In class, students pull out their laptops and the first site that comes up is Facebook. You can be in America, Europe, or Taiwan, and that’s how the world works now. You could probably be in Cameroon and still see the same thing. I also didn’t figure I’d see a student answer her phone in class here. Well, it happened. I guess Americans don’t have a monopoly on disrespecting teachers.
Parents are no different either. Is that child shrieking their head off about some inane crap? Throwing a tantrum because the parent didn’t get fries and won’t let the offspring play in the McPlayplace? Well you could be anywhere, there are inconsiderate people all over.
Both of these happened to me in the last week. First in Friday class I noticed everyone in front of me had Facebook open at one point during the lecture. Then the girl next to me answered her phone which I found pretty shocking and rude, but that’s also the same way I thought when it happened at a lecture in college. And I went to McDonald’s to spend some time reading, and there were kids there that just would not shut up. Having a noisy child is one thing, and I understand every infant will at some point be annoying; being completely oblivious to the looks of everyone around you and not saying a single word encouraging proper decorum is another.
There are also some stark differences. Everyone, for example, leaves their helmet unlocked in or on their moped when they park it and go inside. This is something that would only happen in rural small-town America. Here I am in the fairly near suburbs of a big city, though in America no one in such a situation would leave anything worth more than $5 lying about.
Additionally, the international students here are… not quite as diligent as I thought. Here we are in graduate school, and we have a project due this week, Wednesday. Last week the professor was not in class as she was still under the effects of her fever and consequently the first scheduled group did not present their project. The TA didn’t tell us anything about the next week. So the days pass, no one is communicating. Finally it is suddenly Sunday night. I email the entire group, asking whether anyone has spoken to the professor, or what our two leaders plan on doing. These leaders are official positions. The email I sent at 9pm gets 2 responses before I go to sleep 4 hours later. One is addressed solely to me that asks what time we are getting together, the other is from the group leader later asking for ‘opinions’ on what to do. No taking charge, everyone clueless, and most people are simply MIA. We didn’t meet today. No word on tomorrow. I think Wednesday might just be hilarious. Never in college did I ever consider simply ‘not doing’ a project but that’s the way this is going right now. I’ll keep you posted.
One drag here is the showers. I never know whether they are going to be cold or hot. At this point, my ‘hot’ is a sort of lukewarm that I probably considered cold a month ago. Now though, if I can get 5 minutes of precious non-freezing water I feel like a champ. I’m on a roll with two days in a row of not-freezing showers, going for three tomorrow.
One crazy thing here is the receipt lottery. Every two months, the government holds a drawing. They pick about half a dozen numbers. Three of these are grand prize numbers, and if you match all 8 digits, you get a cool 2 million NT$. The others are general prizes, and you can win for matching all the digits but it’s only 200k, though the prizes go all the way down to matching 3 digits for a paltry $200. So how do you enter? Get a receipt. Really. Ask for your receipt from any purchase. Tiny hole-in-the-wall places still won’t have a receipt available, but 7-Eleven and any chain or large store will provide them. Your receipt looks like this:
The purple-pink number at the top is your number. The blue stamp below that is verification from the store that it’s real. The rest of it is regular receipt, with 7-Eleven branding, their own rewards program, and information about the purchase. So why does the government run this gig? Well in theory, it’s to help keep transactions above board and prevent tax fraud. The idea is that the customers request receipts which means the company has to print a copy and then it has its own official record that can be audited. Does it work? I haven’t seen the stats. Anecdotally it seems to be better as a proverbial stick than a carrot. Nobody seems to shy away from the small restaurants that serve all of the cheap and most of the good food here, the ones that don’t give receipts. I can imagine it would be pretty easy for the government to prosecute a halfway-large company that didn’t issue receipts as part of a consistent business plan.
Some other things: election trucks are quite popular here. They are little trucks fitted with bullhorns and painted to be mobile billboards. The bullhorns blare a candidate’s catchy message and idle up and down main streets. One of the Vietnamese students let himself into my room last night. Again no knocking, verbal call, just an opened door. The same guy that corrected my tones. I’ve also been dragooned into doing things around the school I had to give some interview about the dorms and how totally wonderful they all are. I’m sure it will be used in advertising. I also am talking at some panel about culture or something. My English Corner audience is still rapt one said I had beautiful eyes and a beautiful nose. Yes, nose. I was definitely expecting eyes/hair for the blue/blonde thing, but the nose has it. I’ve also found a regular place to get smoothies/冰沙 which rock socks. Of course I don’t even know what most of them are even after tasting them , but that’s not important.
And that’s all I’ve got. The project will be interesting, at the very least in how it comes together or doesn’t.
It’s been almost a month since I left China now. I’m not even sure how many people will read this, but oh well. It’s hard writing a conclusion to this and I think it’s because I don’t feel it’s actually much of a conclusion at all. I will be back in China, it’s only a matter of time. I’ll be abroad again, and it may be in Taiwan, or who knows where. So here it is: a chapter that for now, at least, is the last.
Getting tickets to Harbin was an adventure in itself. I talked to my tutor, and she called around, presumably to a couple booking agencies. I went to the hotel/dorm ticket office, and the lady there also called her contacts. 买不了!, mai bu liao, “cannot be bought” they all said. I took one sweltering-sweaty walk over to the Nankai campus, and the same result. Tickets are available starting 10 days in advance of travel, and they must be bought in person. No internet, and though you can use a phone to reserve them, you have to go pick them up ASAP or have them delivered. So I took a super far (read: expensive) taxi ride to the same place we went to to get our tickets from Beijing to Guilin for the ten-day field trip. I figured Guilin is a tiny town that is popular in the summer, Harbin is a large city that is not. Surely they must be available. They were not.
Standing at that ticket counter, I changed directions. “Alright,” I’m thinking, “I was looking for tickets from Beijing to Harbin, which can be hard to find when you’re not in Beijing. What about from Tianjin?” I had been looking for tickets from Beijing because my friend was studying at Tsinghua University there, he just started Chinese this summer, and going to Tianjin would actually be somewhat out of the way. Nonetheless, I asked. And still none.
So I returned to the dorm and went through the motions again. Tutor, no. Dorm office no, Nankai no. Knowing that if you want something done right, you do it yourself, I decided I was done with this 2-day comedy of errors and got in a taxi. Again.
There was definitely fear as I rode toward my judgment, moon dollars ticking away with each passing kilometer. Could I not find train tickets? After nearly half a year cumulative in this country, could I not perform such a simple task? I had always told people that my Chinese was nowhere near fluent, but good enough that I could get around. Was this proof negative? The taxi pulled up. The shining new Tianjin Train Station greeted me. Last year it served only the high-speed trains from Beijing. A year before that it didn’t exist. And now, it was my only hope. I was not looking forward to calling Colin (my friend in Beijing) with “Hey, uhhhh… we can’t go to Harbin because I’m an idiot…” I walked inside and grabbed a spot in line. While waiting, I looked at the big board of trains. Instead of having a completely computerized screen they had some dot-point display. It displayed two trains at a time for 5-day stretches. I waited for any train to cycle through that went to Harbin. Soft sleepers, too expensive… standers, don’t think Colin would go for that… Aha! D177! Arriving just before 11pm, departing Tianjin at 2pm! Cash in hand, I commenced a serious box-out of potential line cutters. Young, old and infirm were powerless over this whitey’s determination to get two of those twenty remaining tickets. And a relatively short 20 minutes later, they were mine. I left the station, clutching my ¥562 worth of tickets. I checked them, placed them in my wallet, checked them again, got a crisp refreshing Coke, checked a third time, and then hailed a cab. It may sound silly, but I was on an adrenaline rush. And this is really why I spent so long relating this comparatively insignificant tale. The sense of accomplishment I felt after massive logjam that had been my previous search was incredible. It was like after landing a job, or finishing a massive paper you feel you really nailed. The walking-on-sunshine invincible feeling after a clutch sports victory. Simply put, a high.
And that was the hardest thing I had remaining on the program. The final wasn’t too difficult, and the grades that we just got back from the International Academic Programs office bore that out. (I am very pleased with my summer grade results.) We had a closing ceremony where we presented on our field trip, got our little certificates, and said our goodbyes to tutors and teachers. And later that night we had a closing party of our own, with most everyone in the program participating. It was outside, on a rare Tianjin night that was not too hot and not too muggy. Then the weekend came, and people dispersed. Many went to Beijing, many left early, I stayed behind, having nothing to do but wait for my friend. I packed, played mafia with other students and the teachers that lived in the dorm, watched movies, and read. Then on the 16th, all packed up, I headed to the train station with backpack over shoulders, Erhu over chest, duffel in one hand and suitcase in the other. I was quite the sight, once again playing the sweaty, overburdened whitey in a role I had become so familiar with by now.
I met Colin and the train station and we waited an hour or so for our train. We boarded, and then commenced a thoroughly passable nine hour ride of rummy, American music, and Futurama episodes.
And then later that night, we arrived in the glorious city of Harbin. It has a metro area of 4.5 million people, but chances are you haven’t heard of it. It’s famous throughout Asia for its Ice Lantern festival and Snow Festival, and the elaborate works of art on display during each. As I alluded to last post however, it is mostly dead in the summer. I suppose it’s because there’s not much to do, but for starters the weather was positively awesome at around 25 degrees Celsius, and it only rained a little more than in Tianjin. I thought it was a pretty decent place to spend 5 days. We went to a Jewish museum that was formerly the premier Harbin synagogue, (Harbin had 20,000+ Jews living in it during the 1920s) as well as a provincial museum which had some cheap displays on natural history. The best museum we went to however was the Unit 731 Germ Warfare base. During what for us was World War II, and during the latter half of the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s and 40s, a covert chemical and biological warfare testing station was created. Running such ghastly tests as “How long will this man survive frozen in ice?” and “What if we give this captive syphilis and don’t treat it?” the entire building is a monument to the horrors that took place within the compound. It is one of many, examples of a cruel treatment in the past and just one reason that the average Chinese is, at the very best, suspicious of the Japanese. As we walked through the exhibits with photos of procedures, as well as implements and dioramas, the older members of the Chinese tour group with us would gasp with each new horror. Jewish Museum general tribute to Jews Death certificates at 731 museum
The coolest thing however, was the tigers.
We went to a Tiger Reserve. Naturally, the purpose of the reserve was some ludicrous thing such as preparing the tigers for their eventual release into the wild, but this was a straight-up tourist attraction with the fattest felines you ever did see. Neither the government nor the reserve administration had any interest in letting go of the tigers that were laying golden kuai. Our options were to go on a regular Greyhound-like tour bus or a semi-armored bus with a steel grate for walls. The decision was not hard. After choosing our awesome bus, we were also informed of the choice of meats. Not tiger meat mind you, but a choice of what we could supply them with. We went with two chickens each (the live, clucking type) as well as 4 strips of steak. The chickens went quickly. It was evident the tigers had been through this song and dance before, and as soon as they heard the clucking were roused from their lazy reclining positions. As our guide/driver reached for the chicken, the tigers leapt up against the side of the bus, ready to receive our offering. The driver opened his side of the safety door, slammed in a chicken, and attempted to jettison it, but the tiger was right there waiting. A couple clucks later, one more tiger had been fed his lunch. The steak was a bit different. Whereas the guide controlled the chicken launcher, we were able to take what amounted to a large fork and get a massive strip of undoubtedly low-grade beef on the end. Then the games began, moving it towards the tiger then away, strafing along the side of the bus, and listening to its annoyed roar. Eventually the taunter would push the steak through the metal grating, the tiger would snag it and jealously pull it away, retreating to devour it in peace as the next tiger stepped up.
Getting there itself was a chore. I had my trusty Lonely Planet that was published in 2007 with data from 2006, and it had helpful information on the several bus routes we needed and how to get between them. Helpful in the sense that 1 block can be construed as 3 blocks, and Northeast and Northwest corner are the same thing. Getting over these hurdles involved lots of asking random people, including asking one particularly helpful older street-cleaner who seemed positively overjoyed to help a pair of lost-looking whiteys journeying to the poorer outskirts of (what must have been) his hometown. Although it’s also possible that I perceived a smile based on a lack of teeth as well. Could have been either way.
So there were museums, a totally awesome tiger park, and not too much else. We spent a little bit of time just walking around the downtown Central Street area, which had the requisite shops and restaurants. On our first day we were stopped by a Russian family who then started asking for directions to a hotel. All we could do however was turn, stare, shrug and tell them we only spoke English. Harbin is unique in China in that most of the white foreigners are Russian, and English is not the dominant secondary language. Of course, there was still tons of English, as well as Engrish. Both non-chain and chain restaurants like Pizza Hut (which we went to) still had English on their menus, but the spoken language of choice for those over 30 seemed to be Russian. Since it is awesome and America rocked the USSR’s socks off shortly after my birth however, it is readily apparent that Russian has taken a steep drop in importance, as evidenced by the number of young people we met that still preferred to study English. It is also readily apparent that the Russians are really creepy. I’ll get to that soon. But while we’re on the subject of languages and Americans:
Harbin people speak very good standard Chinese. Whereas Guangxi people speak a really messed up dialect with tons of different words, and Beijingers throw around R-endings every other word and slur speech like drunken sailors, Harbin is very close to Standard Mandarin, which is unsurprising given its Northeastern origins. This allowed for even smoother than usual speech with the cabbies. Twice in fact we were given discounts on fares. Once, on our last cab ride to the train station, the driver asked the standard “Where are you from?” question. Although having varied my answers, usually with South Africa or Ireland as one of them I was all business this time and just told him America and left it at that. He latched on to this however, and immediately went on about how awesome we were in every way. In typical Chinese fashion I deflected the complements, politely disagreeing and insisting that we were not in fact the lords of all creation and we were more like a village on a knoll than a city on a hill. Nonetheless he continued his rambling about America, mentioning everything from how cool Obama is, how attractive we all are, how smart we all are, and what great movies we create. His words, not mine. He also made several thumbs up gestures during the ride, and as much as possible used the words “OK” and “Good.” Upon arriving, the meter read 11 kuai. There is an automatic ‘fuel surcharge’ of 1 kuai which made it 12. I pulled out the money and he told me 10. I was confused at first, and was trying to think of any reason his meter might be broken, if it was a special day, or what. Turns out we were precious cargo, and after asking why, his only response was “You’re Americans. Americans are cool!”
We got one more taxi discount. The Unit 731 museum was a long ways away, and a bus ride would have left us several kilometers short we still would have had to walk. We opted for the cab, and before getting in, negotiated a 60yuan price. But after closing the door, he activated the meter. We blazed through the city and into the outskirts as he chewed up kilometers. The meter kept increasing, hitting 40, then 50. I decided that if it went beyond the 60s and into 70 I would throw a fit, already formulating my argument. He had however been talking on his radio the entire time. Most taxis in China seem not to have radios, but someone in Harbin decided that if a bunch of taxis helped the others out especially in terms of directions, they could get more fares per hour. Ours was asking about the specific location of the 731 base, though he clearly knew the general area. He was also however shooting the bull with his friends over the radio, talking about the foreigners he picked up. I listened, and waited. Colin and I had been in a conversation but when he started to talk about us I started listening more intently. As we got close to the conversation and the meter broke 60 and then 65, I asked why he was talking about us to his friends. I had not previously let on that I understood more Chinese than “ni hao” so he probably felt pretty ambushed. Although we had agreed on 60 and the meter read 65 or so, he let us go for 50 kuai instead. I gave him a hundred, he gave me 50 back, and I asked, “Really?” but he seemed pretty sure of it. I don’t know if it was an attempt to regain lost face, or like the other one thought we were really cool, but that was another 10 kuai saved. Wahoo.
There was another sketchier side to Harbin as well. After leaving a bar, Colin and I returned to our hostel and decided we wanted McDonald’s. We went to the near one, which was closed. Disappointed, we decided that KFC was almost as good and walked down central street to it. Also closed. But it was halfway to the 24 hour McDonald’s (I was blown away the first one in fact wasn’t 24 hours) so we again made the voyage. We got to the McDonald’s and discovered how sadly depleted they were in food. I got an order of nuggets and a drink, while Colin got his stuff as well. While standing in line, we were approached by two Russian men with weathered faces. Demetri was shortish and almost fat, and Aleksander was sort of tall and somewhat gaunt. They were wearing lots of clothing, even though it was a warm summer night. Like other Russians, they first approached us speaking Russian. Demetri’s English was decent enough to harass us however. The conversation went something like this: “Do you want to have fun?” Demetri asks.
I hesitate. “Uhhh what sort of fun?” Skeptical only begins to describe me.
“You know, you know. Fun.” As if he has telepathically beamed me his meaning. This guy is on something.
“No thanks, we don’t really feel like it. We just want McDonald’s.”
“McDonald’s is bad! Bad food! Do you like bad food?” This guy is absolutely nuts.
“Um, yes, I like McDonald’s, their chicken nuggets are delicious.”
Aleksander chimes in, “Nooooo, McDonald’s is bad!”
Colin goes on a short rant on the merits of McDonald’s, implying that Russia has given no such comparable gift to the world. For better or for worse, this is lost on our ‘friends.’
Food ordered and received, we sit down promptly. They meander over to us. Demetri is not going to let us go without a fight. Perhaps literally.
“Hey man, let’s go party.” I swear this is something out of a bad movie. These are like the Russian mobsters in the beginning of Boondock saints. I wouldn’t trust them farther than I can throw them, and our boy Demetri here is at least 100 kilos.
“You want to come?” Aleksander hasn’t quite refined his subtle moves yet.
At this point I’m pretty amused, but also a little scared. If it actually came down to it, I have no doubt a physical struggle would end in your valiant protagonists losing out. Hoping they don’t speak out Chinese, I make the decision to solicit our neighboring patrons for advice. Two Chinese girls, probably even younger than Colin and I, are eating their food in relative peace. I butt in unceremoniously, apologize for doing so, then ask them what they think is going on.
“What do you think they want?” I inquire.
They have no clue. I ask a more circumspect question: “Have you ever seen them or any other Russians do this?”
No they have not, but I neglected to ask if they were even locals. There is a look of trepidation on their faces. I’m not sure which pair of whiteys they’re more afraid of. For all she knows, this may be a creepy pick-up line.
I leave them be. Colin and I discuss, in a quick and gratuitous use of slang, how best to deal with the Russian guys. We consider the silent treatment. Not viable, really. Everyone knows when they get the silent treatment. So for a couple more minutes, they ask if we want to have fun, party, and drink. With Canadian tuxedos over stained shirts, it was hard to consider these caricatures of characters as an actual threat to me. Still, we continue rejecting their advances. Then I get the idea to monologue. I spring the idea to Colin. “Basically,” I tell him, “I will just go on and on about whatever I want for several minutes. You don’t have to care, you don’t have to understand. Just let me talk for a long time. Then you take a turn, and hopefully they think we are actually interested in some real conversation.”
So I start telling Colin the saga of Brett Favre. He is utterly apathetic toward all sport, and certainly this line of speech, but as I explained earlier, that’s not the point. I get worked up telling Colin about Favre’s legacy, his highs and lows, and how ESPN worships him. Just as I wind down and Colin starts into a lecture on some sort of economic principle, our tormentors departed the restaurant. We breathed a sigh of relief, laughed, and waited a little bit before leaving to make sure they were well and far away. The poor Chinese girls to my left had long since departed, taking smart advantage of our entangled situation.
Colin and I left the McDonald’s half-joking about what might have been, the good and the bad. And I really don’t know how it would have gone. I suspect it would have ended poorly. Demetri and his lackey seemed awfully scummy, and I don’t think it farfetched to imagine they might have been very low-level mob thugs. Or maybe they were just two misunderstood men, too cool for this world. Either way, we saw them the next day in the broad well-lit daylight of a very populated Central Street, thankfully. It was awkward.
And that was Harbin. We took the D28 back to Beijing, and the ride was much the same. Every time I ride a train in China I’m conflicted as to its viability in America. I love taking the train in China, and if it were the same price in the States I’d love it here too, but I don’t know how feasible that is. Anyhow, we got to Beijing after midnight, when the taxis were out in force, picking off us tourists coming from the train station like so many wolves circling weary sheep. Faced with waiting in a really long line for a legit taxi or taking a black taxi, we actually chose the third way. We walked a couple blocks from the trainstation, plopped down our luggage, and attempted to hail a taxi. We did, and every one we did we would haggle with. And we took turns laughing at offers, giving counteroffers, and generally have a good time. Or at least I did, and I think Colin enjoyed the chess-match/gamesmanship of it all. Some of the drivers were a little more annoyed, but hey they didn’t get my fare. We eventually found one who took us for 60 kuai, even though the meter would have run us around 25. It was past midnight, and tired-looking foreigners each with 50kg of baggage and looking quite tired; guess who had the bargaining power. Still, I felt accomplished in getting him to bother bargaining with us for almost 5 minutes and getting him to insult my knowledge of Beijing before we took the ride. It turned out or hostel was in a super sketchy hutong and unsurprisingly he had to call the hostel, so I gave him my phone and away we went. We arrived and fell asleep.
The next day was then our last full day in glorious land of Zhongguo. To celebrate, we went to Silk Street to peruse the knock-off goods. I bought a “SILK STREET AND PEARL MARKET SECURITY” badge off one of the shop attendants, and I literally mean ‘off’ her. I pointed at it and asked how much it cost. At first she laughed, said I was kidding, and it wasn’t for sale. I named a price of ten yuan, she jokingly said 1000, and we ended up settling on twenty. It is my pride and joy. We also bought Polo shirts for 25 RMB each. This is an absurdly low price. It took about that many minutes worth of haggling, and we got them down to pretty much their basement price. We figured this because when we were walking around with our shirts, not a single one of the other vendors believed we bought them for 25 RMB. One vendor seemed willing to pay 15 for each of them. And the amount of pain and negotiating we went through to get them down from 150 each, to 80, 30, 26, 25.5 and then finally 25 was high. I don’t actually care about that .5 yuan each, it’s about beating the vendors at their own game and not giving an inch to some of the great rip-off queens of China that ply their trade at Silk Street. Rarely is your starting price the price actually paid, so there’s quite a deal of accomplishment in winning that fight.
I also returned to the Passby Café and dragged Colin along with me. It was a nice ease back into American prices. It’s $5 for the most American sandwich I’ve ever had in China, but still none of those annoying tax/tip shenanigans.
And after one final night at the club, (Banana!) we were off the next day.
We got to the airport with time to spare, for there wasn’t much point in sitting around the hostel growing old. I’m not sure if it’s ironic, glorious, or just tasty, but our last meal in China was Burger King. We boarded, took seats side-by-side in the exit row, and the 777 was away.
Leaving always feels weird. I liked this year more than last. Again my Chinese grew by leaps and bounds, thanks to boundless practice. I’m confident in it now. Also, I was a lot closer this year to more of the program participants than last year. I did more traveling, all with said friends. For example, Tai Shan by all accounts simply should have been miserable. My lungs almost collapsed in the middle of it. We took a terrible train early in the morning, arrived in the terrible city of Tai’an, had a miserable breakfast and commenced the soul-crushing ascent. We got to the top and I actually did collapse, buckled legs, onto my bed. The food at the top was expensive, and when we woke up at 4:00am to see the sunrise, not only were we entirely fogged in, but it thunderstormed on us. And there was the standing in the gondola line for 1.5 hours, then the standing train ride back. Somehow, somewhere, we stole fun from the jaws of defeat.
We touched down a couple minutes before we left, when speaking of local times. INS and customs were a breeze, and getting my utterly nondescript suitcase was by far the most annoying issue. My parents picked us up, and stepping outside that O’Hare airport to see the blue sky was like seeing the end of your favorite movie; you know what’s coming, you know when, but you still love it.
I miss the jiaozi and the baozi, as well as delicious meat chuanr and cheap EVERYTHING. I don’t miss the dirtiness. I miss train rides but not train stations. I don’t miss censored internet, but I really find myself missing the great municipality of Tianjin.
And China has rubbed off on me, not always for the better. Driving on a two-lane highway only days after getting back from China, I made an aggressive pass. It wasn’t into oncoming traffic expecting him to hit the shoulder, but there was a visible car on the horizon that quickly got larger. I don’t know if I would have normally done that. I also might be already over that however, as driving now I feel perfectly normal. Sometimes I’m more cynical about our future with China, as I think about all the prejudiced idiots I’ve met who truly believe China can do no wrong. But then I remember that Harbin cabbie, and how most young people see us, and I’m encouraged. I’m conflicted, just like China is.
I don’t have much else to say. Like I already stated, I will be back, it’s only a matter of time. And hopefully next time I’ll be getting paid instead of doing the paying.
Thanks for reading! I hope you felt it was worthwhile!
Last weekend we made a voyage to Tai Shan, or Mount Tai. It is holiest of the 5 sacred Taoist mountains of China . Because the city of Tai’An is on the whole worthless, dirty, and generally unpleasant, it was decided we would not bother spending Friday night there. Instead on Friday night we watched the fifth Harry Potter movie, and then went to bed pretty early. Our train was for 7:21am which meant we wanted to leave the dorm at 6:15 just to be safe. After waking up at 5:00 and not being able to go back to bed, we eventually left the dorm and caught a taxi to the train station. At the beautiful new train station that a year ago only serviced the Tianjin-Beijing high-speed train, we waited for about half an hour and met up with some other Badgers going to Tai Shan who took an earlier taxi. I also drank two bottles of juice as I seemed to have come down with a late June cold which I am just now getting over. They called our train over the loudspeaker and we were off.
We found our seats. Unsurprisingly, they were occupied by people with standing tickets. Trains are the main way of transport in China, since flying, though cheaper than in America, is still really expensive. And for distances longer than a couple hundred kilometers, buses are not efficient in terms of fuel, labor, or bodies moved. For migrant workers therefore, the only way to really get from point A to point B is the train, and the cheapest ticket is the standing class. Some trains are high-class and only have hard sleepers (cots) or soft sleepers (luxury cots) and no standing space. Alas, this was not our train. When we took our seats, the people in them seemed a little miffed that these young, rich, white kids had the audacity to take the seats that they had claimed fair and square. I felt a twinge of guilt, but it’s not my fault that the purchasing power of my dollar is inflated because their government has created a sort of de facto peg to the American dollar and has artificially deflated its value in order to attract more exports. My guilt having been rationalized, we sat down. We had a row of 5 seats, 3 on one side of the train and 2 on the other. Across from us were 5 very 地道 (didao, authentic) Chinese people. One of them was an old man who had fought for the North Vietnamese against the Americans in the Vietnam War, and also fought the Russians in the Sino-Soviet border conflict. He had an awesome Mao pin on his shirt that I considered offering him 100 kuai for, but more rational people on the train pointed out this might be highly offensive. Another of our train buddies was a total slob. He ate peanuts out of his hand as one might expect a dog to do, lapping them up and munching on them, mouth totally open. He also had a thinly veiled antipathy toward America. In the course of our conversation he insulted my friend’s shoes, tried to make us guilty for being educated, told us our government was evil, and was miffed when informed that we actually buy our MP3 players in the US, not China, because we want them to last longer than a month. He quite accurately represented the China that has slowly been dying since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms; xenophobic, reactionary, jealous, small-minded, and jingoistic. Unfortunately, this is still common in the rural and poor parts of China, which is exactly where this man was from. His home province of Anhui is the 5th-poorest in China based on GDP per capita.
After the lectures and naps that went on and off for 4.5 hours, we arrived at Tai’An, the city at the base of Tai Shan. As I said before, it is not a great place to be. Some small cities in China have a certain charm based on an old city, or have been spruced up because of tourist traffic, or are in some other way redeemable. Tai’An is not. It is dirty. By the end of our 24-hour excursion, we were only half-jokingly referring to Tianjin as a cosmopolitan metropolis. We took a small lunch at a restaurant near the train station, then got cabs to the base of Tai Shan. And then we started climbing. I’ll let some pictures take over for now. The climbing got harder and harder. Not only did fatigue grow, but it became ever and ever more vertical, and eventually it became a sheer wall of stairs. Thousands of stairs. We started out, and then midway through our faces turned red from the huffing and puffing. By the end, it was declared that I looked ghastly pale and very sick. When we got to the top, a tout immediately spotted us and took us to a hotel. We go the room for 400 kuai, which isn’t too bad when split five ways. Cheaper than I had expected to pay for lodging on top of a mountain. I passed out while waiting to shower and my lungs were threatening to collapse. The day after my chest felt weak and I coughed constantly. It was perfectly exhausting. We fell asleep by 8:00pm. We were plenty tired to do so, and we also wanted to get up in time to see the sun rise, which is supposed to be a big draw for Tai Shan.
We got up at 3:45am and left the hotel to venture out into the dark. The entire mountain was misted in, and visibility was perhaps 20 feet. As we started to follow a small crowd of Chinese people whom we figured knew the way to the observation point, we noticed they were wearing ponchos. Sure it was so foggy my camera flash was turning the haze into a mirror, but the forecast called for a 10% chance of showers, and the day before had looked okay. We poked fun at them and laughed. And karma cackled back.
About a third of the way to the observation point, it started drizzling. Half a minute later, it was raining. Then the lightning came. Keep in mind, we are on top of a mountain. This was lightning that was simultaneously accompanied by thunder. For those not meteorologically inclined, this means the storm is not 10 miles away, not 1 mile away, it is right above you. And when you’re 1500 meters in the air, it’s not far above. We ran for cover, and there wasn’t much. We found an outcropping on the rock wall and hid under it. The rain refused to stop however, and a moat started forming, as if to box us in. And it kept growing, encroaching, swallowing my sandaled toes. I moved to higher ground, but it kept coming. Finally there was a slight lull in the rain. I took my chance, and we fled to the hotel. Cold, damp, and annoyed at the lack of sunrise, we just sat for a bit, regaining feeling in the extremities. We then checked out and headed for the gondola line – there was no way we were going to make it down a rain-slicked mountain with aching legs in time to make our 9:56am train back. We got to the gondola line at 5:30am, precisely when the hotel staff recommended. We were not only the first ones there, but no one else actually showed up until about 6:15. So we loitered. Finally, a man came out of the ticket booth hut (he slept there) and opened up the gate. A mass of humanity followed, but we had a gameplan and stuck to it. Three of us rushed to the roped line to secure first place and block it off from others, while 2 went to the ticket window. This plan was executed to perfection. After buying the tickets, the pair joined up with us and we got the first gondola off that rock. It was actually a really cool ride, it started with an eerie view of mist then below that we had a really good view of the landscape.
The gondola took us halfway down the mountain, and then we caught a bus for the other half. It was pretty incredible to see what we had climbed just yesterday, and took almost 5 hours to do so. When we got to the bottom there were plenty of taxis waiting to take tourists like ourselves to the train station. So we hopped in, and 10 kuai later were there. After a true breakfast of champions – Pepsi, soggy fries, and a spicy chicken sandwich – at a KFC imitator, we went to wait for the train. We had bought our return tickets when we arrived the day before, but on such short notice, there wasn’t exactly space. So we got standers. The 无座 means “no seat” and the 学 is short for 学生, student. We were actually able to find a very convenient nook and sit 4 cramped people down at a time out of 7, so it wasn’t too bad. Not a pleasant experience, but when you’re paying $4.18 to go 600 kilometers, how can one possibly complain?
We got back at around 4:00pm and from there it was dinner then a pretty early 10:00 bedtime, this due mostly to the fact we had been up for your typical 18 hour day, and had been standing for a good chunk of it.
It was an odd weekend. I can’t really point to anything and say affirmatively “that was fun” except for maybe the gondola, but it was still enjoyable. And the weekend in Tianjin would have just involved basically sitting around anyway so I feel it’s good we at least did something.
This is our three-day weekend, and after the test and culture class on Thursday I am out of here to Qingdao. You may be more familiar with the postal-map spelling of Tsingtao, and yes it is the very same city of the beer. The Germans set up shop there when they colonized, and there are also supposed to be nice beaches, along with churches and some other cool stuff to see.
And that’s basically it. Three-day, then regular weekend, then 10-day to Guangxi. We’ve already been here more than a month, and when the 10-day starts I’ll be halfway through my 12 weeks here. (The program is 11 and I have a week at the end with a friend who is in China on a Northwestern University program.) The title of this post is lifted from the vocab list we got in class yesterday. It is about a butcher, and how good he is at his craft and how it sounds like music when he slices and dices a cow. It also felt appropriate given the difficulties involved with our Tai Shan trip.
I'm now almost exactly 24 hours from boarding the great silver bird and taking off. Currently I am debating the virtues of staying up the entire night before and whether that will help me adjust, which in truth will all depend if I can fall asleep right away on the plane.
I also got an email from the program coordinator this morning: Dear all,
We received urgent notice from the Bureau of Public Health today regarding a decision by the P.R.C government on dealing with persons from the infected areas of human cases of H1N1. This government regulation states that all persons who have been to the infected areas within the last 2 weeks shall be quarantined for 7 days.
Since all of you are coming from countries within which H1N1 human cases have been found, no-one could be exempted from this new regulation.
With the support of our local institutes, program staff negotiated on the terms and conditions related to the quarantine. The result turned out to be quite successful: instead of being quarantined for 7 days, we will only need to do it for 3 days. In the meanwhile, food will be provided by our hotel for free, as well as other complimentaries such as shampoo, towels, toilet paper, etc. Internet and room phone will also be set up by the time you check in.
What you need to do:
1. Make sure you don't have a fever when you enter China. Officers from Beijing Entry/Exit Inspection and Quarantine Bureau (Beijing CIQ) will check every passenger once the plane lands. If you already have a fever, please do not board the plane.
2. During the quarantine, please do not leave our hotel building.
We understand that this governmental policy may cause you inconvenience. Please be reassured that we will adjust our schedule accordingly to make up for the class hours missed during the quarantine.
We appreciate your cooperation and will accommodate you as much as we can. ------ 3-day quarantine upon arrival. I'm not sure if this will be in a different hotel or the one we are scheduled to be in, but it sounds like our hotel in Tianjin. This will run into our scheduled city tour the first day after arrival, and will likely run into the first day of class as we'll since we arrive in China Friday afternoon and will likely get to our hotel Friday night. It'll probably be pretty boring, but oh well.
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.
First things first: I now have a Picasa album which should allow both for thumbnail image previewing, sufficient space, and it automatically resizes them for easier uploading and viewing. Try going to http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/eric.mathis/Tianjin08 and you should be able to view every picture I have taken so far here. It's 400 and growing, 220+ of which were taken this past weekend.
I have a new background for my computer. Here it is:This is the view midway down our descent of the Great Wall. One of very few pictures of the wall that does not contain any people (人) in it. The wall itself was an extremely difficult climb. Easily the roughest climb on any structure containing stair-like creations intended to aid the ascension process. I say stair-like because in truth, stairs is a little too generous of a term for all of them. When your foot surprises you because the step you just took was a total of 1 inch higher than the last one, then you stub your toe on the 1.5-foot next one, it is hard to call them stairs without a massive asterisk. Wag of the finger to you, Chinese slave-laborers.
Other than the stair problem, the wall just kept going up and up. As the pictures plainly show, there was a quite heavy fog the day we went. I think it was genuine fog, because our elevation was high enough and we were 80km removed from urban Beijing. (Beijing as a provincial-level municipality is a little bigger than the size of Connecticut.) What I did notice is that white people sweat a lot more than Chinese, or at least show it. There were men easily in their 60s that must have smoked most of their life judging by their teeth, and they certainly didn't look any worse for the climb. There were also tiny Chinese girls in nice dresses and makeup (one even had heels) that looked like they were going for a stroll on the Champs Elysees. Meanwhile, the Americans are huffing and puffing all the way up, drenched. I guess life just isn't fair. It's tough being white in this country. I swear.
After the Great Wall (长城) we had our taxi drivers take us to a baozi restaurant. Baozi are dumplings, like potstickers aka jiaozi, except they are wrapped in a more doughy and less greasy crust and not fried. While there, we ordered a couple trays of baozi and a couple vegetable dishes. I also stole half a plate of leftover ones from another table. I have no clue what was in them but they were delicious. The dish names were creative, at the very least. I'll just say I'm not sure who, or what, they used to translate the dish names.
We ordered it.
Honestly I wasn't extremely pumped, as I am not a fan of mushrooms nor whatever green vegetable it came with, but it was a laugh nonetheless. After the baozi we went to the Summer Palace. This is where we first got hosed by the taxi drivers. The situation went like this: we had agreed the previous night at the hotel to hire 3 taxis to drive us around all day for 400 kuai per taxi, 100 per person. So we did, and met them at 7:30 sharp. They drove us around, and recommended the baozi place to us. A few in the group seemed surprised that they earned commission on getting us to go the places we went, but after my father's Moroccan rug... experience... (Sorry Dad, it is a nice rug, and I can't remember exactly how much we paid for it, but it was too much. Way too much.) it was rather expected. It was hard to get worked up about this though when lunch came to 13 kuai per person. This was actually cheap for a real restaurant with a roof, running water, and more than one person staffing it, so I chalked it up as a genuine aid to us even if they did make money. Then, they took us to the Summer Palace, and the fleecing started. (By the way, we had a native and fluent Chinese speaker in our group and this all still happened.) The taxis took us to a place that sells boat rides. These would eventually take us to the South Gate of the palace. As we learned 3 hours later, this gate was extremely far away from everything interesting, and there happened to be a lake in between as well. The boat ride cost 40 kuai that covered the entrance fee as well. North Gate tickets were 15 kuai. Now, they did tell us the difference would be 15-20 kuai between the boat and regular entrance. That wasn't what was annoying. It was the fact that once we arrived, we were a good hour walk from anything remotely interesting. The lake looked cool for about 5 minutes or so, then we all got bored and ornery rather quickly. After wandering around and going the opposite direction we wanted, we ended up with very little time to actually see anything. So it goes. The last, and most tragic chapter of the story, dear reader, is at the end, paying the cabbies. The worst part was, it went down exactly as I had not hoped. We got to the hotel, and the taxi that arrived half a minute ahead of us had already started paying. Apparently, it was now 450 kuai per taxi. The reason apparently, was never given. Someone said something about the tolls (They were 50 kuai in total.) and it seemed reasonable enough, so 450 was settled on. For about a minute that is. After we let on that we were going to acquiesce to the new price hike, someone directly asked the driver about the tolls. The driver immediately seized on this as a chance to hike it another 50 kuai, up to 500 per taxi. He played it off extremely well, (all body language I'm interpreting here) as though he had forgotten the tolls, and they were supposed to be part of the price anyway. Then the first-arrived taxi shelled out. It's extremely hard to call bullshit when you don't speak the language, and can't annunciate thoughts into words such as scam, agreed upon price, etc... Everyone else in our party seemed to accept it, and I don't fault them; 50 kuai is 7 dollars and they weren't in a linguistical position to argue, much like I wasn't. Perhaps I should have talked to our Chinese friend and gotten her to ask for a few basic things like why the sudden yet predictable price gouging, but forcing her to be an interpreter for an argument stacked against me didn't exactly seem like the best thing to do. I don't really mind taking the lumps, especially when they are that insignificant.
That was all on Saturday, and we got back sometime around 7:30. We had dinner at an overpriced and under-filling pizza place near our hotel. Every pizza place in this entire country is overpriced and classy apparently. Pizza Huts are regarded as four-star restaurants, places it is acceptable to close a big business deal in. Same with TGIFriday's.
Something that Beijing has, that Tianjin doesn't seem to, is a sense of energy and excitement. Walking down the street in the early night, there were tons of people just out and about. It could be that our hotel was in a hip downtown district (it was) and that our school in Tianjin isn't near anything, but compared to last weekend even, simply walking the street there were more young people, more old people, more 30-year olds with their little kids just hanging out. Two random guys just walked up to us and started talking to us in very poor English, but you could tell they were really excited just to see us, talk to us. It's hard to describe concretely, but I'll leave it at the city just felt more alive.
The next morning, I woke up and took a quite scenic walk to Tiananmen Square with my roommate. It was about 3 blocks away, maybe 4, but we walked around 20. I only brought sandals to Beijing. Once there though, it was just awesome. There were thousands of other tourists there, most all Chinese. From who knows how far off in China, they were there, snapping pictures just like we were. It was the first time I saw large amounts of Chinese tourists in China. It's also when it dawned on me that this was actually a very rare sight. Domestic tourists. It's common in the States of course, but after being in France a couple times, I cannot recall ever meeting or seeing any significant groups of French tourists. Perhaps the Eiffel Tower, but the percentages of French at the Tower and Chinese at Tiananmen are not even close. Chinese were way more than 95% of the people here. The same goes for Italy, and Spain too. It is one of the obvious yet elusive observations. America is big, almost exactly the size of China, and regional differences are massive. France does indeed have its own provinces, and they have different characteristics, but when you can cross your entire country in half a day of driving, are things so different within the country? What is a road trip without any time spent on the road? Are the people living in Strasbourg, Paris, and Marseilles anywhere near as different from each other as a New Yorker, Oregonian, and Georgian surely would be? I think the answer to that question is no. America does obviously have a history built on accepting emigrations and diasporas that China does not, but the plain size and population of China means that it too can claim a regional diversity owned only by the other large countries of the world. It's a diversity unlike the kind you hear about concerning school admissions and affirmative action, and may be less important, but does create significant differences in people and policies nonetheless. Anyhow, I'll try to stop waxing philosophical on random tangents and instead regale you with more about how my time in China is going.
Here is a picture of me at Tiananmen. (天安门)
It's only been in movies and TV news and magazines a million times before, but how many of them have Wisconsin representing? "Represent," for Mom, Dad, Nana, Gramps, and anyone over 40 reading this, does not always mean anything specific. It is sort of a word of affirmation, as in someone shouting "Any Dungeons and Dragons players up in here?" followed by a "Represent!" The s may be dropped in favor of a z as well.
Despite the aforementioned energy I felt in Beijing, I absorbed none and managed to fall asleep by eleven pm on both Friday and Saturday nights, foregoing the nightlife enjoyed the previous weekend. After 6 hours of walking or so on Saturday though, I didn't mind the 10 hours of sleep. After Tiananmen on Sunday morning, we checked out and had 4 hours to kill before the buses departed to take us back to Tianjin and our weekly grind of learning 30 汉字 (Chinese characters. Remember?) a day. After hitting up a food court that was rather difficult to order in and made me feel even worse about my spoken Chinese than usual, a few of us decided to hit up the Temple of Heaven. It was pretty cool, and also happened to be where I found my new facebook picture. We were in a sort of courtyard, looking at no buildings in particular, when I saw this man. He was old. Very old. Like he had seen a Great Leap Forward or five. He was stooped like a porch, and I decided to get my picture taken with him. It felt a little cheap and gimmicky, but he was smiling the whole way through, and even shook my hand (he himself started the shake) after the picture was taken. I thanked him about 5 times and ignored all the other people looking at me, judging me as probably either the ungrateful American treating their elders as tourist attractions (yes) or a rare foreigner who is honoring a generation of Chinese that made sacrifice upon sacrifice all in vain (ehhhh... perhaps). Either way I hightailed it out of there.
This post has been decidedly heavy, and that needs to be rectified. So here is your fifth and final picture, and the requisite Engrish posting. The first two characters of the cerebral disease sign literally mean "small brain." The CCP secret police might be among the world's elite, but the PC police certainly aren't.
That's about it for the weekend. I forgot to mention that last week in class we heard a massive noise, a series of booming staccato pops and a weird sucking and crunching sound in between. We shortly debated the cause, considered they might be shooting rockets into the sky in a climate control effort. After asking the teacher (老师) and deciphering 4 words of her sentence, I think we determined that it was a building being demolished. My Friday test score was up 4 points from that of the week before.
These posts are getting longer, which itself is not a problem but I am going to try to throw in some shorter ones a little more often and may make posts of simply a picture and a paragraph, if I can keep it to that. It will certainly keep my average bedtime earlier.
