Young Turks, Mongol Hordes, and ALL NATURAL MALE ENHANCEMENT

My room, my side on the left.

First week of classes under the belt, and I have to say I’m bored to tears. They’re three hours long and I honestly don’t even know what we’ve learned. Research Methodology was very similar to the library orientation freshman year of high school: journals are your best academic sources, anything not peer-reviewed is suspect, and you can use different Boolean operators to refine your search.

Woooo.

With the boring crap out of the way, I’ll start in on some more interesting things. The Engrish here hasn’t been as tragic as it was on the mainland, but that clearly doesn’t stop people from wearing shirts that say PORN on them. Though technically not Engrish and not as funny as YAMP, it’s the funniest clothing I’ve seen yet. There are also plenty of typos everywhere, including large billboards. Hey, why buy eyewear when you can buy eyewaer? And should we get a chiken sandwich for lunch?

Another similarity here is the traffic. Size matters, and right of way is measured in kilograms. Buses are on the top of the food chain, then trucks, large cars, compacts, mopeds, bikes, and pedestrians. Also, if you want a bus, you have to hail it. If you’re standing at a stop it will breeze right by every time. And while waiting for a bus, I saw an genuine Chinese fire drill. At first I didn’t believe it was actually happening, but they stopped at the red light (shocking in itself) and got out, rotated counter-clockwise, and were on their merry way.

Yet more similarities: I’m the token American, except now I don’t have 60 others to share the title with. I am 1 of 2 at this school, the only one in my dorm, and so far the only blonde I’ve seen. This means a) more stares than in Tianjin and b) everyone wants to be my friend. Everyone, including Gentry. Or maybe it’s Jentry, Gentri, Jentri, or whatever. I don’t really ask, but I like to think it’s Gentry for the irony factor. In his case, I don’t care to know. He’s creepy. Why? Well he’s from Indonesia. He’s Christian. So far, no problems. He’s getting a doctorate in pharmacology. Okay, cool. He’s friends with Obama – wait what? And he saw a blue light come from under a door and zap him in the heart. Huh? Which turned out to be his guardian angel so now he likes blue but it’s also the color of part of the American flag and liked by a lot of Americans so he’s clearly American too and hey he used to have a green card and had the number for it but someone stole it so he can’t go to the US but he will use his contacts with Barack if only I could put Gentry in contact with 44 and by the way getting a green card means he is totally a citizen but wait maybe not but hey if he marries a nice American girl he can become an American but she has to be Christian no Muslims or Jews because they’re dirty and he wants one that’s super attractive and he will always love and support her so if maybe I
have some friends that want a husband that will provide [absolutely nothing] for them I could go ahead and call them as a favor to both him and her since I have blue eyes which basically means we are like blood brothers and besides he’s studying pharmacology so he can refine the extract from some plant in Indonesia that you rub around certain parts of the anatomy to make them magically grow in less than 3 minutes and it’s really great if only he could sell that he would make millions but hey Gentry can use my MBA expertise together with his bullshitology and we can rule the world like if Bill Gates and Steve Jobs got together with Sergey Brin and Larry Page and basically out anything it would be really cool and oh if I could just help him get to America since being a citizen I clearly have pull with all 300 million of my compatriots.

If you were able to parse that in one read I commend you because that’s pretty much how our ‘conversation’ went. He would talk at me and I wouldn’t even dignify him with a smile and nod but rather space out and cruise the internet. He seems to be a misogynist, racist, zealot, and the icing on the cake is that he smells bad. In no way do I want to associate with him.

The locals here are pretty cool. I find them to be quite 友好, friendly, despite the numerous stares. In search of lunch one day I walked down a street adjacent to campus, and then kept walking some more after turning at an intersection. I found an establishment that had dumplings, just what I was looking for. I stopped in, tried to get the old woman’s attention as politely as possible, and ordered my dumplings. Then she started talking at me quite fast and I wasn’t able to pick up too much. With the dumplings I also got beef noodles and a terrible, horrible drink. It was some sort of tea, and it was the worst non-alcoholic drink I have ever tasted. It was simultaneously too bitter, too sweet, like tea on road rage if it were sentient and angry. Still, not finishing it was simply not an option. I killed my dumplings, worked on my noodles, and every so often took great heaping gulps of tea, careful to slosh it straight to the back of my throat. Punishment over, I paid and got up to leave. Then, the lady told me to wait a second and produced some produce. She thrust a heavy green fruit into my hand. I took it, and the next day dissected it. I could immediately tell it was citrus, but beyond that had no clue. As I found out later, it is in fact the pomelo fruit, which Microsoft Word doesn’t even have in its dictionary. Nice. And just today I bought some meat-on-a-stick, 11 sticks for supposedly 110 kuai, but the bossman refused to accept more than a hundred.

This weekend I spent with the Mongols and Turks basically. On Thursday I went for a walk. Then I kept walking, walked across a dry canal, skirted a farm and through bushes. I wound up close to the golden arches and decided I needed a snack. I popped over to McDonald’s and saw three classmates sitting outside. As I discovered, they were Turkish and all on the MBA track like me. Again I found it convenient to be un-American in geography, and the two-city strategy paid off; knowing of both Istanbul and Ankara made quite the first impression. This definitely helped to offset the image of a sweat-soaked blonde dude literally walking out of the bushes with thistles and branches hanging off him. We made small talk about our countries and majors, and then went back (by bus thankfully) since they had already been sitting there for a while.

Limbs, after I tried cleaning up from the bushes.

The next day I went out to take some night photos. Sadly I’m still crap at it. On the way back though, I ran into my roommate Yaoo and his Mongolian friends sitting outside the gym, drinking beer. There are no open container laws, so I never really made it back to the room until later. I turned around and hit up 7-11 and bought some Asahi, and we proceeded to roam around campus for the next 5 hours. We mostly discussed music, as everyone had a turn going through my phone to see what kind of music this genuine in-the-flesh American listened too.

The next day was another with the Turks. Osie Selman, and Zehra asked if I wanted to go to a coffee shop. I met them, and being hungry, we first went to… McDonald’s. Their idea, not mine. As it turns out they go quite often since they can’t really take most any of the local food. Well it’s their loss I think, as I’ve had some damn fine fried rice, noodles, and dumplings here. But hey whatever. After the quick ride over and back, we eventually hit our target destination, a shop called Circus. Nothing Circus about it, and the playlist draws heavily on Fort Minor and Eminem, but no complaints there. I ordered a strawberry smoothie, and absolutely blew the waitress away. The Turks speak no Chinese, and their English is not that spectacular. So rolling up with a wo yao yi bei cao mei bing sha put the waitress on her feet and had her repeating it to her coworkers. We settled in as the Turks smoked and demanded English out of me. I tried my best to appease them and monologued for a while, then got tired of it. I wanted to talk with them, not at them. So I went for the question surest to get an interesting answer:

“What do you think of the United States invading Iraq?”

The next time I checked my watch it was almost 3 hours later.

We talked about war, (it’s bad) pipe dreams, (we should all just ‘get along’) George W. Bush , (not a popular guy) and bloodthirsty Americans. I tried to explain how a war wasn’t in the people’s best interests, how we don’t just drop bombs indiscriminately, and did my best to dispel myths. It’s not easy but I think I was changing some opinions. Or maybe they were just changing mine.

After talking for many hours we returned. I for one was still in recovery mode from the Mongolian adventure the night before which kept me up until 6:00 AM. I managed to stay up long enough to see the Badgers open up 14-0 on the Goofers, then awoke to a satisfactory final. Today I had to meet with group mates for a presentation this week, on Arrangements of Reporting Relationships in an Organizational Theory class. And since I’m the only native speaker in the entire class, I’ve been tapped to deliver for our group. Yay.

拜拜

Welcome to the Jungle

At least that’s what it feels like. For the geographically challenged, Taiwan/Formosa/The Republic of China on Taiwan/Rogue Province #1 is a subtropical island. It’s sort of like Florida in that it’s humid, hot, constantly bombarded by typhoons, and yet still has 20 million people. Entirely expected, but still my first impression on leaving the airport.

Ah, the air travel. It was supposed to be bad enough with a 3-leg journey, ORD à DTW à NRT à TPE. Getting to Detroit was a quick hour and fifteen, then Japan was the 13 hour ordeal. It went pretty typically of those transpacific flights among us plebeians jammed into “economy” class. The entertainment consisted of an episode of Psych, The Karate Kid (remake with Jackie Chan), The Joneses, and Date Night. The worst part of the flight was the typical 7-8 hour mark when it’s starting to get really long, and you just can’t bring yourself watch another movie in succession. I skipped out on Diary of a Wimpy Kid when I thought my eyes were going to bleed and eardrums explode. Sidenote: thanks again for the earphones John. My utter inability to sleep on planes was no help. To make a boring story a little shorter, the long flight concluded, I landed in Tokyo, and then boarded my flight that was delayed by half an hour, or so the placard said. It wasn’t quit the experience that my first flight to Beijing was, but we waited on the tarmac for about 2.5 hours since there was a problem syncing the navigational equipment from plane to ground.

Landed in Taiwan at midnight local time, reeking thoroughly of Unwashed American. I changed my shirt in a futile effort to make a good impression on my pickup crew at the airport. Immigration, customs, were a breeze. Found my waiting escort, got the car, and were off by 12:30. My helpers graciously offered to take me to Carrefour where I could buy bedding. This turned out to be clutch since when I arrived at the dorm at 3:45 AM (2.5 hour drive, plus shopping) I discovered that I am sleeping in a box. Seriously; it has a bottom, and raised walls on each side, including the end for your feet. This is actually explicable by the fact that I am living in a quad dorm room, so the beds are lofted and partitioned equally. Thankfully I can just fit inside without resulting to contortionism.

Awesomely, my quad is only occupied by two people. My roommate Yahoo was actually awake and playing video games (DotA) when I arrived. The next morning I awoke at 10:00 ready to tackle… wait, what was I here for again? What room number was I going to? How do I get internet, or food for that matter? And am I supposed to go to classes soon?

These questions were the focus of my Wednesday. I wandered around, returned to my room, examined the school map online, and then found the International College. I went back that afternoon, and started registering as a student, and going through preliminary steps to procure an Alien Resident Card (ARC). Still no classes though, forgot to ask before leaving the office. Can’t say I was crying too hard about that. I was able to get to an ATM around the corner and withdraw some Nationalist Traitor Dollars (NTD). Legal tender in hand I left the building and was immediately confronted by a distant mirage. Could it be? That most universal of images, more synonymous with America than Old Glory, nearly as much of a world citizen as the United Nations, with a caloric density rivaled only by lard. Yes, it was; those Golden Arches, a giant smile beckoning me to a place I truly belong.

I didn’t actually go. I still haven’t actually eaten at McDonald’s even though I’ve been inside one twice already (more on that later). I just went to a street slightly off campus, hit up a 7-11 for some hangers and hand towels, then some chicken breasts in some weird cinnamonish powder. Meal for the day secured, I returned to my room and attempted to stay up until 10. I had still only managed 6 hours of sleep in the past 48, and a decent sleep schedule is always my primary objective. So I killed some time reading, and cruising the internet.

The next day I realized I still hadn’t seen a white person on campus. I thought I did, but then I saw him from the front and nope. Then I saw another false positive. The only 2 I had seen were at Carrefour. As of press time, still none. I went to the downtown of the little town I’m in, Wufeng, and bought some pictures for ID use. I also converted the bulk of my USD into NTD. And in the interest of full disclosure if you haven’t Googled it yet, it’s New Taiwan Dollar, not Nationalist Traitor. If only. Those errands finished I bought some Ethernet cable and a pink fan with an anime face on the front. I was in the store, looking at fans, and it was in a nondescript cardboard box. It also had no ostentatious branding on it, yet there sits my fan. This fan is only made necessary because of a dorm rule stating (and enforcing) the A/C cannot be turned on until 4:00pm. It turns off sometime at night. In another Physical Plant Fiasco, my ceiling light just broke yesterday. I don’t think my roommate knows about it yet seeing as how I haven’t seen him in more than 48 hours now. Hopefully it can get fixed sometime this week. Time to get that lamp I was previously considering.

Thursday I was able to register for classes and also met a Vietnamese guy named Huan. Or maybe Juan. Perhaps Hwan, Hwon, or crazier. I don’t rightly know. He seems pretty cool, and though he seems to have no concept of personal space, being all touchy-feely and close, I can overlook what must be second-nature to him. Huan informed me his professor was going to a Vietnamese restaurant with said professor’s undergraduates and Huan. After checking my jam-packed social calendar for conflicts I accepted. First we met the professor and talked for a little bit. The prof did his undergrad in Taiwan, then went to The University of Illinois for an MBA. Cool beans. We then segued into being foreign students, etc… when the subject of stipends came up, he asked what the grade threshold was. Eighty percent, I replied. His next statement was one of those understated ones that sort of blows you away after you hear it, process it, then do a mental double-take.

“You should tell that to your professors before you take your finals.”

Wait, what? Now it’s no literary bombshell, certainly not the first sentence of Moby Dick nor the distilled torment of Kurtz’s realization on the human condition. But the meaning behind it is unmistakable. The work, it would seem, is mostly optional. In what academic environment does the graded make suggestions to the grader? What if I say my planned job will require a 95%, should I mention that too? Now I can’t say I’ve even started a class yet and don’t know for sure what it will be like, but as my most solid piece of information it’s a little disconcerting. As with many things here, I’m taking the wait-and-see approach.

Conversation over, we took the bus into Wufeng and found our restaurant. I eschewed the Pho in favor of some fried seafood balls with house sauce and julienned veggies. I don’t know what went into it, I probably don’t want to, but it was delicious. Best tasting meal so far. Also at dinner we ordered some Vietnamese beer. According to everyone at the table, it was the best brand. It tasted like your standard mass-produced non-light beer, and didn’t do anything to change my opinions on the lack of good beer in Asia. I don’t find the American conglomerates to make beer any better, but any liquor store you go to will have plenty of excellent craft beers. Not so here. I finished my beer pretty quickly, which seemed to surprise most people. I then shared another and downed that pretty easily. Again this was found impressing, but instead of shotgunning one and starting a power hour right then and there, decided against it. Also apparently stunning was my knowledge of Vietnam. When I would ask the undergraduates, whom were also Vietnamese, what city they were from, many said “the north” to which I replied “Hanoi?” Much cooing followed. Then one said not everybody was from there. “Ho Chi Minh City?” Again, appreciation for knowing two cities in a place where some communities were literally bombed back to the Stone Age. Dispelling myths about Americans, one dinner at a time.

The next day I was to apply for my ARC in person at the office. The office, unfortunately, is in Taichung City. My school is in Taichung County. In between lie a labyrinthine network of buses, and woe be to any foreigner who dreams of actually navigating them. But was I to go alone? No! I had the company of another foreign student, a Mister David Tran. Honestly, he introduced himself as Mister Tran. He also said he didn’t have an English name, so I gave him David. As I was walking back to my dorm and mentally preparing for my bus adventure, I ran into him. His face lit up and he asked where I was going. Taichung, I said. He asked if I wouldn’t mind waiting until noon. Not a problem I said, and an hour and a half later we were off.

His English is quite frankly terrible. At first I thought his Chinese was better than mine, but slowly that theory unraveled. First he knocked on my door and we left. The English problem was quickly discovered, so we used Chinese. And for a while, two hours even, he would talk my face off, and I couldn’t understand him. I was worried, thinking to myself about how crappy my Chinese was, how I couldn’t understand nearly as much as I thought. After two hours we had ridden two buses to their termini and were about to board a third. This was where the directions got hazy however, and in a stroke of luck at our bus stop was another foreigner who spoke English and knew exactly where the National Immigration Agency was. Better lucky than good. After I submitted my papers, I asked Mister David Tran what he wanted to do in Taichung. Previously in passing he had just said ‘things,’ in English. Now he said ‘find work,’ in Chinese. So we started to pound the pavement.

I was doubtful. But I certainly admired his willingness to go straight for what he wanted, not settling for anything less than face-to-face contact. In a sense that’s required since not every mom and pop storefront has website, but his spirit was admirable. So at lunch we found a paper and with the help of the staff he circled some classifieds. Then we started walking. We literally found a sufficiently busy street, walked down it, and stopped at every restaurant and gas station, asking for employment. He seemed to converse easily with the locals, but then I started paying attention. There were many blank looks. At a couple restaurants, the owner would flatly tell them they didn’t understand him. Then we went to McDonald’s. He was turned away the first time and told to come back when they were less busy. Then he asked me a question. I couldn’t make it out. Instead of smiling and nodding I told him as much. In heavily accented English, he asked “You want to eat?” Wow. For those at home speaking Chinese, it sounded like ni xian jin, 你現金嗎？ Ostensibly he was saying ni xiang chi ma, 你想吃嗎？ It sounded nothing like that. He also pronounced yuan like juan and qu as du. There were many others that I simply didn’t understand. The situation suddenly crystallized though and I felt much, much better. I also looked upon Mister David Tran (who sort of reminds me of a certain someone from Chinese class who was totally jacked and wanted to get a six-pack as in two weeks) as a little worse, and sort of dumbfounded at his inflated sense of self. At one gas station interview he had to ask me the meaning of such trivial words as ‘birthday’ and ‘height’. I wasn’t tracking strikeouts to hits, but the ratio wasn’t good. I wouldn’t hire someone who was functionally illiterate and heavily accented for a service position either.

Towards the end of our odyssey I was growing tired and more than a little bitter. Twice he had said we would take the bus and return, once we never made it to the bus, once we got on and rode for a while when he requested he get out. I wasn’t missing out on any plans; hell this whole adventure constituted my plans for the day, but anytime promises are repeatedly broken, it’s irritating. If you don’t want to go yet, just say you want to stay until you get one solid lead and not some lame “don’t call us we’ll call you” response which was what he was getting. Anyhow, eventually one place sat him down for an actual interview. The owner wasn’t there but some supervisor was. The supervisor herself was interesting if only for her clothes or lack thereof. Her shirt was more or less normal, but her shorts, or whatever piece of clothing was below her shirt, were a feat of engineering rivaled only by the Hoover Dam.

I simply couldn’t stop staring. Not because she was exceptionally attractive, though she wasn’t bad looking and it definitely didn’t hurt, but rather I just didn’t get this garment. Now, everyone is prone to exaggeration once in a while. While regaling friends with stories everyone, your author included, is prone to overstating for effect. I try to limit that on this blog. To make up for the boring content that is my tale of classes, registrations, and transport, I try at the very least to bring the truth. A 13 hour flight is truly a 13 hour flight. When I say I didn’t sleep at all on the plane, that I can’t sleep on planes, it’s true I just can’t. (Disclaimer: If I am in an exit row and have room to lean my head forward onto the tray table I can sleep that way. I cannot sleep using just the seat.) Now please believe me when I say the shorts this girl was wearing were between 4 and 5 inches long. My basis for this is my phone which the developer states is 4.5”. When held next to these shorts I’m sure they would be approximately equal. These shorts were simply a marvel of the textile arts, true evidence for intelligent design if ever there was any. Okay maybe not that far.

After three hours of walking around and a few job nibbles, we boarded another bus which this time took us straight back to campus. It was a combination of us walking really far throughout the day, and getting a bus that was express or the like. We got back exhausted, having had dinner at KFC in Taichung.

And that’s pretty much where things stand. Today I woke up at 6:30 AM again as has been usual, but this time I was able to go back to sleep so maybe I’m starting to get over the jetlag. I’m thinking of buying a bike soon and start exploring more, but I’ll have to weigh my odds of getting run over by a bus running a red light as tends to happen here. Also, I’m still on the guest internet since I don’t have my student ID and can’t login to my school account. So no pictures I can upload yet! Maybe soon!

to Taiwan

Mother, Father, random Google search visitor:

I think I'll be blogging from Asia University in Taichung, Taiwan. Some info:

http://www.asia.edu.tw/Main_pages/English_Pages/index_English.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia_University_(Taiwan)
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=asia+university+taiwan&ie=UTF8&hl=en&hq=asia+university+taiwan&hnear=&radius=15000&ll=24.04666,120.68651&spn=0,0.01929&t=h&z=16&layer=c&cbll=24.04666,120.68651&cbp=12,0,,0,5&photoid=po-2698746

Not sure how much I'll be writing as the feel & format will be closer to undergraduate semesters than my China summer, but it'll be an outlet and photo display at the least.

Coda

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!

Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way...

Hey-o peng-you! (That rhymes, pronounce it puhng-yo)

Things have really died down here. I am not the only one who feels like they're treading water. Much talk has devolved into meals and activities planned upon returning to the glorious 美国 (meiguo, America) or how glad to be leaving soon. Some are leaving as early as Friday, most next Monday, and I'm not gone until the 23rd. I don't know if it's a sign but I almost just typed in 23th.

Aside from trying to memorize a bunch of characters and grammar patterns, a lot of my time recently has been spent focusing on things to do after graduating. I'll be done with school (or undergrad at least) this May and I'm going to want to try to figure out everything I'm applying for by November, which means brainstorming now.

You may have heard of the Rio Tinto incident that is ongoing. It's an interesting Goliath vs. Goliath case of a commodities multinational vs the PRC central government. Usually my faith in the Chinese authorities is less than zero and I'll take the reverse of their accusations as true, but this is a bit different. If there's one thing the Chinese seem to know how to do, it's attract foreign investment. From the rise of Shenzhen to the prevalence of McDonald's, they seem to have that down. And every investing company looks at long-term security. So for China to move and arrest an Australian and 3 Chinese executives of Rio Tinto it's hard to reject their assertions out of hand. There may be some backpedaling but China still seems to be (unsurprisingly) something of a Wild West legally speaking.

I don't think this will have much of an effect on me as right now I don't plan on going into business in China. Currently I'm looking at teaching English in Taiwan after graduating or getting a Master's through the National Defense Intelligence College. The Taiwan gig is the current frontrunner. It would be nice to get a full year of foreign experience, and a true, solo immersion. I have unquestionably learned a lot here, but sitting in a dorm with 50 other foreigners doesn't count.

I probably couldn't get a job teaching in one of China's top cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, or Hong Kong, and I'm not sure I'd want to spend a year in Xi'an, Tianjin, or the like. Qingdao would be the closest thing I might be able to accept. Taiwan pays better than the mainland, it is easier to get a job, and is cleaner, and Taipei is much more internationalized.

The NDIC program looks interesting too. Although attending 'regular' school, it also pays a salary which is nice. There's also no obligation for either party at the end of the year-long program but it gives great future contacts and if I do well, I'm confident I have the abilities to gain full-time employment. It might be nice however to have that extra year of foreign experience before doing this.

Finally, law school remains at outside chance. My parents would certainly like that route, and they are right that it opens a lot of opportunities, but it's also 3 full years and a lot of money so I have to weigh that very carefully.

So 2 of my 3 current possibilities are directly related to this program. To me that signifies money well spent. Studying abroad is awesome and I would recommend it to anyone, but you don't want to make it one big vacation.

In less dry news, we had a program talent show over the weekend. There was dancing, singing, and erhu action all by those more talented than I. Also, delicious pizza from Papa John's. In America it might have only been average, but it's the closest thing I've had here to an American style pie.

I'm getting even more excited about school and work this semester as these days progress. I'm looking forward to dying of brain overload in my History 600 class this semester. It'll also be nice to go back to my work and start up a positive cash flow instead of this dreadfully negative one I'm on now.

Just some other random thoughts: I'm not paid by them, swear, but I really like www.skritter.com for learning Chinese. It's subscription-based now, but totally worth it. Also, I have a friend in Beijing whose computer totally died on him. He's now running Ubuntu. I actually reformatted my computer twice over here, thankfully my recovery partition worked out. To be without a computer over here would be a pretty big downer. Pending acquiring train tickets, that same friend and I are going to Harbin after our programs end, on the 16th. We have 4 or 5 days there which should be plenty to see everything. The city is famous for its ice festival in winter, but summer is cheap which is a nice benefit.

And that's where I'm at right now. As the program winds down I'm looking forward and so far I like what I see. We have 1 day of class, 1 oral final, and 1 written final left before closing ceremonies. I'll try to get in at least another update, maybe 2 while in country and then 1 or 2 when I'm back.

下次

Basically the entirety of July

Sorry about the delay dear readers. I never really got the 4th of July update up, then things sort of snowballed.

We had a 3-day weekend over the 4th of July weekend. I and 3 other friends on the program went to Qingdao. You probably know the city but by a different name; Tsingtao, as in the Tsingtao beer. For the curious, Tsingtao Brewery Group is minority owned by Anheuser-Busch. Qingdao is also a totally awesome city in its own right however. It is sort of split into two different sections that are separated by a large overpass high over a valley, but it was a great place to spend our long weekend and the 4th.

We left Tianjin as soon as we could on Thursday. This ‘as soon as possible’ was after the continuous trainwreck that is my Erhu learning experience. After our end-of-week test, several 白人 (bairen, white people) congregate to continue our assault on the noble cultural tradition that is the Erhu. I’ve already shortly described the instrument, but let’s just say that my play of it has only marginally increased. Every time I create the unsatisfying chalkboard-screech, somewhere a baby Confucius is crying plum sauce tears. And there are a lot of them.

Anyhow, we got out of Erhu class and quickly got our bags and hailed a taxi for the new secondary Tianjin train station. This one is totally out in the sticks, a 60 kuai cab ride away. It replaced the old Tianjin West station which had a history of “more than a hundred years” when we asked the cabbie how old it had been before being retired. I believe that account though; having been there last year, I can attest to the fact that it is a grotesque shithole where people sit on newspaper, benches do not exist, and all the stall doors in bathrooms have been broken off so when once happens to wander in you are glared at by 3 Chinese dudes taking dumps. But enough about last year. This time we went to a gleaming station that when we went still had asphalt being laid down for the drop-off traffic circle and as-yet-unfinished steps. This is usually the cue for me to talk about change and slave labor but I’ve already gone off about that. Anyhow, we caught a D train for Qingdao and only 5 hours later or so were there. D trains are a very fast class of train. At the bottom are the 4-digit trains and the K, which stands for kuai, fast. These trains were classified as fast a long time ago in a far away bureaucratic office. These trains are those for the migrant workers, poor, and just plain unlucky SOBs who missed out on the other tickets. These are the trains that smell awful, the trains that you do not want to be in. After that there is the T-class of trains which I have heard stand for te’bie, approximately meaning special. These are your average train. Nothing terribly sinful, nothing great. And then you have the Z and D. Z is generally for overnight express trains containing only soft-sleeper berths. The Z goes from Beijing to Xi’an a full 6 hours faster than the K, a difference of 12 vs. 18 hours. D is a similar speed of train but used for shorter distances, and tends not to have sleepers but rather just soft seats. These trains can hurtle along at up to 330km/hr. Not quite maglev fast, but these things are blazing.

Arrival in Qingdao was early-evening. We got to our hostel and discovered they had one room for two people and then 2 dorm beds in a room, and no other beds. We took them, checked in and then checked out the hostel’s common area. It was a pretty cool hostel, and had a decent bar as well as available hookah, a movie room, a PlayStation 2, and a pool table. It was here, on this glorious green velvet battlefield, that it was proven, my pool prowess. And by that I mean the 4 of us played a team match against each other in what may have been the slowest-moving most scratch-ridden competition involving the sinking of opponents’ balls ever to have resembled a game of billiards. The quality of play was terrible, but a decent way to pass one of the humid afternoons. Back to the Qingdao arrival night however; we went out exploring the nearby streets. It was here that we discovered the joy of bagged beer.

I have never before purchased beer measured by weight. In Qingdao however, on the streets next to the little kabob places and small convenience stores, were people selling beer right out of the keg. And when you sell beer to people that are walking the streets, how do you get it to them? Well you could put it in little plastic cups, but that limits you to about 16 oz per serving. In a bag however, you can double that by serving a kilogram of beer! Beer is roughly equivalent to water in density since so much of it is water, so that’s a liter of beer! More than a 7-Eleven Big Gulp! Verily, is there anything in this pioneering country that is not possible? Well, a fair judicial system probably isn’t but whatever. Let’s not get too picky shall we? Settling for cheap beer over rights, we continued to walk the streets. We discovered many seafood and produce markets, I had some meat kabobs, others had egg-and-vegetable burrito-type things, and we generally walked around getting the regular stares. After finding a place for an informal dinner and some more walking, we returned to our hostel a few hours later and went to sleep.

The next morning was brewery day. We got up at a reasonable hour and took a cab over to old brewery. It still functions as one of their several factories, though it is also a museum. It was pretty cool to see the history of Tsingtao, including both the cosmetic and real changes it went through as it was alternatively owned privately, then by the Japanese, then Nationalists, then Communists, then privately again. (It was recently privatized about a decade and a half ago.) We also got to see the bottling and canning process in live action, in addition to seeing all the machinery that they use both currently and from years past. It was pretty cool, and we got to taste a batch of their unfiltered beer (it wasn’t that different) and at the end of the tour we were given a small 1.25L pitcher to split between the 4 of us. I bought some nice souvenirs in the attached gift shop, and they were actually quite reasonably priced.


We walked around the restaurants near the brewery but they appeared to be pretty dead. When you don’t know the restaurants in an area, and don’t have any recommendations to go by, we stick pretty well to the common tactic of ‘if there are no other locals present eating, you shouldn’t either’ so we returned to our hostel. I had a halfway decent sandwich which, like much of the Western food in China, served only to remind me of glories I am missing out on and did little to sate my desire for grease and preservatives in the same dish. After the pool fiasco and a game of hearts which involved moon-shooting by yours truly, we went out to a really awesome seafood place. Here we were able to get fresh crab, fish, prawns, and all other delights. We were also able to see the waiter absolutely smack the living daylights out of a fish after we selected it. For our second fish, the second waiter was a lot less enthusiastic and just tapped it, so it probably wasn’t even stunned when it encountered the boiling water. But it was sure as hell dead when it entered my belly, swimming in delicious juices and practically falling off its tiny bones. After this delicious-but-expensive dinner, we returned to the hostel and then walked down to the beach. I got big time déjà vu, having walked down the exact same stretch of beach and out to the exact same pavilion precisely one year ago, but it was still really cool. Last year I was only in Qingdao for less than a full day, so it barely counted anyway. After marveling at a cool phenomenon which had the ocean water we kicked up looking a fluorescent blue and observing the sketchy old men going for a swim, we returned to the hostel to turn it in. The next morning would be pretty early.

The others got up sometime around 7:00AM. I kept sleeping until I got a call from them at 8:30. They were already at “Old Person Beach,” a stretch of sand a few kilometers long and many more kilometers away from our hostel. After a pricey cab ride, I met them there and we proceeded to walk along the pretty clean beach, which is always a notable accomplishment in China. We considered hiring jet skis, but they only had 2 available and required the passenger seat to be taken by one of their supervisor guys, so we didn’t go for that. We also could have taken a boat ride, but no one seemed particularly interested in such a pedestrian activity for the cost of 100 yuan. So we walked along the beach, made fun of the Chinese for their terrible fashion sense and its extension to bathing suits, built a sandcastle, made sand graffiti, and attempted to jump over waves. Despite that short description we managed to spend a while at the beach and I got an awesome burn over my shoulders and part of my torso.

Once more we made our way to home base and basically zoned out for the afternoon. The heat and humidity was stifling, and there was no inclination by anyone to go out exploring in the sun. However in the hostel common room we met another group of 4 from our program who were staying at the next door hostel. We decided to go to dinner, and being as it was July 4th, a Mexican restaurant seemed pretty fitting.

I ordered some mediocre fajitas. Some got burritos and your other standard Tex-Mex food. We decided to cheap out and BYOB since it was so cheap and nearby. At this dinner, our waitress was wearing a shirt that declared “Free Hugs” and I found this pretty entertaining. At the end of the meal, we turned on her and demanded what her garment promised.

Now imagine you are a petite Chinese girl, probably in your early 20s, weighing not more than 100lbs and coming in certainly no higher than 5’4” but probably more like 5’2”. You have just served 8 loud Americans. You may not realize it is their national holiday, but they have been drinking. Drinking in quantities such that, were it your body metabolizing the alcohol, you would probably be struggling to stand. (No one in our party was drunk yet, we had had less than a liter of beer each.) Suddenly, without warning or apparent reason, this blonde, 185 centimeter/77kg foreign devil is approaching you, arms wide, with an oafish smile. Do you:

A) Cower and look panicked?
B) Yell for your boss and start swearing?
C) Take a shot of liquid courage and approach?
D) Cry and then kick said whities?

Sadly the answer isn’t terribly surprising or entertaining, and the correct one is A. Nonetheless, the four of us who approached got what was duly owed, and then explained to her what her shirt meant. Discussing it later, we determined it was unlikely she would wear that shirt again while working. Victory for English and America.

We walked around the corner looking for more places to eat drink and be merry. We found a happening place and asked for a few pitchers of Qingdao beer and cooked peanuts and edamame. And it was there we stayed for many hours.

I was saddened that when we saw the foreigners sitting just a couple tables away with shirts containing disparaging remarks about Ann Arbor, they refused to join us. They were Ohio State University students. We explained that we were Badgers, and could at least come together under the banner of the Big Ten and Michigan antipathy, and more importantly than any idiotic sports associations, we also happened to be citizens of the same great country when it just so happened to be that country’s birthday and we were all stuck in China. Instead they made rather inappropriate gestures in our direction. So we invited some nearby Brits to join us and they were a blast. We played a large and rather rowdy game of Circle of Death/Ring of Fire/King’s Cup with British rules. One of these was that without possessing a Jack, one is not allowed to go to the bathroom. If a player is to do it anyway, the rest of players are to come up with a punishment. This resulted in pushups, random hugs, and 2 girls from the other group we met standing on chairs singing “I’m a Little Teapot.” Also during the game we twice broke into song, once being for the national anthem, and another for God Bless America. It was truly beautiful. I am one of those saps who probably puts way too much stock into gimmicky patriotic stuff like that, but reflecting on being in China, and how much we really do have in America, it was easy to get sentimental about very concept of freedom.

After a long night which involved 30*1.25=37.5 liters of beer split amongst us, as well as our share from dinner, we made one last taxi pilgrimage to our hostel. And 1 liter of water later, I was asleep. This all occurred pretty early on in the night since we had a train to catch at 7:46 the next morning. We were able to make the train just fine, though I sadly left my Say No To Scurvy shirt hanging in the hostel room. It had a good run though, and I hope it enjoys its next life being worn by a Chinese person who has absolutely no clue what it could possibly mean.

After the long weekend things settled down pretty much. The weekend afterward, our AC broke and since it was on a weekend it took a couple days to get fixed. I have still been demolishing reading material. My sandal broke as we were leaving Qingdao, which was a pretty big bummer. I have replaced the nice American ones with some crappy-quality foam Chinese sandals that have tiny little glittery plastic beads in them. They were the most manly thong-style sandals available, so go figure.

Also in the past month some of my classmates have been diligently preparing for the speech contest, held this Sunday. I elected not to participate as although I see a great value in improving my speaking skills, it is mostly about face. You probably already know the importance of saving face in East Asian cultures, and getting face is what this contest is all about. A few students are picked to represent Wisconsin in Beijing, and these students are groomed into speaking machines. Wisconsin always wipes the floor in this competition, and wants to continue to do so, so the speakers are given non-stop tutoring in an effort to perfect this one speech. I know for a fact that the students selected are great at Chinese, (half of them are good friends) and given who they selected I probably wouldn’t have been able to qualify anyway, but I didn’t want any surprises. I just didn’t see the value in delivering a speech memorized rote, repeated hundreds of times, containing vocabulary inserted by teachers.

Since the conclusion of our week break, we have also switched into new classes. I am now done with Classical Chinese and into Fourth Year. It is a thrill to be back in something that is more intellectually stimulating. I am able to pay attention in lecture, and furthermore have to in order not to fall behind. In short, it is back to how normal classes function. I am back to learning new vocabulary and grammar patterns. Classical was major-required so I don’t really feel like it was a waste, and though getting back into standard classes has made life here more rigorous, it’s still a nice change. Also, I helped myself to a magazine from the train we took to Beijing at the beginning of the break, and also one from the plane when we flew back to Tianjin. (More on the break later.) I’m a big time believer that reading real magazine articles and then highlighting new characters and grammar constructs is a great way to learn. This has also been our source for third and fourth year class as well and has probably been a common language teaching tool since the invention of the periodical, but it’s nice to have as-real-as-it-gets content to draw from and relate to. For example, one of the articles is about Culture Street, a wildly popular tourist trap in Tianjin.

A little before the break I went shopping and happened upon some glorious 100% imported Land-o-Lakes cheese. Imported stuff is a dead giveaway when it has not only the label you are familiar with from America, but has a massive sticker just pasted on in Chinese since there is absolutely none on the original packaging. I also found a cool fountain pen that draws from a real inkwell and looks super fancy. I also got a care package from America (thanks mom!) including all sorts of salted snacks including Goldfish and Cheez-It Snack Mix, which is delicious. But those are all long gone by now, and in fact have been since the break. It’s about time I actually tell you about that mythical break I keep mentioning.

Technically, it is a field trip as it involved choosing a topic and then asking questions of locals where we went. But that is boring and our report hasn’t been written yet so I’ll spare you the academic details. This thing had been in planning since even before the 3-day. From Friday to Sunday, July 17-26, it included a total of 10 days when considered generously, so it is also called the ten-day. Five of us went, and we met up with the boyfriend of one of the girls who was starting a trip to China. We quick a took train to Beijing and then caught our major one down to Guilin, a city in Guangxi. This second one was 23 hours chock full of the standard sketchy middle-aged Chinese men and broken air conditioning that seem to be part and parcel of the China experience. Between reading, sleeping, and chatting the time somehow slowly passed, and we arrived in Guilin significantly smellier but not permanently scarred. Thankfully our hostel was right across from the train station, as we couldn’t really be bothered to go anywhere. Unthankfully, they informed us that though we had booked for two nights, they only had beds available for one. Wonderful. There wasn’t much fight in us left though, and we got in, showered, and got some food. Bedtime was early, as we had reserved a tour for the Dragon Back Rice Terraces at 8:00AM.

We got up, put all our bags into the luggage room, and departed. I feel obligated by my pride to mention here that I managed to cram every single thing I needed for this ten-day expedition into a single, regular-sized school backpack. Adequate shorts, shirts, toiletries, my camera and swimswuit, my Lonely Planet and a novel, everything was made to fit within my Bag of Holding. Just thought you should know. We got on the bus for the terraces which took a while itself. It was a big bus with lots of pickups and plenty of waiting for others, so we didn’t actually leave Guilin until past 9:00 and then got there a couple hours later. We then took a minibus farther up the mountain, and ate at a restaurant that served bamboo chicken and rice. Basically, these were just cooked inside the bamboo. It was delicious however, and the rice was extra sticky and the chicken extra juicy. One of the culinary highlights of the trip. We then walked up a little bit and made it to the actual rice terraces. It was awesome.



I took a ton of pictures but a lot of them look very similar. Lots of them are just me messing around with exposure/field depth as well as saturation and contrast. It was basically like being in the Discovery Channel. We were also able to walk out to the end of one of the terraces. Again, it was just really cool and a great sight to behold. After feasts for our eyes and stomachs, we went back to the base of the mountain and walked around a village of the local minority population. Ever since it was opened to tourists in 2002, many people are basically making bank and new construction (all in the same old style still) could be seen along the banks of the little river the village was straddling. More pictures and a little relaxing ensued, and we got back to Guilin around 6PM.

Then we checked into an establishment of questionable reputability.

We got to the hotel and checked in. In the elevator we noticed there were pictures of some absolutely gorgeous girls, clad in bikinis or nothing at all, shown basically having a good time. There were also a few giving massages. We got to our rooms, and in ours there was a picture of another of these bikini girls, laying quite suggestively. The little card was “welcoming” us. It also had a phone number.

I don’t think it requires much of an imagination to figure out what was going on here. I should also note that, according to China Road by Rob Gifford, this is a completely normal experience. Usually in China I am way too cheap to stay in a hotel instead of a hostel so I can’t really comment, but I am utterly unsurprised, and have heard stories to this effect before.

The next day we prepared to go to Yangshuo but first stopped at the train station to get tickets back to Beijing. Half of us waited in line while half stood over all our luggage. It took maybe an hour for us to get to the front, an hour of excruciating sweatiness and smelly migrant workers. Thankfully no one wanted to chat us up. Then, just as our party got to the front of the line, the woman simply closed the ticket window. There was no advance warning, no invitation to step over to another line, just a curtained ticket window. This was exactly the time I noticed on the big board that there were no tickets left for our train, not for Saturday, or even Sunday. In fact there were no non-standing tickets left for this train for the next ten days. I broke the news, and after a collective sigh we basically decided that our only option was to fly. That, or an almost 40-hour K train. So we got on the bus to Yangshuo, a tiny hamlet of 300,000 people that is a major tourist destination and filled with expats. We arrived at our first Yangshuo hotel (the hostel we would go to later for 4 nights was full the first night) and ordered our plane tickets, got ripped off for $200 on a one-way domestic flight, and then went to sleep.

The next day I had one of the many Western style breakfasts available in Yangshuo. Fried eggs, toast, bacon, are all in plentiful supply there. Although not quite on par with Baker’s Square greatness, Chinese breakfast is so vile that it was divine by comparison. Another theme of this trip was the sweltering heat. Being in a sub-tropical climate in summer can have pretty predictable results. Going out for a walk would result in a drenched t-shirt. Making the hike from our old hotel to new hostel was basically walking across the town, which was also unpleasant. After that we walked around and explored the city. It has one main pedestrian drag called West Street that is filled with restaurants, bars, tour companies, KTV, and shops. It was a pretty happening town, thanks to the endless supply of tourist dollars. After grabbing a surprisingly good pizza, we walked around some more. And then the sickness started.

The next morning, the first of us fell ill. He had a basic cold and fever. The rest of us rented bikes and got out to see the countryside, including plenty of locals, and water buffalo. After a couple hours on the bikes we decided we had gone past some village famous for fans that we were looking for. I didn’t really mind and kept looking at the scenery. It was incredible. There was farmland and then massive karst peaks rising like teeth on the blade of a saw.


We turned around and biked back. In keeping with the glorious Chinese tradition of not giving a damn about safety, part of this bike ride was through a tunnel. A very, very dark tunnel with insufficient lighting that lacked sidewalks. This tunnel was often frequented by massive tour buses, regular cars, and large trucks. And they absolutely love to be insane and pass each other, completely consuming the other lane. Usually this is not a problem, as each direction has a wide lane, then shoulder, then a gravel/packed dirt side. The tunnel removed any room for error. If some bus decided to pass us (and they all did) and some other large bus was coming at them head on. We would have been made into hamburger by a quick sideswipe. And there was absolutely nothing we could do, other than pedal as fast as possible and get out of the danger zone. So that was slightly unnerving, but again, completely expected.

Bike ride over and showers done, we headed over to dinner. There I ordered some peppered beef. I asked for super spicy and it came out pretty weak. The flavor itself was still great but the spiciness was lacking. After more walking around we ended up at a bar that served 8 kuai Brandy and Coke. The owner turned out to be a cool Belgian guy who had been in Yangshuo studying, then shortly after becoming a patron rented a room above the bar, and shortly after that bought half of it. We chilled there for the rest of the night.


The eclipse (日偏食, ripianshi) happened during breakfast. It was sort of underwhelming since where we were it was just a partial eclipse. A few hundred km north and it would have been incredible I bet.
The next day we planned on going to cooking classes in the morning, but we were late to rise (maybe 9:00AM) and were all hankering for breakfast. We decided to put it off until the afternoon. Instead we attempted to watch the new Harry Potter. We bought a pirated DVD copy, but the quality was so bad it was completely unwatchable. So instead we went with The Hangover, which I must say was a really great movie. It had some pretty crude jokes, but considering how the movie was billed it is in its own way reasonably realistic, and the characters were pretty funny. After that movie we then made our way to the class.


It started out with a trip to the local market. There were plenty of vegetables, lots of butchering going on, basically everything you’d expect to find in a really authentic market. We picked up eggplant, dumpling stuffing, dumpling wraps, chives, and probably some others I didn’t notice. We went back to the restaurant/cooking school and started to make Gongbao aka Kung Pao chicken, pork and chive dumplings, and breaded fried eggplant stuffed with the dumpling mix. The eggplant thing was very rich due to the fried breading and melted like a jalapeno popper. The dumplings were alright, but I must say I make a damn fine Gongbao chicken. Now if only I get all those ingredients again and have a skilled cook looking over my shoulder, I’d be set. The lesson took us to dinner and sort of was dinner, but we elected to go for secondsies, and after that, more wandering. This night we hopped around more from a couple different places, but ended up at our old standby which by the way is named Kaya.

The next day was a nature-filled extravaganza. First we went to a water cave. This involved a couple bus rides, some off-roading, and a rickety boat that may or may not have had puke on it. This boat took us into the cave where we saw some interesting looking rock formations. They all had labels and were supposed to resemble figures or certain shapes, but for the most part they were a big stretch and just part of the touristiness of it. Then we got to the mud pool, which was really fun. There’s basically no other way to describe it. There was one pool, and it had standing, cool, soft mud that was maybe a foot or two deep, depending on where you were. Lying down in it, you float so high it’s unbelievable. Sadly I have no pictures since I wasn’t really thrilled with the prospect of taking my camera into the cave, but it was really fun. My swimsuit still has a beige tint where all the white was. And finally in the cave we got to the hot springs. The source was at the top so they got warmer the farther you went up, and it was really nice to lie down in the mini-pools and just relax. We were supposed to be timed, but we just got out when they were all filled and a line started to form.

After the mud caves, we went back to the city proper, ate lunch, and rented some kayaks. They were the typical cheap plastic shell types, and the life jackets were questionable, but it was awesome to kayak down the river, starting in the late afternoon and then ending at dusk.

The next day was just a day of rest. Others had gotten the same cold, everyone except me. And I wouldn’t get it either, but instead caught a rather nasty stomach bug. Sometime on this final full day, this day of rest (Friday the 24th for those at home keeping score) I got food poisoning. It started with some light diarrhea in the afternoon. I figured that was it, and it was gone. My stomach felt good. After dinner, I returned with the early group (those who were also just getting their share of the cold started) and after curling up in the fetal position, staggered into the bathroom, and puked. After several fountain-like heaves, I brushed and rinsed a few billion times, then went to bed. A couple hours later, I woke up, got out of bed, and visited the bathroom again. More lunch and dinner into the toilet. This then became a regular occurrence in what can only be described as the night from hell. Every hour or so, I would get up and puke. On the 3rd or 4th time, it was bile. But still it kept coming. I tried drinking little sips of water, I tried no water, I tried a liter of water. The only thing that changed was tint of the green bile. My last time puking was at 8:30AM, and then our friend diarrhea came back for a couple rounds. At this point my stomach was completely void of anything. That Saturday my stomach was still not feeling good enough to ingest anything, though I had 1/3 a cup of ramen noodles and two of the airplane snacks since I figured I should eat something. We got back to Tianjin at around midnight, and I weighed myself, clothes on, and was 73.7kg. That is less than 163 pounds. That is less than I weighed sophomore year in high school. Yes, I was very hungry.

And that is basically it. On Sunday I did see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and in theaters no less. It was awesome, even though I haven’t read the 6th or 7th book yet. I maintain that Rowling didn’t give me much of a reason after the boring, emo fiasco that was the 5th book, but now I’ll get around to those. Like I said before, we have new classes and they’re great, and both my lecturer and TA were my teachers last year in Tianjin while taking second year Chinese. This program is 2 weeks from being over, and after that I still have 1 week traveling with my friend from high school who is currently studying in Beijing. I really miss American food, and am looking forward to the start of school again though I know this semester is going to be a rough one academically.

But I’ll keep the updates coming in this time I have left! Promise!