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.

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.

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.

Arrival and first day

So my flight was delayed by 4 or 5 hours. At first we sat on the tarmac while they had a hydraulics failure. Then they eventually asked everyone to get off the plane, gave us $10 meal vouchers and told us to be back in 30 minutes. An hour or so later we got into the air. I was expecting the flight to be purgatory but it actually wasn't so bad. I watched 3 and a half movies, dosed off a lot, etc...
The flight was 12 or 13 hours and we ended up going over the North Pole and Siberia. When we landed, the airport itself was incredible. First, it was just complete in March. It looks new, feels new, and is beautiful and massive. I think I read an article in the New York Times that said it had more floorspace than the Pentagon. I believe it. I met up with 3 other UW people and we got our luggage and went to the shuttlebus that took us to Tianjin.
As soon as we got outside though, the Beijing air hit us. First, everything far away was seen through a fog, just like a natural one. Second, the smell was weird. It was something like chlorine combined with slightly rotting plant matter and a tinge of sulfur. The drive to Tianjin was interesting, though I slept through lots of it. What I did see though, was that their roads were immaculate. New, perfectly shiny black asphalt and glowing paint. The sheer amount of roads and onramps and offramps and curves reminded me a little of the highways in California going from Orinda toward our dentist or Marie Calendar's near Ygnacio Valley Road. Additionally, this was our first glimpse of the 'local charm' as there were people biking right on the highway between Beijing and Tianjin.
We got to our hotel/dorm at around midnight local time (we are 13 hours ahead of Central Time during the summer) and got to sleep around 1:30 AM. I only got 5 and some hours of sleep,
I just couldn't get any more because I apparently wasn't tired.
Today, we started on a tour of Tianjin at 10 AM. We drove around on a bus and got out a bunch too. First, we went to a strip of cheap shops with tons of knock-offs like Luis Vuitton and Rolex. After that we stopped off for lunch. Ordering was most difficult. It was "Hot Pot" style so they gave us a pot of half spicy sauce and half mild, and 6 plates of what I think was beef strips that we dropped into the pot for a bit then pulled it up and ate it. It took us forever to order though since we were all so bad at Chinese, and eventually got a guy with much better Chinese to help us out. That along with a 600ml beer cost us only $6 each. After that some went to the supermarket and some went to the bank. I opted for the bank since I was unable to get any money from the campus ATMs. I got 1500 Yuan (also called kuai or Renminbi/RMB) which is a bit over $200. The current conversion rate is basically 7 kuai to 1 dollar. Even with a plummeting dollar, this country is so cheap. Also during the bus ride, I got the first taste of people pointing. Even while in the bus, Chinese outside would point at us. Finally, the highlight of the day so far would have to be when I made a one-year old kid cry. He was sitting with his mom and dad right behind us at lunch, and he kept staring at us. We smiled and said hi to him, and he seemed really amused. I eventually asked his parents if I could take a picture with him, and handed my camera off to a friend while his mom held him up. As soon as the camera came out however, he got incredibly shy and would not even show his face. His dad then took him and came and sat next to me, and sort of held him up. The poor kid was visibly shaken now. As the dad was sort of shoving the boy toward me I thought he was intending for me to take him. So I did. Oops. He had already been complaining and looking worried, but he started full-out bawling. His dad immediately took him outside and I started telling his mother how embarrassed and sorry I was. Neither of the parents seemed at all troubled and they seemed to think it was kind of cute/funny too. When the dad brought the kid back I said sorry to him, then his mom told him to say no problem but he was just embarrassed again and hid from me. Hopefully I haven't scarred him into a life of hatred for the white menace. Oh well.