World Series Champions.

Wo Shi FaGuoRen

Everyone in China thinks I'm French. Really. It's odd if I can get through one day without at least one person asking if I'm French. They truely believe it, too.
Example: Tonight I'm at the noodle shop, waitin for them to bring out my takeout. While I'm waiting I strike up a conversation with this guy. We're speaking in Chinese for a bit about what I'm studying etc etc, and then comes the inevitable question: "Can I practice English with you." (Since I am white, I obviously speak English). Sure, so we continue the conversation in broken Chinglish. We've been speaking for about 5 more minutes - mostly about how he has been taking American English classes because he wants to go to California - when he asks where I'm from. When I bust out with the America card, he gets all shocked: "zhendema?! wo juede ni shi faguoren!" Apparently all this time, despite my perfectly fluent American English, he has thought I was French.

~L

CHINA RAGE!

Tomorrow I have a xingqikaoshi. What does that mean? It means slap-you-in-the-face midterm. Which makes me bitter about Chinese. Which makes the following post, a compilation of things that frustrate me about good ol' Zhongguo, seem appropriate. Perhaps on a more jolly day when I dont have a massive kaoshi or a bu hao bing, I'll post the list of happy, interesting observations. Hopefully you'll be able to see the humor as well as the rage in most of these. So, in no particular order, here we go:
(P.S. requests for pictures of any of these things could most likely be provided)

Trench toilets
-The squatting toilets I can deal with. They’re in my dorms; I’ve learned to deal. It’s the wall less trenches where the scary Chinese lady squatting next to you stares at the white person the whole time that freaks me out. Damn my bladder. I now rate bathrooms on a star scale, and get really exciting about a 5 star (meaning, a western toilet with toilet paper, soap AND running water) and no longer fear the 5 black stars (black means negative; also usually means trench with no walls or water running through it).

BYOTP
-Seriously? Sometimes I just don’t have the bag space for a roll of TP.

Syrupy honey
-Honey is runny. That rhymes. It also means that it’s difficult and quite messy to spread on toast.

No ethnic food
-Unless you count KFC, it’s pretty much Chinese or nothing. A little Korean, but good luck finding anything outside of the East Asian area. How I miss you, Greek, Mexican and Ethiopian!

No tap water usage
-To many chemicals. Avoid it for all but the briefest usage, unless you’re into mutation.

Going bald
-I’m also attributing the chemicals in the tap water with making me go bald. Showers seem to be unavoidable.

75 words a night
-It’s really just a lot of words to learn. Good think every Chinese person I meet thinks flashcards are incredibly amazing and that I have invented the most creative thing since sliced bread.

Hand washing
-People in China hand wash their clothes every night after they wear them. They never have more than one outfit hanging on the line. When I hang up my load of laundry every two weeks (i.e. everything I own) my roommate lets out this horrific sigh and goes “ahhhhh hen duo yi fu!” as though she’s judging me for my American excessiveness, when really, she has more clothes than I do, she just doesn’t put them on display.

No socks
-There is no such thing as normal athletic socks in China. You have a lovely choice between dress socks of all colors, knee-highs, or super expensive above the ankle numbers, often made by Pepsi.

No reeses cups
-Really. Not anywhere. I’m dying here.

Sporadic hot water
-Sometimes you get it, sometimes you don’t. If you’re lucky enough to have it, expect it to fluctuate between scalding and freezing, with a few blissful seconds in-between.

Pollution
-’Nough said. I have the black lung.

Language partners
-Since I’m white, I literally can’t even walk down the street without people asking me to be their language partner. Everyone is desperate to learn English. If you make the mistake of giving away your contact info, expect hourly texts accompanied by the following: :) , : D, ;) etc.

The subway card refill machine
-HOW THE HELL DOES THIS MACHINE WORK!? All I want is to put money on my card. I try and I try and it will not work. The fuyuan will not help. Please, God, someone show me what buttons to push!

The post office stamp debacle
-Walk into the post office. See 3 counters. None are labeled stamps. Ask attendant “where can I buy stamps.” Sigh of anger. “I guess you can do it here” (I have never managed to pick the correct counter – apparently). “Give me $X and your letters.” I have never seen the stamps. They do it for me every time. And I think they’re overcharging. I just want some damn stamps.

blogs/youtube/bbc/wikipedia
-All among the sites that the Chairman doesn’t want me to see. I guess they might corrupt my thinking. Yes, this includes this blog (I hope it’s pretty!)

Kaoshis
-Big tests. Friday mornings – 8am

Tingxies
-Medium tests. Every morning – 8am

White people tax
-I’m white, therefore I must not speak Chinese (this assumption is even made when I’m speaking it), and thus I ought to pay more.

Spitting
-Hocking a lugie is perfectly acceptable behavior, be you man or woman, old or young, inside or outside.

Juvenile behavior
-Sideline off the last point and segway into the next: everyone in china is perpetually stuck in junior high. I literally would not be surprised if someone pulled my hair and made a fart joke on the bus.

Anti-queue/line up day (the 11th)
-On the 11th of every month China has instituted a wonderful holiday called “paidui” – line up day (get it? the 11 looks like people lined up – the communists are so clever). Anyways, they have this lovely holiday because China doesn’t know what it means to line up. Queuing simply does not exist. There are mobs everywhere: at checkouts, at banks, to get on the bus, at intersections (in their cars) etc etc. In the subways they’ve painted lines to illustrate where you should line up and where you should wait for people to get off, but no one follows them. No one even lines up on line up day. This means that you can’t get off the subway when you want to, and you WILL get cut in line when you’re paying for something. Be aggressive.

Padded tiny bras
-There are no bras in china above a B cup or without excessive padding. None. I suppose this makes sense, but it’s unfair to the foreigners. Also a good oxymoron: the Hooters over in chaoyang.

Pantless children peeing in the streets
-Children in china either don’t wear pants, or their pants don’t have crotches. This is because when they have to pee, they just squat where they are, be it a back alley or the middle of Tiananmen square. Public street peeing in incredibly unhygienic, incredibly prevalent and incredibly acceptable.

No heat, yet windows open
-For reasons I have yet to figure out, many buildings here have no heat, yet perpetually leave the windows open – even when the thermometer says 7 degrees on it. I attribute this practice of my roommates to the deathly illness I currently have.

400000 incomprehensible busses
-There are bazillions of busses here. The routes do not make sense. You must be fluent to read the signs. There IS NO WAY to determine which bus you ought to take. You simply must know it. All the Beijingers do. (Luckily, they are quite giving with this information).

Buying something in a dept. store (receipts)
-This is an extreme production that I think I talked about earlier. At the counter where you select something you are handed a receipt. You then walk over to another counter to pay where you are handed another receipt. You then go to a third counter where you pay the remainder of your item’s balance. You are handed another receipt. Some places have yet another counter, but at most you are now allowed to return to the original counter where your receipt is scrupulously examined and you are finally given your item.

Posted signs: Chinese :: cockney: English
-It’s another language. Words mean drastically different things. It could be a cockney like rhyming scheme. I think it’s more of a sounds sorta kinda like that and starts with the same letter scheme. Regardless, reading signs is hopeless.

Curfews
-All dorms have them. They lock the doors (with bike locks) at 11 on the weekends and 12 on the weekends (although I’m told that my dorm is open later than most because they know foreigners who like to stay out late live there). This is a pretty much citywide observed rule though. The only people out past midnight are usually not Asian. If they are, they’re in KTV (karaoke) where they’ve reserved a room for the night and do not plan to return to their dorms till they reopen at 6.

Counterfeit money
-It’s everywhere, and it’s a cruel cruel thing indeed.

No personal space
-If you come to china, expect to give up any love you may have for your bubble. People will stand uncomfortable close to you at all times – even if the crowd doesn’t require it. You will cuddle penguin style on busses. Chinese people will sit in your lap and laugh at your character writing. These same people might also force feed you fruit and ask to be a language partner.

Missing address numbers
-Address numbers don’t exist. I may have the correct address, but I will not find it, because who knows if I’m at the #5 end or the #2780 end of the block? Good luck to you, intrepid person with a plan.

Clothing: bedazzled and petite
-I cannot shop here because finding something in my size and/or finding something that is not bedazzled/sparkly/bright pink/covered in feathers/cutesy/or any other number of tacky adjectives is like finding a needle in a haystack.

Chinese class starts at 10
-All full time Chinese college students start their classes no earlier than 10. I have 8 ams every day. Chinese students also start their college careers by taking a test that determines their school and major; the school then chooses their schedules. They do nothing but go with the flow.

Coffee is a myth
-It’s true. Instant coffee exists, but is expensive. Real coffee is supremely steep and must be purchased at a place such at Starbucks. The coffee shop is an elusive mirage that I will never find and never study in.


This list could so easily be continued, but then I'd be failing tomorrow's midterm. Hope everyone else is surviving midterm season rage free.

~L

P.S. Tomorrow evening I go to Shaolin with my Kung Fu instructor for the weekend. I'm gonna beat up some monks.

Sox in the Series.

Simatai Sunrise

I've just realized that I never wrote anything about my trip to the Great Wall, so I figure I ought to do that now before I forget.

We left for the Great Wall on a Saturday morning. The section we went to was part of the Badaling wall (near Simatai), so it was about a 2.5 hour bus ride from school. It was raining when we started out, but as we went along the sun came out, the mists lifted, and it became absolutely beautiful.

We hiked along the wall for about (I don't remember, but I'm thinking/researching the number, I'm going to guess 6)) kilometers (about 3 hours) until we got to the town of Gubeikou. The walk itself was visually stunning, but a lot more exhausting than I would have expected. Clearly the walls were not built with transportation, or even people running back and forth between watchtowers in mind. At times it was incredibly steep, and the stairs could get quite daunting. Since a good part of the wall we were walking on was unpreserved, there would often be just crumbled rubble to scramble over, and once or twice we had to physically scale walls in order to climb through the windows of towers (there were footpaths around these towers, but we're too hardcore/into being nijnas to bother with those). We met a bunch of interesting people along the way, mostly tourists from both China and elsewhere, although the wall was not too crowded. It was littered with people who were willing to sell you anything from t-shirts to bookmarks to beer along the way. After we crossed the drawbridge into the town we walked through the village to the home of one of Ai Laoshi's friends where we ate dinner. The main source of income for these people is clearly corn: we walked through acres of cornfields, and each house had a huge stack of husked corn out front (I think the harvest has just finished, so there was literally tons at each home). This corn buisness was also reflected in the meals we had - there was always delicious cornbread available.

After dinner we hung out at the house until 9, because it's illegal to camp out on the wall, so you have to sneak up under the cover of darkness. It was absolutely freezing. Thank goodness for hot water and penguin mentality, or we never would have survived. Finally someone had the good sense to build a fire, and the penguin huddling moved into a circle. Singing happened. Our hosts went out and got fireworks, and we had a show. It was lovely! They set off the fireworks about 5 feet from where we were standing (just on the other side of the corn pile from the fire huddle), so it probably wasn't incredibly safe, but it was beautiful. There were the little wimpy poppers (which hardly sounded wimpy from that close distance) and also a few big blossoming ones .

At 9 we had to divide into two groups. One group would hike up and sleep on the wall for the night. The other half would sleep in host families houses in the village and then wake up at 4 for a sunrise hike up Simatai, the highest tower in the great wall. As much as I was tempted to actually sleep on the wall, I opted for this second choice, as it sounded like a once in a lifetime opportunity, and I had heard so much about how the Simatai sunrise is a lifechanging experience.

Myself and 4 other girls went down the road to our hosts house. They set us up in a room with a giant heated bed that we all shared. The beds have a furnace underneath them, so the freezing temperatures were absolutely no longer an issue. In fact, I woke up several times extremely hot. All of the houses in the village had pretty much the same style and layout: an L shape around a courtyardish area. The middle of the L was a living room/kitchen, and then there was a bedroom on either side. Most people ate outside in the courtyard that was formed by the building and the corn pile. Here's a picture of a typical house in the village:


Waking up at 4 was difficult. It was cold, early, and pitch black. We began our hike up the wall. It was incredibly trecherous. We had no light, and were feeling our way along a footpath littered with rocks and such. On one side was a steeply climbing slope covered in brambles and thick trees, on the other side an abyss into dark nothingness. Tripping was common. Our guide looked like he was 60-70 years old, and he bounded the whole way up, not even stopping for breath despite the extreme steepness. As we got to the harder parts of the hike, luckily, it started to get a bit lighter. This was absolutely important, as at some points we were quite literally crawling up the slope. So much for switchbacks - the rule of this illegal-to-climb mountain is to grab the tree above you and drag yourself through the mud up to the next tree, because it's a bit too steep to walk. Making it to the top was so worth it though - it was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. I ended up finishing the hike on my own, the group I was with was climbing too slow. As I started to clear the treeline, the view was incredible. I had to stop every once in a while to catch my breath, and to capture the sight of the valley below on camera. At the top we all grabbed spots on the rocks next to the watchtower to settle in and watch the sunrise. The hight and sheer drop to all sides of this tower is extreme. You would think there would be no need for a tower - or wall - there because it's practically unclimbable on the Chinese side without a rappel line. The Chinese though this too - until 8 crazy Mongolians managed to make the climb, kill a bunch of Chinese, take their cows, and get away with it. I couldn't help thinking of those guys on my way up, unassisted like I was by a path and a guide.

Anyways, the sunrise was gorgeous. You could actually see the sun moving up and over the mountains. I took a video, but it hardly does it justice. I understand now why so many people have found that place, and that moment, so inspirational.

And there were so many mountains! American mountain ranges can hardly compare to Chinese ones. I think it's because the Chinese ranges are bigger, more rugged, and, for lack of a better word, spinier. I'm really upset that not many of my pictures came out well. Because of the low light, I needed a really high exposure, but I had no tripod and my hands are not steady.



After the sunrise a handful of us hiked over to the neighboring peak in the direction of the tiger's back ridge for a view back at the watchtower. This peak was a bit lower, but provided an even more amazing view. I really cant even describe it.

The hike back down was just as extreme as going up. We had to use the trees again, literally choosing a tree, falling on it, and then repeating the process all the way down. Our guide was behind those of us in the front on the way down, but eveytime we got to an intersection we would just wait a few minutes for his dog (who made the hike up and has the amusing name of PeePee) to come find us and show us the way. PeePee is the Lassie of China.

Around 8 we settled back into our house's courtyard again for breakfast. Corn zhou, corn bread, boiled eggs. It was delicious. I'm a huge fan of corn zhou, especially with a bit of sugar.

To get down to where our bus was able to drive to, we had to either hike down a trail on the other (China) side of the wall, or take a zip line over a ravine and then a boat to the bus. Clearly I opted for the latter. The zip line was amazing amounts of fun and totally worth the 30 kuai. There really is nothing like zooming over a ravine under the great wall tied to nothing but a rusty wire.

In sum, the Great Wall was gorgeous, and if you get the opportunity to make it out to Simatai, you should absolutely not turn it down. Also, if anyone would like to make it back to the wall to camp out, let me know (because it's still on my to do list).



~L

The Bookworm is Salvation

Today I cut econ to go to a book lecture in Sanlitun by an author that my Daoism professor always talked about. I was pretty excited when I recognized his name in That's Beijing. His name is Bill Porter. He does a lot of translations (of the Dao de Jing etc), but the book that I've been trying to get for forever is called Road to Heaven. He basically got curious one day about whether or not Chinese hermits still existed, so he literally had a taxi drop him at the foot of a mountain rumored to have them and set out on foot to find some. And he did. And he wrote a book. And it sounds awesome! And now I've chatted with him over coffee, and he's shown me his slides, and I feel substantially informed about Chinese hermits. I could totally find one (if I had the means). We also chatted about why I couldn't find his book - apparently he has some lame publisher who only makes so many copies a year, but keeps the copyright, so the publisher can continue to suck money out of the book. I guess he's involved in some legal action, and the book is consistantly sold out. But he says he gets his copyright back in 2009, and will switch to another publisher. It sounded like a nightmare.

He was wicked cool though, and I was pretty thrilled to hang out with him. He totally looks like you'd think he would, too - kind of like Santa, but in a Marlin's t-shirt. He got me really pumped up about traveling China, and now I'm especially hoping that I'll be able to make the Wutai Shan trip in a few weeks. I wish I could stay longer to travel around China. It's so difficult to squeeze in everything that I want to do. Hopefully I'll at least be able to get Shanghai and Xishuanbanna to work out.

After the lecture I hung out with some random people I met there for a bit. It was so nice to speak English and talk to nice intellectual people with accents over Mexican food. Followed by Baskin Robbins (or should I say: "American Flavored Ice Cream"?) It was a good night. Except that on the way home I got off the train and proceeded to stand at the bus stop for a good 20 minutes wondering why the heck my bus wasn't coming before I finally thought to look at the sign and read that the bus I wanted had stopped running for the night. Damn.

I hope everyone has been having a good semester so far. If you read this (if anyone reads this?) email me some updates on your life! I feel so cut off from everything. And if any ADPi's are reading - congrats on the new Alphas, you guys seem like you're having so much fun!

~L

I Went to a Concert with Bread and a Polo

Last night I went to Talib Kweli concert. I regret not having my camera, but it was a bit of a last minute decision to attend. As in, I was walking home from the bakery, was accosted by a friend on the street and thrown into a cab. So I attended the concert in a polo and loafters carrying a loaf of bread. But, it was totally worth it because the concert was awesome. I was in the very front, and got a few high fives (I was also right next to the speaker and my right ear is still ringing a bit). He's a really good performer. At one point during the concert he did a couple throw back sing alongs that he would rap over including Sweet Dreams by La Bouche and other such guilty pleasures. I didn't know the band that followed his performance before last night, but they were amazing! They're called Ozomatli, and you should definitely look into their stuff. They're from the LA area, so their music has a spanishy feel, but they're also very rock and easy to dance to. They played a ton of instruments too, including trumpet, trombone and gourd. For their big finale, they jumped off the stage - with their instruments - and played a song or two in the middle of the crowd, and then - still playing their instruments - started a conga line with the entire audience for the final song. It was awesome. Basically they were just amazing performers who really got the crowd incredibly pumped. We hung around afterward to meet the band and they were all really laid back and cool, so we went to the after party back at their hotel for a bit.

Basically, last night was awesome and totally worth sneaking in through the window at three in the morning, and I really want you guys to listen to this band, because I think I love them.

~L


P.S. The silk road back entries are coming along. Please scroll down and check them out.