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！
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