My room, my side on the left.First week of classes under the belt, and I have to say I’m bored to tears. They’re three hours long and I honestly don’t even know what we’ve learned. Research Methodology was very similar to the library orientation freshman year of high school: journals are your best academic sources, anything not peer-reviewed is suspect, and you can use different Boolean operators to refine your search.
Woooo.
With the boring crap out of the way, I’ll start in on some more interesting things. The Engrish here hasn’t been as tragic as it was on the mainland, but that clearly doesn’t stop people from wearing shirts that say PORN on them. Though technically not Engrish and not as funny as YAMP, it’s the funniest clothing I’ve seen yet. There are also plenty of typos everywhere, including large billboards. Hey, why buy eyewear when you can buy eyewaer? And should we get a chiken sandwich for lunch?
Another similarity here is the traffic. Size matters, and right of way is measured in kilograms. Buses are on the top of the food chain, then trucks, large cars, compacts, mopeds, bikes, and pedestrians. Also, if you want a bus, you have to hail it. If you’re standing at a stop it will breeze right by every time. And while waiting for a bus, I saw an genuine Chinese fire drill. At first I didn’t believe it was actually happening, but they stopped at the red light (shocking in itself) and got out, rotated counter-clockwise, and were on their merry way.
Yet more similarities: I’m the token American, except now I don’t have 60 others to share the title with. I am 1 of 2 at this school, the only one in my dorm, and so far the only blonde I’ve seen. This means a) more stares than in Tianjin and b) everyone wants to be my friend. Everyone, including Gentry. Or maybe it’s Jentry, Gentri, Jentri, or whatever. I don’t really ask, but I like to think it’s Gentry for the irony factor. In his case, I don’t care to know. He’s creepy. Why? Well he’s from Indonesia. He’s Christian. So far, no problems. He’s getting a doctorate in pharmacology. Okay, cool. He’s friends with Obama – wait what? And he saw a blue light come from under a door and zap him in the heart. Huh? Which turned out to be his guardian angel so now he likes blue but it’s also the color of part of the American flag and liked by a lot of Americans so he’s clearly American too and hey he used to have a green card and had the number for it but someone stole it so he can’t go to the US but he will use his contacts with Barack if only I could put Gentry in contact with 44 and by the way getting a green card means he is totally a citizen but wait maybe not but hey if he marries a nice American girl he can become an American but she has to be Christian no Muslims or Jews because they’re dirty and he wants one that’s super attractive and he will always love and support her so if maybe I
have some friends that want a husband that will provide [absolutely nothing] for them I could go ahead and call them as a favor to both him and her since I have blue eyes which basically means we are like blood brothers and besides he’s studying pharmacology so he can refine the extract from some plant in Indonesia that you rub around certain parts of the anatomy to make them magically grow in less than 3 minutes and it’s really great if only he could sell that he would make millions but hey Gentry can use my MBA expertise together with his bullshitology and we can rule the world like if Bill Gates and Steve Jobs got together with Sergey Brin and Larry Page and basically out anything it would be really cool and oh if I could just help him get to America since being a citizen I clearly have pull with all 300 million of my compatriots.
If you were able to parse that in one read I commend you because that’s pretty much how our ‘conversation’ went. He would talk at me and I wouldn’t even dignify him with a smile and nod but rather space out and cruise the internet. He seems to be a misogynist, racist, zealot, and the icing on the cake is that he smells bad. In no way do I want to associate with him.
The locals here are pretty cool. I find them to be quite 友好, friendly, despite the numerous stares. In search of lunch one day I walked down a street adjacent to campus, and then kept walking some more after turning at an intersection. I found an establishment that had dumplings, just what I was looking for. I stopped in, tried to get the old woman’s attention as politely as possible, and ordered my dumplings. Then she started talking at me quite fast and I wasn’t able to pick up too much. With the dumplings I also got beef noodles and a terrible, horrible drink. It was some sort of tea, and it was the worst non-alcoholic drink I have ever tasted. It was simultaneously too bitter, too sweet, like tea on road rage if it were sentient and angry. Still, not finishing it was simply not an option. I killed my dumplings, worked on my noodles, and every so often took great heaping gulps of tea, careful to slosh it straight to the back of my throat. Punishment over, I paid and got up to leave. Then, the lady told me to wait a second and produced some produce. She thrust a heavy green fruit into my hand. I took it, and the next day dissected it. I could immediately tell it was citrus, but beyond that had no clue. As I found out later, it is in fact the pomelo fruit, which Microsoft Word doesn’t even have in its dictionary. Nice. And just today I bought some meat-on-a-stick, 11 sticks for supposedly 110 kuai, but the bossman refused to accept more than a hundred.
This weekend I spent with the Mongols and Turks basically. On Thursday I went for a walk. Then I kept walking, walked across a dry canal, skirted a farm and through bushes. I wound up close to the golden arches and decided I needed a snack. I popped over to McDonald’s and saw three classmates sitting outside. As I discovered, they were Turkish and all on the MBA track like me. Again I found it convenient to be un-American in geography, and the two-city strategy paid off; knowing of both Istanbul and Ankara made quite the first impression. This definitely helped to offset the image of a sweat-soaked blonde dude literally walking out of the bushes with thistles and branches hanging off him. We made small talk about our countries and majors, and then went back (by bus thankfully) since they had already been sitting there for a while.
Limbs, after I tried cleaning up from the bushes.
The next day I went out to take some night photos. Sadly I’m still crap at it. On the way back though, I ran into my roommate Yaoo and his Mongolian friends sitting outside the gym, drinking beer. There are no open container laws, so I never really made it back to the room until later. I turned around and hit up 7-11 and bought some Asahi, and we proceeded to roam around campus for the next 5 hours. We mostly discussed music, as everyone had a turn going through my phone to see what kind of music this genuine in-the-flesh American listened too.
The next day was another with the Turks. Osie Selman, and Zehra asked if I wanted to go to a coffee shop. I met them, and being hungry, we first went to… McDonald’s. Their idea, not mine. As it turns out they go quite often since they can’t really take most any of the local food. Well it’s their loss I think, as I’ve had some damn fine fried rice, noodles, and dumplings here. But hey whatever. After the quick ride over and back, we eventually hit our target destination, a shop called Circus. Nothing Circus about it, and the playlist draws heavily on Fort Minor and Eminem, but no complaints there. I ordered a strawberry smoothie, and absolutely blew the waitress away. The Turks speak no Chinese, and their English is not that spectacular. So rolling up with a wo yao yi bei cao mei bing sha put the waitress on her feet and had her repeating it to her coworkers. We settled in as the Turks smoked and demanded English out of me. I tried my best to appease them and monologued for a while, then got tired of it. I wanted to talk with them, not at them. So I went for the question surest to get an interesting answer:
“What do you think of the United States invading Iraq?”
The next time I checked my watch it was almost 3 hours later.
We talked about war, (it’s bad) pipe dreams, (we should all just ‘get along’) George W. Bush , (not a popular guy) and bloodthirsty Americans. I tried to explain how a war wasn’t in the people’s best interests, how we don’t just drop bombs indiscriminately, and did my best to dispel myths. It’s not easy but I think I was changing some opinions. Or maybe they were just changing mine.
After talking for many hours we returned. I for one was still in recovery mode from the Mongolian adventure the night before which kept me up until 6:00 AM. I managed to stay up long enough to see the Badgers open up 14-0 on the Goofers, then awoke to a satisfactory final. Today I had to meet with group mates for a presentation this week, on Arrangements of Reporting Relationships in an Organizational Theory class. And since I’m the only native speaker in the entire class, I’ve been tapped to deliver for our group. Yay.
拜拜
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