" now, a month later, my head hurts and my muscles tense up.

On the bus again, I taught those nearest me fun time-killing games. The crowd favorite, "The Essences Game" (which Liza taught me) is a person-guessing game in which no helpful questions may be asked... only vague "essence" queries such as "what sort of flower/geographic formation/grade of gasoline/potato chip/Lord of the Rings Character would this person be?"

After that, we re-cast the Star Wars movies with people on the program. We are not nerds. Nope.

Our arrival in Shangri-la was anti-climactic. It was an old town, much like Lijiang, and a tourist trap. The only things different were the temperature (it was cold) and a third kind of writing on all the signs (Tibetan!). The cool stuff, as we learned, was a short bus ride away.

Seven and a half hours after our trip began, we finally beheld what Shangri-la was all about.

The monastery was magnificent... enormous rooms holding thirty and forty foot high Buddhas carved out of wood. There were monks outside, seemingly working on a new structure. I didn't realize this was an option, but some of my friends offered to carry dirt up a ramp to the top of this structure and help stamp it down with their feet. Sadly, I can not say that I helped build a Tibetan Monastery in Shangri-la... but I do know some folks who did.

As with all semi-touristy attractions, Shangri-la had its share of panhandlers, cute children for paid pictures, and wares-merchants. I managed to avoid the panhandlers and cute children, but I just had to buy a couple of Tibetan knives from the vendors. They were really great. I would show them to you, but they were confiscated out of my checked luggage in Beijing (this, despite my pointing at a sign that said "knives are OK if they are in checked luggage. The woman at the gate responded "these are not knives" and I was too dumbstruck to try and fight that.)

After three hours, we boarded our bus again and headed back for one last night in Lijiang. As usual, we had fun on the bus.

On the five hour bus ride back from Shangri-la

That night I spent shaking, sweating, and vomiting relentlessly. Stupid walnuts.

The next morning, Jesse offered me a "nuclear option" stomach pill again (he had previously offered one in Chengdu), and this time I took it. According to him, the pill would "kill everything in [my] stomach. Everything."

I shuffled my feet all the way to the airport (where I spent some time sleeping on the floor) and generally tried to pass out all the way back to Kunming. The second we got back to the hotel, I got in bed and turned out all the lights. It was about six o' clock. I slept until nine the next morning, and I felt much better. I was, however, unmotivated to eat anything else while I remained in China.

From Kunming we flew back to Beijing, where we had one last free day before returning home. I went to the Pearl Market with the Will, Jesse, Nell, and Hillary and proceeded to buy things like a kid in an under-priced candy store. My German friend, Bill, who I had met on the plane to Harbin, met us there and went with me to KFC. He wanted a debriefing of my time in China, and we had a very nice chat that was helpful in wrapping-up my whole China experience.

That evening, we had our farewell banquet. Each Chinese class was supposed to do a short skit, but our class only had three members who showed up at the banquet (to be fair, a lot had left Beijing earlier). I thought we had gotten off free, but then Will started a chant that went something like "Mike's class, Mike's class" and everyone picked it up... so I got up and did a brief rant about why my class wasn't there. Then I told an awful joke about Pirates and Beijing cab drivers. It's not one I wish to save for posterity.

One last look at Shaoyuan 5

We said our goodbyes, and the next morning we took leave of Beida. The four months we were there went by so fast. I still find it hard to believe I was even in China. But I have pictures and quite a few new friends who seem to have materialized out of nowhere, so I'm reasonably convinced that I was there.

I have now been back for over a month. I apologize for those who were expecting a quick trip-summary, but, like I said at the start of this blog, I can occasionally be lazy.

I hope that I have written down, as accurately as possible, my experiences in China. I have a terrible memory, so in a few years what I've written here is all I'm going to remember, I'm sure. I've enjoyed sharing it with you, and have appreciated all the comments (Kay). I encourage you all to visit China sometime- it is a fascinating and amazing place.

With that, I think I will end this all-too-long narrative. This will be the last post on this blog, but I've had such fun writing it that perhaps I'll have to do another at some point.

Thanks for reading. Zaijian, y'all.

-Mike

Pan-China Adventure

2008-04-17T12:49:00.003-04:00

I've had spotty internet since we started off (on the 12th) on our tour of China. This is not an update, but rather the promise of an update. What I have to do (I've decided) is write up the entire update without internet, and then post it the next time I have access. The only reason I haven't done so yet is because every time I'm about to do a writeup on a bus or an overnight train, someone asks to borrow my computer to finish a paper for class.

I'm taking good notes in my head, though, and I have acquired some great pictures. For now, though, I leave you with a shot of Team Victorious leaving the train station in Beijing.

Left to right: Alice, Hillary, Jesse, Ben (Team Captain), Will, Me, Nell

I was right about that whole "what I said is getting cut" thing

2008-04-10T03:20:00.003-04:00

Hey everyone, here's a link to the show I was on. I think I look and sound sort of dumb. And my hair is weird. Oh well.

Things that were cut:

The moderator asks me whether Americans will be OK with a black man in the White House. I explain why that's a bad question and why the media needs to take more responsibility in reporting based on policies.

The moderator asks me whether Americans will be OK with a woman in the White House. I say that the same answer applies.

The moderator asks me an actual question about economic policy. Cut.

At one point I start coughing a lot (I had the very end of a cold). They cut that. I'm happy about that specific cut.

Things I enjoy:

The moderator asks me a question about the types of supporters that Obama and Hillary draw. I try to avoid stereotyping and so talk about their image branding efforts.

He then turns to the Hillary girl and says "is it true that most of the supporters behind Hillary Clinton... are women and latin people."

At another point, he reveals his very thin layer of neutrality. "Yes, when Hillary is voted into the White House... presumably... That'd be GREAT!.... in the opinions of some people."

In general, he keeps trying to talk about stereotypes, colors, and large ethnic groups, and if we don't answer a question the way he wants us to, he rephrases and asks again.

I make a few feeble attempts at jokes. Very feeble.

And overall the show is boring. I would recommend watching the whole thing only to help you go to sleep.

http://www.cctv.com/program/e_dialogue/20080409/103862.shtml

Success!

2008-04-07T04:52:00.000-04:00

The show was moved from tonight to tomorrow night, so I'll send the link out then (maybe)- but this isn't about that.

Just a few seconds ago, I received tangible evidence that all of my time attempting to learn Chinese has not been in vain.

The phone in my room rang, so I picked it up and said hello. The woman on the other line said "ni hao" and then talked for about ten seconds. I understood none of what she said. I said, in Chinese- "who are you looking for?" And she said something again, and this time I picked up from the context that she wasn't looking for anyone in particular. She ended with "keyi ma? (is this possible/are you able/is this OK/may I/can I/might I?)" And I realized that she was a telemarketer or something and wanted to talk me into buying something!

I told her "Bu keyi, duibuqi" and hung up the phone after saying goodbye to a stranger who (I fervently hope) thought that I could actually speak Chinese.

If I weren't double-majoring already, I'd take a few more language classes back at William and Mary.

Half of What I Said Will Probably be Cut

2008-04-03T03:24:00.000-04:00

Just got back from CCTV- now THAT was an experience.

A driver from Beida took us there, where we had to wait outside for our contact to come meet us. We then walked through two checkpoints of armed guards into a really amazing lobby. TVs, of course, were everywhere. She led us to the newsroom, where we met our host and got put into makeup alongside him. While we were sitting there, he asked questions such as "does Chelsea Clinton have a boyfriend?" and "Why does America want to boycott the Olympics?" We declined to answer the second question.

Once in the studio (really cool- four camera angle setup) we all sat down and he started practicing saying our names. Then, strangely, he pulled a mask out of his pocket and showed it to us. (the following is paraphrased as best as I can remember)

"I carried this around in 2003 during the SARS epidemic. It is too thin, though. It wouldn't do anything."

We gave him confused nods.

"When the SARS started, all the western media started to say terrible things about China, and then, in a very wise decision, the Chinese government decided to fix the problem and become more transparent. So I think that's a good thing."

O...kay...

And then we started the show. We received no instructions as to the format, how he would like us to discuss, or anything else. He asked us for our opinions about things, and we gave them. We were all very reasonable and respectful of each other's opinions, there was no yelling, it was a very nice discussion. It will probably be very boring to watch.

It was clear that he was a big Hillary supporter based on the kinds of questions he asked Katie, who was the Hillary supporter. He asked me a number of questions, all of which I felt were trying to bait me into talking about some sort of ridiculous trumped up non-issue. One that he asked me that I'm almost certain is getting edited out was a two-part question. First, he asked me about Barack and how the nation would feel to have a black president. I told him outright that I felt like the media was focusing on these things which were non-issues instead of the facts, and it was a bad question. He later asked me what I felt about having a woman in the White House, at which point I said "again, I feel like that sort of question is just wrong to ask, because--" but then he cut me off and asked another question.

I realized today that everything I had previously thought about the media was entirely correct. There is no desire at all to talk about actual policies and actions, and every desire to talk about race, gender, flip-flopping, crying, and whatever other nonsense that the media feels will be somewhat sensationalist. The few times that Matt, Katie, or I tried to discuss actual policies, we were cut off very quickly and no follow-up questions were asked.

All in all, it was a reasonably good show- I don't think that I'll come off looking TOO stupid or anything like that (well, depending on how they edit)- but it really does make me lose my faith in the media even more.

Don't listen to what the media tells you. If you really want to be informed, then go to THOMAS (through the Library of Congress) and you can do a quick search for all of the Bills that any of the candidates has ever sponsored. Compare these bills to the bills that other senators sponsor. Check the voting records. See what your candidate REALLY believes in, at least enough to try to pass a law about it. Then, pick your candidate- not based on party lines or media rhetoric, but on action that that candidate has taken with which you agree.

But all that venting aside, I'll be able to post next week sometime a website where you can go and watch the show. You'll be able to tell which panelist I am because I'll be the one starting almost every response with "well I don't actually think that matters--"

28 Days Later

2008-04-01T04:19:00.001-04:00

I like the idea of continuity and self-reference, and I noticed that in 28 days, I will be home again. One thing is certain- when I wrote my original post 28 days before I came to China, I had no idea what was going on. I put off thinking about it until the last minute, packed the night before I left (forgot a few things I needed) and ended up on the other side of the world.

I'll be writing more of my final thoughts and overall impressions as the days tick away. We still have one more week of school and then a thirteen day trip around China, so there should be plenty to write about.

There are many reasons that I'll miss China, but there are also plenty why I'll be glad to be back. For example, the washing machines in the dorms (and hanging them up to dry) have all but utterly destroyed my clothes. Just last night, one pair of pants emerged from the machine with a giant hole in it. The washing machine allows only those truly deserving clothes, with greatness of heart and valor, to survive unscathed.

So all that is to say that, in a stark reversal of my usual temperament, if you ask me if I would like to go on a shopping trip at any point this summer, I will probably say yes.

I was going to do some sort of April Fool's joke, but then something actually happened that seemed funny enough. For the debate at CCTV tomorrow I have been upgraded from Independent to Republican, because CCTV requested a Republican and the other two people going are supporting Clinton and Obama. So regardless of my actual beliefs (right now I disagree and agree with different things and haven't decided which issue is the most important to me as far as supporting a candidate goes) I get to play my favorite role of devil's advocate against two people who essentially agree with all of each other's points. That, at least, should be a lot of fun.

Great Wall (or: "You buy! You buy! Two one dollar! I not try to cheat you!")

2008-03-30T09:51:00.000-04:00

One thing that people generally don't mention about the Great Wall is that, in most places, you have to hike up a mountain for about an hour just to get a glimpse of actual wall. Also, people will try to sell you things for most of the hike. But it is at a great discount. Because you are good friend. And they sell for big loss.

I bought two t-shirts for 25 kuai (3 bucks) after working them down from 300 kuai. I didn't really want them, but once you've haggled with someone for ten minutes you sort of feel obligated to buy something.

We forgot it was Spring...

First View of the Wall

It's a big wall.

Alice, Jesse, Vince, Will, Nell, Hillary, Me

We had a snowball fight on top of one of the guard towers.

After two hours, it was time to go. We were all very sad.

On Sunday Will, Hillary and I went to the Winter Palace, which was really just like a gigantic garden with lots of lakes. They would have been lakes, at least, if there had been water involved. Big muddy holes is more like it. It was a beautiful day, though, and a very nice place to visit overall.

Something we don't see much in Beijing

Hiding behind a tree in the bamboo forest... can you see me?

In other news, I'm going to be on CCTV on Thursday as part of a three person panel discussing the United States elections. As I was walking up the mountain to the Great Wall, Dr. Sun came up beside me and started asking me all of these questions about politics. Afterwards, he asked me to be on the panel. Which is funny, because I don't actually know that much about the individual candidates, so I guess I have to start studying.

That's all for now. We only have one more action to learn in our 24-action Tai Chi class, so I know that the semester is winding down. Just a few more weeks of "young maid passing the shuttle through the loom" and "finding the needle in the sea" and "grabbing the sparrow's tail" for me. I'm about ready to be back, though. I miss fake Chinese food. That's very sad, isn't it?

All the Tea in China

2008-03-24T10:06:00.000-04:00

I found it. I found where they keep it. It's all in on a small street known, in English, as "the tea market." Go figure. Ben, Hillary, Nell and I took a nine hour tour over to the Tea Market today just for fun. We're getting much better at the subway- only took us an hour and a half to get there.

Once we arrived at the street, we were greeted with the familiar opening of doors in every direction and the ubiquitous "hallo!" of the shopkeepers. Upon browsing through one of the chock-full-of-tea stores, I had a realization- I know absolutely nothing about tea. I felt very silly to even be in a place called the Tea Market. As we walked around, salespeople would shove plates full of dried up leaves at me. I wasn't really sure if I was supposed to smell it or touch it or just look at it intently, so most often I just tried to ignore them, which is HARD to do in a place where determined sellers will actually come up to you and physically pull you towards their wares. It's more annoying than invasive- as I've said before, I'm pretty sure I could take a small Asian lady if she got violent.

After finishing up the smaller shops, we set our sights a little higher- the Beijing International Tea Market Building. A giant mall filled only with tea shops. We spent a good deal of time discussing how such an arrangement could work out for the individual shops economically. Anyway, we were harassed by the standard "Jin lai kan yi xia!" (Come in and look right-quick) and we dutifully (like the easy targets that we are) went in and looked right-quick. Finally, on the top floor, we passed a shop and were NOT yelled at or attacked in any way. At first we thought that someone forgot to man his or her battle stations, but then we saw a friendly looking lady just sitting at her table and sipping some tea. When she saw that we were looking at her, she said, in English, "Would you like to try some tea?" And then we had a two hour tea-party as we tried every kind of tea in her store, learned about its origins and proper preparations, and bought most all of the aforementioned tea. A little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing.

Afterwards, we went to "snack street" where I had all the hunger scared out of me by piles and piles of scorpions-on-a-stick. The shopkeepers would wave them in my face, and the scorpions would wave too because they were still very much alive. I am not very squeamish, but I am sane, so I went and got a happy meal.

I haven't put any pictures up lately because my camera ran out of batteries and I have to borrow a charger to make it work again, but it should be clicking away this weekend when we go to the Great Wall. Last weekend was pretty decent, but nothing particularly noteworthy other than going to the Summer Palace, which would have been fun to talk about if I had pictures. We're going back, and I'll take pictures then.

I hope everyone had a happy Easter!

I got bored and shaved.

2008-03-20T00:04:00.000-04:00

As a joke, I left a little bit in the middle, which I have since shaved off. This picture really doesn't do it justice, though.

It was worth not shaving for over a month just for the double-takes I'm getting now.

And now for the... ummm... last weekend's update.

FRIDAY:

We went to a bar district that was located around a lake. I took a picture, but it was far too blurry. What is of note about this trip is that I did not actually make it into any bar, since there were two very drunk Americans who decided to join our group and get us a good rate on drinks at a bar. At each establishment, one would walk up to the person working the door and start speaking in very fluent Chinese. He would then turn around and list a very reasonable price for a beer that he had managed to achieve. The other American, misinterpreting this as an entrance fee rather than the price of a beer, would invariably approach the doorman and proceed to scream at him in English and Chinese about the proper way to treat people and how, if we were Chinese, there wouldn't be an entrance price. In every single case, there was, in fact, not. However, he apparently forgot this in the twenty steps that we had to take, in our embarrassment, between bars.

Dear US Government,

If you REALLY want to curb binge drinking, please find this American and videotape him on a random night out. It will be hilarious AND highly discouraging for anyone thinking of drinking to an equally stupid point.

SATURDAY:

Saturday looked like a warm day, so I didn't bring my coat, which means I didn't bring my camera. Other people have pictures of this day, but I don't have those pictures yet. When I do, I will post them. At least I say I will. Most likely, though, I will forget which day they belonged to and just lump them in with all of my China pictures and then, in twenty years while looking through my backup files, I will exclaim "there! there I am at the Temple of Heaven!"

So anyway, we went to the "Temple of Heaven" which is really an incorrect translation, since it's more like the "Altar of the Skies." It is an enormous structure in the middle of a concrete square that I can't really describe. Google it! It's really cool.

The coolest part, though, was the sprawling complex of gardens to the side of the Temple of Heaven. I have not seen so many trees and animals since I arrived in Beijing, and they were a welcome sight. Down one path, there was a small gazebo with an old toothless Chinese man playing the accordion. He could play the keyboard very well, but only knew one chord, it seemed, to play on the drones. There were a few older people around him singing a song along with the melody. One possible reason that karaoke is a much bigger success in Asia than in America is because Asians (Chinese people, at least) have no problem with singing as loud as they can in whatever pitch they find handy at the time. It was a lot of fun. As we were leaving, the Chinese man started to play an American folk song that we recognized but didn't know the words to. If we had, it could have been a great cross-cultural moment. Oh well.

Saturday night we went to see some acrobats. The show was amazing, and I can't really describe my mixture of fear and joy as I watched men jump and flip through hoops that were easily nine feet off the ground like it was the easiest thing in the world. There was no trampoline involved.

Also of note was a woman riding a unicycle on top of a large rolling ball while flipping bowls and spoons onto her head. What I hear is that there are certain cities in China where all they do is train for this stuff. I believe it.

After we left the theater and started walking back in the bitterly cold Beijing night, it struck me that there was another reason I was dumb for leaving my coat in the room.

SUNDAY:

On Sunday Will, Hillary, Alice, Nell, and I went by subway back to the Forbidden City area. It took us an hour and a half to get there, but we made it.

Our destination: that hill, which is entirely man-made.

The park surrounding the hill was very peaceful and quiet, and on top of the hill was a very large Buddha and a great view of the Forbidden City. At the back of the hill, we found a great mass of older Chinese people dancing, singing, playing hackey-sack, and otherwise having a good time. I got some videos that I WOULD post on youtube.....

This guy is doing street calligraphy with water. We saw a few people doing this.

We stayed for a while and then headed back.

View of Wudaoku from the Subway- in case anyone was wondering what
Wudaoku was, since I reference it a lot.

Overall it was a very peaceful and green weekend- a much needed respite from the normal Beijing feel.

Before I close, Bobby had a question about my views on the Beijing Olympics.

The Beijing Olympics:

There are a lot of people talking about how we should boycott the Beijing Olympics in response to human rights abuses, Darfur, Tibet, and whatever else. I read somewhere that, according to the article's writer, Bush attending these Olympics (as Bush has promised) would be akin to FDR attending the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Here's the problem with all of that. We assume that boycotting the Olympics would be like taking a stand and telling them that world opinion is not on their side about the above issues. However, I don't believe that the message would actually sink in, and in fact I feel as though much more progress would be made on those things if the Chinese Olympics were strongly supported.

When Spielberg dropped out of the planning committee (he was helping design the opening show, and backed out because of objections over Darfur), the Chinese press had a week long "what an idiot" chant going along every media outlet. And the Chinese people, according to what I can see, completely and wholeheartedly agree. I have not heard solidarity like that since there was a bill about pasteurizing cheese when I was in France. They ALL thought Steven Spielberg was being childish, unfair, and ignorant. Now, I'm not going to go in to whether or not I believe they are right, because I don't think that matters in the least for this question.

What matters most, in my mind, is what the average Chinese person believes and what they WILL believe given a certain set of actions. The average Chinese person that I have met is extremely friendly, very likable, and super-excited about the Olympics. It has nothing to do with politics for them- it is a symbol that they as a people (not the government) have been able to prosper to a point where they can hold such a prestigious event. If you try to take that away from the, regardless of the reason, there will be more weeks of "what idiots they are" and the country will become even more sure of its own decisions (if the dishonorable idiots who pulled out of the Olympics are saying something is wrong, then obviously that thing must be right).

Again, this has nothing to do with right and wrong or what I would or wouldn't like to happen, but it's the most logical eventuality if Olympic boycotts are realized. Personally, I see the Olympics as a great thing for China, and I feel as though it will give the Chinese people more exposure to internationals (and more opportunities to make friends), which is a very good thing for both them and us. Also, I've never seen people so excited about the Olympics. They wouldn't "learn a lesson" from an Olympic failure- they'd just be really sad.

Besides, in my view, change comes from economic motives. If you strongly disagree with the government of China, and you disagree with human rights violations and unfair working conditions, etc, etc... then don't purchase Chinese manufactured goods. That makes a lot more sense to me.

Quote of the week, from Business Strategies, as always (from a competing team upset that everyone was voting for our market differentiation campaign):

"You can't just use George Clooney as a perpetual trump card!"

Why I Don't Shop in China

2008-03-14T05:08:00.000-04:00

I wish I had gotten a picture of this. Will, Maria, Elliot, and I were walking around the Wudaoku area, and I made the mistake of glancing to my left as we passed a large electronics store with plate glass windows. Inside the store I saw approximately zero customers and around thirty salespeople. And every single one was staring at me and, I imagine, smiling hungrily. I'm not sure what sort of message they're going for, but sometimes having a larger sales force MIGHT not be the answer.

I'm working on a weekend update (we saw acrobats, the Temple of Heaven, and even returned to the area around the Forbidden City) but I wanted to throw out a quick note about the current situation first. I'm not sure if this is in the American news, but a certain part of China (it rhymes with Ribet) is undergoing riots and crackdowns at a level unheard of in over 20 years. Cars, shops, and tour buses have apparently been burned in the capital. Depending on your sources, there are either ten dead shopkeepers burned to death by the rioters (official accounts) or eighty dead rioters shot by the crackdown (...actual reality accounts). I came by this information in bits and pieces, since most every source that I access is subsequently banned and shut down by the country. Youtube is gone for who knows how long because there is riot footage, apparently. I'm sort of pissed about not being allowed to use youtube, so I encourage all of you to seek out this riot footage and watch it as many times as possible just to piss of the folks who would rather no one be aware of this situation. It would be a ridiculous understatement to say that mass censorship of this degree makes me seethingly angry, and is certainly not convincing me of the correctness of China's (to quote Eddie Izzard) "Do you have a flag? No flag no country. According to the rules that I... made up... just now." arguments. (I apologize if the previous quotation is incorrect. I would double-check it on youtube, but...)

Long story short, I don't think that I'll be going to that place, as was the original plan. Dr. Sun hasn't told us about our contingency-plan trip yet, but I'll report on that as soon as I know.

In other, less serious news, I'd like to present the following dialogue between me and the personification of my shower this morning.

Me: Good morning, shower.

Shower: A fine morning indeed.

Me: How about a moderately temperate shower on this fine morning?

Shower: Hop on in!

Me: Shower, why are you scalding hot?

Shower: I'm sorry, why don't you turn down the dial?

Me: The dial is down to the very bottom. You are still searing my flesh. Wait a second, now you are spurting ice cubes.

Shower: Sorry about that, why don't you just turn me back up.

Me: Well I am, and I'm still near hypothermi--

Shower: BURN, capitalist pig!

... or something like that, at least.

Business Strategies is Still a Joke

2008-03-12T03:57:00.000-04:00

But George Clooney is awesome. That's why, when handed yet another entirely vague set of directives to make up an entire marketing plan for an Italian furniture company within twenty minutes, I decided that he should be the cornerstone of our campaign. After the presentation, which also included lots of made-up numbers and impossible-to-really-know assertions, our teacher said "I like your idea for the celebrity spokesperson, but it brings up a question. What is the criteria for selecting the best celebrity spokesperson for your company?"

I made a decision-tree and gave it to her. It looked like this.

She laughed. Sometimes I feel like she knows that there's no real way to fill a two-hour class with relevant content based on the phrase "trouble the water to catch the fish."

Weekly Update

2008-03-10T05:36:00.000-04:00

Is this weekly now? I feel like I've cheated my original plan, but I feel as though the posts I do now are more content-rich. At least that's what I tell myself so that I can sleep at night.

Before I get into the actual weekly update, do you know what I found in China that really boosts my ego? Engaging in any sort of strength competition with small Asian girls. It's not fair, but fairness has very little to do with self-esteem.

FRIDAY

On Friday evening we took our first Chinese class field trip. We had been bugging Li Laoshi for a while to take us somewhere, and we settled on the Beijing Opera, at a place near Tienanmen Square called the Laoshi Tea House. To get there, we had to take the subway, which was...

You know, a little crowded.

But that's OK because, though the crowds at the subway stations are huge, the discipline and order of every passenger is impeccable. It was eerie how quiet a mass of thousands of people could be while shuffling along in an orderly manner.

Once we were in the subway, we all became very close friends. I would show you how close, but my friends were enjoying my company so much that they got close enough so as to restrict all arm movement, so I couldn't get my camera out. As Lauren said, if we had been forced to take the subway before we all knew each other, it might have been awkward.

We made small talk amongst ourselves on the way there, and at some point Steve said something about Communists. Lauren and Maria launched into a chorus about how he wasn't allowed to do that here. Steve retaliated with a very loud diatribe about how no one could understand what he was saying so he could say whatever he wanted about Communists. The train stopped.

"Which door do we get out of?" said Steve.

"The one over there" said a helpful Chinese man behind him, pointing at the opposing door. Oh irony, what fun you are.

We made it to the performance with about ten minutes to spare, and they brought us several light snacks- pumpkin seeds, spring rolls, random balls of things that could either be covered in sugar or flour... the normal stuff. None of us had eaten, so we devoured the snacks available and then asked about getting more. After finding that each spring roll was only 1 kuai (.13 cents) we promptly ordered 35.

Now, the actual Beijing Opera turned out to be much better than I was expecting. I had prepared myself for two hours of solid glass-shattering screeches and overwrought gestures, but as it turns out, my preconceived notions were entirely wrong. Except for the costumes. I was right about those...

We were in the back. I'm so glad my camera has 30X zoom

There was a mixture of singing, music playing, dancing, martial arts, tumbling, sound-effects making, and even stand-up comedy. After the comedians came out, I asked Li Laoshi to translate some of the things that she was laughing at. One of the jokes was basically this:

1- "So there's a farmer, and he has three animals. A is pig. B is horse. C is dog."
2- "C is dog, B is horse. Pig is what?"
1- "A"
2- "What is A?"
1- "Pig."

And oh how the people did laugh. I feel, like I usually do, as though something was lost in the translation. In general, though, I am very proud that the Chinese people have now raised their humor to near-Abbot and Costello levels.

After the show, of which I have several short videos that I'll try to edit into something watchable, we took a group picture.

Left to right: Heather, Me, Maria, Steve, Li Laoshi, Lauren, Jennifer, Anna
(classmates not present: CJ and Alisha)

Many more pictures with various combinations of people were taken, and pretty soon Maria started jumping in shots to try and screw them up. I tried to stop her one time. I tell you this to explain the following picture, which I enjoy quite a bit.

It was as if an occult hand had reached out and saved the picture.

After returning to the Wudaoku subway, we all went to Pyro (even Li Laoshi!) for a post-opera drink.

SATURDAY

I signed up for a trip to go to the 798 art district. It consists of an enormous complex of former factories (textile mills, mostly) that were taken over by rogue artists in the late 80's and built into the center for the Chinese modern art movement. Once you're there, you're allowed to walk around and go into pretty much any building to see free, museum-quality modern art exhibits and put your finger on the pulse of the current trends. If you like art, you would love this place.

I wasn't able to get any pictures of the really cool stuff, because every building had a "no pictures" policy, but there was some pointillism, impressionism, abstract, sculpture, video (one about a man and his horse... and by horse I mean bike that he constructed a horse's head around), etc... If any of my friends got some sneaky shots, I'll post them in the next blog.

There was ONE place we were allowed to take pictures, and that was in an exhibit featuring the too-often-ignored medium of enormous mirrors. The highlight was a giant cube in the middle, the inside of which was all glass.

Amy, Maria and I inside modern art

Saturday night we tried to watch V for Vendetta, but that turned out to be an epic fail as, after getting halfway through the movie, the computer we were watching on overheated. Instead, we (Jessie, Ben, Me, Will, Hillary) ended up sitting around and talking about bad roommate experiences we had in the past. Jessie and Ben currently live with a really nice guy who, at the same time, KNOWS he is a bad roommate and seems to revel in it. A prolonged and well-acted story involving his morning routine of waking up at 5AM and banging on every object in the room while simultaneously talking loudly to himself won out as being the most hilarious of the night.

SUNDAY

On Sunday afternoon I finally got to meet Daisy, my grandmother's friend and tour guide from almost twenty years ago. We met at the Wudaoku subway station and went to a local cafe for some tea and cake. She brought a friend with her who isn't quite a monk but still locks herself in Tibetan monestaries for months at a time. And also, she knows Gong-fu, the actually dangerous version of Tai Chi. She didn't speak very much English, but Daisy translated and every now and then I was able to throw out some Chinese vocabulary. Daisy invited me to Peking Roast Duck on Thursday night, and that's what Beijing is famous for, so it sounds good to me.

That evening, Will and I walked into the English Bar expecting to continue teaching Casablanca. Instead, we found that the TV had been moved and we had to make up a lesson on the spot. We talked about American politics for an hour and a half. Oh, and films and TV shows. They LOVE "Prison Break" here. In fact, every time I introduce myself to a room of Chinese people, they all chuckle and someone will yell "Michael Scofield!" like I know who that is. They enjoyed our lecture, though, and decided at the end that, if Forrest Gump were a real person, they'd want him to be President. I just imagined him sitting in a room full of high ranking officials saying "My momma always said..." and it made me laugh.

MONDAY

Tai Chi, Chinese, and laundry.

Movie review of the week: The Legend of 1900

One of our Chinese friends suggested this movie to Will and lent him her copy. It was made a while ago by an Italian director (who also wrote the script) and follows the life of a boy abandoned on a transatlantic steamer in the year 1900. I understood exactly why our Chinese friend (for whom English and American movies are both relatively new) liked it- there was a simple fable being told and lots of interesting music being played. The visuals are excellent, and the idea isn't bad, but still this has to be the most terrible good movie I've ever seen. I call it a "good" movie, not because it was, but because the all of the plot, action, scenery, and especially the dialogue- are all direct rip-offs of other, actually good movies. The director/writer, while perhaps having a good grasp on the English language right now, has no idea the way people talked 100 years ago. In any given scene, if one were to think of the most cliched, overdone thing that a character could possibly say in that given situation, I guarantee that The Legend of 1900 will blow your mind with its psychic abilities.

The film opens on a poor trumpet player in the street, talking in a voiceover about the past five years. He walks into a pawn shop, and immediately divulges far too much information about himself to the proprietor. He actually says "that's a piece of history right there, my horn. That horn is my life, mister." And THEN there's the pawn shop owner saying he'll give some low sum, and the trumpet player says "what?! this is real brass, mister. Like I said, it's my life. I can't just sell my life." and then he walks out, only to turn around and, with much effort, sell it. As he's walking out, a pained expression crosses his face and he says "just let me play it one more time!" And, of course, he is allowed to do so.

It's the first movie in a long time that I have legitimately stopped halfway through. Will and I just acted out the rest of the movie ourselves. Don't see this movie.

And now, having written all that, I suddenly remembered that I wanted to make either a reference to Jake Reeder in this post or ask him a question through it. I have no IDEA what that reference or question might have been, though. If anyone else would like to ask Jake Reeder anything, though, you can reach him by posting on the comments page. You don't even have to KNOW Jake Reeder to do it. Go ahead, you know you want to.

"Yeah man, we got one upstairs..." (Weekend Review)

2008-03-03T21:40:00.000-05:00

I may have mentioned this before, but Peng, from the English Bar, has at least one of everything in the world. If he doesn't have something in sight, he either "has it upstairs" or is "getting that this Friday." The other night, Will and I went down there to study for our midterms. We ended up playing for five hours on two full sized basketball shooting machines (like the kind you'd see at a larger arcade). So I got a B+ on the midterm, but, as I told my teacher, I didn't try to cheat by cramming a lot of things I didn't REALLY know into my head the night before. What was on the test represented what I had truly absorbed from her teaching, and I was not trying to deceive her in any way. I was very proud of the spin.

FRIDAY NIGHT

We met up with two of Will's friends, (I will spell this incorrectly) Zhuang Ning and Tien Tien (literally translated "Sweet-sweet") and played more basketball. I'm proud to say that, on the righthand basketball machine at the English Study Bar in Beijing, China, I hold the high score of 122. (Take that, everyone who ever laughed at my athletic ability!)

Later we met up with some more people and went back to Pyro. One of the Chinese girls had a piece of paper and started drawing while we were at the table. Then she handed me this...

I'm on the right. You know, the cross between Wolverine and a Leprechaun.

Then the girl sitting next to her gave me this...

Apparently I have a big nose.
Earlier, Dannie looked at my driver's license picture and said "oh, you've gotten fatter."
I think it's a cultural thing. I love my Chinese friends.

Though not quite as good as the good times last weekend, good times were had by all. Before leaving the bar, Zhuang Ning invited Will and I to her birthday party on Saturday!

SATURDAY NIGHT

Zhuang called Will to tell him that we would be meeting at the English Bar at six and then going to dinner. We met and went to a restaurant called "The Secret Garden," which served Hunan dishes. I don't really know what characterizes a dish from that region, but whatever she ordered for us to spin around on the giant lazy susan was great.

As the dishes came around, we asked her and her friends what they were. Spicy beef, spicy chicken, shrimp (barbecued and eaten whole- the tail was especially delicious), and the best eggplant based dish I have ever eaten.

About halfway through the meal, a new dish came out.

We asked her what this dish was, and she said "oh, this very special. It is... ball of pig." Will and I looked nervously at each other. "Are you sure?" we said. She pulled out her pocket dictionary. The next few moments were tense. "Spare ribs" she finally said. Whew.

After dinner we went back to the English bar and played more basketball/ping-pong. Dannie's aunt made some delicious corn and rice-based sugary thing in a basket, and I had fun playing with an e-reader (it's like an electronic book that doesn't hurt your eyes) that someone was showing off.

Nifty.

SUNDAY NIGHT

I didn't have any homework, so I went with Will to the Bridge Cafe for an "American" breakfast. They did a very decent job, but it still tasted distinctly Chinese. I seriously have no idea how they do it. We stayed for a while and I read a few hundred pages in a book that Will is reading about an American who stayed behind in China after World War II and fought for Communism. Of course, after he fought for Communism, he was thrown in jail for sixteen years. It's not exactly a feel-good story.

We went to the English bar because Will was scheduled to teach for two hours and he asked me to tag-team it with him. Peng had, to our great, great, amazing surprise (sarcasm is difficult in print), purchased an enormous flat-screen TV that he put in the classroom, and he just wanted us to watch a movie with the class and stop it every ten minutes to explain difficult words. We were viewing possibly the worst movie that one could possibly use to teach modern English: Casablanca (I always forget whether to put movie titles in italics or quotation marks. Mary, you're an English teacher, right?)

Casablanca is an amazing movie! I had never seen it. However, it does have...

1. Accents: Every character in the film has an accent. Only of them is a neutral American accent. And he (Rick) only says two or three lines over and over again. No one in the class has a clue what anyone else is saying. Even if they did, though, they still have to contend with...

2. Antiquated phrases: the adult students are very quick to yell out phrases that they did not understand, with the expectation that you will define it for them as it is clearly an important English phrase (it's in Casablanca, after all). So we explained such things as "fishing smack," "cheerio," "gestapo," and "here's looking at you, kid." The consequences of such phrases will be felt by Americans at the English bar for weeks.

Next week I might suggest Star Wars and see how that goes over.

A Riddle

2008-02-28T17:45:00.000-05:00

A few days ago, Tram took me to a grocery store other than Wu Mei for the first time. It was a small place,with a hole-in-the-wall Jin Bing stand and a Coca-Cola sign sticking out the front, but it had a great number of things that I had resigned myself to never finding in China.

First, I found a Gillette combination razor/shaving cream pack. You'd think this would be easier to find, and it probably is- it just wasn't in Wu Mei and I still haven't bothered to go to any other shopping center (we have a Wal-Mart AND a Carrefour). Something would seem terribly wrong if I went to Wal-Mart in China (maybe they have "made here!" and "crafted locally" stickers on everything) and so I choose not to go. Anyway, having bought the razor/shaving cream, I can now place it in a prominent spot and look at it from time to time, occasionally chuckling and shaking my head as if to say "not today, friend."

Next, I found instant milk-tea. I don't know if I've mentioned milk-tea before, but it is a hot drink that manages to combine the smooth creaminess of milk with the slightly metallic herbiness of tea. Maybe that's not a great description. It tastes good. You have to stir it, though, or it just tastes like hot water and then there's a big clump of really strong tea/sugar stuff at the bottom.

Perhaps the most important purchase I made came as a pair- sliced bread and a jar of peanut butter. These are two items I had pretty much given up on, and I have been taking full advantage of having them. I don't have a knife, so I just dig the bread into the jar and go for it. This is not a "sharing" food. I was very, very happy about the peanut butter and bread.

Moving on from the grocery store, I've been meaning to share the following story for about a month now. To preface- in order to appreciate the story, you just have to believe that Peng is not a sketchy person and that everything he said was delivered simply because he thought it was the most logical reaction...

So there are a group of us at the English Bar, and this girl named Jordan is explaining to us, and to Peng (the owner of the bar) how the students in her class really like to hear riddles and jokes and things like that. Peng asked her to give him one of the riddles. It was, as follows:

"What is greater than God
More evil than the devil
Rich people want it
Poor people have it
and if you eat it, you will die."

She then explained that the answer would be obvious once you figured it out, and that there was only one correct answer. We (the Americans) threw around a few ideas for a minute while Peng sat there quietly. After all of our answers were rejected, Peng confidently (though whisperingly) said "It is cocaine."

Jordan said "well that's a good answer but it's not right..." And Peng responded "are you sure? It makes perfect sense with all the clues! It MUST be cocaine." And Jordan said "Actually, the answer is 'nothing.'" We all said "ahhh" and realized how dumb we had been. As we were leaving, Peng said "Nothing works, but I still think it's cocaine. It is a better answer."

Not Quite Dead Yet

2008-02-21T01:12:00.000-05:00

Unshaven, but Outside at Last!

Well I've certainly been lazy, but the cause of my lack of updates is not so much sickness as a general lack of stories to tell... which I suppose is directly related to sickness, but I've come to accept that I'm never going to feel like a million bucks in a place where a nice day is indicated by the phrase "I can see some blue today." I've been a bad traveler, though- staying in, talking only to Americans... I did put pants on at about 5PM today, and I considered that a great success.

There was an old man that I met on the plane to Harbin. His name was William, and he described himself as "German, with Russian parents, but I lived in Malaysia for fifteen years and am an Australian citizen." His observation on language learning is another reason I have not been posting- it's not like a straight slope, it's more like a series of plateaus. I'm on the plateau where I can now tell people what I want in very simple terms, but I still can't really understand anything that they say to me. I am not discouraged by this, but it does cut down on my "I can finally do this!" stories.

On Friday we had a mixer with all of the other programs in Beijing that we could find. John "The Duke" Wayne has a way with going up to any random person and instantly becoming best friends with them, and so he found tons of other groups and pledged a good portion of our 70-person contingent to the party. I met some cool people, but the true highlight of the night was an amazing DJ who actually had enough skill to convince me to come out and dance for an hour and a half straight. Anyone who has ever been with me in a dancing situation knows that this was quite a feat, but he kept mixing good songs one into the other, so I kept dancing. I mean... flailing my arms and jumping up and down.

Saturday we went to the Llama Temple, which is a very very old Buddhist temple complex. It is exactly like every other temple that we have been to... around every corner is what looks like a barbecue pit, and inside every pit is enough incense to choke the gods and cause them to pass out and fall out of the clouds. I imagine that's the point. The only object of real note in the temple is a giant, four-story (ish) Buddha carved out of a single, enormous tree a couple hundred years ago. Of course, there was no picture taking allowed, so you have to come to Beijing to see it.

I did walk around campus a little and was able to take pictures here. It's getting very close to being warm!

It's almost sort of Spring! The ice is kind of in a way melting a little bit!

And I DID discover a new favorite food. I'm not sure exactly what they're called, but as far as I can tell it's "Jin Bing." Imagine a crepe that's rolled up in a tiny omelet that has spices and sauce and a crunchy rice-y center. It's the perfect snack to carry around, and it only costs 30 cents! That's not a huge surprise around here anymore, but it is really really good and we need a few Jin Bing stands in America.

The preparation of the delicious crepe/omelet/crunch thingy...

That's all the general news I have. In non-China news, I haven't started working on an eight minute piece of music that I need for Italy (maybe I'll make an Italy blog!) this summer and it's due in two months. If anyone has any one-word ideas for what the piece should be about, please send them to me. I'm looking for some inspiration here.

As a final thought, my roommate Junta came in the other night with this card that a random guy on the street handed him. The more Chinese I learn, the more I see why it's so hard for them to translate anything into English, but I still get a kick out of these. Here's exactly what the card has on it:

"Comfort helath casino bar It's Chinese style bar We have beautiful young girls, sexy dancing, no ticket. Welcome show girl bar, looking forward. Welcome show girl bar, looking forward. Welcome you!!! Based on this card, you may get one glass/bottle of juice, or Tsing Tao beer/coca cola for free!"

Quote of the Day-
"Well, at least in China you can always be sure of someone lurking in a dark corner." -I forget where I heard this, but I'm pretty sure in context it was very true.

Things I've Learned About Being Sick in China

2008-02-17T01:24:00.000-05:00

1. Don't get sick in China.

2. See 1.

That about covers it. All I have left is a slightly annoying pressure on my left temple that I think is a remnant of sinus pressure, as well as a more reasonably runny nose. I've been very lucky to made so many friends here who seem to have come equipped with their own pharmacies.

Hillary gave me some sinus stuff, which was awesome, except for the first night when I took two right before getting into bed and then saw that it was "daytime!" Which led to a very fun night which mostly consisted of my brain saying "I want to sleep, but I can't stop thinking about it and I'll never get to sleep if I'm thinking about sleep. I should stop thinking. Like now. Now would be good. It would be a good time to go to sleep. An excellent time not to be awake, but I should really stop thinking about it...." etc...

Today Maria (who is Guatemalan) offered me "good Guatemalan drugs" if I relapse, which would certainly raise my medical multiculturalism. I think I should be OK though.

I forgot to mention this, but in class on Friday we were talking about getting extra credit from playing a game, except everyone tied, so all of the students quickly had their hands up in the air saying "we should all get extra credit" at which point the teacher said "no" and I said, "This isn't a democracy!" And then everyone stared at me and I remembered where I was. Context is important.

Traditional Chinese Medicine

2008-02-14T03:21:00.000-05:00

Not much new to write, as I have essentially locked myself in my room for the past three days in attempts to get over this bug that everyone seems to have. Danni, from the English Bar, sent over some traditional Chinese pills, which I have gladly taken, considering that none of my good old-fashioned American pills were doing anything. It remains to be seen what effect they will have.

The good news is that internet is back on in our building, so I can post without leaving my room.

I'm posting today to reflect on what's happening on the other side of the world at the College of William and Mary. President Nichol resigned after being informed by the Board of Visitors that his contract would not be renewed in July. I spent a good part of the day (what else was I going to do?) reading stories and interpretations and opinions on this matter. The following are my thoughts (with thanks to David Husband for pointing out some BOV practices):

You may believe either that President Nichol got up every morning at 4AM to spoon-feed hungry orphaned kittens and, in addition, was a fantastic leader (and if you disagree I can call you ignorant/closed-minded/evil/neo-con) or that he was sent by Satan himself to increase divisiveness, lose the college money, and bring the reputation of our beloved school down (and if you disagree then I shall call you a liberal, spoiled-brat, ignorant (this word plays both sides), and hypocrite). From what I can tell, there is no other option or "middle ground," or if there is it seems to be shouted out of existence by the two diametrically opposed camps (who sometimes are miraculously able to take the exact same action and make it mean two completely different things).

If there is any doubt in the minds of supporters of either side, they refuse to show it. The truth may lie somewhere in between, but it would be argumentative suicide to admit any wrongdoing on the side that you espouse. The BOV (evil or awesome, depending) has a chance here to open up the records of what went on in their closed-door sessions and be fully open about the reasons that President Nichol's renewal was left to lapse. These records, giving insight into the rubric of grading a college president, would serve to make it very clear why the BOV did what they did. This will never happen, though. Someone might come across looking poorly, someone might open him or herself up for a personal attack, etc.... and so empty lines of rhetoric from both sides will continue to clash unyieldingly.

At Woodberry, when someone was kicked out, whether we agreed with it or not, we were all sat down and given the relevant facts of the case, regardless of what those facts might be. We were told very clearly what Woodberry stood for and how this person failed to rise to those standards. We were also told that the vote to remove the person was unanimous (because once you see who's going to win, you go back and MAKE it unanimous. Which sort of defeat the idea of "unanimous" but I understand why it's done.) The point is that, as high schoolers, we were at the very least given enough respect by our superiors that they believed we could handle an honest explanation of the facts at hand. We might have disagreed with the rules used, or the methods that found out the culprit, or any number of other things... but we understood, certainly, exactly what the rules were. This is not so in the case of the loss of a William and Mary President. And, considering recent controversies about the Wren Cross and the Sex Worker's Art Show, the door is wide open for anyone to interpret Nichol's ousting in whatever way is wished. It's like everyone gets a brightly colored invitation to the "let's see who can yell the loudest" party.

I appreciate that the firing of a college president is a very sensitive issue (and very different from the dismissal of a high school student), but to make a decision such as this, behind closed doors, and then to offer only cursory allusions to reasons of dismissal, however well intentioned or justified, is only setting up the college for more extreme polarity down the road. When every student knows "without a doubt" that he or she is right, then the point of college may have been lost.

I want to make it clear that I am neither supporting nor condemning the BOV- except in their voting practices- because I have no way of knowing what their criteria were. I do not believe that anyone should be happy about this, because I can't imagine what trouble Nichol has caused that would be worse than the national attention that this story is getting now.

In the end, though, as has been stated from every front, "the college is greater than any one man." And things will continue much as they always have...

Tai Chi and Running into Glass Doors

2008-02-12T08:59:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was our first Tai Chi lesson, and it was an experience straight out of a movie. Our instructor was waiting for us outside the International Studies building (a straight shot from our dorm) and seemed, in his blue sweatshirt and pants, to be the Chinese version of the trainer from Rocky. In personality, he was exactly like you’d imagine an old Chinese master (the kind without the beard) if you were imagining the nice kind. Really, just think one up, as clichéd as you like… that’s our teacher. As Hillary later put it, “it’s like he was doing Taijie with his voice.”

First, he would say everything in fiercely pronounced mandarin, which I have no way of explaining other than saying accented staccato with about four different pitches. Then he would say “eeenglish,” and he would draw out the “e” like that and scoop the pitch while saying it. You know, like you would imagine someone to do in a movie. Then he would explain that the move he just named was something like “whiiiiite, greeeeen, oopen wiiings.” And then we followed his movements as closely as possible, which he would reward with a “veeeeeery guuud. Hen (pronounced “hun”) hao (“how”).

To demonstrate further, he would turn to us and, for example, place his right hand above his left, as in a position, and say “riiiiiiight? Riiiiight? Riiiight.” And then move the left above the right very quickly and say “wrong!” and then go back to right over left and say “riiiiight. Riiighht.” And then switch again, “wrong!”

In summary, best Tai Chi teacher ever. By the end of the semester, we should know all the steps in the 24-action version of Tai Chi.

Today I woke up and I was sick. Apparently I came down with the same thing that has plagued everyone else since Pingyao. Oh well, I got to watch Zoolander and some Scrubs this afternoon to make it all better. I thought I was feeling better tonight, but then, on my way to the International Studies building to get internet, I tried to walk through a glass door. It was just as funny as the people watching me had always thought something like that would be.

The reason that I have to walk to the SIS building to get internet is because ours isn't working. We chalked this up to Chinese New Year festivities/lack of work, but today I heard that the REAL reason we don't have internet is because the IT people are pissed at our whole building for buying one internet account and sharing it with three people in the room (which is what our program told us to do, so I'm confused on that point.) And so they shut it off as a sort of punitive measure. As Ben put it, "now they have a bunch of angry meiguo-rens in the building we have the American ability to form unions/mobs" I can't remember whether he said unions or mobs. Same difference.

Chinese class is getting harder, and so I'm using lots of mnemonic devices to try to remember different characters. My favorite devices, that I'd like to post here completely out of context, are "Man-Sideways Jesus-Carrot," "Questionmark people-questionmark Apollo Landing" and "Lion King." If you think the way that I do, then those things spell out the Chinese equivalent of "What," "To know someone," and "How is it?" I'm pretty sure if I keep doing this I'm going to become very confused and crash and burn sometime in the near future.

Chinese New Year!

2008-02-10T08:33:00.000-05:00

Feb. 6-9- Taiyuan and Pingyao

Yesterday we returned from our trip to the north. Everyone complained about how cold it was. Everyone, that is, except for those of us who had braved the wild winter weather of Harbin.

Our first stop was the city of Taiyuan, about eight hours north of Beijing and two hours away from Pingyao, which was our true destination. We stopped in the city because Dr. Li wanted us to be in a big city for Chinese New Year. Most of us didn't understand, at first...

But then we heard the fireworks. It was the middle of the day, and they were already going full force. In fact, they went on through the night and sporadically for the next three days. It's best to watch the video, because it defies description, other than saying that a Chinese New Year celebration makes the Fourth of July look like a three year old holding a sparkler. If you hear anything that seems like rain in the audio- it's just millions of firecrackers that act as a sort of garnish to the explosive feast.

The next day we went on to Pingyao. The town of Pingyao is an ancient walled-in city, much like most European ancient walled-in cities. They had the requisite big-spikey-thing that they could drop on invaders...

It's in shadow, but there are lots of spikes...

And, like most ancient walled-in cities, even the hotels are part of the ancient gloriousness...

Amanda in the hotel courtyard

And we spent a good deal of time in the marketplace, looking at old things to buy. It was a curious thing that most of the ancient artifacts in any given antique store looked exactly like the ancient artifacts in any adjacent antique store.

The program bought us all tickets to go into any museum in Pingyao, and so we tried to visit as many of them as possible. They were all what used to be large homes with courtyards turned into exhibits about the growth of Pingyao's martial arts or the first banks in China. The more I see of Chinese museums, the more I think of the wonderful museums that we enjoy in the United States, which avoid making every display look like a scene out of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. We had fun seeing what we could of the actual historical objects, though.

There was a room full of these little statues in a Daoist Temple,
and this one was apparently mine.

John Wayne (we call him "The Duke") and I manage to look
dumb in front of lots of Chinese people. No one told us that
they were behind us until it was too late. I don't really know
what that pose is all about...

This is just a great picture of John and Amanda

As always, all of the photos I took on our trips (not too many, don't get excited) are at http://www.flickr.com/photos/23482798@N04/

Hopefully I'll get back into the swing of doing a post every other day now that our Spring Break is over. Tomorrow is our first day of Tai Chi, and I'm pretty excited about that (even though it is at 7AM).

02/01/08-02/04/08- HARBIN (I feel like poem)

2008-02-04T08:16:00.000-05:00

02/01/08

“The especially charming and beautiful scenery, fresh air and novel elegant pavilions reflecting in green jungles are very strongly impressed on your memory, but also forget to return home. …. If we roam here listening birds and insects’ singings, we will feel like poem.” –Jin Wei Hotel Guest Services Directory

We arrived in Harbin at 1:00AM local time, and were instantly greeted by a brigade of black-market taxi drivers who make the Beijing drivers look like patrons of virtue. As Will later put it, “I don’t think I’ve ever actually been shoved towards a taxi.” We settled on two of the least sketchy taxis that we could find and headed for downtown Harbin. Once we checked in at our hotel (all in Chinese- I wasn’t involved) Steve, Will and I pushed together our two beds (cheaper than three) and tried to find things to do other than sleep. First we tried to turn on the TV, but all that we could turn on was a small red light. We decided that this must be high entertainment in near-Siberia, and went to sleep.

02/02/08

The next day we went out on the town. No matter how many layers of clothes we had on, it was still freezing. I’m writing this now from Beijing, and we went out to get dinner and it felt downright balmy. Harbin is really a difficult place to describe. There’s the Russian architecture, but also Chinese and Modern and Turkish, etc… and it seems vaguely reminiscent of New York City. Below you will find a picture of me at a Russian supply store.

I made a hao pengyou (good friend).

We wandered for a bit, and then found the river of ice.

The sun setting on the river. I'm standing in the middle of it while taking the picture.

I’ve never seen a frozen river before, and it was amazing. It must be about a kilometer across to the island, and all that you can see is ice and horses with carriages and, on the banks, ice luges and inner-tubes and skating rinks divided by mounds of snow. We all decided to go down a hill with inner-tubes, which I thought was going to be the scariest thing I did that day. I was sure that at some point, halfway down the 45 degree hill, I would spin around and hit a small bump and go THWAP with a very graceful Olympic-style back-flip onto my head.

After our death-defying, we decided to find the ice festival. So we walked across a frozen river of ice, you know, like any intelligent person might do. I watch a lot of Man vs. Wild, so if anyone HAD fallen in, I would have known what to do. I'm sure that Mom is laughing right now, and by laughing I mean writing me an e-mail about personal safety (there were cars on the ice, so we figured it was safe).

After a good fifteen minute walk, we hit dry land again in the form of Sun Island, which was apparently a barren ghost town. We walked around for about thirty minutes without seeing anyone, which was very strange considering this was supposed to be the general location of the ice festival. We expected a crowd to jump out at any moment and yell "surprise!" After all, this is China, and the one time we can't find anyone is the time when we were most trying to find a large gathering of people. Oh irony. We did find a strange patch of red liquid on the road, though, and imagined a scene in this deserted place where a car could just wheel around a corner and take one of us out.

We think it would look sort of like that. We may have been delusionally cold, so please forgive the utter inappropriateness of taking such a picture.

In time, we found the festival. The snow festival. Which was closing (because it was almost dark), which explained why we couldn't find anyone. We were told (in Chinese, no one speaks English in Harbin) that the ice festival was down the road, but very, very far. It would help if we took a taxi.

Unfortunately, there were no taxis in sight, so we recommenced our journey on foot. Across the island we marched in the bitter, 0 degree Fahrenheit cold. Across the inverted bridge of Kazahck-Dun...

I made up the name.

And again further down the road. Dissension in the ranks was rampant. Mutiny was a distinct possibility, as was hypothermia. Steve, after all, had left his heavy jacket in our room back in Beijing. Just as we thought we could go no further, a line of taxis appeared miraculously, as though out of a dream, and we negotiated a good price for our whisking away to Ice-World.

When we finally arrived, it was as though all of the trials and tribulations of the past five hours were no more than five minutes, for the Ice Festival loomed larger than most amusement parks, and glowed brighter than the Vegas Strip (another definition of strip that I forgot to teach my students. Darn). The festival really was amazing, and from here I think I'll let my pictures and videos tell what they can about our experience there. I also now have all of my photos from China posted at http://www.flickr.com/photos/23482798@N04/. I'll be on a school trip to Inner Mongolia from now until Sunday. Otherwise, I would have written a longer post about our trip to Harbin. I decided that getting the pictures and videos up was more important than writing a novel about three days. The bottom line is that I highly recommend Harbin as a travel destination- I like everyone would love the Ice Festival. Best weekend trip ever.

Acropolis, acropolis. I feel like such a stupid American.

Me, Hillary, and Will in front of a super-gigantic ice tower covered in ice.

The whole group in front of one of the many large Olympic-themed ice sculptures.

This links to a video of the greatest song about the Beijing Olympics ever written and performed by a majority of China's pop stars, a-la "We Are the World." The moment at about 3'07" cracks me up every time. If you listen, maybe you can guess why.

Someone double-dog-dared me.

Strip English

2008-01-30T10:35:00.000-05:00

My International Finance class was canceled tonight, and so I asked Tram if I could go with her to help her teach tonight. Last night we taught, as a team, the adult class, and it was lots of fun. MUCH more fun than teaching kids (though they were cute). Because our teaching styles are so different and yet seemingly complimentary, we decided that we would just teach with each other whenever we could and split the pay. This may seem like I'm dividing my pay in half for no reason, but I'd rather spend twice as long doing something that's actually fun than spend half the time sweating bullets in front of an expectant class.

The adults pretty much know all the English vocabulary that one would need to get around, so we spent our class talking about colloquialisms. You know- "beat around the bush," "let someone down," "make fun of someone," "feel like a million bucks," and the like. They absolutely love learning things that they think real Americans say, and it's the greatest classroom environment you could imagine. They listen, they ask intelligent questions, they laugh at the right times, etc.... we even got applause at the end of both nights that we have taught.

And are there funny stories? You bet there are! I have to warn my readership that the following stories result from language misunderstandings and honest intellectual curiosity, and as such are mostly funny in a slightly inappropriate way (I'm sure that most of you that know me well are shocked).

So the first one (which is sort of my favorite) started when I inadvertently used the word "strip," as defined by a small piece/slice of something. A very confused Chinese man raised his hand in the front and said "is that all that word means? I think it have different meaning."

"ummm" I replied.

"What is the meaning of this word?" another Chinese woman asked, innocently. I looked at Tram, who was already laughing. I looked at the 35 adults in front of me, eagerly searching for an answer that only I possessed.

"Well it's a noun... like this piece of paper here. If I take scissors and cut this piece off, this is a strip of paper.... and it's also a verb. And the noun associated with the verb is 'stripper,' and a 'stripper' is someone who 'strips.' And what that means is that she takes her clothes off for money." I pause. "and I guess it could be a guy, too."

A man in the middle row who has very long hair raised his hand. "Why would someone want to cut off her clothes?" There was a murmur of agreement in the group.

"Well you see, the two meanings of the word really don't have anything to do with one another. Tram?" Tram was not helpful. "A stripper just takes her clothes off. She doesn't cut them. She just... removes them." I looked out and saw that great confusion was still rampant, though one or two of the more knowledgeable students were giggling.

"Well they dance and there's music, and they take their clothes off." I offer.

"Do they take the clothes off before or after they dance?"

"... I... would guess probably during... do you understand?" And I could tell from the laughter that they did. And if they didn't, I wasn't going to explain further.

After class, another guy told me that he watched "Friends" a lot, and he understood most of it, but he didn't understand one phrase. He seemed a very serious guy, and his English was very good. I asked what the phrase was. He said: "nice butt, great rack." I paused, and then explained as technically I could. I then excused myself to go laugh for a few solid minutes. Maybe you had to be there to see why this was funny, but even after the last story I just didn't see that coming.

The students were very nice to Tram and I after the class was over, and about fifteen stayed afterwards to sit and talk with us at the bar while we ate (because Peng fed us again). In the best compliment since I've been in China, one of the guys (I say guys, they're all 30-40 years old) asked what days we were teaching, so that he could be sure to come back for those days. He said Tram and I taught the best English classes that he'd had since he started coming to the bar for English lessons (and if you ignore the part of the sentence that says "since he started coming to the BAR for English lessons" it's really a great compliment).

Mike Laoshi

2008-01-28T06:18:00.000-05:00

Only in China could the following story have taken place.

Yep, I'm a part time English teacher. At a bar. An "English Study Singles Bar," run by a guy named Peng who graduated from Johns Hopkins two years ago, bought an unsuccessful club, and turned it into a popular place for all ages to learn English and Mandarin, and then go on dates and get drunk. From a business point of view, this is absolutely brilliant for a variety of reasons.

I found the place because Tram came to me yesterday and said "Mike, I'm going to go get a job teaching English. Want to come?" and I wasn't doing anything else at the time.

We got there, and Peng came out, greeted us warmly, and offered us free drinks. Indeed, this is a wondrous place. Our friend Jordan arrived to teach a group of children, and as this was her first time with children, she begged one of us to teach with her. Tram had to go, so that made me a working teacher within 10 minutes of my interview.

The kids all had cute American names like Jenny, Carol, Lory, Cathy, and, I kid you not, Tom and Jerry (best friends who DID name themselves after the cartoon). They were surprisingly advanced in their English, though they did drive me to madness a few times hitting each other and not paying attention. The problem with teaching children whose native language you do not speak is that when they yell loudly at each other, it is impossible to tell whether they are saying "the teacher is dumb" or "please be quiet and listen to the teacher, I'm enjoying his lesson very much." I've found that calling them by name when they're acting up works very well, but only for about ten seconds at a time. My teaching style can best be summed up by:

Me- "Salad. Sa. Lad."

Them- "Sellud"

Me- "ae. Ae. Like cat. Salad."

Jerry- "meow! CAT CAT CAT!"

Tom- "Teacher teacher Jerry hit me!"

Me- "Tom, Jerry. Listen." (while I'm saying this, Cathy and Lory start playing with a tamogachi or something like that.)

Me- "Salad."

Everyone except Cathy and Lory- "Salad."

Me- "Cathy, Lory. Salad."

Cathy and Lory- "Salad." (Jenny puts her head down)

Me- "Are you tired?"

Jenny- "Yes."

Tom- "Jerry hit me!"

Me- "Tom, Jerry. Stop."

Tom- "Teacher can we play a game?!"

Me- "You need to learn at least five words."

Tom- "Cathy is very big."

Me- "Why... why would you even say that?"

I could go on... for about two hours, but I feel as though that's enough for now. I get to teach adults tonight, and needless to say, I'm thrilled. We get paid 100RMB per hour, so if I teach three or four hours a week that will pretty much cover all of my expenses. Yay!

Here's a random picture inside the bar. At the time, these students were doing skits. I didn't understand them, but everyone else thought they were hysterical.

In other news, we have plane tickets to Harbin and all is go for the ice festival. I've been getting some great e-mails from several of you containing lots of different pictures of Harbin- thanks so much! The more I see of it, the more I want to go. There's even a Great Wall Ice Luge!

Karaoke and Duck (and Frog)

2008-01-26T22:58:00.000-05:00

Yesterday we went to another hot pot place, and this time I got pictures so as to demonstrate what a hot pot is.

I think we're both supposed to be looking at the camera. Oh well. That's Jenn on the left. She's Tram's roommate. Will and I often eat lunch with them. As you can see, the hot pot is powered by an inverted metal funnel filled with hot coals, or, as we would call it in America, a "lawsuit waiting to happen." There is a sort of broth filling the rest of the container, and you throw all manner of meats and vegetables and noodles into it, wait 30 seconds, and take them out. Eat, repeat, and enjoy.

Last night I was lucky enough to fall in with a group of people who were being led by a guy who had been here for a semester and brought along his Chinese girlfriend. She was extremely nice and spoke fairly good English, and she knew all the best places to go in Beijing.

Before I talk about dinner, just as a side note I wanted to mention that the guy who had been here last semester (I forgot his name, but I think it was Dan...) gave us a really great idea for something fun to do once we've been here a while. Once he had been in Beijing for a few months, he said, he would play a game where he would put 10RMB ($1.3) into his wallet, hop on a bus, and then after an hour or so on the bus, get off and try to make his way back to campus. I'm not sure I would do this alone, but in a small group this could be a fun game. You could even send out multiple groups and make it a competition. Nothing like getting completely lost in a foreign city to learn your way around.

For dinner we had the goal of Peking Duck, and so we went to a restaurant that specialized in that and we were seated in the back room, as usual (I think it's because we're a large group, not because we're Americans...). The decorations in the room were all very large posters of Mao, farm workers taking up the cause, and various communist propaganda that started looking more and more attractive as our democratic system of meal selection became tiresome. In the end, we decided to let our Chinese friend become benevolent dictator and decide what the rest of us would eat.

We enjoyed a feast of duck, noodles, tofu, frog soup (Glenn explained to me that frogs tasted so much like chickens because they are really very genetically close, having both descended from the velociraptor, or something like that.), barbecued pork (at least that's what I'm calling it), thin strings of fried potatoes ("potato made better" as Jordan said), and various other rices and noodles. It was a delicious night, and I'll admit we splurged a little, spending a whopping $5 US per person. Mom, Dad- I'm sorry. I'll try mightily to curb my rampant spending.

I'm not sure I see the connection.

After dinner we went to a Karaoke club! These things are big deals here- four floors with a hundred rooms at least, each containing a lounge area and a stage and a massive TV, not to mention a song library with just about everything you'd want (they didn't have Meatloaf. I guess they'd do anything else for their customers, but they won't do that.)

We spent about three hours singing everything from the Beatles to Aladdin, and my throat still hurts today. I apologize to Mr. Hornady for not even attempting to sing in a healthy way.

But come on, doesn't it look fun?
From left to right: Junta, Jordan, Glenn, Tram, Jenn

Roommate Bonding

I'm sure that there are videos of me singing "Billie Jean" floating out there somewhere. I didn't get any on my camera, though.

Today has been a relaxing laundry/blog/homework day, with the homework, of course, coming last. We went to the Medicine House with Tram and Jenn for lunch and ordered the best dessert that I've had so far in China. It's so easy you could even do it at home! Here's what you need:

One Banana (or two)
One pot full of molten sugar (or two)

Heat banana(s), pour pot of molten sugar onto bananas. Serve with ice cold water to harden into crunchy candy shell around very hot banana(s). Eat until you go into sugar-shock. Stop.

Those Wild Northerners

2008-01-25T11:02:00.001-05:00

So we (Hillary and I) have been working for the past couple of days on this Harbin thing. We've been working on it so much, in fact, that I haven't actually done anything of note. Oh! Except I did have my first conversation with a Chinese person. It went (translated) a little something like this:

Me- "I want that. Five."

Chinese Person- "(something incomprehensible) Five?"

Me- "Correct. Five."

And I received five large dumplings on a plate. Success!

I also think I did well on my first test, but I was more excited about the dumpling ordering. Before the test, we played a game in class. I'm not sure I told you about the last game we played, but it involved saying numbers in sequence, and whoever screwed up got extra homework. Really. So after having played a few of Chinese classroom games, I've decided that a great game to invent and sell in the US would be something called "Terrible, Terrible Consequences." In it, you wouldn't receive anything good for doing well, but you would be punished with writing and memorization if you messed up. I think it would sell millions.

Anyway, back to the frozen wasteland that is Harbin. The more research I did, the more magical this place has become, and the more certain I am that, no matter what common sense is thrown at me, I will go there. I have five main reasons.

1. Harbin is basically a Russian town. It's only been Chinese since 1946. So it's sort of like visiting Russia.

2. The Harbin Ice Festival looks AWESOME.

It's a castle made of ice! How can we NOT go?

3. The Harbin Snow Festival also seems cool. There are snowmen. Enormous, enormous snowmen.

4. If I go to Harbin, I'm going to tell everyone I went to Siberia. It's not exactly Siberia, but it's close enough. If people doubt that I went to Siberia, I'll show them a picture of a frozen castle and say that's what the Siberian royalty live in.

5. While I was reading about Harbin, I came across an article that said "in the winter, you can access Sun Island by walking across the frozen river, or you can hire a go-cart to take you across." That's right. Go-cart.

We were originally going to try to get to Harbin by train, but when we ran the idea past Dr. Sun and Dr. Li, they gave us that "oh you silly Americans" look that you get used to if you travel in a foreign country. First, Dr. Li showed us this picture of people getting tickets at the Beijing train station around the time we would be trying to go...

We decided to fly instead.

Then Dr. Sun started telling us about the wild people up North. Here's the example he used (paraphrased):

"The people here... when you talk... when you have a fight, you talk. You talk for a while, and this is how we do things. The people in the North, they will say maybe two sentences and then they will punch each other."

We left the office undeterred, though with the new plan that if we meet an angry Northerner we will run before the second sentence.

Business Strategies 2

2008-01-23T19:52:00.000-05:00

Finally, the blog posts the actual time that I write the blog instead of some random number. This is very important to me. Anyway, this will be a quick post.

Total number of Chinese characters learned: 35
Total number of words learned... 45?

And now a recap of Business Strategies Class (all numbers in 24 hour time, because that's what my phone displays):

Today's Strategem: Openly repair the walkway, secretly march to Chen Cang.

This was a pretty straightforward assignment, and it involved knowing when to fool your enemy into thinking that you're doing an obvious thing, while the whole time you're doing something completely unorthodox. Here are my notes from the class, written in real-time.

13:02- Setting up powerpoint

13:10- Still setting up powerpoint

13:14- Teacher begins class by essentially reading what we were supposed to read for class out loud to us.

13:22- Finishes our assigned reading repeat and tells us the story of Chinese startup alibaba.com.

13:23- Business advice! "getting investors is important." ...

13:33- Continues reading out loud straight from the powerpoint- currently rehashing information stated ten minutes ago. Wow, I guess investors ARE important.

13:38- Repeatedly refers to a number on the powerpoint which reads "82 million" as "84 million." No idea what is lost in the translation.

13:40- States "so that was a brief view of the company's history"

13:41- "And now for a view of their business model..."

14:00-"in 2005..." "it helps to get media attention"

14:05- Tenuous connection is finally made between strategem and business case study.

14:07- Break.

14:20- Assignment for group debate/discussion given. We (team 1) receive: "You are the senior managers of Alibaba. You believe that Alibaba's strategy has been_____. Back up your points with examples."

14:25- I convince the group that a really good demonstration of the Strategem would be to stand up and tell nothing but lies about the company to confuse the class.

14:26- My team tells me that this is unrealistic because everyone has all the facts about the company in his/her hands.

14:30- For lack of a better idea, my idea wins out.

14:50- I deliver a speech about how, even though Alibaba.com is making tons of money and has very bright prospects, the arrival at this position was entirely through luck and as such we, the senior management, wish to sell off all of our subsidiaries to our competitors.

14:55- During question and answer our competitors express a desire to purchase one of our subsidiaries. We agree to talks.

15:00- The teacher asks if any group has anything more to share. We say "HA! We're not going to sell our subsidiaries! We arbitrarily built five more websites while you were fooled by our deception! We totally Chen Canged you!"

15:01- Anarchy.

Ok, so most of that might have just been a diversion from the obvious statement that class was boring... Chen Cang!

Projects, Planning, and Plotting

2008-01-21T02:04:00.000-05:00

Now that everything has settled into what I might call a routine here, I've decided to lay out some of my best plans and see how that goes. I don't expect to have anything to do on Tuesdays and Thursdays, because I have still not been contacted by my internship about a time to come work. Oh well.

Project #1- I'm going to make use of the 2GB flash drive in my camera and make a video about an average day here at Beida and in Beijing. I'm enlisting the help of all my friends here to help me. I hope to have it posted within a few weeks.

Plan #1- I received an e-mail from my Mom this morning which was a forward from Aunty Deb. It had to do with an ice festival held in the northern province of China that happens every year between January 5th and February 5th. As it just so happens, we have a break for Chinese New Year on February 1st and nothing to do until the 6th. As it also so happens, Beijing is the transportation hub of China and a round trip to Harbin, the capital of the northern province, is only about $120 American. As it also also so happens, my friends and I are impulsive and reckless college students, so I'm going to spend the next few days trying to plan a trip to Harbin. In addition to an ice city, they also have Siberian Tigers. Yay!

And now for the news... (except not from CNN. Do I seem bitter?)

Tram and Will at the Medicine House

After a week and a bit here, we may have finally figured out how to order the food that we want. We went to the Medicine House last night and, for the first time, everything we ordered was just the way we wanted it. The iron plates that look like fajitas without the tortillas are exactly that, with delicious eel and beef and potatoes (I like eel, so it's not like an antballs thing again). We also got an enormous plate of fried rice and some broccoli (that's for you, Mom).

Afterwards Tram and I took a long walk towards Wudaokou to find a stationary store that Will told us about so that we could buy flashcards. On the way we got to walk over a cool overpass and Tram took a picture!

Which would have been better if I had turned flash off, because there are lots of cool cars and buildings and lights in the background.

We found the stationary store and bought our flashcards, and then we went into a Chinese grocery/clothing store. I bought some pineapple beers (wouldn't you if you saw something called "pineapple beer"?) and then went upstairs to look at some clothes. But I found something else instead...

Never let go. Seriously.

If anyone has $30 that they want to give me, I will buy this for you.

It's like Outback- We're Closer to Australia, so It'll Taste Better

2008-01-18T06:22:00.000-05:00

OK, so tonight is my mega-update since I've been slacking the past few days. It isn't because I haven't tried to update the blog, but random things have been happening that have kept me from doing so. I'll include bits of the blog that I HAD written, and then reasons that I was interrupted.

01/18/08

Today I officially received my Chinese name: Jiang Jun, which means soldier and, more specifically, “General.” It’s the closest approximation Li Laoshi could find for “Johnson.”

I didn’t post yesterday because yesterday was painfully boring and all I did was find a Western Union to get money. Oh, and I ate walnut balls covered in fried ants. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and it was a little sweet and actually sort of tasty, but whenever I started enjoying it, the phrase “you’re eating ants!” would pop into my mind, and I would have to suppress gagging.

INTERRUPTION

1. Laundry- Here's a picture that should explain why laundry may have delayed my blogging.

But it's CHEAP! (and that's what's important)

2. "C(h)risis"- As I had finished hanging up my laundry, I received two simultaneous calls... one on my room phone, and one on my cell phone. It was Dr. Sun and Dr. Li, the directors of our program, and they wanted me to know that there was a "crisis" and Will and I needed to go to Dr. Sun's office right away. Of course, we assumed that William and Mary had screwed up on some crucial study abroad thing and we were no longer students (or something to that effect). As it turned out, however, once we got to the office Dr. Sun asked us if we would possibly be willing to move.

"Why?" We asked. He explained to us that a guy from Va. Tech had failed to show up in a room down the hall, and now the two guys in that room had to move to building number 9 (which is for doubles). We failed to see how this involved us in any way. We were soon informed that it didn't, but the guys who should move were fussing about it. Chris, especially, was very unhappy about the move. Luckily, I had talked to Chris before (he's the guy I got lost at the airport with) and I happened to know that he's one of those who just loves to argue for argument's sake. We told Dr. Sun that we'd be happy to move if it was a last resort and the other guys were going to leave the program or have some sort of fit over it, because it's really not a big deal. Which is especially why it annoyed me that such a small thing would take me away from blogging AND manage to do it in a really heart-racingly-scary way. So, after that episode (we're still on Friday) I returned to some writing...

(Friday night)

Walking around, I also found this great sign that I wanted to share with all my trumpet playing friends back home (especially Tornello because it’s her birthday). (Saturday note- it WAS her birthday)

No Trumpets Allowed in China

And right after I uploaded that image, Chinese internet decided to die. No one knew what had happened, but we DID know that we had to reset our internet, which our friend Matt, who was here last semester, kindly did for us the first time. Now, he wasn't around, so I decided to fix the internet myself. This involved wading through about ten pages that looked exactly like this-

-with me yelling out sort of what different the characters looked like, and Nell and Alice offering translation suggestions. Every few hours I would grow impatient and click randomly, which would invariably reset or fatal-error the entire system, requiring us to start over at the very beginning. Eventually, I continued to not fix it.

Later, we went out to various clubs and almost saw a fight. And by fight, I mean eight guys ran outside of a bar and nearly simultaneously broke their beer bottles in half and started brandishing them as weapons. We decided not to go to that particular establishment.

(Saturday)
01/19/08

Today we woke up and went to the Beijing City Museum, which is a fun super-huge structure on the outside.

Maybe you can't tell from the picture. SUPER-HUGE

And the least exhibition space of any museum I've ever been to on the inside. Which is OK, because the exhibits they did have were pretty cool. They had a whole section devoted to Buddhist statues constructed in the past few thousand years. I tried to be cool, interesting, and helpful all at the same time by giving Tram, my new Vietnamese friend who lives in Texas, a lesson on everything that I remembered from Intro to Buddhism (Fall '05). About halfway through my speech, she mentioned that she was, herself, Buddhist. So that was good.

This is in the museum. I wanted to position the picture so that it would look like I saw playing ball with the dog/lion/thing, but everyone said that would look dorky so I didn't.

The museum had some great exhibits, like I said, but they also had some weird things happening. I didn't get a picture of it, but one display had ancient Chinese glasses and candle holders next to a "Mitsubishi Electric Fan, Circa 1920's." And in another part of the museum, just kind of sitting out in the open, there was a "Planing Machine, British, Circa 1920's." I did get one of my favorites in a picture, though, in an exhibit about the historical Beijing Opera instruments.

The caption reads: "Saxophone- Modern Times"

Obviously I got my internet working this evening (by randomly clicking- score!) and then we went out to dinner for a hot pot, which is a distinctly Beijing thing that is actually just really good fondue. If you ever come visit, I can highly recommend them. The title of the blog comes from a comment that Will made over our hot-pot, after he said "I bet Indian food here is a lot better than in the US, because we're closer to India."

So I have to go to Outback, now, sometime before I leave.

Between 1368 and 1912...

2008-01-16T04:21:00.000-05:00

I received word today that I have money waiting for me at one of the banks, but by the time I got out of class the English speaking banks were closed.

Speaking of class, today we learned the words for "mother" "father" "older brother" and "younger brother," among an array of adverbs, adjectives, and verbs. Sorry Rachel, but I can't reference you in Chinese yet.

I had my first "Business Strategies" class today, which utilizes the little-known Chinese text "The 36 Stratagems," which was written by an anonymous author sometime in either the Ming or Qing dynasty. As our teacher informed us later, the Ming and Qing dynasties cover a period of time from 1368 to 1912. So... that's helpful.

It contains 36 mantras that aid in any given situation, whether you are in an advantageous position (loot the house while it is on fire) or a disadvantageous position (beat the grass to startle the snake) or a confusing position (shut the door to catch the thief) or whatever other position you can imagine (borrow the knife to kill your enemy).

Today we discussed "create something out of nothing," in a business and historical context. It originated when a Chinese ruler tried to trick a subordinate into certain death by telling him to make 100,000 arrows in ten days, or else. The subordinate, obviously unable to make 100,000 arrows so quickly, instead borrowed 30 boats from his friend. He then hired 30 soldiers to man the boats, and stayed up for seven days and nights creating straw men to place in the boats along with the soldiers. On the eighth day, the "fleet" appeared out of nowhere outside of an enemy army settlement, and arrows from 20,000 archers rained down on the boats. When they returned to their homeland, there were 100,000 arrows attached that were removed and presented to the ruler, who was suitably impressed and did not have the subordinate killed.

My group decided that the best application of this story in modern business was Apple computers. Though "Snakes on a Plane" was a close second.

THIS

2008-01-14T23:53:00.000-05:00

... is CNN?

No, not the whole building. Just an apartment on the 16th floor. There are about eight people in small cubicles in the main room, and Mr. Florcruz (the bureau chief) has a side apartment thing. The only reason they are cramped is because the other apartment that they own is getting painted, or something like that.

Anyway, my taxi pulled into this gated complex and then dropped me off. CNN, as I could see in my intern packet, was in building 12. However, the buildings in the complex ranged in number from one to ten. Obviously, this was a problem. I spotted an African woman coming towards me and, reasonably sure that she was not a native Chinese speaker either, I asked if she spoke English. "No," she said, but she did speak

FRENCH!

I've never felt so fluent in French in my LIFE. I'm certain that there were a lot of things that I was trying to say that didn't really come across as making sense, but I had such a feeling of real conversation and understanding. A stark contrast to my daily struggle to order rice in any given cafeteria here.

She helped me find the correct building, and I went up to the sixteenth floor and spent about five minutes talking to Mr. Florcruz before leaving the building, because all he wanted was a resume. He said he'd send it out and hopefully find something for me to do. It was fun getting the taxi there and back, though.

Instead of doing homework, my new friend Alice came over and we decided to tour the campus. I'd have pictures, but my battery died. I'll try to describe them in fewer than a thousand words:

(Insert picture of stereotypical Chinese tower here)

(Insert picture of frozen lake with ice-skaters here)

etc. etc...

After seeing what campus had to offer, we decided to go off the beaten path and leave campus. We walked around the edge of the wall and then across the street. There was a gate that led to a dirt road, so we went down that. Eventually we arrived at a dirt road that resembled a post-apocalyptic zombie-movie setting. Rubble lined the roads. Still, we journied on. Journied should be a word.

Eventually we came a frozen pond, an empty fountain with a stone fish in the center, and strange porcelain tiling under the dirt on the road. I have no idea what the deal with that was. Anyway, across the frozen pond was a very long, single story building, which seemed to be alone in the otherwise desolate landscape. There was a light on, and a few men were walking in, and a few were walking about. Behind us, two men walking the opposite direction on the path started yelling something at us and pointing at the house. They kept walking. I asked Alice what they were saying.

She said that, as they pointed at the building, they simply yelled "good fun."

I'm going to wonder for a long time what that meant.

Tiny Shrimp

2008-01-13T23:56:00.000-05:00

01/13/08

Yesterday Will and I decided to rearrange our room so as to counterbalance the hotel-roominess of it all. We plundered Junta's room, which we referred to as his "single room penalty" and created a large open space in ours, where we were able to place a coffee table surrounded by eight or so chairs, a tea table, and a mini-fridge. After dinner, we had a tea-party. This was a great idea, except that all we had were loose, dry tea-pellet-things and no strainer. We thought of purchasing some stockings, but then decided that might be weird for two guys to do at 9PM.

For dinner we went back to the dumpling place because they were serving soup, and our friend Tram said she knew how to order so we wouldn't have to. That was all we needed to hear.

At first glance, the soup consisted of wontons and greens- like spinach- with tiny little spices and things floating around. I would have gone on happily believing this until someone said "this is good seaweed" and I thought "well... OK" and then someone else said "no, it's moss" and I thought "fine..." and then someone ELSE said "and aren't these tiny shrimp and crab cute?" and I thought "...." Then I looked down and saw that, indeed, there were itty bitty shrimp and crabs floating in the soup. I picked up a shrimp and looked it in its tiny little beady eyes. I'm sure it would have been happy to know that it was delicious, if a little salty. Next to me, Will found a baby squid.

01/14/08

This morning was our first day of classes. I'm in a small class of seven with a younger instructor, Li Laoshi (Laoshi isn't a name, but the word for teacher. At least something like that. I haven't done my homework yet). She is very nice and patient, and gives lots of positive feedback when we get things right. Today we learned "hello," "goodbye," "sorry," "how are you?" "I'm doing well," "cool," and "I don't speak Chinese." We were also introduced to 12 of the 38 Chinese "finals," which are better known as "weird noises that we as Americans have never had to make before," and the four tones that can be used on any syllable. We spent a good hour on the difference between one that goes up, and one that goes down a little and then up, but lower. I think the guy from "Jaws" said it best: "we're gonna need a bigger boat."

I have my first day of internship at CNN tomorrow. I have to make my way across half the city and find a random building I've never seen before. I'm placing my hopes and dreams on the assumption that there will be a large "CNN" in neon lights over the front.

Noodles!

2008-01-12T04:46:00.000-05:00

01/12/08

Noodle House- Revisited

I woke up this morning at 7, because I went to bed at 9. As you can tell, I was a Friday night party animal. Will was asleep, but Junta was up and we had a lovely cup of tea together (because they bring us hot water and tea every morning outside our door) and then tried to go to the bank to exchange his traveler’s checks and my hundred bucks.

The first bank that we hit was the Agricultural Bank of China, and they didn’t exchange money and referred us to the Bank of China, which was just off campus and just a hop across the sign-ignoring highway of death and despair™. Once we got there, though, we were told that the Bank of China only exchanged money Monday through Friday.

A quick side note- next to the Bank of China was a two-story KFC Select. This is the third KFC that I’ve seen since I arrived in Beijing. I have yet to see a single McDonalds, but the lines at every single KFC were of Disney-worldly proportions. I don’t get it.

For lunch we went back to the Noodle-house, where Junta helped me order spicy noodles (do-dao-mein, or something like that). It was considerably easier than the previous Noodle-house experience, except for the whole chop-stick-to-eat-soupy-noodles thing. There’s a guy in our group named Steve, and he can’t use chop-sticks at all. I tried to teach him. He’s probably going to starve.

After lunch, the entire group took a trip to the Forbidden City, right in the middle of Beijing. It took about an hour to get there by bus- and we aren’t even at the edge of the city. The palace complex was impressive, with every gate holding behind it another, larger courtyard with another, larger temple-pagoda-house-thing. Here’s a picture of what I mean. I’m standing at the gate of a very similar building to what is behind me.

See?

There were some neat places, though, like extensive rock gardens. In one place we found an elevated stone table with stone seats. We figured it was for tea or paper rock scissors. That was supposed to be amusing because we’re playing paper rock scissors, but you can’t really tell in this picture. Oh well.

(From left to right- Me, Jennifer, and Will)

I really appreciated the English subtitles that they had on every gate- “Gate of Tranquility,” “Gate of Respectable Thoughts,” “Gate of Martial Valor,” etc… but my favorite sign was this one:

(The more you care for the palace,

the more the palace shows its splendour.)

I appreciate the sentiment.

After walking through the Forbidden City (which was a long, long walk) we arrived at Tiananmen Square (“where nothing bad has ever happened™”). It was a very, very large square… there’s not really much more I can say, aesthetically, about a giant slab of concrete. It was worth seeing, though.

This evening I’m going out with Jordan and Glen, who live across the hall and are very good at Chinese, to get some hamburgers. At first I felt bad because I was abandoning the local food so quickly, but honestly, I think hamburgers might be healthier than all the delicious grease I’ve been putting in my system.

Finally, as promised, here are some pictures of “Hotel California”

Building 5, sweet Building 5.

My bed is on the left. See? It’s a hotel. Except without anywhere to put your clothes. Mine currently live in the TV cabinet.

Pictures Coming Soon-ish!

2008-01-11T19:59:00.000-05:00

01/11/08- Evening

Of Yolk Cake and Dumplings

In the afternoon we went to find food. We needed first, though, to get a fan ka (meal card) so that we could join the ranks of supreme efficiency. A student here at Beida who spoke a little English helped us out, which is good because, when they give you your meal card, they also give you a numerical password to the meal card. But only in Chinese. I would be very hungry tonight if not for that kind translator.

We first tried to go to “noodle house” for lunch. We walked through the doors, which, like most doors at Beida, are large, heavy-ish clear flaps that hang down from the door frame, giving one the impression of walking through a car wash. We stood in the long line (as one student informed us, there are always long queues) and when we got up to the front, we realized that no one in our group, not even the guys who had taken three and four semesters of Chinese, could even order the simplest of noodly dishes. Not wanting to hold up the line any longer than we did, we beat a retreat to “dumpling house,” where I fully utilized my skill of pointing at large vats of dumplings to indicate which ones I wanted. Now, I didn’t know which dumplings were in which vat, but I didn’t really care. The woman helping me then said something in Chinese, and, taking an educated guess, I put my hands into a medium sized plate. My friend Will, who speaks Chinese, ended up with a giant serving platter full of at least a hundred dumplings- so I think I got lucky.

I noticed at this time that no one in the entire restaurant had anything to drink with his or her meal. No one. If you are aware of my love of drinking copious amounts of water/sweet tea/whatever at the table, you may have some idea as to the extent of my thirsty sorrow.

(update- I found out later that, after you point at a type of dumpling, the lady asked “how many?” and in the case of dumplings, “one” equals six. So Will ordered 10 dumplings and ended up with 60)

Earlier in the day (I just remembered what I did before lunch!), after the language test had so completely disheartened me, I found the one other person in my group who also had no knowledge whatsoever of Chinese. Her name is Anna, and she is of Russian descent but lives in Denver and goes to a college there, and apparently she hadn’t eaten since the plane ride the day before. I felt superior, having been to the mini-mart already, and so I took her there. While looking around, I came across a couple of items that I wanted to share-

Wrigley’s Coffee Flavored Gum (do we have this in the US?)
Steak Flavored Cheetos (I am assuming it is steak flavored because the other package had a picture of cheese on it and this one had a picture of a t-bone)
Chocolate Chip and Red Bean Cookies… (I have no idea what the “red beans” actually are. I might find out by semester’s end) and, my personal favorite…
Egg-Yolk Filled Mini-Cakes. Right next to the chocolate-filled cakes in your friendly pastry isle.

An update on the ATM situation- APPARENTLY I was supposed to tell my bank that I was going to China. I didn’t think I had to because it had always worked in Europe without prior notification. Anyway, my impression is that they canceled my card, so I have to get a new one sent to me. In the meantime I’ll skip on over to the bank of China and just hand them all the American money that I brought.

Obviously, I finally found the internet and I am allowed to post. An interesting side note, however, is that though I can post to my blog, I can not view it myself. Yay!

28 Hours Without Sleep Later

2008-01-11T00:41:00.000-05:00

Today's a double-issue since I didn't have internet access yesterday to post anything.

01-10-08

I don’t have internet right now to post this, but trust me that I’m writing this the evening that I arrived in China. I met a good number of my group at Newark, including Will, my roommate who’s also from William and Mary, and Chris, my new friend from American University with whom I had fun and exciting adventures.

The North Pole is beautiful right as you cross the boundary where night stretches on for months at a time. It’s also a frighteningly vast amount of ice.
Thirteen hours on a plane isn’t so bad when you have movies starring The Rock on constant replay.
Arriving in Beijing was odd, in that it seemed exactly like the place we took off- New Jersey
My bank refused to give me Chinese money through the ATM. This was a slight source of frustration.
After being picked up by our group in the airport, we were told to go down the escalator. As Chris and I faithfully did just this, apparently our group leader said “oh wait, no, upstairs” and marched everyone off. Chris and I waited at the bottom of the escalator for a few minutes, wondering what was taking everyone so long, and finally we set out looking for them. As it turns out, they were looking for us too, but we never did manage to find each other. We just wandered around the airport for about half an hour. Luckily, Chris had some money and I had the address of Peking University written in Chinese characters. With this power between us, we hailed a black-market taxi and proceeded on the most terrifying cab ride ever. What was perhaps most terrifying was that the city never seemed to end, the sky never seemed to yield its smoggy grey coat, and Batman never materialized in this Gotham/Sin City cross-breed. In Beijing the traffic seems to have taken all the best from Italy, New York, and driving behind a tractor trailer. When the driver dropped us off, we weren’t REALLY sure that we were at the university. We were just happy to get out.
We found a very nice student who spoke just enough English to understand that we wanted her to read the Chinese directions to the place for foreign students and tell us where that was. She didn’t know, but she entertained us by accosting every other person on the pathway and getting them to tell her where it was so that she could lead us there. I asked her if she was on her way to meet friends, because I didn’t want to inconvenience her. I think she misunderstood me, because her reply was “I have a boyfriend.”
Dr. Sun enjoyed our tale of abandonment.
After hauling our enormous suitcases up the five flights of stairs to our rooms, we realized that we were in a hotel. I’ll put up pictures, because I don’t think I can really explain it properly. We’ve dubbed our hall “Hotel California.”
Two of the students who were here last semester, Matt and Jessie, took us out to a mini-market and then to dinner. I bought a bottle of water for the equivalent of 40 cents. Then we bought dinner for four for an equivalent of one dollar. Pork and vegetable dumplings. Yum.

01/11/08

It’s Five o Clock Somewhere

Woke up this morning at 6AM Beijing time, which is 5PM EST. The goal of the morning is to find a phone to call home and inform those at home to call the bank so that I can retrieve money. Right now I’m borrowing 250 Kuai from Chris, and I’m sure that his goodwill, though bountiful, will eventually run out.

Upon waking up I went to our roommate Junta’s room (he has a single, Will and I are sharing a double for now) and took a crash course in the various pronunciations of a few words in Chinese. I am now 100% confident that I will call someone’s mother a horse before I leave.

Today we take our language placement tests. I wonder if I should just hand them a blank sheet of paper or sit down, spend some time looking at it in a display of effort and concentration, and then hand in a blank sheet of paper.

(update) I insisted I knew no Chinese whatsoever, and they made me write my name down at the top. The guy then took it, looked at it, and wrote a big zero on it. Which made me feel good.

Tomorrow- look for the tale of the noodle house!

Phrases learned-
"Thank You"

28 Hours Later

2008-01-08T02:54:00.000-05:00

I promise I didn't stay up until 3AM just to retain title continuity. But it is true that in 24 hours I will be... at least in an airport. Which, with airport security as it is, is basically detached from American soil anyway.

My next post will be from China. Slight difficulty- I've been reading around about various national Chinese firewalls that block all sorts of websites, including certain google sites, of which this blog is one. I guess building one insurmountable wall wasn't enough.

Anyway, I don't think that will stop this blog, but if it does... whoops? Until then, however, a quick survey of where I stand right now.

Bags Packed- 0

Books Purchased- 0

Phrases Learned- 1 ... still....

Facts About China That Don't Come From the Disney Movie "Mulan"- 0

I prefer surprises. I keep telling myself that.

28 Days Later

2007-12-12T14:08:00.000-05:00

Mr. C gave me the idea for the title of this blog by leading me to the poem below. I remember when I used to actually attempt to dig holes to China, so it seemed fitting. As it is, I'll be taking a slightly quicker route by flying over the north pole in exactly 28 days.

I'll be using this blog to update those of my friends and family who wish to know what I'm up to in Beijing. I'm bringing a digital camera and will try to include pictures with the posts (save myself a few thousand words) and there's a chance for the occasional video.

I'm expecting to update every other day, at least, when I'm in Beijing, and if anyone cares and I slack off you should yell at me to stop being lazy. There won't be any posts from now until right before I leave, though- this post is just to make sure that people know where my blog is and how to access it.

I'm already having trouble with the blog-writing-engine-thingy. I can't make all the fonts the same. Oh well.

Digging For China

“Far enough down is China,” somebody said.
“Dig deep enough and you might see the sky
As clear as at the bottom of a well.
Except it would be real–a different sky.
Then you could burrow down until you came
To China! Oh, it’s nothing like New Jersey.
There’s people, trees and houses, and all that,
But much, much different. Nothing looks the same.”

I went and got the trowel out of the shed
And sweated like a coolie all that morning,
Digging a hole beside the lilac bush,
Down on my hands and knees. It was a sort
Of praying, I suspect. I watched my hand
Dig deep and darker, and I tried and tried
To dream a place where nothing was the same.
The trowel never did break through to blue.

Before the dream could weary of itself
My eyes were tired of looking into darkness,
My sunbaked head of hanging down a hole.
I stood up in a place I had forgotten,
Blinking and staggering while the earth went round
And showed me silver barns, the fields dozing
In palls of brightness, patens growing and gone
In the tides of leaves, and the whole sky china blue.
Until I got my balance back again
All that I saw was China, China, China.

– by Richard Wilbur

Language Update- My current grasp of Chinese lies entirely in the phrase "I would like a beer." Hopefully I can get a few more words under my belt before I leave.