7 pictures to go with 3,249 words -or- A long update, plus Beijing!

It’s been a long time since last update, and for that I apologize. If you have the attention span to read all of this in one sitting, I commend you.

Since we last left off, I was without internet for almost 4 days starting on the Friday 12th and going until Monday the 15th. It was terrible and excruciating. I read a lot (I have now finished Marley and Me and A Hope in the Unseen since arriving here) and did a better job of studying characters than when my internet was up.

Over that weekend, we again went out. If I haven’t touched on the blistering pace of change here, let me expound. At the beginning, we tried to go to a restaurant that was a favorite from last year. It is now a clothing shop. Also when we arrived, there was a Construction Bank of China branch that was quite gutted and most definitely under construction. Less than a week later it was up and running. The exact same goes for another sweet restaurant right next door. It’s incredible what can happen when labor is cheap, the economy is in the toilet, and there aren’t all these namby-pamby regulations and unions. As a rich foreigner benefiting from the process, I like it, but I also feel really guilty.

Anyway, over that weekend we planned on going out to a club again. I suggested we go to the Mayflower, which last year provided free drinks to foreigners. We sent an advance party in a cab, but they reported that this ‘promotion’ of sorts was no longer going on. So we went to Club 7, the first club that I went to last year. Our large party exited the hotel and we got in a caravan of taxis. After we knew they knew where they were going, we set off.

It’s only 6 city blocks or so down the road from our campus, but no one particularly wanted to walk it, and when a cab ride is $.30 per person, why not? It also gives everyone a chance to 聊天 (liao tian, chat) with the cabbies, which is usually fun. We cruised down the street, pulled awesome U-turns as the club was on the opposite side, and hopped out.

Remember that lecture on change and new establishments? Yeah. It was boarded up. Nothing had taken its place yet, but it had either moved (I doubt it) or gone under (probably). This made me very sad, as one of the highlights of the place was the LCD screens they had of Doraemon with trippy colors on loop. This is made doubly awesome when comfortably numb and zoning out, but focusing solely on the LCD screens for minutes on end.

Disappointed, we got back in our cabs (who were overjoyed to have another fare, as we had paid before getting out) and had them take us to 酒吧街 (jiuba jie, bar street) and back to Coco. This time we had a semi-private booth on the 3rd floor which was pretty cool. We could stand at the glass floor-to-ceiling wall/window and look out at the dance floor and DJ. It was cool, but we were there for a relatively short time. After our late start then false start I don’t think we got there until at least 11:00pm, probably later. I don’t recall exactly when, but at some point someone else on the program, who I don’t think we actually went to the club with, came up to us and said something about how some guy from Wisconsin pissed off some other guy and now the Triads or Police were going to come and we’d all get messed up something fierce. Even at the time it seemed that ridiculous, but no one seemed to mind leaving.

It’s convenient to be white here. You get ripped off, but you can get away with most anything. Taking a balloon from your local McDonald’s? Go for it. Yelling “BADGERSSSSSSSSSSS” in a crowded club parking lot? Sure, why not, shoot for the moon! And precisely both of those happened. After a hurried exodus from the club, a taxi-sized group of 4 of us got together. We needed to see if everyone else got out. We could call, but minutes are expensive and it’s such a pain to talk to people 1-on-1 when you’re trying to figure out the whereabouts of a whole group. So I yelled. A full-lunged shout, which probably didn’t even sound like an actual word but more of a primal scream to those who didn’t speak English.

“BADDDGERRRRSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS”

My voice can be quite the boomer. Deep and loud, it rolled across the parking lot like thunder. Crashing up the ears of all, the mighty cry was heard for kilometers and kilometers. A little hyperbole there, but you get the idea. And the responses flowed back. Just like that, I had fulfilled my safety obligations. Everyone in the parking lot was now looking at me of course, but it was awesome. Is someone going to come up and chide me? No.

“Wait a sec Eric,” you might be saying right now, “Isn’t this perpetuating the stereotype of the loud American?” My response to that is “Naturally, it is.” But it is so, SO fun. And as stated earlier, there was legitimate purpose behind it as well and totally harmless. So take that.

Also that weekend we went to an all-you-can-eat-and-drink Japanese steakhouse. The cost was only 150 kuai per person. Flipping through the menu, I would point at things and say 七个，七个，七个 (seven of these, seven of these, seven of these…) and use the hand gesture . Those are a really convenient way to unambiguously say a number when you get lazy with tones, its loud, or whatever. It also makes you look a lot less white in the eyes of whatever Chinese person you’re interacting with, which can help from time to time, especially with bargaining.

Anyhow, we ordered some things from the menu, including some red bean ice cream, some plum juice, and a few shrimp and meat dishes. I went outside to help a friend find the place, came back, and they had come back into the room, informing us we needed MORE. Our order had been rejected for having too little. I then flipped through the menu, pointing at anything anyone remotely expressed interest in, and requesting seven. A veritable mountain of meat came to us only minutes later. Platters and plates of lamb, beef, chicken, shrimp, sushi, steak, more beef, and squid, oysters, and other fun edibles trundled our way on a cart. Also, gallons of Tsingtao (pronounced qing dao) and sake were on hand. We had a plastic one-gallon jug of sake, which we absolutely murdered along with the help of our hibachi chef and one of the waitresses. We also did several 干杯’s, (ganbei) which sort of translates to cheers. However, when you ganbei something, you finish it. And you’re supposed to start at full. We had mugs of beer, and shotglasses for sake. We tried to keep the amount of 干杯’s to under once every two minutes, but I don’t think we held to that. Thankfully sake isn’t 80 proof alcohol, and this was closer to 30-40, but the quantity was high. We lost track of beers ordered. Surprisingly, no one got particularly drunk.

This was mostly due to the sheer mass of food we consumed. The steak was positively divine, the best I’ve had in this country. It’s a good thing I’m not counting calories or the like, since that meal may have stretched into 5 digits after counting the alcohol. After that wonderful meal, we returned to the dorm briefly and then went to a KTV parlor. We met up with a lot more of our program classmates and went got a large room. We only had it for an hour though, and after a Titanic duet and some Britney it was time to go. A few of us returned to Alibaba’s where we met some cool French Canadians. Unfortunately they are gone this weekend and we were gone last weekend, but they have our phone numbers if they deem us worthy of talking to again.

The school week after that was pretty uneventful. We took a pretty easy test, there was a sweet thunderstorm, and I reformatted my computer. Not terribly much worth commenting on. Then on Friday, we went to Beijing.

After said easy test, we had Erhu class. Erhu is an instrument approximately a thousand years old. It has two steel strings (they were silk originally) and a standard horse-hair bow between them. The range is only a couple octaves, but it’s pretty fun. I’m absolutely terrible at it, but whatever. We have slowly been learning finger positions and the best way to hold the bow, and how not to make terrible screeching sounds. Not much of this is getting through to me, but most of the class is doing pretty well. This is a picture from our first Erhu lesson, when we were just getting our hands on them for the first time. All that concentration isn't helping me one iota.


At 2:00pm we boarded a bus to Beijing. We were off a little bit later after making sure everyone was on board, and after a rest stop in the middle, we got to our Peking Duck restaurant at 5:00. I might catch some flak for this, but I find Peking Duck (北京烤鸭 beijing kaoya) to be highly overrated. I mean it doesn’t taste bad, but it’s super rich like duck always is, and adding some plum sauce and a little bit of sliced onions and cucumbers to duck is no great alchemical feat. It still tastes like Asian Boston Market, if such a thing existed. I hope the program didn’t pay too much for it is the bottom line I guess.

After said dinner, we walked up and down a boring street for half an hour or so, then returned to the front of the restaurant. I zoned out and tried to catch a nap while waiting for the bus to take us to the theater for another stereotypical Chinese experience, Peking Opera. After congested traffic, we arrived at the hotel/theater with a few minutes to spare. We took our seats, and the show began.
Last year, I was not a huge fan of the opera. It was boring. So boring, in fact, I decided to walk out and find myself a crisp refreshing drink and wander the streets. It was a decision I did not regret. I thought about doing so again this year, but felt that I should give it another go. Who knows, maybe it wouldn’t suck?
And that is precisely how I would describe it. It was a blissfully short hour and fifteen minutes. The first act was really boring, a 25-minute ordeal that had me worrying it would be a repeat of last year’s fiasco. It involved a lot of talking and not a lot of funny. Thankfully, it ended (Though the plot was not resolved, the entire thing was a woman trying to get on a boat to follow her lover in another boat. She got on a boat, then it ended.) and we were greeted with a new scene about Sun Wukong the Monkey King and his fight against 18 warriors. The ‘action’ got a little repetitive, but it kept me mostly entertained. It was pretty decent, and quite unlike pulling teeth.

We got to our hotel lateish, and found our rooms. My roommate decided it would be funny to wear a shower cap while not showering. I followed suit and put it on like a SARS/bird flu/swine flu mask. Some went out to clubs while a few of us just went around the corner for dinner. We stopped at a place near the end of a sketchy alley. They had the spiciest noodles, maybe the spiciest thing, I have ever tasted. It was obscene, and my friend who ordered it had to stop eating it because her mouth was on fire and she was on the verge of getting sick from the hotness. After second dinner we went back to the hotel and got to sleep. The next morning started before 8:00am.

Four of us gathered in the lobby at 7:50am. By 8 we were out. A quick taxi ride over to Tiananmen, met up with another friend, and we walked under the street, had our bags screened, and up onto the square. Big Brother, naturally, was watching. After the obligatory Mao portrait picture, we set off to cross the street again and head over to the Forbidden City.



The Forbidden City is monstrous. The 24 emperors that resided in it barely ever left its walls. It had harems, slave quarters, and other fun-filled places of joy in addition to the requisite temples, pavilions, and administration buildings. We spent a couple hours in it wandering around, admiring places such as the Imperial Garden and generally being regular tourists. The thing is, even all the other Chinese there were tourists too, so no one was particularly out of place. There was also one thing that I’m sure would have had Mao turning over in his coffin:
Note the bottom-right.

After the Forbidden City we took lunch at an incredible place, a holy place, known only as the Passby Bar. It served the most positively divine sandwiches ever. Sadly, I got the risotto for lunch (not bad itself) but it was so awesome, we decided to make sure it was not a one-time event. We would return.

And from lunch we went to Silk Street. It is an indoor bazaar, a carnival of consumers, huckster rodeo, all things new China. It has pushy vendors that speak good English to go with their French and Spanish as well. They hawk ties, Luis Vuitton, Dolce & Gabana, and all other sorts of brand names that are actually complete knock-offs. In proud Chinese tradition, they have posted a sign:
Just as “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” (the official Communist party line for the current system in China) really means “cut-throat no-regulations capitalism” the presence of this sign means the exact opposite of what it says. The shopkeeps themselves will readily tell you they are fakes. I bought a couple silver charms for my sisters (get pumped Kara and Liz) and a couple belts, because I was lacking in the snazzy belt department. After lots of browsing and everyone seemed to be satisfied, we returned to the hotel, dropped off our stuff and went to a great Muslim restaurant recommended by Lonely Planet. It was off on a side street but was totally packed, with Chinese, Arabs, Indians, and a couple other whites as well. The food didn’t disappoint either, with tender lamb and some great vegetable dishes.

Again we went to the hotel while the 女生 (nüsheng, girls) got ready. I read some and watched terrible Chinese dramas on TV. We reconvened at 10:30 or so and went to a club called Banana. There are a couple in Beijing called Banana, and we actually went to the wrong one first, as seems to be a theme now. There was actually a cover charge at this one, which means it’s pretty high-class or at least tries to be. Getting in, the music was deafening as expected. However, this club also had fire, and bubbles. Occasionally a bubble machine would go off and bubbles would float through the air. This proved immensely entertaining. Also, the bartender would occasionally light things on fire. Sometimes he juggled them as well. Then there was the tower of bottles with some flaming bottle at the top. It was quite a feast for the eyes, especially when all sound was pounding chaos mixed with such regal tunes as Soulja Boy.

I ordered a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label, which for some mystifying reason is referred to here as “rum.” I don’t know why, but that’s how it is. This was mostly done using hand signals as the club was far too loud and our table was literally next to the dance floor. After the waiter spilled some on me, robbed me of 10 kuai (maybe he thought it was a tip) and basically failed at being a high-end waiter, the bottle was magically empty, the victim of 8 or so people and one birthday girl. And just as sure as Charlie don’t surf, Eric doesn’t dance. Or at least not while sober. With that obstacle eliminated I got up danced for a long, long time. As we slowly lost people, the remaining 4 of us returned to the hotel at some unknown time. After some discussion, it was decided that a McDonald’s run was necessary. So we stumbled over to McDonalds, changed minds, and went to KFC. I ordered a chicken sandwich. It was the longest I have ever had to wait for fast food. It felt like an hour eternity, but was probably closer to 15 minutes. Still, that is a ridiculously long time to have to wait. After finally getting the sandwich, we returned to the hotel and slept it off. Sleep was fitful however, as the cleaning staff could not keep from talking really loudly in the hallways, in addition to early morning knocks and checkout-reminder calls. Going to bed when it was once again light out didn’t help either.

The original plan for the Sunday was to go to the Temple of Heaven and Summer Palace. Neither of those happened, as we were all dead tired. Instead, we went to the Passby bar again and ordered these:

Truly, heaven on bread. Incredible, would order again, A++++++
And after that we basically wandered around. There were some small hutong off to the side of the street the Passby was on, so we just sort of went through those. Eventually we decided on walking to a nearby park. “Nearby” turned out to be relative however, and after we almost got there we decided to turn it in and get a taxi back to the hotel. From there we just sat and relaxed for an hour and some until the bus was ready to take us back to Tianjin.

And then there were this week’s classes. Mine is slowly getting harder and more interesting. We had a midterm today which wasn’t too bad. Tomorrow early in the morning we are heading out to Taishan, the holiest of the Taoist mountains in China. From there we will be able to climb it, watch the sunset, sleep on the summit, and watch the sunrise. Hopefully it will live up to the hype. The weekend after is our 3-day during which I am going to Qingdao. These upcoming travel opportunities should be pretty fun.

More than 3000 words but that’s all I have for now. I’ll try to be a little more 认真 (renzhen, earnest) about updating this thing.
再见！

Pains, Trains, and Automobiles The First

The long weekend will be split into two posts so it is an easier read for you and doesn't take me several hours to write. The first post will more or less cover Thursday/Friday and the second will cover Saturday/Sunday.

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.

The little things

can be very gratifying. It's always a massive psychological reward when you can use any skills, however feeble, to accomplish something concrete and beneficial. I felt that way in France five years ago on my 3-week exchange program, and it's still just as true. Yesterday I mentioned that our AC unit was broken. Well today, breaking with typical Eric fashion of "let-it-lie-maybe-it-will-get-magically-better-or-someone-else-will-fix-it" I decided to get it fixed. I took the AC remote and went down to the lobby. By complete happenstance the lobby also just received a package from me which was thrust into my hands by the receptionist. I then told her that our air conditioner was broken, gave my room number, and tried to explain that it could be I'm an idiot that doesn't know how to use the remote. She didn't seem to notice or care about the last part, and as soon as she took down the number she told me that someone would be contacted. A half hour later or so a mechanic type guy came up, messed with the settings to make sure it wasn't just me being dumb (it wasn't) and cleaned the filter. Then, after making her repeat it several times, I gleaned from the housekeeping woman who was also in the room that she would come back in a few hours to see if it was now working. She did, and it wasn't. So she got the mechanic and another guy to come up again, they opened the window and started working on the actual AC unit that was outside our room. They got it fixed. All of this happened within the span of 3 hours or so. It was a really big warm fuzzy to get our cold steely going again.

The oral midterm went okay, it was a little short but there were some parts I absolutely nailed which the teacher pointed out at the end. The package, for those curious, mostly contained foodstuffs including Goldfish, Nutrigrain bars, and Flipsides. My father thought there was a slight chance it wouldn't make it, which I shared upon learning that my mom did not lie on the customs form about packing food.

Final word: does jelly and/or jam need to be refrigerated upon opening? I feel like it does but that is really not an option here...

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.