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.
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