Movies! I added a link to the right that has movies I took. Uploading to Youtube is a pain here so right now you will only get them in this way. I only have 20 or so (I am still in the process of uploading them) and they are all labeled so it shouldn't be too annoying to look through them and not have to worry about repeat viewings. Some are pretty cool, including a fight between two captured crabs and a backhoe putting tons of seaweed on a dump truck. This is the first frame of the seaweed movie. I will talk a little more about this in the next post.Thursday was our midterm, and it went fairly decently. I scored a 90% on the written part, which together with my 95% on the oral made for a 90.5 grade. Decent. My current grade is something like 90.3% which will allow me to punch in an A if we get all the extra credit we are promised. (Up to 4% or so) One thing that seems a little more evident now is that given the detailed grade sheet they are keeping they don't seem very inclined to hand everyone A's. Enough of boring grades.
After the midterm, people cleared out of the dorm pretty quickly in an effort to make the most of our time available. I left at 4:00 and went to Shino's parents' apartment. We caught a bus where, unsurprisingly, I was stared at. It happens a lot when you are half a foot taller than everyone and your hair and skin are almost bright enough to have a Lumen count all their own. At Shino's parents' while she packed I watched CCTV 9 for a short while, which is China's dedicated English channel, and broadcasts news and also some Discovery Channel styled programs. I learned about an English reporter's efforts to document the Boxer Rebellion. Her dad returned from work, and we then went to dinner. One thing in China is that it is quite kosher to go to a restaurant and BYOB. We packed 4 beers, bottles of Coke, Sprite, and apple soda, and a bottle of baijiu (hard liquor; pronounce this bye-jeeoh) that was 56% alcohol. Shino poured a glass full of the baijiu for her dad, and by the end of dinner he downed it no problem, nver grimacing at a sip. At dinner I learned that her mom works in the military, and her dad either still does or used to. At their apartment I saw a little trophy of sorts that said "PLA SECOND ARTILLERY" with a little howitzer. Her family is also at least fairly rich. The apartment is in a fairly nice part of town, and they have a flatscreen TV, DVR, and lots of other expensive-looking things that probably break easily. They also have plenty of room, and are on the 11th floor of the building. There is also only 1 apartment per floor and 1 office suite. Anyhow, it was obvious that her family is connected somehow, which I thought at the time was pretty cool. After a dinner of a bunch of meats and vegetables thrown into a pot to cook in some sauce on a hot plate (pretty standard fare, even for America) we returned to the apartment and shortly thereafter departed to the train station.
Train stations here are some of the most filthy places imaginable. First of all, there were just hordes of people. Most all of them were sitting on the ground, everyone having staked out a little square. Those that did not sit on seats sat on newspaper so the AIDS and SARS infested floor would not osmosisize through to their flesh. You know when a native Chinese person or hundreds even decide that the floor is too dirty, it is most definitely dirty. Undeterred, I grabbed a seat on the concrete and played games of hangman with Shino. Not before this however, I got the usual stares and then some. It was rather uncomfortable here, just a general sense of unease. I knew I was being watched by 25% of the room at any given time, and I got the feeling that they were all judging me rather negatively. I don't really care what any of them individually thought, but when an entire room has a rather strong animosity toward you, it's not the most secure feeling. The train departed around midnight. There are 5 kinds of train travel classes, which are standing, hard seat, soft seat, hard sleeper, and soft sleeper. A hard seat is basically purgatory. You get a small and uncomfortably seat and are crammed in with the other plebians. A standing ticket is somewhat like the Malebolge. You stand, crouch, shuffle, fidget, lean. If you are brave you lie down in the middle of the aisle and go to sleep.
We had hard sleepers, which is basically a pimped-out cot. Once again, I was about as long as the cot and it was only a few inches wider than me with my arms at my side lying down. A soft seat is like a nice or decent airplane or bus seat, and a soft sleeper you get a real bed, sometimes with your own mini TV and other entertainment amenities. This picture is from 5:30AM after waking up from 5 hours of fitful sleep. Probably not at my most attractive right here.The time spent in transit was probably what made the weekend feel so long. After some calculating, I spent only a few hours less traveling between Tianjin and Penglai than actually in Penglai. About 36 hours vs. 32 on the road. After the train arrived in Qingdao at about 7:30 AM we waited for a bus to take us to Penglai. After sitting around for two hours, we finally got one. It turned out we missed one an hour or so earlier. (Wag of the finger to you Shino.) Now mother, this was not my fault. I would periodically ask Shino if she knew when one was coming, and how would we know when one did. She said they would shout it out, though they had not shouted the destination of any of the other buses leaving. At two hours of waiting, I asked her to go check again and there was a minibus ready, about to leave. We got on, and I refrained from giving her any grief.
This is the bus. We were more than halfway to the back. At some point the bus was filled up. The bus ride was 5 hours, and consisted of eating of lunch, and mostly sleeping. I snapped many annoyingly glare-filled shots of the countryside and small towns we passed through. We arrived in Penglai at 2 or 3 or so and I decided to partake of a nap upon arrival. I woke up for dinner. We were served with steamed mussels, some other cooked shellfish, and some other celery dish with what may have been scallops or chopped squid. I really don't know my seafood. It was good though, and there was a vinegar sauce that was tasty in small quantities. After dinner we went to the beach and collected shells. The beach was fairly decent. In the US it would qualify as nothing special, below average, but I was expecting a lot worse for China. The water was not any differently colored than our beaches, and there was no searing burning afterwards. After shell collecting we went for a quick dip which was very cold. Finally, I showed Shino what a sandcastle was and how to build one. I tried some night photography and got mixed results, which you can see in the Picasa Google albums to the right, in the album cleverly labeled Part 2.One of my favorites:
We went to bed relatively early, after watching some Winnie the Pooh cartoons (in Chinese of course) because we knew that we would have to be up early the next day for what can generously be described as "Ye olde charter fishing toure" that was basically a ghetto rowboat trip out to some rocky shallows to look around for wildlife, and it was actually quite reminiscent of tidepool trips from California, although there was nothing as cool as anemones. Anyhow, next update you'll get that full story and much more interesting stuff than in this post. I'm done for today, and am already looking forward to getting yet another massage tonight. I had a foot massage last time, which was definitely nice, but the sensation just wasn't the same as a Chinese girl two-thirds my weight putting every pound of pressure available on an elbow shoved into your back.
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