can be very gratifying. It's always a massive psychological reward when you can use any skills, however feeble, to accomplish something concrete and beneficial. I felt that way in France five years ago on my 3-week exchange program, and it's still just as true. Yesterday I mentioned that our AC unit was broken. Well today, breaking with typical Eric fashion of "let-it-lie-maybe-it-will-get-magically-better-or-someone-else-will-fix-it" I decided to get it fixed. I took the AC remote and went down to the lobby. By complete happenstance the lobby also just received a package from me which was thrust into my hands by the receptionist. I then told her that our air conditioner was broken, gave my room number, and tried to explain that it could be I'm an idiot that doesn't know how to use the remote. She didn't seem to notice or care about the last part, and as soon as she took down the number she told me that someone would be contacted. A half hour later or so a mechanic type guy came up, messed with the settings to make sure it wasn't just me being dumb (it wasn't) and cleaned the filter. Then, after making her repeat it several times, I gleaned from the housekeeping woman who was also in the room that she would come back in a few hours to see if it was now working. She did, and it wasn't. So she got the mechanic and another guy to come up again, they opened the window and started working on the actual AC unit that was outside our room. They got it fixed. All of this happened within the span of 3 hours or so. It was a really big warm fuzzy to get our cold steely going again.
The oral midterm went okay, it was a little short but there were some parts I absolutely nailed which the teacher pointed out at the end. The package, for those curious, mostly contained foodstuffs including Goldfish, Nutrigrain bars, and Flipsides. My father thought there was a slight chance it wouldn't make it, which I shared upon learning that my mom did not lie on the customs form about packing food.
Final word: does jelly and/or jam need to be refrigerated upon opening? I feel like it does but that is really not an option here...
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
This post is really long, and in addition, laundry sucks
大家好！That basically means "hello everyone" if I haven't used it yet.
We have Friday off this weekend though I have no clue why, which makes it a long weekend. I am going to Penglai, which is pretty close to Qingdao. In addition to being the home of Qingdao beer (it was run by the Germans who had a territorial concession in Qingdao) Qingdao is famous as a seaside vacation spot. Penglai is a little more off the beaten trail than Qingdao but apparently is still legit and supposed to have great natural beauty, etc... It may blow my parents away that I am a) going toward the ocean and b) just mentioned "natural beauty" after the Butchart Gardens Mathis Family Fiasco a decade ago permanently handicapped my sense of natural beauty but so it goes. I will also not have my laptop with me so this will be the only update you get for at least until Monday. Enjoy it. Anyhow, I have no clue what I'm going to see in Penglai, but I am sure it will be supercalifragilisticexpealidocious.
Before the calm however, is the storm; Thursday is our midterm date and tomorrow, is the oral mid-term. I will probably have to talk for 15 minutes about my opinion on why Chinese food is bad for your health, why I came to China, and a bunch of other mundane topics. It shouldn't be a problem though, as most of my TAs think I have "very perfect" pronunciation. Perhaps I wouldn't last long in the real world but in a classroom I'm not too worried. The written mid-term will be a blast I'm sure and they'll probably pull out obscure words we learned but never went over too much. Stuff like "statistics." We'll see how it goes.
Which having covered Wednesday and Thursday takes us to today. I got a quiz back, got 9/10 (this was higher than my first couple weeks' average of 8.5 or so but in the past couple it had been closer to 9.3) and realized for the umpteenth time just how nice and yet arbitrary our teachers are. I missed 3 of the 5 characters and 1 of the 5 pinyin words, and also missed all the key/new vocab in the sentence. It probably should have been well below an 8.0 but because my teacher thinks I am just the bee's knees it's a 9.0. I guess it really is about who you know and not what.
One thing I have just noticed is that the Great Firewall of China has been modified significantly. This blog, and the entire *.blogspot.com domain is suddenly unblocked. However www.thepirateybay.com which is a massively popular and extremely shady illegal download site now is. (Don't worry John, I am specifically taking advantage of my time here to use that site. It's not even illegal because I already own all of the West Wing anyway.) So in a minor irony I now must use my school's Virtual Private Network (which bypasses China's filter) to access The Pirate Bay, download the tracker, then close my VPN connection and lose my campus-associated IP and startup the actual BitTorrent program to perform the shady activities.
Our air conditioner broke. It just blows cool air now, doesn't get anything near the 17 Celsius it used to be able to do, much less the 23 I would settle for. It makes for quite excruciating nights of sleep when it hits 90 Fahrenheit outside and your alternatives become burn under heavy covers or use one thin one and expose yourself to the myriad species of insect that always manage to get into the room. Last night was my worst night of sleep yet, simply because of the unceasing harassment by bugs.
Another thing that sucks about this country (there are many, I'll be making a list. Perhaps a Pros vs. Cons at the end) is that everything is too gosh-darned small. Now, I am not a particularly big person. I am a little over 6', perhaps coming in at 6'1" with shoes on. According to my Google research, this puts me in the 75% percentile for my race, age, and gender. The bed, as I may have mentioned before, is about exactly my height. Given it is built into the wall and a few inches of space between my head and the headboard are absolutely necessary for basic comfort, my feet always slightly hang off the edge. So the bed sucks. So do the desks. I feel like they are puny little things I could toss across the room. When sitting down with no slouch, my feet flat on the floor, my knees touch the bottom of most of the desks. There is a larger "model" but there are only 3 of them in our classroom. The desk in my room I am at now suffers from the same problem. My thighs are thick enough that I can raise my legs a little and tilt the entire desk. The Great Wall was another place where my size obviously did not fit in. If I were running around in and out of guard towers without being careful, I would have smacked my head a couple times.
On Sunday, my roommate Ricardo and I along with another guy went to Culture street in search of the ever elusive purple drops. While there, I learned that my sign is actually a rabbit and not a dragon, which sucks because dragons are awesome. Still, the wikipedia entry on my sign had a pretty spot-on description of me. I am 100% aware of the total load of BS it is and put no stock in it, but it was still nice to see myself described correctly on the 8.5% chance that there was. I am now going to have to return to America with some sort of rabbit gear in tow.
Also at Culture Street, I had an interesting bargaining experience. I was on the hunt for any decent-looking jurley for my sisters. Walking along, I saw a silvery bracelet with some characters on it that looked fairly cool, given what I think my sisters would wear. I asked the guy whose stuff it was how much money it was after handling it for a little bit. I am an admitted bargaining novice, but one thing you cannot do is show too much interest in anything. Even if it makes you swoon because it's the only Hello Kitty vs Sailor Moon Limited Edition African Soapstone Battle Trophy left on earth, I find the best thing to do is act with as little interest as possible. You can't try to play the storekeep for an idiot, they know that anything you buy will almost by definition be interested in, but you can't show any attachment. With this silver bracelet it wasn't too hard, but the point stands for anything. Anyhow, after I asked him how much for the bracelet, he quotes me a price, 100 kuai. I was expecting something like this, and immediately scoffed at him, shot him a glare that basically said you're an idiot, and told him it was maybe worth 20 at the most. From here, things got interesting. The woman shopkeeper next to him laughed a little. The man who gave me the price smiled, and replied with something that was not a new price. Then, while I was holding it in my hand, he started almost shooing me away. By this time we had a small crowd of 6-10 onlookers, some shoppers and some sellers. Ricardo, who had been listening and nearby the entire time, said that he was saying I should just take it for free. I agreed with his assessment. However, I was not about to take a $3 bracelet and not pay for it just to get beaten up by a Triad 15 minutes later. I was also not 100% sure he was offering it for free. I kept looking at him, said something like "I can take away?" in some terribly broken Chinese and he seemed to respond in the affirmative. His neighbor the woman who had laughed earlier, was looking on and smiling during the entire ordeal. At last, I offered to pay him 20 kuai, and he seemed surprised given I had just "confirmed" that I could have it for free. I insisted on giving it to him, and walked away. I didn't take a look back to see if we had picked up more spectators, or if anyone was having a laugh at me. I'm still not sure what triggered the entire exchange. It could have been so many things; my hostile and quick reaction to his price humoring him and offering it to me as a gift to a foreigner for (apparently?) not being an idiot and getting taken for a ride. It could be that it all worked out as he planned and once he heard 20, thought it was a great price, and the rest was just theatrics. Perhaps he felt a little humiliated with the way I shot back at him and maybe it had something to do with his competing neighbors/friends. Or perhaps I misdiagnosed the entire situation and he was either genuinely angry, or didn't understand a word of my Chinese, or something else. It really was one of those moments when you wish you had a recording or transcript of the entire thing so you could go back and figure out just what in the hell happened back there.
Also while at culture street, I bought a 2 kuai rock carving of a turtle for myself and a couple rings, once again for my sisters. Here you can see the lewt, along with a 1 kuai coin, inside a silver dish that I stole from a Korean restaurant. I do genuinely feel bad about the stealing, but I don't think a restaurant is the type of place that will accept my offer to give them 20 kuai in exchange for it. It's also a unique thing that I have a 0% chance of finding somewhere else. I hope that rationalization is enough for you dear reader, because so far it has been for me.
Tragedy struck this weekend as my mouse died. It keeps spazzing out and says it is alternatively plugged in and then not, and loses power when not plugged in as though there is some sort of actual microfracture in the wiring somewhere. My Age of Empires 2 exploits shall for now remain only in my daydreams while in lecture class.
On Saturday I went to Yummy Cafe, which is a tiny establishment a block from our school. It was the cafe's first birthday party, which was cause to celebrate and eat American food. There was cheese, salsa and some sort of taco bites, chicken wings, and many other delicious things to eat. There was a keg of Carlsberg. (or so I am told. I am not one of those beer aficionado types but it was a keg, and pretty good) And with that keg naturally came... beer pong China Edition. As the picture clearly illustrates, resources were limited. It was 6-cup instead of 10 simply because the
table size was quite lacking. Lines were used in the brick because slam-dunks wouldn't be very kosher. Friendly fire counts, and it did happen once. Perhaps worst of all, we could not find ping pong balls, meaning we used 2 plastic bottle caps, the exact same kind you would get from opening a 2-liter in the states. Despite all this it worked out fairly well, though the team on the left of the picture dominated basically the entire night up until being dethroned in the last game by myself and an oh-so-clutch partner, though not the one shown. I am simply glad I can check off the Eastern Hemisphere on my beer-pong bingo chart. (No mom, those do not actually exist.)
Friday was our hottest day yet here. I believe the temperatures hit the mid 90s. The pollution was among the worst while we were here, which probably contributed to the problem. Despite this we decided to play ultimate and what started as a 5v5 eventually got up to something like 11v11. We played on a field that was mostly dirt with some sparse grass, with a topography as consistent as the housing market. Afterwards my lungs were tired enough that if I breathed too deep I would get short of breath and have to cough, similar to after the wall. I'm not sure if it's because I am completely out of shape or the fact that visibility is better measured in meters than kilometers, but it's probably not a good sign either way. Before the Frisbee activities, I went with my tutor to the supermarket and located the essentials. I bought water, Lay's, apples, and peanut butter and jelly. I will probably actually begin consuming breakfast now that I can make something decent and fast.
That's everything. All that happened on Thursday was that I decided to pop in the CD that came with the book and was extremely disappointed to find it was one low-quality video track, 20 minutes long, of a woman reading every story in the book. It was incredibly low budget, and quite unremarkable.
Saw this on a car the other day, Autobots represent!
Well it has been a week since last posting, sorry for that. No particular reason other than I didn't feel like making a long post and I knew it would inevitably come to that. We are going to try this post Memento style, backtracking from what is currently the future several days from now regressing all the way to the day after my last posting, Thursday. Ready? Well we've already started. (Note: I have never actually seen Memento so I'm terribly sorry if I somehow oversimplified such a brilliant piece of cinematic artistry from the one and only M. Night Shyamalan.)
We have Friday off this weekend though I have no clue why, which makes it a long weekend. I am going to Penglai, which is pretty close to Qingdao. In addition to being the home of Qingdao beer (it was run by the Germans who had a territorial concession in Qingdao) Qingdao is famous as a seaside vacation spot. Penglai is a little more off the beaten trail than Qingdao but apparently is still legit and supposed to have great natural beauty, etc... It may blow my parents away that I am a) going toward the ocean and b) just mentioned "natural beauty" after the Butchart Gardens Mathis Family Fiasco a decade ago permanently handicapped my sense of natural beauty but so it goes. I will also not have my laptop with me so this will be the only update you get for at least until Monday. Enjoy it. Anyhow, I have no clue what I'm going to see in Penglai, but I am sure it will be supercalifragilisticexpealidocious.
Before the calm however, is the storm; Thursday is our midterm date and tomorrow, is the oral mid-term. I will probably have to talk for 15 minutes about my opinion on why Chinese food is bad for your health, why I came to China, and a bunch of other mundane topics. It shouldn't be a problem though, as most of my TAs think I have "very perfect" pronunciation. Perhaps I wouldn't last long in the real world but in a classroom I'm not too worried. The written mid-term will be a blast I'm sure and they'll probably pull out obscure words we learned but never went over too much. Stuff like "statistics." We'll see how it goes.
This is a tank. Tanks are cool.
Which having covered Wednesday and Thursday takes us to today. I got a quiz back, got 9/10 (this was higher than my first couple weeks' average of 8.5 or so but in the past couple it had been closer to 9.3) and realized for the umpteenth time just how nice and yet arbitrary our teachers are. I missed 3 of the 5 characters and 1 of the 5 pinyin words, and also missed all the key/new vocab in the sentence. It probably should have been well below an 8.0 but because my teacher thinks I am just the bee's knees it's a 9.0. I guess it really is about who you know and not what.
One thing I have just noticed is that the Great Firewall of China has been modified significantly. This blog, and the entire *.blogspot.com domain is suddenly unblocked. However www.thepirateybay.com which is a massively popular and extremely shady illegal download site now is. (Don't worry John, I am specifically taking advantage of my time here to use that site. It's not even illegal because I already own all of the West Wing anyway.) So in a minor irony I now must use my school's Virtual Private Network (which bypasses China's filter) to access The Pirate Bay, download the tracker, then close my VPN connection and lose my campus-associated IP and startup the actual BitTorrent program to perform the shady activities.
Our air conditioner broke. It just blows cool air now, doesn't get anything near the 17 Celsius it used to be able to do, much less the 23 I would settle for. It makes for quite excruciating nights of sleep when it hits 90 Fahrenheit outside and your alternatives become burn under heavy covers or use one thin one and expose yourself to the myriad species of insect that always manage to get into the room. Last night was my worst night of sleep yet, simply because of the unceasing harassment by bugs.
Another thing that sucks about this country (there are many, I'll be making a list. Perhaps a Pros vs. Cons at the end) is that everything is too gosh-darned small. Now, I am not a particularly big person. I am a little over 6', perhaps coming in at 6'1" with shoes on. According to my Google research, this puts me in the 75% percentile for my race, age, and gender. The bed, as I may have mentioned before, is about exactly my height. Given it is built into the wall and a few inches of space between my head and the headboard are absolutely necessary for basic comfort, my feet always slightly hang off the edge. So the bed sucks. So do the desks. I feel like they are puny little things I could toss across the room. When sitting down with no slouch, my feet flat on the floor, my knees touch the bottom of most of the desks. There is a larger "model" but there are only 3 of them in our classroom. The desk in my room I am at now suffers from the same problem. My thighs are thick enough that I can raise my legs a little and tilt the entire desk. The Great Wall was another place where my size obviously did not fit in. If I were running around in and out of guard towers without being careful, I would have smacked my head a couple times.
On Sunday, my roommate Ricardo and I along with another guy went to Culture street in search of the ever elusive purple drops. While there, I learned that my sign is actually a rabbit and not a dragon, which sucks because dragons are awesome. Still, the wikipedia entry on my sign had a pretty spot-on description of me. I am 100% aware of the total load of BS it is and put no stock in it, but it was still nice to see myself described correctly on the 8.5% chance that there was. I am now going to have to return to America with some sort of rabbit gear in tow.
Cultural creations at culture street. A molasses butterfly and a painting.
Also at Culture Street, I had an interesting bargaining experience. I was on the hunt for any decent-looking jurley for my sisters. Walking along, I saw a silvery bracelet with some characters on it that looked fairly cool, given what I think my sisters would wear. I asked the guy whose stuff it was how much money it was after handling it for a little bit. I am an admitted bargaining novice, but one thing you cannot do is show too much interest in anything. Even if it makes you swoon because it's the only Hello Kitty vs Sailor Moon Limited Edition African Soapstone Battle Trophy left on earth, I find the best thing to do is act with as little interest as possible. You can't try to play the storekeep for an idiot, they know that anything you buy will almost by definition be interested in, but you can't show any attachment. With this silver bracelet it wasn't too hard, but the point stands for anything. Anyhow, after I asked him how much for the bracelet, he quotes me a price, 100 kuai. I was expecting something like this, and immediately scoffed at him, shot him a glare that basically said you're an idiot, and told him it was maybe worth 20 at the most. From here, things got interesting. The woman shopkeeper next to him laughed a little. The man who gave me the price smiled, and replied with something that was not a new price. Then, while I was holding it in my hand, he started almost shooing me away. By this time we had a small crowd of 6-10 onlookers, some shoppers and some sellers. Ricardo, who had been listening and nearby the entire time, said that he was saying I should just take it for free. I agreed with his assessment. However, I was not about to take a $3 bracelet and not pay for it just to get beaten up by a Triad 15 minutes later. I was also not 100% sure he was offering it for free. I kept looking at him, said something like "I can take away?" in some terribly broken Chinese and he seemed to respond in the affirmative. His neighbor the woman who had laughed earlier, was looking on and smiling during the entire ordeal. At last, I offered to pay him 20 kuai, and he seemed surprised given I had just "confirmed" that I could have it for free. I insisted on giving it to him, and walked away. I didn't take a look back to see if we had picked up more spectators, or if anyone was having a laugh at me. I'm still not sure what triggered the entire exchange. It could have been so many things; my hostile and quick reaction to his price humoring him and offering it to me as a gift to a foreigner for (apparently?) not being an idiot and getting taken for a ride. It could be that it all worked out as he planned and once he heard 20, thought it was a great price, and the rest was just theatrics. Perhaps he felt a little humiliated with the way I shot back at him and maybe it had something to do with his competing neighbors/friends. Or perhaps I misdiagnosed the entire situation and he was either genuinely angry, or didn't understand a word of my Chinese, or something else. It really was one of those moments when you wish you had a recording or transcript of the entire thing so you could go back and figure out just what in the hell happened back there.
Also while at culture street, I bought a 2 kuai rock carving of a turtle for myself and a couple rings, once again for my sisters. Here you can see the lewt, along with a 1 kuai coin, inside a silver dish that I stole from a Korean restaurant. I do genuinely feel bad about the stealing, but I don't think a restaurant is the type of place that will accept my offer to give them 20 kuai in exchange for it. It's also a unique thing that I have a 0% chance of finding somewhere else. I hope that rationalization is enough for you dear reader, because so far it has been for me.Tragedy struck this weekend as my mouse died. It keeps spazzing out and says it is alternatively plugged in and then not, and loses power when not plugged in as though there is some sort of actual microfracture in the wiring somewhere. My Age of Empires 2 exploits shall for now remain only in my daydreams while in lecture class.
On Saturday I went to Yummy Cafe, which is a tiny establishment a block from our school. It was the cafe's first birthday party, which was cause to celebrate and eat American food. There was cheese, salsa and some sort of taco bites, chicken wings, and many other delicious things to eat. There was a keg of Carlsberg. (or so I am told. I am not one of those beer aficionado types but it was a keg, and pretty good) And with that keg naturally came... beer pong China Edition. As the picture clearly illustrates, resources were limited. It was 6-cup instead of 10 simply because the
table size was quite lacking. Lines were used in the brick because slam-dunks wouldn't be very kosher. Friendly fire counts, and it did happen once. Perhaps worst of all, we could not find ping pong balls, meaning we used 2 plastic bottle caps, the exact same kind you would get from opening a 2-liter in the states. Despite all this it worked out fairly well, though the team on the left of the picture dominated basically the entire night up until being dethroned in the last game by myself and an oh-so-clutch partner, though not the one shown. I am simply glad I can check off the Eastern Hemisphere on my beer-pong bingo chart. (No mom, those do not actually exist.)Friday was our hottest day yet here. I believe the temperatures hit the mid 90s. The pollution was among the worst while we were here, which probably contributed to the problem. Despite this we decided to play ultimate and what started as a 5v5 eventually got up to something like 11v11. We played on a field that was mostly dirt with some sparse grass, with a topography as consistent as the housing market. Afterwards my lungs were tired enough that if I breathed too deep I would get short of breath and have to cough, similar to after the wall. I'm not sure if it's because I am completely out of shape or the fact that visibility is better measured in meters than kilometers, but it's probably not a good sign either way. Before the Frisbee activities, I went with my tutor to the supermarket and located the essentials. I bought water, Lay's, apples, and peanut butter and jelly. I will probably actually begin consuming breakfast now that I can make something decent and fast.
That's everything. All that happened on Thursday was that I decided to pop in the CD that came with the book and was extremely disappointed to find it was one low-quality video track, 20 minutes long, of a woman reading every story in the book. It was incredibly low budget, and quite unremarkable.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
It's not for dinner.
I miss steak. A lot. I want a juicy 16oz medium-rare steak in front of me right now. I wrote about it last time, and it has gotten worse. I have decided not to eat steak here anymore, for 3 reasons. First, the steak I have upon returning to the US will taste that much better. Ripping into the tender flesh of a cow with a massive carbon footprint will be that much better. Second, steak here is expensive. I paid 108 kuai for a steak last night. Them there's some American pricing. Finally, the steak here really is genuinely bad. As noted earlier, it has peppered beyond all belief, perhaps in an effort to mask the not-so-steak-like taste of it. It is also cooked poorly, or just all awful cuts. The one I had last night was "medium rare" and it was basically medium well, if not well done. It is simply not an enjoyable experience over here.
Also last night while at the restaurant (饭馆) there was a meowing sound coming from somewhere next to or around our table. After looking around for it and trying to coax it out from wherever with food, I persuaded Shino to ask the waiter about the cat, whom calmly and quickly responded as if having been aware of this fact for some time, that the cat was in the wall. Yes, in the wall. I do not know why, nor how, but there you go. Cat's in walls, this country's got it all. Additionally at dinner, Shino presented me with a gift. It is a children's book (Complete with CD-ROM! I haven't popped it into my computer yet based on what I believe to be a well-founded fear of god knows what popping up.) of popular fairy tales, including Seven in One Stroke, one of my favorites from the Brother's Grimm, and more classic ones such as Snow White and Cinderella. It has basic-level characters and pinyin. Pinyin, for those wondering, is the name for the most common Romanization system for Chinese sounds. In Pinyin, the venerable Chairman Mao is Mao Zedong. In Wade-Giles Romanization, it is Mao Tse-tung. No one actually uses Wade-Giles anymore since 1980, and Chinese people type using pinyin. Pinyin also includes the tones of Chinese above vowels, which I may do a post on later. Anyhow, this book has the pinyin right above the characters and it is kind of exciting to read something other than the textbook and get around 80% comprehension. The title of the book is "Ge Lin's Stories." If I ever work up the courage to pop the CD into my computer, I will for sure take screenshots if there is any animation or whatnot.
Also last night while at the restaurant (饭馆) there was a meowing sound coming from somewhere next to or around our table. After looking around for it and trying to coax it out from wherever with food, I persuaded Shino to ask the waiter about the cat, whom calmly and quickly responded as if having been aware of this fact for some time, that the cat was in the wall. Yes, in the wall. I do not know why, nor how, but there you go. Cat's in walls, this country's got it all. Additionally at dinner, Shino presented me with a gift. It is a children's book (Complete with CD-ROM! I haven't popped it into my computer yet based on what I believe to be a well-founded fear of god knows what popping up.) of popular fairy tales, including Seven in One Stroke, one of my favorites from the Brother's Grimm, and more classic ones such as Snow White and Cinderella. It has basic-level characters and pinyin. Pinyin, for those wondering, is the name for the most common Romanization system for Chinese sounds. In Pinyin, the venerable Chairman Mao is Mao Zedong. In Wade-Giles Romanization, it is Mao Tse-tung. No one actually uses Wade-Giles anymore since 1980, and Chinese people type using pinyin. Pinyin also includes the tones of Chinese above vowels, which I may do a post on later. Anyhow, this book has the pinyin right above the characters and it is kind of exciting to read something other than the textbook and get around 80% comprehension. The title of the book is "Ge Lin's Stories." If I ever work up the courage to pop the CD into my computer, I will for sure take screenshots if there is any animation or whatnot.
Here it is in all its glory:
I took a walk a couple days ago with the intent to go to McDonalds then walk around a little. My plans were cut short quite abruptly when a bird took a liquidy dump on me. It was aimed quite perfectly, I must say. I noticed it only because I felt something slightly hit my hair, which I thought was nothing more than a blown leaf. Instinctively, I put my hand up to brush the offending vegetable matter out of the way. Instead, my fingers were met with just a smidgen of a bluish substance. Now, I had been walking by a lamp-post and had looked at the ground just prior to this and thought, "Wow, there is a lot of pigeon crap there." Well some annoying bird decided he didn't like me and let me know. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, this was not the first time a bird has done this to me. In cub scouts, must have been around 4th grade, I specifically remember setting out for a hike with Daniel and Mr. Smith and the rest of our pack. We had our uniforms on (meaning it couldn't have been too rough of a hike) and just set out from the parking lot. With the cars still in full view, a bird dropped a massive one right on my head. It made an audible sound, and basically felt like a massive raindrop. In a similar way, I put my hand up to feel what the hell had just hit me, and it was the same sticky substance. Daniel thought this was hilarious. So did the other scouts. I would wager the adults did too, but were too gracious to let on as such. I just remember trying to comb out what basically amounted to quick-drying glue out of my hair. The only reason I can fathom for someone to have a comb with them on a Scout hike is an over-zealous interpretation of the Boy Scout motto Be Prepared, but I guess it worked out well for me. Now, I tell you this even though the bird from yesterday was a quite superior marksfowl. It managed to not only graze my hair, but also to land the majority of it squarely on my shirt. Here I am, an American in a bright blue shirt, strolling through Tianjin with a disgusting stain squarely on the front my shirt, that no human not under the influence of hallucinogens could possibly miss. I debated what to do, and eventually decided to constantly tend to it to make sure no one though I was dumb enough to put it on in the morning and make it clear some shit went down (quite literally) that caused this blight. Getting back, I ran it under water for hours on end and used both regular soap and powdered detergent on it. With one true machine washing, it may be spotless. As it is now it's pretty good. And that was basically my Monday.
At McDonald's, I ordered what I think amounted to a Royale wit' Cheese. It had hamburger patty, cheese, cucumbers, and the special sauce. Cucumbers. The special sauce was not bad nor good really, just too much of it. The cucumbers, I guess, should not have surprised me. Lays does after all sell Cool Cucumber chips, and the picture showed cucumbers, but after seeing other people order other burgers from McDonald's with pickles on them, I thought it would we pickles. I was wrong. On the way back from McDonald's I saw a girl wearing a t-shirt in the same trendy font now popular on A&F and AE clothing nowadays, the somewhat imperfect block letters. Except the biggest word across the top of the shirt was COORSE which naturally is not a word. There was some stuff below it which I couldn't catch, but if you need any evidence how cool English is here, there you go. And this is common too. Horrible sentence fragments and spelling errors all over clothing here, sometimes just letters put together without any vowels to spice things up. They think that English sounds beautiful too.
On another walk a week or so ago that I don't think I mentioned, a little kid walked by me, turned around, pointed, and simply laughed. Now, I was used to the stares, the discreet glances, paranoia and little whispers. But he still managed to surprise me. Perhaps I should have stolen his soul, or at least pretended to. That would have been funny at least.
Finally, we saw an "acrobatics" show yesterday afternoon which was more like a carnival sideshow with magic and other entertainment. I took tons of pictures, including one of this girl doing crazy contortionist things. Seconds after taking this she let go of the ground and completely supported herself, in that stance, with her mouth. Yeah... kind of nuts.
There was also a couple magicians doing standard slight of hand tricks that while not too hard to understand looked pretty nonetheless. They cheated on some of the balancing things (The plates and the beginning bottles trick) by using a sort of interlocking thing so they didn't fall. One of the plates stopped spinning during their routine. Whatever, most of it was still cool.
Test tomorrow, and tutoring any minute now. I may be going for yet another massage tonight, not sure yet.
I took a walk a couple days ago with the intent to go to McDonalds then walk around a little. My plans were cut short quite abruptly when a bird took a liquidy dump on me. It was aimed quite perfectly, I must say. I noticed it only because I felt something slightly hit my hair, which I thought was nothing more than a blown leaf. Instinctively, I put my hand up to brush the offending vegetable matter out of the way. Instead, my fingers were met with just a smidgen of a bluish substance. Now, I had been walking by a lamp-post and had looked at the ground just prior to this and thought, "Wow, there is a lot of pigeon crap there." Well some annoying bird decided he didn't like me and let me know. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, this was not the first time a bird has done this to me. In cub scouts, must have been around 4th grade, I specifically remember setting out for a hike with Daniel and Mr. Smith and the rest of our pack. We had our uniforms on (meaning it couldn't have been too rough of a hike) and just set out from the parking lot. With the cars still in full view, a bird dropped a massive one right on my head. It made an audible sound, and basically felt like a massive raindrop. In a similar way, I put my hand up to feel what the hell had just hit me, and it was the same sticky substance. Daniel thought this was hilarious. So did the other scouts. I would wager the adults did too, but were too gracious to let on as such. I just remember trying to comb out what basically amounted to quick-drying glue out of my hair. The only reason I can fathom for someone to have a comb with them on a Scout hike is an over-zealous interpretation of the Boy Scout motto Be Prepared, but I guess it worked out well for me. Now, I tell you this even though the bird from yesterday was a quite superior marksfowl. It managed to not only graze my hair, but also to land the majority of it squarely on my shirt. Here I am, an American in a bright blue shirt, strolling through Tianjin with a disgusting stain squarely on the front my shirt, that no human not under the influence of hallucinogens could possibly miss. I debated what to do, and eventually decided to constantly tend to it to make sure no one though I was dumb enough to put it on in the morning and make it clear some shit went down (quite literally) that caused this blight. Getting back, I ran it under water for hours on end and used both regular soap and powdered detergent on it. With one true machine washing, it may be spotless. As it is now it's pretty good. And that was basically my Monday.
At McDonald's, I ordered what I think amounted to a Royale wit' Cheese. It had hamburger patty, cheese, cucumbers, and the special sauce. Cucumbers. The special sauce was not bad nor good really, just too much of it. The cucumbers, I guess, should not have surprised me. Lays does after all sell Cool Cucumber chips, and the picture showed cucumbers, but after seeing other people order other burgers from McDonald's with pickles on them, I thought it would we pickles. I was wrong. On the way back from McDonald's I saw a girl wearing a t-shirt in the same trendy font now popular on A&F and AE clothing nowadays, the somewhat imperfect block letters. Except the biggest word across the top of the shirt was COORSE which naturally is not a word. There was some stuff below it which I couldn't catch, but if you need any evidence how cool English is here, there you go. And this is common too. Horrible sentence fragments and spelling errors all over clothing here, sometimes just letters put together without any vowels to spice things up. They think that English sounds beautiful too.
On another walk a week or so ago that I don't think I mentioned, a little kid walked by me, turned around, pointed, and simply laughed. Now, I was used to the stares, the discreet glances, paranoia and little whispers. But he still managed to surprise me. Perhaps I should have stolen his soul, or at least pretended to. That would have been funny at least.
Finally, we saw an "acrobatics" show yesterday afternoon which was more like a carnival sideshow with magic and other entertainment. I took tons of pictures, including one of this girl doing crazy contortionist things. Seconds after taking this she let go of the ground and completely supported herself, in that stance, with her mouth. Yeah... kind of nuts.
There was also a couple magicians doing standard slight of hand tricks that while not too hard to understand looked pretty nonetheless. They cheated on some of the balancing things (The plates and the beginning bottles trick) by using a sort of interlocking thing so they didn't fall. One of the plates stopped spinning during their routine. Whatever, most of it was still cool.
Test tomorrow, and tutoring any minute now. I may be going for yet another massage tonight, not sure yet.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Pimping all over tha world
Or at least in the greater Tianjin area. We'll get to that later.
Last night at around 2 AM, I noticed that outside was once again bathed in the orangy-pink glow of prosperity. I was so taken by it that I got out of bed, found my camera, and put it on the TV. I set it to a 20-second exposure with the lowest possible f-stop, and got this:
Unfortunately, the tilt is fairly pronounced. I was going to fix this by wedging a little toilet paper under the right side and trying again. Again, unfortunately, my roommate started sleep talking in gibberish and moving around in his bed. I am not sure if I in any way contributed to this little restlessness but I didn't want to actually wake him, so I let it go.
Last night was completely un-blogworthy but I figure at least to tell you why. First, I have been spreading Baldur's Gate 2 to a couple guys from across the hall. I have no clue if they like it at all but I feel I have done my solemn duty nonetheless. Sometimes it is just nice to take a break and play a game of Age of Empires 2 and kill a lot of digitized people. It's certainly fun. So I started playing a game at around 10 PM and a few hours later realized the time. For anyone curious, I was the Teutons. They are awesome.
Also, I spent half an hour or so last night doing some very informal research on potential cities to visit during our "field trip" July 18-27. After arbitrarily deciding on Inner Mongolia, I Wikisurfed and looked through my Lonely Planet and eventually decided that the only city worth a damn was the regional capital, Hohhot. It is fairly close to Beijing (I trust your ability to find it on a map) and by train (铁路 which literally means iron road) is only 10 hours. Trains themselves are supposed to be quite an experience, and I guess I will be partaking. The weeklong break is in theory supposed to have some academic merit, but I'm sure I'll be able to spin something about the Chinese treatment of minorities, how they are being turned into tourist attractions, etc... Really though, if completely ditching English for a week and relying solely on my feeble Chinese abilities isn't enough of a challenge though, I don't know what would be. This plan is entirely subject to change and is still early rumination. Train tickets for any long ride however, are supposed to be booked 25 days in advance. We'll see about that.
Today was a return to Culture Street, the place we went on our first day where I took some pictures, including one of a statue of some guy with a bunch of characters behind him. At culture
street, I loaded up on plenty of crap to haul back to the US. I got a set of coasters for 15 kuai, 10 pairs of chopsticks for 15 kuai, a couple basic embroideries of 2 of the fuwa for 2 kuai each, and a couple dozen photos. One of the shops was exploration and ship themed. They had some naval stuff (all way too big, sorry dad) and some globes. Like me though, the Chinese only got 9/10 on their map quiz.
Shortly after witnessing this monument to the Chinese educational system, a suspicious looking man approached Ricardo (my roommate, if I haven't mentioned that yet) and I. He greeted us in English, with a heavily accented "Hello!" We get that from time to time, strangers starting up conversations in touristy areas. Well this man opens up with that then asks us where we are from. I tell him in Chinese that we're Americans, living at Tianjin Normal University, taking classes at Nankai. He then launches into a chat with me, in Chinese, about god knows what. I comprehended perhaps a half what he said, using the time-honored smile and nod strategy. This man however, was no standard Chinese interested in practicing his English and meeting a foreigner. This was a businessman, though his dress would not belie such a fact. A picture's worth a thousand words, but that's 3-4 pages of 12-point Times New Roman so I'm only going to give it a couple hundred here. He was wearing massive square sunglasses, the same kind old people in Florida wear. His pants were khakis, remarkable only in the stains on them--food stains, with grease and food crumbs still caked on. His shirt suffered the same fate, with several darkened splotches nearly hidden by the pure ugliness of the design; horizontal stripes of faded pink, white, and steely blue in uneven widths that may have been the result of his flowing folds of fat. Forrest Gump once said you can judge a lot from a person by their shoes. That may be true, unfortunately I did not think to take in more of this creature than necessary. My assessment of him may seem harsh, and it is, but this man was up to no good. After chatting me up for a few minutes, he asked for my phone number. This set off every alarm bell and nervous impulse in my brain. It was almost exactly like receiving one of those c!4li5 4 U bi gg3r 5cRe w HOT ch! x 2nite! emails except in person. I immediately responded to his digits request with an emphatic Why!, then collected myself and told him that I did not have a phone here in China. Only moments later he said that if I wanted to "meet" or "talk" to some "pretty girls" I should call him. Maybe he runs the local rotary club? Either way, he wrote down his name and number on a scrap of paper and handed it to me though I have absolutely, positively no intention of giving this man a call. If you are feeling bored and want to pull an expensive international prank, by all means go ahead and call 13116025241. The phone country calling code for China is 86, and you'll need to make sure you dial 011 to get to international calling. Happy hunting.
Finally, today I went to a cafe that served hamburgers, steak, and other things holy. I had a steak and fried shrimp, which like most other food items in this country, was disappointingly small. It was also way over peppered, and only left me hungry and hankering for a true, juicy steak with a steamed baked potato and a few buttered green beans on the side. I wouldn't say I'm homesick, but certainly countrysick. We have a quiz (小考) tomorrow just as we do every day, and I need to study some 25 characters in preparation. So I will leave you with this sign that was in front of a jewelery store.
Last night at around 2 AM, I noticed that outside was once again bathed in the orangy-pink glow of prosperity. I was so taken by it that I got out of bed, found my camera, and put it on the TV. I set it to a 20-second exposure with the lowest possible f-stop, and got this:
Unfortunately, the tilt is fairly pronounced. I was going to fix this by wedging a little toilet paper under the right side and trying again. Again, unfortunately, my roommate started sleep talking in gibberish and moving around in his bed. I am not sure if I in any way contributed to this little restlessness but I didn't want to actually wake him, so I let it go.
Last night was completely un-blogworthy but I figure at least to tell you why. First, I have been spreading Baldur's Gate 2 to a couple guys from across the hall. I have no clue if they like it at all but I feel I have done my solemn duty nonetheless. Sometimes it is just nice to take a break and play a game of Age of Empires 2 and kill a lot of digitized people. It's certainly fun. So I started playing a game at around 10 PM and a few hours later realized the time. For anyone curious, I was the Teutons. They are awesome.
Also, I spent half an hour or so last night doing some very informal research on potential cities to visit during our "field trip" July 18-27. After arbitrarily deciding on Inner Mongolia, I Wikisurfed and looked through my Lonely Planet and eventually decided that the only city worth a damn was the regional capital, Hohhot. It is fairly close to Beijing (I trust your ability to find it on a map) and by train (铁路 which literally means iron road) is only 10 hours. Trains themselves are supposed to be quite an experience, and I guess I will be partaking. The weeklong break is in theory supposed to have some academic merit, but I'm sure I'll be able to spin something about the Chinese treatment of minorities, how they are being turned into tourist attractions, etc... Really though, if completely ditching English for a week and relying solely on my feeble Chinese abilities isn't enough of a challenge though, I don't know what would be. This plan is entirely subject to change and is still early rumination. Train tickets for any long ride however, are supposed to be booked 25 days in advance. We'll see about that.
Today was a return to Culture Street, the place we went on our first day where I took some pictures, including one of a statue of some guy with a bunch of characters behind him. At culture
street, I loaded up on plenty of crap to haul back to the US. I got a set of coasters for 15 kuai, 10 pairs of chopsticks for 15 kuai, a couple basic embroideries of 2 of the fuwa for 2 kuai each, and a couple dozen photos. One of the shops was exploration and ship themed. They had some naval stuff (all way too big, sorry dad) and some globes. Like me though, the Chinese only got 9/10 on their map quiz.Shortly after witnessing this monument to the Chinese educational system, a suspicious looking man approached Ricardo (my roommate, if I haven't mentioned that yet) and I. He greeted us in English, with a heavily accented "Hello!" We get that from time to time, strangers starting up conversations in touristy areas. Well this man opens up with that then asks us where we are from. I tell him in Chinese that we're Americans, living at Tianjin Normal University, taking classes at Nankai. He then launches into a chat with me, in Chinese, about god knows what. I comprehended perhaps a half what he said, using the time-honored smile and nod strategy. This man however, was no standard Chinese interested in practicing his English and meeting a foreigner. This was a businessman, though his dress would not belie such a fact. A picture's worth a thousand words, but that's 3-4 pages of 12-point Times New Roman so I'm only going to give it a couple hundred here. He was wearing massive square sunglasses, the same kind old people in Florida wear. His pants were khakis, remarkable only in the stains on them--food stains, with grease and food crumbs still caked on. His shirt suffered the same fate, with several darkened splotches nearly hidden by the pure ugliness of the design; horizontal stripes of faded pink, white, and steely blue in uneven widths that may have been the result of his flowing folds of fat. Forrest Gump once said you can judge a lot from a person by their shoes. That may be true, unfortunately I did not think to take in more of this creature than necessary. My assessment of him may seem harsh, and it is, but this man was up to no good. After chatting me up for a few minutes, he asked for my phone number. This set off every alarm bell and nervous impulse in my brain. It was almost exactly like receiving one of those c!4li5 4 U bi gg3r 5cRe w HOT ch! x 2nite! emails except in person. I immediately responded to his digits request with an emphatic Why!, then collected myself and told him that I did not have a phone here in China. Only moments later he said that if I wanted to "meet" or "talk" to some "pretty girls" I should call him. Maybe he runs the local rotary club? Either way, he wrote down his name and number on a scrap of paper and handed it to me though I have absolutely, positively no intention of giving this man a call. If you are feeling bored and want to pull an expensive international prank, by all means go ahead and call 13116025241. The phone country calling code for China is 86, and you'll need to make sure you dial 011 to get to international calling. Happy hunting.
Finally, today I went to a cafe that served hamburgers, steak, and other things holy. I had a steak and fried shrimp, which like most other food items in this country, was disappointingly small. It was also way over peppered, and only left me hungry and hankering for a true, juicy steak with a steamed baked potato and a few buttered green beans on the side. I wouldn't say I'm homesick, but certainly countrysick. We have a quiz (小考) tomorrow just as we do every day, and I need to study some 25 characters in preparation. So I will leave you with this sign that was in front of a jewelery store.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Of Spin Cycles and Backstreet Boys
Weather report: Cloudy, foggy, perhaps mostly real H2O given that it gave us a short rain a few hours earlier. I took this a few days ago. It was nice to a) see the moon and b) see it white.
One thing I forgot to mention is that Wednesday last week was my first and last Taiji lesson. It was at 6:30 in the AM and rather annoying. We had an old guy speaking Chinese to us with Wang Laoshi occasionally translating. We did a couple weird hand movements like you would see in a movie, wherein we apparently gathered our Qi. Then we would do a squat, the type where you lean up against a wall and try to keep your knees completely bent, except all sans wall. It was only half an hour (I think future sessions would have been longer) but was rough on the thighs and more importantly, involved exercise at 6:30 AM. I dropped it in favor of Chinese chess.
It was also time to do laundry this week. In this hotel/dorm which has 30 rooms per floor on 5 floors, there is a single washer, and no dryer. Dryers, by the way, do not exist in this country unless you are ridiculously loaded. The washer also happened to be quite small, capable of cleaning god knows how few towels or whatever the washing machine SI unit happens to be. I decided then, to wash only boxers and t-shirts, considering I had yet to wear pants here, and I'm not too worried about my short rotation getting dirty yet. I was able to fit a bunch of these small items in, and everything went fine. The machine naturally, was all in Chinese but there were 2 convenient buttons that were obviously supposed to be pushed, so I hit those two and it started whirring away. After one of the hotel workers told me it would be 50 minutes, I went on my way. Hopefully I will continue to have laundry luck.
Some prices here seem very expensive. An "I Believe" pen, for example, costs something like RMB 3.50 which at half a dollar seems about the same as US prices. Massages, as mentioned previously, barely crack $8. Keep in mind RMB=kuai and 7 RMB = 1 dollar with these common prices here:Bottle of water: 600 ml (standard plastic bottle size).60 kuai each in a supermarket, 1-2 kuai in a convenience store, 4+ in a touristy place where you get ripped off
Beer: 600ml bottle is 3-4 kuai in a convenience store, a 350ml bottle (standard American can or glass bottle size) is 15-25 or more in a bar or club
Food: Cheap street food is 3-5 kuai for a large rice meal or a sort of tortilla-bread wrap with chicken and vegetables etc... while a fairly good restaurant can run you 100-150 kuai each.
Spirits: Disgusting, puke-inducing liquid that is apparently 35% alcohol by volume costs 2 kuai for about 150ml. It looks like rum, and smells like beef and cough syrup.
Cigarettes: Are 13 kuai or so per pack depending on the brand. American brands may be higher but are also often fake. Don't worry mother I have not taken up smoking.
Electronics: At a mall I saw a pair of quite unimpressive looking earphones for 120 RMB. This is in line with $5-$10 ones in the US that looked about the same quality. My cell phone, I am not sure if I mentioned it previously, was 300 for a rather old model. I was feeling a little hosed until I realized the battery life on it is BEYOND GODLIKE and I haven't had to recharge it yet. It has only lost 2 bars of life out of 7. I got it more than 2 weeks ago and have basically had it on ever since.
Produce: Apples were 4-5 kuai per pound. Despite working as a cashier at Jewel for 3 months I have no clue how this compares. It seems cheap though.
Clothing: Regular cotton shirts with no brand names can be ~10 kuai.
I can't think of anything else for now. Yesterday was my first experience with Karaoke Television, aka KTV. After another Hot Pot dinner, went to a massive KTV building. The building had dozens and dozens of rooms, and they are all furnished with large flatscreens, leather couches, and naturally a sweet built-in AV system. Given that my friend Shino is an Asian female born after Mao's death in 1976, she was naturally a fan of Britney Spears, The Backstreet Boys, and Celine Dion. Not quite being able to say the same, I nonetheless endured the sound of my own singing voice, belting out That Way, My Heart Will Go On, and Oops I Did It Again. I was able to squeeze in a Mrs. Robinson just to humor myself thankfully. Not only was the experience interesting and rather how I expected it to be, it was really expensive. 215 kuai for 2.5 hours in a 10'x10' room and a pitcher of orange juice. Not quite the best way to spend a dollar or 30 in Tianjin, but whatever. Perhaps there are cheaper places, or the moral is just to take a larger group. What was interesting was the amount of 40-year-old men there often with wives and family friends. One thing for certain is that the scale of KTV is uniquely Asian.
There is an Iraq-China Olympic qualifier in an hour but the tickets just ran out on me. Instead I will be going to an all-you-can-eat-and-drink pizza place for 39 kuai. I figure as long as the food is digestible it will have been worth it.
I saw "Snowflower Beer" on cups and cans at other places in the city, so I now have no clue what the restaurant was called.
Not much else to say; took another test on Friday, and an hour or so afterwards my teacher said I did a good job. I'm not sure how much she looked at it, but even if it was just the multiple choice, I'm pleased. Of course, this is all assuming I understood the Chinese. That's all from me today. I'll try to get back to taking more pictures, going on more walks.
Rest in Peace Tim Russert
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Snowflower Beer
Went to a restaurant with a Chinese friend (named Shino Lee. I have the sneaking suspicion it's Korean...) called "Snow" but the glasses literally say Snowflower Beer in Chinese characters. I don't know if that is the restaurant's name, or some random brand, or what. At the restaurant, we ordered some fried shrimp, a whole fish that was soaked in a hot soup/sauce, some fruit that I couldn't remember the name of, (in English even) some Chinese grass which is a vegetable that has the texture and look of thick grass but tastes like every other green vegetable on earth. It was the first time I felt truly full in this country. It was expensive (for China) and came in at 130 kuai or so for two people.
I asked a taxi driver, and it is 5.34 kuai for a liter of gas. The price here then is $3.57 per gallon, which is almost as high as the cheaper areas of the US. I had thought that China was one of several (now decreasing) countries that subsidize oil, but given that the US has fairly high gas taxes and the national average is $4.00 the price doesn't seem subsidized at all. After googling a little, it seems that subsidies are now only offered for specific industries and poor areas. Although the rural poor in America are getting hammered, I doubt the Chinese are. While the NYT article suggests commutes and inefficient equipment as massive gas and therefore money drains, one thing that helps keep your oil demand down is when you still use a bike to commute and have an ox instead of a tractor. Moral of the story: mo' money, mo' problems.
Anti-Engrish notification: my cell phone has a built in English-Chinese dictionary. It is ridiculously awesome, and I think that every cell phone here has it. Steak, in case you were wondering, (I certainly have been) is 牛排.
I asked a taxi driver, and it is 5.34 kuai for a liter of gas. The price here then is $3.57 per gallon, which is almost as high as the cheaper areas of the US. I had thought that China was one of several (now decreasing) countries that subsidize oil, but given that the US has fairly high gas taxes and the national average is $4.00 the price doesn't seem subsidized at all. After googling a little, it seems that subsidies are now only offered for specific industries and poor areas. Although the rural poor in America are getting hammered, I doubt the Chinese are. While the NYT article suggests commutes and inefficient equipment as massive gas and therefore money drains, one thing that helps keep your oil demand down is when you still use a bike to commute and have an ox instead of a tractor. Moral of the story: mo' money, mo' problems.
Anti-Engrish notification: my cell phone has a built in English-Chinese dictionary. It is ridiculously awesome, and I think that every cell phone here has it. Steak, in case you were wondering, (I certainly have been) is 牛排.
Monday, June 9, 2008
The Grrrrrrrreat Wall!
First things first: I now have a Picasa album which should allow both for thumbnail image previewing, sufficient space, and it automatically resizes them for easier uploading and viewing. Try going to http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/eric.mathis/Tianjin08 and you should be able to view every picture I have taken so far here. It's 400 and growing, 220+ of which were taken this past weekend.
I have a new background for my computer. Here it is:
This is the view midway down our descent of the Great Wall. One of very few pictures of the wall that does not contain any people (人) in it. The wall itself was an extremely difficult climb. Easily the roughest climb on any structure containing stair-like creations intended to aid the ascension process. I say stair-like because in truth, stairs is a little too generous of a term for all of them. When your foot surprises you because the step you just took was a total of 1 inch higher than the last one, then you stub your toe on the 1.5-foot next one, it is hard to call them stairs without a massive asterisk. Wag of the finger to you, Chinese slave-laborers.
Other than the stair problem, the wall just kept going up and up. As the pictures plainly show, there was a quite heavy fog the day we went. I think it was genuine fog, because our elevation was high enough and we were 80km removed from urban Beijing. (Beijing as a provincial-level municipality is a little bigger than the size of Connecticut.) What I did notice is that white people sweat a lot more than Chinese, or at least show it. There were men easily in their 60s that must have smoked most of their life judging by their teeth, and they certainly didn't look any worse for the climb. There were also tiny Chinese girls in nice dresses and makeup (one even had heels) that looked like they were going for a stroll on the Champs Elysees. Meanwhile, the Americans are huffing and puffing all the way up, drenched. I guess life just isn't fair. It's tough being white in this country. I swear.
After the Great Wall (长城) we had our taxi drivers take us to a baozi restaurant. Baozi are dumplings, like potstickers aka jiaozi, except they are wrapped in a more doughy and less greasy crust and not fried. While there, we ordered a couple trays of baozi and a couple vegetable dishes. I also stole half a plate of leftover ones from another table. I have no clue what was in them but they were delicious. The dish names were creative, at the very least. I'll just say I'm not sure who, or what, they used to translate the dish names.
We ordered it.
I have a new background for my computer. Here it is:
This is the view midway down our descent of the Great Wall. One of very few pictures of the wall that does not contain any people (人) in it. The wall itself was an extremely difficult climb. Easily the roughest climb on any structure containing stair-like creations intended to aid the ascension process. I say stair-like because in truth, stairs is a little too generous of a term for all of them. When your foot surprises you because the step you just took was a total of 1 inch higher than the last one, then you stub your toe on the 1.5-foot next one, it is hard to call them stairs without a massive asterisk. Wag of the finger to you, Chinese slave-laborers.Other than the stair problem, the wall just kept going up and up. As the pictures plainly show, there was a quite heavy fog the day we went. I think it was genuine fog, because our elevation was high enough and we were 80km removed from urban Beijing. (Beijing as a provincial-level municipality is a little bigger than the size of Connecticut.) What I did notice is that white people sweat a lot more than Chinese, or at least show it. There were men easily in their 60s that must have smoked most of their life judging by their teeth, and they certainly didn't look any worse for the climb. There were also tiny Chinese girls in nice dresses and makeup (one even had heels) that looked like they were going for a stroll on the Champs Elysees. Meanwhile, the Americans are huffing and puffing all the way up, drenched. I guess life just isn't fair. It's tough being white in this country. I swear.
After the Great Wall (长城) we had our taxi drivers take us to a baozi restaurant. Baozi are dumplings, like potstickers aka jiaozi, except they are wrapped in a more doughy and less greasy crust and not fried. While there, we ordered a couple trays of baozi and a couple vegetable dishes. I also stole half a plate of leftover ones from another table. I have no clue what was in them but they were delicious. The dish names were creative, at the very least. I'll just say I'm not sure who, or what, they used to translate the dish names.
We ordered it.Honestly I wasn't extremely pumped, as I am not a fan of mushrooms nor whatever green vegetable it came with, but it was a laugh nonetheless. After the baozi we went to the Summer Palace. This is where we first got hosed by the taxi drivers. The situation went like this: we had agreed the previous night at the hotel to hire 3 taxis to drive us around all day for 400 kuai per taxi, 100 per person. So we did, and met them at 7:30 sharp. They drove us around, and recommended the baozi place to us. A few in the group seemed surprised that they earned commission on getting us to go the places we went, but after my father's Moroccan rug... experience... (Sorry Dad, it is a nice rug, and I can't remember exactly how much we paid for it, but it was too much. Way too much.) it was rather expected. It was hard to get worked up about this though when lunch came to 13 kuai per person. This was actually cheap for a real restaurant with a roof, running water, and more than one person staffing it, so I chalked it up as a genuine aid to us even if they did make money. Then, they took us to the Summer Palace, and the fleecing started. (By the way, we had a native and fluent Chinese speaker in our group and this all still happened.) The taxis took us to a place that sells boat rides. These would eventually take us to the South Gate of the palace. As we learned 3 hours later, this gate was extremely far away from everything interesting, and there happened to be a lake in between as well. The boat ride cost 40 kuai that covered the entrance fee as well. North Gate tickets were 15 kuai. Now, they did tell us the difference would be 15-20 kuai between the boat and regular entrance. That wasn't what was annoying. It was the fact that once we arrived, we were a good hour walk from anything remotely interesting. The lake looked cool for about 5 minutes or so, then we all got bored and ornery rather quickly. After wandering around and going the opposite direction we wanted, we ended up with very little time to actually see anything. So it goes. The last, and most tragic chapter of the story, dear reader, is at the end, paying the cabbies. The worst part was, it went down exactly as I had not hoped. We got to the hotel, and the taxi that arrived half a minute ahead of us had already started paying. Apparently, it was now 450 kuai per taxi. The reason apparently, was never given. Someone said something about the tolls (They were 50 kuai in total.) and it seemed reasonable enough, so 450 was settled on. For about a minute that is. After we let on that we were going to acquiesce to the new price hike, someone directly asked the driver about the tolls. The driver immediately seized on this as a chance to hike it another 50 kuai, up to 500 per taxi. He played it off extremely well, (all body language I'm interpreting here) as though he had forgotten the tolls, and they were supposed to be part of the price anyway. Then the first-arrived taxi shelled out. It's extremely hard to call bullshit when you don't speak the language, and can't annunciate thoughts into words such as scam, agreed upon price, etc... Everyone else in our party seemed to accept it, and I don't fault them; 50 kuai is 7 dollars and they weren't in a linguistical position to argue, much like I wasn't. Perhaps I should have talked to our Chinese friend and gotten her to ask for a few basic things like why the sudden yet predictable price gouging, but forcing her to be an interpreter for an argument stacked against me didn't exactly seem like the best thing to do. I don't really mind taking the lumps, especially when they are that insignificant.
That was all on Saturday, and we got back sometime around 7:30. We had dinner at an overpriced and under-filling pizza place near our hotel. Every pizza place in this entire country is overpriced and classy apparently. Pizza Huts are regarded as four-star restaurants, places it is acceptable to close a big business deal in. Same with TGIFriday's.
Something that Beijing has, that Tianjin doesn't seem to, is a sense of energy and excitement. Walking down the street in the early night, there were tons of people just out and about. It could be that our hotel was in a hip downtown district (it was) and that our school in Tianjin isn't near anything, but compared to last weekend even, simply walking the street there were more young people, more old people, more 30-year olds with their little kids just hanging out. Two random guys just walked up to us and started talking to us in very poor English, but you could tell they were really excited just to see us, talk to us. It's hard to describe concretely, but I'll leave it at the city just felt more alive.
The next morning, I woke up and took a quite scenic walk to Tiananmen Square with my roommate. It was about 3 blocks away, maybe 4, but we walked around 20. I only brought sandals to Beijing. Once there though, it was just awesome. There were thousands of other tourists there, most all Chinese. From who knows how far off in China, they were there, snapping pictures just like we were. It was the first time I saw large amounts of Chinese tourists in China. It's also when it dawned on me that this was actually a very rare sight. Domestic tourists. It's common in the States of course, but after being in France a couple times, I cannot recall ever meeting or seeing any significant groups of French tourists. Perhaps the Eiffel Tower, but the percentages of French at the Tower and Chinese at Tiananmen are not even close. Chinese were way more than 95% of the people here. The same goes for Italy, and Spain too. It is one of the obvious yet elusive observations. America is big, almost exactly the size of China, and regional differences are massive. France does indeed have its own provinces, and they have different characteristics, but when you can cross your entire country in half a day of driving, are things so different within the country? What is a road trip without any time spent on the road? Are the people living in Strasbourg, Paris, and Marseilles anywhere near as different from each other as a New Yorker, Oregonian, and Georgian surely would be? I think the answer to that question is no. America does obviously have a history built on accepting emigrations and diasporas that China does not, but the plain size and population of China means that it too can claim a regional diversity owned only by the other large countries of the world. It's a diversity unlike the kind you hear about concerning school admissions and affirmative action, and may be less important, but does create significant differences in people and policies nonetheless. Anyhow, I'll try to stop waxing philosophical on random tangents and instead regale you with more about how my time in China is going.
Here is a picture of me at Tiananmen. (天安门)
It's only been in movies and TV news and magazines a million times before, but how many of them have Wisconsin representing? "Represent," for Mom, Dad, Nana, Gramps, and anyone over 40 reading this, does not always mean anything specific. It is sort of a word of affirmation, as in someone shouting "Any Dungeons and Dragons players up in here?" followed by a "Represent!" The s may be dropped in favor of a z as well.
Despite the aforementioned energy I felt in Beijing, I absorbed none and managed to fall asleep by eleven pm on both Friday and Saturday nights, foregoing the nightlife enjoyed the previous weekend. After 6 hours of walking or so on Saturday though, I didn't mind the 10 hours of sleep. After Tiananmen on Sunday morning, we checked out and had 4 hours to kill before the buses departed to take us back to Tianjin and our weekly grind of learning 30 汉字 (Chinese characters. Remember?) a day. After hitting up a food court that was rather difficult to order in and made me feel even worse about my spoken Chinese than usual, a few of us decided to hit
up the Temple of Heaven. It was pretty cool, and also happened to be where I found my new facebook picture. We were in a sort of courtyard, looking at no buildings in particular, when I saw this man. He was old. Very old. Like he had seen a Great Leap Forward or five. He was stooped like a porch, and I decided to get my picture taken with him. It felt a little cheap and gimmicky, but he was smiling the whole way through, and even shook my hand (he himself started the shake) after the picture was taken. I thanked him about 5 times and ignored all the other people looking at me, judging me as probably either the ungrateful American treating their elders as tourist attractions (yes) or a rare foreigner who is honoring a generation of Chinese that made sacrifice upon
sacrifice all in vain (ehhhh... perhaps). Either way I hightailed it out of there.
This post has been decidedly heavy, and that needs to be rectified. So here is your fifth and final picture, and the requisite Engrish posting. The first two characters of the cerebral disease sign literally mean "small brain." The CCP secret police might be among the world's elite, but the PC police certainly aren't.
That's about it for the weekend. I forgot to mention that last week in class we heard a massive noise, a series of booming staccato pops and a weird sucking and crunching sound in between. We shortly debated the cause, considered they might be shooting rockets into the sky in a climate control effort. After asking the teacher (老师) and deciphering 4 words of her sentence, I think we determined that it was a building being demolished. My Friday test score was up 4 points from that of the week before.
These posts are getting longer, which itself is not a problem but I am going to try to throw in some shorter ones a little more often and may make posts of simply a picture and a paragraph, if I can keep it to that. It will certainly keep my average bedtime earlier.
再见！
That was all on Saturday, and we got back sometime around 7:30. We had dinner at an overpriced and under-filling pizza place near our hotel. Every pizza place in this entire country is overpriced and classy apparently. Pizza Huts are regarded as four-star restaurants, places it is acceptable to close a big business deal in. Same with TGIFriday's.
Something that Beijing has, that Tianjin doesn't seem to, is a sense of energy and excitement. Walking down the street in the early night, there were tons of people just out and about. It could be that our hotel was in a hip downtown district (it was) and that our school in Tianjin isn't near anything, but compared to last weekend even, simply walking the street there were more young people, more old people, more 30-year olds with their little kids just hanging out. Two random guys just walked up to us and started talking to us in very poor English, but you could tell they were really excited just to see us, talk to us. It's hard to describe concretely, but I'll leave it at the city just felt more alive.
The next morning, I woke up and took a quite scenic walk to Tiananmen Square with my roommate. It was about 3 blocks away, maybe 4, but we walked around 20. I only brought sandals to Beijing. Once there though, it was just awesome. There were thousands of other tourists there, most all Chinese. From who knows how far off in China, they were there, snapping pictures just like we were. It was the first time I saw large amounts of Chinese tourists in China. It's also when it dawned on me that this was actually a very rare sight. Domestic tourists. It's common in the States of course, but after being in France a couple times, I cannot recall ever meeting or seeing any significant groups of French tourists. Perhaps the Eiffel Tower, but the percentages of French at the Tower and Chinese at Tiananmen are not even close. Chinese were way more than 95% of the people here. The same goes for Italy, and Spain too. It is one of the obvious yet elusive observations. America is big, almost exactly the size of China, and regional differences are massive. France does indeed have its own provinces, and they have different characteristics, but when you can cross your entire country in half a day of driving, are things so different within the country? What is a road trip without any time spent on the road? Are the people living in Strasbourg, Paris, and Marseilles anywhere near as different from each other as a New Yorker, Oregonian, and Georgian surely would be? I think the answer to that question is no. America does obviously have a history built on accepting emigrations and diasporas that China does not, but the plain size and population of China means that it too can claim a regional diversity owned only by the other large countries of the world. It's a diversity unlike the kind you hear about concerning school admissions and affirmative action, and may be less important, but does create significant differences in people and policies nonetheless. Anyhow, I'll try to stop waxing philosophical on random tangents and instead regale you with more about how my time in China is going.
Here is a picture of me at Tiananmen. (天安门)
It's only been in movies and TV news and magazines a million times before, but how many of them have Wisconsin representing? "Represent," for Mom, Dad, Nana, Gramps, and anyone over 40 reading this, does not always mean anything specific. It is sort of a word of affirmation, as in someone shouting "Any Dungeons and Dragons players up in here?" followed by a "Represent!" The s may be dropped in favor of a z as well.
Despite the aforementioned energy I felt in Beijing, I absorbed none and managed to fall asleep by eleven pm on both Friday and Saturday nights, foregoing the nightlife enjoyed the previous weekend. After 6 hours of walking or so on Saturday though, I didn't mind the 10 hours of sleep. After Tiananmen on Sunday morning, we checked out and had 4 hours to kill before the buses departed to take us back to Tianjin and our weekly grind of learning 30 汉字 (Chinese characters. Remember?) a day. After hitting up a food court that was rather difficult to order in and made me feel even worse about my spoken Chinese than usual, a few of us decided to hit
up the Temple of Heaven. It was pretty cool, and also happened to be where I found my new facebook picture. We were in a sort of courtyard, looking at no buildings in particular, when I saw this man. He was old. Very old. Like he had seen a Great Leap Forward or five. He was stooped like a porch, and I decided to get my picture taken with him. It felt a little cheap and gimmicky, but he was smiling the whole way through, and even shook my hand (he himself started the shake) after the picture was taken. I thanked him about 5 times and ignored all the other people looking at me, judging me as probably either the ungrateful American treating their elders as tourist attractions (yes) or a rare foreigner who is honoring a generation of Chinese that made sacrifice upon sacrifice all in vain (ehhhh... perhaps). Either way I hightailed it out of there.This post has been decidedly heavy, and that needs to be rectified. So here is your fifth and final picture, and the requisite Engrish posting. The first two characters of the cerebral disease sign literally mean "small brain." The CCP secret police might be among the world's elite, but the PC police certainly aren't.
That's about it for the weekend. I forgot to mention that last week in class we heard a massive noise, a series of booming staccato pops and a weird sucking and crunching sound in between. We shortly debated the cause, considered they might be shooting rockets into the sky in a climate control effort. After asking the teacher (老师) and deciphering 4 words of her sentence, I think we determined that it was a building being demolished. My Friday test score was up 4 points from that of the week before.
These posts are getting longer, which itself is not a problem but I am going to try to throw in some shorter ones a little more often and may make posts of simply a picture and a paragraph, if I can keep it to that. It will certainly keep my average bedtime earlier.
再见！
Thursday, June 5, 2008
The benefits of soloing (This is a Long Post for a Chinese Censor to Read)
...are mostly that you get to keep all the lewt and experience. And that's where I'll try to end the MMORPG references.
Second of all, I found a workaround that allows me to see my blog, comments and all, without having to go to the normal listed url, so pictures should appear just fine and comments are now solicited. (Thanks though Robert)
As a bonus for reading this entire thing, you get three, count them, 3 pictures sprinkled throughout. Remember to click for a big size. Let's start:
And now to the actual content: The city is once again in a hazy shade of factory byproduct, and the sky (天, which is also the first character of Tianjin. By the by, I have no clue what the jin means. I have asked several Chinese people who live here and none know. It could mean nothing and exist solely for Tianjin, but that is very rare for Chinese.) is back to a completely blank gray like it was in The Matrix 2 when Morpheus or whoever tells Neo they blotted out the sky to stop the solar energy harvesting of the robots. Okay so it isn't exactly a roiling mess with random thunder and lightning, but you truly cannot see any blue nor signs of weather-related clouds. Speaking of awful air conditions, tomorrow we are going to Beijing for the weekend. We have a Peking Duck dinner reserved for tomorrow night but other than that nothing is planned. I'm not decided on whether I'll be taking my computer or not. I have no clue whether or not the hotel has high-speed internet, how good the hotel is, or where it is. This entire program has been very unscripted, or at least it appears that way to us. From our delayed flight to the Beijing trip to the teachers' plan to mix up our classes (I have no clue why) there is not a lot of rhyme or reason to a lot going on. Which is fine. Odd, but fine.
The MMORPG reference was I guess in relation to the amount of useless crap I have bought already here. My inventory is as follows:
!-A Chinese Chess set which cost <$1 and will be completely useless in the States where no one knows how to play it.
!-A set of playing cards that in theory helps teach Chinese characters (汉字)
!-A sweet-ass poster that is a "Table of Monarchs of Chinese Successive Dynasties"
!-A cool glass from a restaurant (stole it) that has the Beijing 2008 Olympics logo and the Tsingdao logo as well
!-An extremely mediocre cell phone that gets 40 minutes of time per month, and 180 text messages. Definitely not giving the number out, not only because receiving international calls is either impossible or prohibitively expensive, but also I don't even know it. I am so cool I have my own number stored in my phone.
!-Several advices. An "advice" is an ATM receipt. Nothing too special about them, though the fact that it is called and advice is a constant source of mirth. (Did You Know?: the word 'mirth' appears in Supreme Court records [ie as opposed to laughter] only during a select few years. Apparently one stenographer was a vocab teacher. My parentheticals are getting longer.)
!-Sunglasses. They were rather expensive for China, and the sad thing is, I actually haven't even used them. See large paragraph No.1 for explanation why. -4 or so pairs of chopsticks (筷子) I bought from Carrefour. Some have characters I can't read, one set says something like Happy Bear. They cost about $.40 each, and I'll be bringing a bunch back to the states to give out.
!-A ton of random foodstuffs that look mighty suspicious. Take, for example, Cucumber Lays. They are every single bit as awful as you think they are, and worse. I also have a large bowl of ramen that I cannot for the life of my figure out what meat it is flavored with, or contains. I can't find the cow (牛) or chicken (鸡) anywhere, which is bad. I'll probably end up eating it in a fit of desperation.
!-PASTRIES. Oh god, food is good. After two weeks of bitching about the lack of breakfast food not consisting of rice porridge and pickled vegetables, I have found a suitable bakery. They sell danishes, muffins, all sorts of delicious delicious things I can keep down in the morning.
!-A rice cooker. Unfortunately I have no dish soap with which to clean it. This is a conundrum.
!-And this, the current king of the inventory. If only we had warned Burma. (Too soon?)
Those were purchased from a random shop while I was out on a walk on Tuesday. It was a nice walk, only covered a half dozen city blocks or so, but I brought my camera and snapped a bunch of pictures. A lot of them were me messing around with B/W settings and f-stop and exposure time. If you want to look at them, all my Tianjin pictures (tried to prune the duplicates a little) are at www.mywebspace.wisc.edu/emathis/web/tianjin and the ones starting with my walk are at 375-411. It took me something like 6 hours to upload them all so you'd better enjoy them. I am still open to other image hosting sites, ie ones that will give you a preview. Snapfish seems to require even viewers to register, which is supremely annoying. Flickr's free accounts have something like a 100mb/month bandwidth limit, which isn't going to cut it when I can consume that it one day's worth of pictures. I don't have the ability nor inclination to resize and crop my pictures. I am looking to Picasa. For now, the UW Webspace will have to work. And there should be no more than 2 duplicates of any picture, so you'll have to trust me and just load each one. Do not begrudge me though. At least you have real broadband.
While on the walk, I encountered some fairly entertaining things. A condom vending machine, and old guy, and a shiny new banking building remarkable only in that it was a few dozen yards from a decrepit apartment building probably used as a crack den or Triad base. Pictures 376-379 if you care to investigate yourself. Truly, gentrification old school. The old guy is cool enough to warrant a picture of his own right here. As I expected, he spoke a very fast and unintelligible version of Chinese. I literally did not understand a word he said. His dog seemed as excited as all the little Chinese kids usually are to see tall whitey with blonde hair. Dogs are color blind of course though, so my hero's welcome will have to exist only in my head. The walk filling my requisite picture quota for the week, I returned to my room to do some character repetitions. Soooo fun!
We are still on the subject of people staring however. I went to McDonald's, (麦当劳) and hand to god, I like it more here. The spicy chicken sandwich was not at all processed. It was positively delectable. The fries were done perfectly (though that is usually true at McDonald's anyway) and the sundaes are apparently even smoother here, though I did not partake. While at McDonalds, I truly feel in my element. People stare (and it is still funny) but my imaginary response is, 'So what? Whitey invented this place. What are you doing in my store?' Of course, that would be almost racist, and they aren't my exact thoughts, but I feel at home nonetheless.
For now at least, I've run out of things to say. I have had a taco craving. I have not yet contracted Montezuma's Revenge. DotA basically does not work, and I am going to be incredibly rusty at the end of the summer. I finished reading China Road and only have 3 books left to read. Class is still class, and our teachers still don't speak a lot of English. I am downloading season 2 of The West Wing. I didn't think I would have a craving, but I made the mistake of watching the few episodes I still had on my computer, and now need to get watching again. Finally, I am still looking for my mailing address. It'll probably be in the program handbook or somesuch, somewhere.
This post has taken enough of your time, and I have a test tomorrow, so the same goes for me. I will probably update on Monday next. Or not, who knows.
Second of all, I found a workaround that allows me to see my blog, comments and all, without having to go to the normal listed url, so pictures should appear just fine and comments are now solicited. (Thanks though Robert)
As a bonus for reading this entire thing, you get three, count them, 3 pictures sprinkled throughout. Remember to click for a big size. Let's start:
And now to the actual content: The city is once again in a hazy shade of factory byproduct, and the sky (天, which is also the first character of Tianjin. By the by, I have no clue what the jin means. I have asked several Chinese people who live here and none know. It could mean nothing and exist solely for Tianjin, but that is very rare for Chinese.) is back to a completely blank gray like it was in The Matrix 2 when Morpheus or whoever tells Neo they blotted out the sky to stop the solar energy harvesting of the robots. Okay so it isn't exactly a roiling mess with random thunder and lightning, but you truly cannot see any blue nor signs of weather-related clouds. Speaking of awful air conditions, tomorrow we are going to Beijing for the weekend. We have a Peking Duck dinner reserved for tomorrow night but other than that nothing is planned. I'm not decided on whether I'll be taking my computer or not. I have no clue whether or not the hotel has high-speed internet, how good the hotel is, or where it is. This entire program has been very unscripted, or at least it appears that way to us. From our delayed flight to the Beijing trip to the teachers' plan to mix up our classes (I have no clue why) there is not a lot of rhyme or reason to a lot going on. Which is fine. Odd, but fine.
The MMORPG reference was I guess in relation to the amount of useless crap I have bought already here. My inventory is as follows:
!-A Chinese Chess set which cost <$1 and will be completely useless in the States where no one knows how to play it.
!-A set of playing cards that in theory helps teach Chinese characters (汉字)
!-A sweet-ass poster that is a "Table of Monarchs of Chinese Successive Dynasties"
!-A cool glass from a restaurant (stole it) that has the Beijing 2008 Olympics logo and the Tsingdao logo as well
!-An extremely mediocre cell phone that gets 40 minutes of time per month, and 180 text messages. Definitely not giving the number out, not only because receiving international calls is either impossible or prohibitively expensive, but also I don't even know it. I am so cool I have my own number stored in my phone.
!-Several advices. An "advice" is an ATM receipt. Nothing too special about them, though the fact that it is called and advice is a constant source of mirth. (Did You Know?: the word 'mirth' appears in Supreme Court records [ie as opposed to laughter] only during a select few years. Apparently one stenographer was a vocab teacher. My parentheticals are getting longer.)
!-Sunglasses. They were rather expensive for China, and the sad thing is, I actually haven't even used them. See large paragraph No.1 for explanation why. -4 or so pairs of chopsticks (筷子) I bought from Carrefour. Some have characters I can't read, one set says something like Happy Bear. They cost about $.40 each, and I'll be bringing a bunch back to the states to give out.
!-A ton of random foodstuffs that look mighty suspicious. Take, for example, Cucumber Lays. They are every single bit as awful as you think they are, and worse. I also have a large bowl of ramen that I cannot for the life of my figure out what meat it is flavored with, or contains. I can't find the cow (牛) or chicken (鸡) anywhere, which is bad. I'll probably end up eating it in a fit of desperation.
!-PASTRIES. Oh god, food is good. After two weeks of bitching about the lack of breakfast food not consisting of rice porridge and pickled vegetables, I have found a suitable bakery. They sell danishes, muffins, all sorts of delicious delicious things I can keep down in the morning.
!-A rice cooker. Unfortunately I have no dish soap with which to clean it. This is a conundrum.
!-And this, the current king of the inventory. If only we had warned Burma. (Too soon?)
Those were purchased from a random shop while I was out on a walk on Tuesday. It was a nice walk, only covered a half dozen city blocks or so, but I brought my camera and snapped a bunch of pictures. A lot of them were me messing around with B/W settings and f-stop and exposure time. If you want to look at them, all my Tianjin pictures (tried to prune the duplicates a little) are at www.mywebspace.wisc.edu/emathis/web/tianjin and the ones starting with my walk are at 375-411. It took me something like 6 hours to upload them all so you'd better enjoy them. I am still open to other image hosting sites, ie ones that will give you a preview. Snapfish seems to require even viewers to register, which is supremely annoying. Flickr's free accounts have something like a 100mb/month bandwidth limit, which isn't going to cut it when I can consume that it one day's worth of pictures. I don't have the ability nor inclination to resize and crop my pictures. I am looking to Picasa. For now, the UW Webspace will have to work. And there should be no more than 2 duplicates of any picture, so you'll have to trust me and just load each one. Do not begrudge me though. At least you have real broadband.
While on the walk, I encountered some fairly entertaining things. A condom vending machine, and old guy, and a shiny new banking building remarkable only in that it was a few dozen yards from a decrepit apartment building probably used as a crack den or Triad base. Pictures 376-379 if you care to investigate yourself. Truly, gentrification old school. The old guy is cool enough to warrant a picture of his own right here. As I expected, he spoke a very fast and unintelligible version of Chinese. I literally did not understand a word he said. His dog seemed as excited as all the little Chinese kids usually are to see tall whitey with blonde hair. Dogs are color blind of course though, so my hero's welcome will have to exist only in my head. The walk filling my requisite picture quota for the week, I returned to my room to do some character repetitions. Soooo fun!We are still on the subject of people staring however. I went to McDonald's, (麦当劳) and hand to god, I like it more here. The spicy chicken sandwich was not at all processed. It was positively delectable. The fries were done perfectly (though that is usually true at McDonald's anyway) and the sundaes are apparently even smoother here, though I did not partake. While at McDonalds, I truly feel in my element. People stare (and it is still funny) but my imaginary response is, 'So what? Whitey invented this place. What are you doing in my store?' Of course, that would be almost racist, and they aren't my exact thoughts, but I feel at home nonetheless.
For now at least, I've run out of things to say. I have had a taco craving. I have not yet contracted Montezuma's Revenge. DotA basically does not work, and I am going to be incredibly rusty at the end of the summer. I finished reading China Road and only have 3 books left to read. Class is still class, and our teachers still don't speak a lot of English. I am downloading season 2 of The West Wing. I didn't think I would have a craving, but I made the mistake of watching the few episodes I still had on my computer, and now need to get watching again. Finally, I am still looking for my mailing address. It'll probably be in the program handbook or somesuch, somewhere.
This post has taken enough of your time, and I have a test tomorrow, so the same goes for me. I will probably update on Monday next. Or not, who knows.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Wangji hen zhongyao!
Local holiday here in the Golden Bridge International Hotel as internet (网际) has been restored. The weekend was pretty fun, and mostly consisted of invading a bar or club as a large group of American students. This will probably shock no one, but I can confirm that American songs are still the song of choice for any place catering to young people. Bon Jovi, Linkin Park, Smashmouth; if it is less that 15 or 20 years old and in English it's basically popular. 99 Red Balloons also got a play, as well as some Spanish music. Another nice thing is that since Chinese people absolutely LOVE having English on their t-shirts, it automatically boosts the classiness factor of my wardrobe by 100%. In America, you would probably get weird looks for wearing a regular red t-shirt that says "Wisconsin Football" with a little football design on it to anything more formal than well, a football game. In a fancy hotel bar though, I don't think anyone (Chinese) cared. It may have even earned me bonus points.
I already discussed how milk is fairly expensive here (compared to everything else), but pure services with no associated material resources are ridiculously cheap. A massage, for example: 70 minutes of genuine Tianjin Korean-town massage for $8.50. According to my parental units, a massage of that length will run you at least $70 in the States, and that is apparently for a cheap one. This country is giving me anti-sticker shock at every turn, and it's awesome. A taxi ride, by the way, is never more than $2 from within the city to within the city. I have yet to spot gas prices but will be on the lookout.
No new pictures, but a sweet Engrish line from a pack of Mentos I bought. It's not just word order and grammar, they are pulling up really old-school words. The Mentos I bought are labeled as CHEWY DRAGEES. I'll let you look up that word yourself.
Final word - aforementioned Internet reliability here has been downgraded from awful to Detroit-based-AOL. It went out for more than 30 hours.
I already discussed how milk is fairly expensive here (compared to everything else), but pure services with no associated material resources are ridiculously cheap. A massage, for example: 70 minutes of genuine Tianjin Korean-town massage for $8.50. According to my parental units, a massage of that length will run you at least $70 in the States, and that is apparently for a cheap one. This country is giving me anti-sticker shock at every turn, and it's awesome. A taxi ride, by the way, is never more than $2 from within the city to within the city. I have yet to spot gas prices but will be on the lookout.
No new pictures, but a sweet Engrish line from a pack of Mentos I bought. It's not just word order and grammar, they are pulling up really old-school words. The Mentos I bought are labeled as CHEWY DRAGEES. I'll let you look up that word yourself.
Final word - aforementioned Internet reliability here has been downgraded from awful to Detroit-based-AOL. It went out for more than 30 hours.
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