Year in Harbin

Race Day

2007-05-27T06:40:00.000-07:00

I squatted on the track, baton in hand, staring at the white line in front of me and trying to focus on the next 400 meters. My legs were aching from the exhertions of the day before, including 100 and 200 meter sprints, a 5000 meter (3.1 mile) race, all followed by two hours of intense ultimate frisbee. A great day, but I was going to pay for it now in this first leg of the 4 x 400 relay. But there was no use thinking about those things, it was time to focus on the present, run the best lap that my legs would allow. We might not be able to win, but my competitive nature was still pushing me to run the best race possible. Not much time, I thought, need to get in the zone.

"Herro!"

My thoughts were interrupted by a man sitting to my left wearing a maroon suit. "Hi," I replied with a glance and a small nod, and quickly looked back at the track. Just my luck to get put in lane 1, next to the race official anxious to practice his English.

"Where are you fromah?" he continued. "America." This time I said it without a smile, hoping to discourage him. No such luck; by not saying 'Russia' I had caused him and those around him to murmur in excitement.

"Do you wantah to talk aboutah Boose?" he ventured next. I didn't understand, probably because I could see the man loading the gun that would start the race. "Boose?" I said. "The president," he clarified, with a probing look in his eye. I couldn't believe it. This man wanted to start a political conversation in the final seconds before my race.

"Bush? No! I want to think about this race!" I spoke fast and I doubt he caught the whole meaning, but it didn't matter because the gun had been lifted.

"Get set...!" I raised up on my fingers and toes into starting position.

Boom!

I was off and running in my final race of the meet. We lost horribly to several other very fast teams, all of them in particular. I wish I could blame the race official's interest in politics, or my tired legs, but I suppose I should just say we were way out of our league.

My roommate Jin Chao snapped a picture during the last moments before this race. See my head turned towards the maroon suits?

The track meet process began a few weeks ago with a vague posting on the wall in our dorm asking if anyone wanted to participate. No one seemed to know what it was all about, but a few of us figured it would be fun and signed up for a few events. That was all we heard until last Thursday, when we were called to a meeting in the foreign students classroom building. Three of us Americans from the CET program attended, along with about 15 other students of various nationalities.

At the meeting, we were lectured about the importance of this track meet. It was not to be taken lightly, and by signing up we had implied that we were good at our respective events. A few years ago, a foreign student soccer team had won the school tournament, bringing honor and glory to the 50 countries represented in the department. Achievements were hoped for at the track meet as well. Not showing up to an event would be embarassing and cause everyone to lose face.

I looked uneasily at the other two Americans who had attended this 'mandatory' meeting. We had assumed the meet would be a casual affair and signed up for the fun of a group activity, not for the glory of our country. Our attitude could be summed up by attendance level at the meeting; three out of more than ten who had signed up. In accordance with the seriousness of the track meet, we were all issued baby blue track uniforms with "foriegn student center" printed on them, and some pretty spiffy warm-ups to go with. Here's our group photo wearing the uniforms; notice the diaper-like shape to our short shorts.

Saturday morning, the few of us with a masochistic sense of duty went to the track at 6:30am to be a part of the opening ceremony. This time 4 of us showed up. The comparatively good turnout might have been due to a promised 20 kuai to pay for breakfast. If so, that extra person is probably disappointed because I haven't seen any of the advertised cash. Still, we shouldn't complain. The crowds of students filling the stadium and creating a wonderful atmosphere of excitement were in fact required to be there, all day, from 7:30am until late in the afternoon. I doubt they were getting any breakfast money.

We assembled outside the stadium and were issued helium balloons. Thank goodness the other international students had more of a sense of responsibility than most of us Americans. Most of the foreigners about to parade into the stadium weren't even going to race, and yet here they were at the crack of dawn. It would have been embarrassing to have a poor turnout when all the other groups, representing every department at the school, had around 100 students each. After waiting around for more than an hour, we paraded into the stadium. We were a ragtag bunch, but we had spirit. Sort of. You can't see me in this picture, but I'm there.

For a good laugh, compare us with the other departments in the pics at this website: http://news.hit.edu.cn/articles/2007/05-26/05184915.htm It's possible that we were given the balloons on purpose to make us look like fools. As if we weren't different enough already.

After the parade, we all stood in the infield and listened to the Chinese national anthem as they raised the flag. Surprisingly, it was my first time listening to the national anthem here with a large group of Chinese people. I found it very eerie. I felt like a total outsider in a way I haven't since my first couple of weeks in the country. Here was an entire stadium full of people solemnly respecting a flag that to me symbolizes the political part of China, the part with which I have the most problems and disagreements. I tend to focus on our common ground, but it was hard when listening to the heroic communist march music and watching five yellow stars on a red background rise majestically into the air.

The crowds of students sat with their respective departments and generally filled the time by reciting slogans that they'd made up to represent their department. I only remember part of one of them, chanted incessantly all day by the school of management. I had one of the teachers explain the meaning to me:

"the bird opens his wings,
the morning sun rises in the east,
you and I manage well...."

I forget the last line, but you get the idea.

The stadium was crazy. There was too much going on to take in. Each section was labeled with the name of a department, and usually a banner with their slogan. Lines of balloons were tacked up all over. Huge red helium lanterns floated 50 feet high along the edges of the football field. The chanting of different slogans blended together into a drone with the various noisemakers issued to many groups. Plastic hand clappers were popular. One very annoying section had whistles and used them liberally. It was all right because we were all the way across the stadium, but I pity the group sitting next to them.

In addition to the track and field competitions assiciated, we were treated to endless packs of peppy dance troups in the infield. There were groups of all kinds, mostly girls from different departments at the school, but also middle aged women and even senior citizens. Each followed the same basic pattern, sporting colorful costumes, prancing and waiving their arms in synch to various pop songs. Pom-poms were not uncommon. Basically, high school drill team without the mandatory kick line. The dances were going non-stop throughout the day, at the same time as the competitions. Sometimes there was more than one group dancing at the same time. It was a lot to digest.

My races, other than the 4 x 400 relay, were all on Friday. Friday there were no crowds, as it was mainly for preliminaries. My 4 x 100 relay team was crushed, as was I individually in the 2oom. However, during the 5000 meter race I made the discovery that there are not many HIT students who go running. Although my own 5000 speed is pathetically average when measured against people who do serious running, I took third place against HIT's student body. I should clarify; my competitors were only average students, not the real athletes that compete for the school. One such athlete took part in the race and lapped me twice, but luckily he didn't count so I slipped in at third. In any case, they gave me a cool medal and the leader of the foreign student center was really happy for the honor I brought to the department.

Lots of people were curious whether we have track meets like this in the US. All I could say was, no, not really. But how to describe the difference? Our WSU track meets are more serious than the HIT meet, because all the athletes are very good and compete with other schools. But we're also much more casual, because people aren't forced to attend and chant slogans all day. I could almost compare this to homecoming, with friendly competitions between student groups, but the races at HIT were taken more seriously than any homecoming competitions I've been to. In almost every race, no matter what the length, at least one competitor would fall to the track with their face twisting in agony. I never saw a real injury come out of this; I attribute it to the fact that dropping out from over-exhertion is more honorable than finishing near the back of the pack.

The track meet may have been ridiculous in many ways, but it was fun nonetheless. Despite the vast proportion of the crowd being forced to be there, they were resigned to their fate and seemed to enjoy themselves. It was Mandatory Fun. We use the term at the strict summer camp I've worked at. It means that you're forced to be there, and it's a lot of fun. Mandatory Fun is an oxymoron, and oxymorons are very common in China. Here are a few of other oxymorons that are used: Democratic dictatorship. Liberate Tibet. Oh yeah, and Communist China.

I don't know how the people stay sane living with all this confusion. It's been a year for me, and I guess I know more about the place now than when I showed up, but I still don't understand it. The oxymorons are too abundant. Maybe once I'm home, I'll be able to piece together a more coherent analysis of China. Until then, I have a paper to write and another ping pong lesson this Tuesday.

A rat, and Kobe on the Chinese New Year

2007-05-24T07:10:00.000-07:00

A few nights ago I was walking back to the dorm after dinner. It was dark out, but still early so there were plenty of people out for a stroll. A couple of guys ran past me laughing. I saw another guy up ahead dart out into the street from the sidewalk, and I figured the three of them were playing a game of tag. As I continued walking, another couple walking ahead of me also made a sudden lateral move out into the street. I became aware of a sqeaking noise, and was confused for a brief moment. Enlightenment came in the form of a large black rat springing into the air at my feet, forcing me into the same sideways shuffle maneuver I'd just seen performed by my fellow pedestrians.

The animal was insanely energetic. I turned and watched as it scurried back and forth, unable to find its way around the short wall at the edge of the sidewalk. It was constantly changing directions, and squealing like a Dissmores shopping cart. Tracking the dark shape against the shadowy sidewalk was like trying to keep an eye on a ping pong ball at the Chinese national championships, before they changed ball color from white to yellow and increased the diameter to 40mm. Every few seconds the streaking horizontal motion was punctuated with a leap straight into the air. It was during one of these leaps that I became aware of the rodent.

The rat reached knee height and the motion was all vertical, as though caused by a sudden jerk on a string from above; for all you engineers and physicists, the motion of the rat was purely in the x-y plane one moment, and parallel with the z axis the next. I know we all like our physics problems to contain only simple one and two dimensional vectors, but it was very startling behavior in a rat outside weekly homework assignments. The thing would land on the exact spot it left the ground from and resume scurrying without missing a beat. It was probably scared with nowhere to hide, but a scared rat just doesn't inspire the same sympathy in me that most other animals would.

I stayed long enough to watch a few more unsuspecting walkers make the discovery. I thought about warning them, but decided against it. Most people here are startled when I say "Hello, I'm from America" in passable Chinese. Who know's how they'd react to some white guy shouting from the street, "look out, a leaping rat!". If the rat itself wanted to give someone a heart attack jumping around like that, fine, but I didn't want that on my own conscience.

Warning: new, unrelated topic. I keep wanting to mention the NBA in a blog, but it's not enough for a post of it's own and I always forget to add it. I know it's anticlimactic after the rat, but that's just too bad.

I knew the NBA would be well known in China before I ever came here, or at least that Yao Ming would be a big deal. What I didn't realize is just how popular it would be. I've found that almost everyone has a favorite NBA team, and more often than not it's a team other than the Houston Rockets. I guess things would be a little boring around here with hundreds of millions of Rockets fans. It makes sense that they'd branch out. When I first introduce myself to people without a good grasp on American geography, many times it goes like this:

Me: I'm from Washington State.
Them: Oh, the capital of the United States!
Me: No, that's Washington DC. It's confusing, America has two places called Washington.
Them: (look of confusion)
Me: I'm from near a city called Seattle.
Them: (head scratching and squinting)
Me: NBA, Seattle Supersonics.
Them: (grinning with recognition) Ah, NBA! The Sonics! I like the Mavs...hey, you know what? You look just like that guy Nowitzki! He's awesome!

Apparently, basketball is popular enough here for the NBA itself to take notice. At the Chinese new year, some big names were featured in a spot on CCTV5. Yao Ming, Tim Duncan, and Lebron James could all be seen sitting in a big armchair, smiling warmly and saying "Xinnian kuaile." You just don't expect those words coming from a guy like LeBron James. To my even greater surprise, the final representative was Kobe Bryant. While the others were fairly reserved as they spoke, Kobe really got into it. He broke off from the "Xinnian kuaile" pattern, instead saying "Bainian, Bainian" which to me is a more advanced version of happy new year. Instead of just sitting, he clasped his hands together and bowed several times with a big smile. His pronounciation was not bad, and it came of as really genuine. Way to go, Kobe. Now all you have to do is start scoring 60 points a game instead of 50, and next year the Lakers could make it to the conference final. With enough of China supporting you, it might even be possible.

Friends

2007-04-19T09:26:00.000-07:00

Everyone wants to be my friend. I like making friends, and lots of friends is sure better than none, but it can get overwhelming. With people here, especially the younger ones, making friends follows a bit of a different track than I'm used to. When I make a new friend back home, it's generally done without the word 'friend' being mentioned at all. We talk about things we have in common, maybe joke around...you know, get to know each other. It's a casual affair. Here, people are serious about being MY friend, and they need to do it quick before I disappear around the corner.

It's not their fault. I'm probably the first foreigner they've spoken with, and they need to move fast to capitalize on the opportunity. I truly respect their initiative. It takes a lot of guts to approach a stranger, much less a foreign stranger, strike up a conversation and seal the deal by asking for a phone number. Now that I think of it, these high schoolers would be really good at getting numbers in bars if they chose to apply themselves in that way. The problem is, I am only one person and as such it is physically impossible for me be good friends with everyone I bump into on the street. I stopped giving my cell number to people who I talk with for less than five minutes quite a while ago. However, I'm not a mean person and I will give one of my email addresses to pretty much anyone who asks.

Last blog, I wrote about tree planting day. That was last Sunday. On the bus back, a few high schoolers were sitting nearby and started talking with me. Below are two of the emails I got within a day of the planting.

hello!~ Andy
My name is wind .Maybe you have already forgotten me but I remember you.
Today we went to Taiyang island to planting trees . You and Nancy were talking all the time.
When you look me I said : Excuse me may I know your E-mail adress ?
haha do you remember me ?
I want to make friends with you Because you are from America . Haha,my English is very poor so I
think you may help me and have a friend from another country is my dream
Let's make a friend with each other .
OK?

Best Wishes
Your Wind

Andy,
How are you doing? How about your visit? Where have you been? I think the photo i sent to you runs into some problems. This time, I think you can open it.
I really want to make friends with you. what's your Chinese name? Wei * rong. I forget the middle, so sorry. My Chinese is very stardard! I think we can study together and make progress.
My English name is Barry, and Chinese name is ZhangChao. My cellphone number is [5555555], call me or massage me when you are free. Wish your reply.
Take care and have a nice week!
Barry.

Here's the picture Barry sent along.

They're so danged sincere, it really breaks my heart that I can't fulfill their 'dream' of having a foreign friend, but 1) I don't have time and 2) I'm not supposed to be speaking English which is a big part of what they want. Usually I'll send back something like:

I had a great time talking with you, Wind. It was fun planting trees together. I wish you well in school!

Hopefully they won't be too heartbroken.

Actually, I'm complaining here but I don't want to give everyone the wrong idea. Having millions of people dying to meet you is very beneficial and gratifying. If I find someone interesting, I can approach them to talk, confident that they will be happy to do so. It also makes for some interesting conversations with cab drivers and such. I'm always up for a chat, it's just that prolonged friendship with the entire city's population is not sustainable. Allow me the pleasure of a little grumbling here, so I don't have to tell it to Wind or Barry.

Tree Planting and Changchun

2007-04-15T07:49:00.000-07:00

Lunch yesterday was interrupted by a confusing phone call. Someone started speaking English at me, and I couldn't figure out who it was. Normally when I pick up my phone and hear English, that means family, but I couldn't quite make out the voice with the chatter filling the restaraunt. It was male at least, and when I asked who it was I could swear they said 'Sam' (my brother) so I went for a big 'heyyy, how's it going, great to hear from you'. Turns out it was a Chinese guy named Stan and he was calling from the Harbin TV station.

Long story short, I found myself in a taxi this morning at 7:30, heading out to plant some trees on TV. I was accompanied by David, a CET classmate who like me decided to hang around Harbin for spring break instead of heading off to some remote travel destination. When we got to the Dragon Tower (the TV broadcasting tower), we were a little surprised by the scene confronting us. All we knew was some guy named Stan, who had gotten our numbers from yet another friend, wanted us to go out and plant some trees with the tv station for 'Tree Planting Day', the equivalent of Earth Day over here. We didn't know that half of Harbin would be going with us.

Stan was waiting in the parking lot with some other foreigners who I didn't recognize, and behind them a sea of Chinese faces in red baseball caps. It turns out Stan is the host of an evening radio show teaching English, and hangs out with the foreign crowd quite a bit. There was a tall white guy standing in the parking lot with Stan, and next to him a girl who looked Chinese but wearing fairly western style clothes. I introduced myself and got their names as John the Canadian and Becky. They obviously knew each other, so I assumed the girl was also Canadian. I was even more convinced when she started speaking great English and cracking jokes definitely outside the range of Chinese humor; for instance, several cars straight out of 'Fast and the Furious' whipped past us into the parking lot, slammed on the breaks and performed those screeching, 180 degree stops which I've never seen outside of a movie. Becky laughed along with us, commenting "oh my god, they think they're sooo cool". For those of you who haven't been to China, that's an unusual phrase coming from a Chinese person.

Nonetheless, I soon found that Becky is Chinese, born and bred. Her westernization came through intense study, a gift for languages, and a three-year relationship with John the gregarious Canadian. Becky's English is the best I've ever heard from a Chinese person who's never been out of the country. Fooled twice in two days. She and John are getting married and going to Canada this summer, but that's another story. Our small group was rounded out by the Auzzies Boyd and Adam. Boyd is a big guy, very talkative, plays rugby and the guitar. He wanted to know if the crazy stories he's heard about American frats are true. Adam was a nice guy as well, although smaller and more hung over. Stan had thoughtfully provided us with gleaming white baseball caps, a nice contrast with red-capped hordes. It was nice of him to give us the same color as the leaders, but then again we didn't the help sticking out.

We piled on to the waiting busses - 5 or 10 of them - and headed for Sun Island Park to get planting. It was my second trip there, so I already knew that it's a huge fake nature complex where the tickets are expensive and people get wedding pictures taken. I wrote about it in one of my earliest blogs. Just before we arrived, Stan told us that his friend had a radio program going right then, and could we be good sports and sing a song into the phone so it could be on his friend's show live? We obliged with a patchy but heartfelt rendition of 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight', thanks to David's quick work coming up with a good one we all knew.

The tree planting was at best questionable, at worst a tv stunt which wasted a lot of willing labor. The area chosen was on the bank of a river which is low at this time of the year, but will rise much higher at other times. There were already piles of good dirt laid out for us to use filling the holes. I soon found out why. The bank of the river, like the rest of Sun Island Park, was manmade not long ago and was actually landscaped using sand with a very thin layer of dirt on top. I'm no botanist, so perhaps my instincts were off, but....can willow trees grow in sand, and survive being submersed in water for significant parts of the year? That's not even all of it. The process we were to follow planting the trees ended with giving them a good watering. But, that water was not allowed to come from the river due to pollution. I'm not clear on how the trees will be able to survive in a few months submersed in this water, but can't stand a bucketfull right now.

Call me a coward - I prefer diplomat - but I neglected to raise any of these issues as I was interviewed several times throughout the morning. I stuck with the vanilla propagandistic stuff that I thought they were hoping for: Yes, I think planting trees is a wonderful activity and should be practiced no matter what country you're from or in. Yes, I've planted trees before in the US. I think that the American attitude towards helping the environment is very much like the Chinese attitude I see today; everyone wants to do what they can. It's something we all have in common. Yes, I'm very impressed by the number of people who showed up today, and I've never been to a tree planting on such a large scale. All this was followed by a reprise of 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' for the TV cameras, after I coaxed David and Adam up onto the stage for backup.

Us foreigners were given the royal treatment. We didn't really work that hard, just talked to people and dug a few holes while we were at it. I had the feeling this was a really relaxed thing for everyone until Stan came up when I was talking with couple of student reporters. He really cracked the whip, telling them to get back to work and not be so lazy talking to me. Apparently interviewing me was fine, but they should get on with it and get back to the shovels. I was shocked by the hard line Stan took with them. He apologized for interrupting my conversation, but he obviously wasn't sorry for interrupting their conversation. The Chinese seem to treat people very differently depending on the relationship. Bosses, friends, and those you can boss around of all get shown vastly different personalities. As a foreigner, I got the red carpet treatment. The student reporters were lower than Stan on the totem pole, so he was free to lay down the law with them.

I'm getting tired and I need to go to bed, so I have to summarize the rest of the day quickly. I'm only at noon so far. The tree planting ended, and this afternoon I hopped on the train with Jin Chao and we made the three hour ride down to Changchun for a little change of scenery. The train ride was made awkward by a shouting match between Jin Chao and a stubborn guy on the train who didn't want to give us our seats. We won, but the guy's ticket was right next to us so we had to sit together the whole time. After a couple hours, he actually fell asleep and snuggled onto my shoulder for a few minutes before coming around.

That brings me to now. It's 12:30am and I'm in an internet bar next to the shower house we're staying at due to a lack of better sleeping options in the neighborhood. We had some excellent Korean food tonight with Jin Chao's cousin who goes to school here, and her Mom who's visiting for a while. If today is any indicator, the next couple of days in Changchun should be pretty interesting.

break plans and ping pong progress

2007-04-08T21:19:00.000-07:00

I got my one-on-one teacher's phone number today. Unfortunately, my one-on-one teacher is no longer the cute 25 year old of last summer, but rather a guy about my dad's age who today explained to me the reason his face is crooked: in the heat of the summer a few years ago, he left a fan on too long blowing from his left. The next day when he looked in the mirror, his left eyebrow was cockeyed and his mouth shifted slightly right. That sounds to me like something one of my uncles told me once, after he pretended to pull of his nose, all to my wide-eyed astonishment. At the time, I was 5 years old, and since then I've been pretty good at picking out those rascally uncle types trying to pull one over on me. As far as I could tell, my teacher was completely serious.

I actually really like this teacher. We have good learning vibes. In my one-on-one classes, I tend to ask incessant questions and get obsessive with language details. This guy digs that, even though it throws off his lecture and we end up only getting through half of what he's planned. We also chat about other things. He's pretty fit for fifty-something, and once told me about his morning routine of jogging and pull-ups. 'I can do thirteen pull-ups' he said, and stuck out his muscular forearm for me to sqeeze. Feeling inadequate in the pull-up department, I told him I'm more of a jogger; my legs are ripped, but the upper body could use a little work. Staying positive, he jumped up and came around the table to give my calf a squeeze, nodding respect. I know feeling another guy's leg in the states is a little fruity, but I think it's ok here. I've had my abs poked as well. When I told him I'd be staying around Harbin for spring break next week, he wrote his cell number on my midterm paper and said, "Give me a call if you've got time, we can go out and have a drink. I'm busy Wednesday and Thursday nights, any other time is good." I might just do it.

Next week is going to be my last mid-semester break in China. This time, instead of running around China like a chicken with my head cut off, I'm going to take it easy around Harbin. My roommate Jin Chao has a reasonably light class load right now, so the two of us will probably take off and check out one of the nearby Northeastern cities I haven't seen yet, maybe Shenyang or Changchun. I figure, why spend money on a plane ticket to the far corners of China, accompanied by Americans, then come back to to school feeling like the moldy towel that would be riding in my pack all week? The alternative: spend time with a native chinese speaker and friend, explore Harbin and surrounding areas, come back to school refreshed. I do feel a little guilty wasting a travel opportunity because I know how many people would kill for a week traveling in China, but I've got to face facts: I'm traveled out after last summer, fall, and winter breaks. Maybe in a few months I'd be ready to go again, but right now I'm looking forward to wandering Harbin and squeezing in a few extra ping pong lessons. And possibly drinks with my Confucianism prof.

Major breakthrough last time with the ping pong teacher: he backs up from the table and sends me some long ones to smash back. It's been weeks now practicing the most basic motions possible, half-hour forhand, half-hour backhand. Actually, this last time he only broke form for about five minutes, but I can hardly describe how good it felt. I don't even remember what it's like to play a real game anymore, I've been hitting against my ball-machine style teacher for so long. It's good exercise anyway. The sweat dripping off my chin leaves a puddle on the floor; it's a puddle because my chin doesn't move for an hour, held in place by the absolute regularity of my teacher's returns.

I want to retire like this guy

2007-03-29T04:17:00.000-07:00

Today we sat down with a 72 year old retired teacher and chatted about his life. I already knew China had been changing a lot in the last fifty years, but he really brought home the positive impact many people have felt here recently. This guy is an extreme example, but the numbers he gave us were stunning.

The talk was an activity for my Special Topics class. We've been studying the aging problem facing the Chinese; the baby boom of the 50's and the one-child policy of the 80's have teamed up to do a real dropkick on their average age. That's an interesting problem in itself, but it basically boils down to there's going to be a ton of old people soon and no one knows what to do about it. We'd already covered that in class, so what I found most interesting was the incredible increase in quality of life this old timer has experienced in his life, particularly after retirement.

Born into a farming family, he managed to get to college, graduated in 1957, and got a job as a middle school teacher. His salary was apparently pretty good for that time, 62 yuan per month. I don't know much about currency value back then, but that number is pretty low by western standards. We didn't discuss what happened to him during the Cultural Revolution, which I regret, but figure that he probably didn't feel much heat. Despite being a teacher, being born into a peasant family would have helped a lot during the madness when they were attacking the non-peasant classes. Anyway, he told us his salary stayed at that same level, 62 yuan, all the way until 1982. That's a long time without a raise, by my standards anyway. He changed jobs a few times and I didn't understand them all, but I think they included middle school teacher and principal, high school something, a beaurocrat of some sort, and finally teacher at the university level. In the early 80's, his salary started increasing incrementally. In 1985 the place he lived with his wife and two sons was only 23 square meters (200 plus sq feet by my rough estimate).

That's when things started to get interesting. The main point of his talk was that at least some old people in China get taken care of very, very well. He said that such good care reflects the level of respect for the elderly in the culture here. I've also gathered that teaching is a pretty good profession to be in, so this old guy probably got some of the best treatment around during the last 25 years. I'm going to throw out the numbers we got. Just think about the ride this guy had after his 50th birthday. The ages are rough:

1985, age 50. House, 23 sq meters. Salary, around 100 yuan/month.
.......lots of salary increases.......
1995, age 60. Retires with stipend equal to final working salary of 1300 yuan/month.
1996, age 61. Government gives him another apartment in addition to the first, this one 50 sq meters (total 73 sq m).
2000, age 65. Stipend is increased to 1600yuan/month.
2002, age 67. Gov't declares all teachers/former teachers should have at least 90 sq meters of living space. Figures he's got enough room already, so accepts cash compensation for the extra 17 sq meters: 70,000 yuan.
2006, age 71. Stipend increased to 2400yuan/month.

Wow. Now that's a serious increase in standard of living, much of it after retirement. I haven't even mentioned the free family vacations every year, free monthly home medical checkups, and free activity room equipped with exercise equipment, games, and reading material which is shared by the 16 retirees from his old work unit. Also don't forget, it's just him and his wife around the house these days - the sons have big places of their own.

China reserves this kind of treatment for government workers, which explains why so many people want to work for the government. Our old friend was up front with the fact that people living in the countryside get squat, and people living in the cities but not working for the government only recieve a basic living expenses stipend, about 250 yuan/month these days. But before you cry foul, remember that this guy was born a peasant. He could be the poster boy for equal education and upward class mobility in China...not that they'd call it that.

The system now is grossly unfair. But, at least there's some money here to create an imbalance. The Chinese people genuinely want to see the new wealth distributed. That is, at least on a collective level; the old teacher didn't say anything about sharing his salary with less fortunate retirees. Things will probably continue to get better for everyone as time goes on, and that's what individal people seem to really care about. With good reason, as far as I can see. Who argues with a big raise and seventy thousand bucks for quitting work?

Yabuli

2007-03-25T05:55:00.000-07:00

Looking back, the ski trip was pretty decent. We hopped on a train at 8am Saturday morning for Yabuli, the famed resort that I've been hearing about since I got to Harbin last June. People come from all over China to ski there, people like the CCP high up muckymucks and important business leaders. The train was two and a half hours on hard seats, not too bad - the "hard" seats are just bench seats, there's cushions though and it's comfy for a few hours. After that, we got on a bus for a half hour and arrived at the base of the mountain about 11:30. We knew time would be a little tight with our train leaving that evening so we had packed lunch and decided to waste as little time as possible on things other than skiing. Two agonizing hours later, we finally got on the chairlift. The delay was due to them being poorly set up for large groups, and our rental gear coming from two separate places; one happened to be back down the road about 10 minutes. Only in China.

There was a single chairlift,which I am thankful for, but I had let myself have somewhat higher hopes for this most famous of ski resorts. t's possible that there was another on a nearby mountain we didn't have access to. The mountain was about as high as the one at Snoqualmie summit, not exactly the Alps but enough for a satisfying run anyway. Plus we only had about 2 and a half hours, so there wouldn't have been enough time to go exploring a bunch of other runs anyway. My skiing predictably sucked after a long draught of three or four years off the mountain...did I really add that up right? That's a long time. The snow was not groomed and really heavy, making it even tougher to get into a good rhythm, but by the last run I was feeling alright. I'm definitely going next winter, I won't be letting the amazing US mountains go unused for another year.

Since we couldn't buy the same-day return train tickets until we arrived at Yabuli, there were no sitters left. It was a slow train too, which meant three and a half hours instead of the two and a half going down. I passed the time standing in the aisle talking philosophy with one of the Chinese roommates; we wedged ourselves between sitting passengers every 10 minutes or so to allow the food cart to pass. Luckily we had only skied for a couple hours so standing wasn't an undue burden on our bodies. I couldn't help being a little disappointed at a 13 hour ski day that only involved two and a half hours of skiing. But hey, it was a great bonding experience and the skiing was fun while it lasted.

it's beginning to end

2007-03-08T21:50:00.000-08:00

It's back to the grind again. This time it's the beginning of the end, my final semester in China. Maybe it's just that beginning of the semester feeling, but the grind is a little more comfortable than I remember it. I'm working as hard, but I think my language is good enough now that I can get past mind-numbing, out of context vocabulary and grammar and get interested in some content. My class on the Confucian school of thought is especially interesting. I've been getting glimpses and hints about that pillar of Chinese culture by osmosis all along, but it's been teasingly incomplete. Finally taking the thing head on is like scratching a bad itch. As an added bonus, memorizing and reciting Confucian proverbs is a cheap way to come off as really smart to the Chinese.

The new crew is looking good, probably even more studious than last semester. We're missing a couple of key players that kept us all on our toes last time. My suitemate no longer knocks on my door at 6 in the morning with a black eye and puke on his shirt, shaking his head and grinning like he just spent the night with the girl of his dreams. That Russian accent always came out a little heavier with the words "Man, you'll never believe what just happened..." Ai Youzheng, come back and visit any time, and after last semester I'll believe almost anything you tell me.

I've got a request pending for a ping pong teacher. I'm hoping to get some regular lessons going. Improving my game was one of my goals for China but it got lost in the busy schedule for the first couple semesters. No longer. I'm also going to take some cooking classes offered through CET. Tonight is the first one. I don't want to have to stop eating this awesome food when I go back home, and I see no other way to avoid that than making it myself.

Tomorrow we're going to hop on a train heading up to Yabuli and check out how the skiing is in China. I had a disappointing experience with a short, flat 'mountain' over the break, but Yabuli is known throughout the country as the place to go for skiing. I'm still skeptical, but would love to be proven wrong.

Happy Pig Year!

2007-02-20T12:47:00.000-08:00

The Year of the Golden Pig is upon us! And none too soon, the anticipation's been killing me. According to Chinese folklore, the Golden Pig is an especially lucky year. I'm sure some of you have heard, there's supposed to be a glut of births this year, a mini baby boom. Even if a lot of the Chinese don't admit to believing in astrological superstitions, with only one shot at a baby they're not taking any chances. Ironically I've heard it predicted that babies born this year will actually have it extra rough, first during birth because of a shortage of hospital beds and later because of a strain on school resources. Don't forget the extra competition when they apply for college. Like it wasn't tough enough already. Enough pessimism. Honestly, I hope that with the help of their zodiac sign every one of those Golden fetuses, developing even as I write this, will one day be bringing home the bacon.

The much talked about Spring Festival, the mystical Chinese New Year...what's it all about? I can't say it all in a sentence, but it sure didn't disappoint. Thinking back, I'm left with disconnected memories; unique moments that add up to my front seat view of the most important holiday in the most populous country in the world. It's easy to draw a parallel with Christmas. There's the original religious meaning, but to me what it really is is the sum of all the things I do every year with people I care about. Some are rooted in a broader tradition, others unknown to all but me and the few who share them with me. Just like Christmas, I feel that the fundamental importance of Spring Festival is of course the connection with family and friends. I'm sure every place and every person in China has their own permutation of the traditions, their own personal version of the holiday in addition to the things that are common across the board. The way I experienced it, at a particular place in a single year, doesn't make me much of an expert on the holiday. All I've got are some stories that will stick with me.

I arrived in Yichun about two weeks before new year's day. If you haven't read some of the earlier stuff, Yichun is in the far north of Heilongjiang Province which is in the northeastern corner of China. My roommate from Harbin, Jin Chao, generously invited me here to spend three weeks with his family.

One evening shortly after arriving I went night sledding with Jin Chao and a couple of his cousins. It was pretty fun. The hill looked tiny, the fact that it was ice rather than snow helped a lot. The unorthodox wooden sled's metal runners fit wickedly into slots carved into a slide headed for the river. Momentum gained on the sloping river bank carried us all the way to the other side of the frozen water, at least 50 yards past the bottom. After sledding, we were walking on the raised sidewalk parallel to the river. I felt Jin Chao tugging my arm, pulling me a little roughly away from my chosen path. I looked questioningly, and he pointed to the ground where I had been walking. I noticed a dark patch on the sidewalk. Looking more closely I saw that it was ashes, like someone had made a campfire on the sidewalk. I noticed similar patches up and down the sidewalk. In response to my still puzzled look, Jin Chao searched for words I would understand. "The ancestors," he said, and for a horrible moment I thought I had been walking through the cremated remains of some recently deceased grandparent.

Luckily it was nothing quite that disturbing. Jin Chao explained further that leading up to Spring Festival it's traditional to make offerings to the ancestors. The living can help out their forefathers by sending them things like money; since there are no mailboxes in the afterlife, you've got to burn it. Luckily symbolic money will do, thus avoiding a yearly upset in the Chinese financial markets. Thinking back, I realized I had seen several fires going that day. I spend the rest of the evening scanning the ground, navigating a minefield of ethereal care packages.

Jin Chao has been excited about the fireworks for quite a while, so I've been expecting them. They started in earnest on new year's eve day. All day our activities were carried out accompanied by festive but violent white noise; the staccato machine gun pops of firecracker strings and deeper booms of more potent exploding cylinders. Let me restate for emphasis: all day. I was woken by a particularly loud round right outside my window, and the onslaught of noise didn't begin to slacken until well after we greeted the Golden Pig's arrival at midnight. At times the sounds were distant, but just when I'd get used to the situation a neighbor would torch a loud one and make me trip on my sandal or choke on a dumpling. Jin Chao and I did our part, lighting fuses and chuckling at our snow craters as we strolled back and forth between his parents' and grandparents' homes. Thankfully, whistling noisemakers haven't caught on here like they have with our Fourth of July fireworks. Once it got dark, we began setting off some of the other explosive items purchased by Jin Chao's family, the ones which are more fun because they have colors with the noise.

I've always had a lot of fun with fireworks. I was part of the group that organized homecoming week in high school. When it was time to choose tasks, I took the football halftime show solely to ensure the existence of a sweet fireworks display. I always anticipate lighting fireworks at Fourth of July, but the last time I did it I was about 12 years old. Every summer since then I've somehow found myself in a large city without legal access to the best part of the holiday. That's why it felt so good scratching that pyro itch this Chinese new year's eve. Satisfaction at last; grinding the glowing cigarette into green fuse after green fuse, scrambling away with head raised proudly to watch my creations float then fade. Many exciting holiday traditions have lost the butterfly-guts excitement they gave me as a little kid, but 10 years of anticipation really juiced up this fireworks experience.

Let me rewind a bit, back to the morning of new year's eve. After the warzone out the window got us out of bed, Jin Chao and I recieved gifts from his mother. Spring Festival is a time for renewal and cleansing, so after some hot tub time and a thorough shower we tried on our presents: a full set of underwear, including boxers and long john top and bottom. I like the tradition. One, it felt great stepping into my new duds after a soak. Two, unlike all the underwear I've bought myself in China, these fit great. I guess moms the world over just have an instinct for these things, which is a little wierd but I'm happy to finally have boxers that don't fit like a thong. I'm now fairly certain that in China, the sizes start at XL and go up from there which makes me an XXXXXL give or take an extra. Maybe there are a lot of little guys in China with a serious size complex driving sales of the ridiculously labelled underwear. I on the other hand am embarrassed to buy a size that back home would fit only Reuben Studdard or a smallish pony.

TV plays a big role on new year's eve. At 8pm we all sat down to catch the beginning of the show. Every big name performer is present, with enough time for them all because it's not over until after 1am. To some extent, a star's popularity can be judged by whether or not they perform that night. I heard every pop song I've been listening to since I got here, along with the distinctive shrieks of the Beijing opera. Most regions of China were represented by an art form unique to that place. Occupying the prime slot leading up to midnight was China's most beloved comedian. He did a skit, like saturday night live. It had everyone around me clutching their stomachs and gasping for air, and even worked a few chuckles out of me as I understood the occasional joke.

I opened this blog with something a bit sentimental, saying holidays are all about people, then I went ahead and wrote about ash piles, fireworks, and TV. I guess what I meant to say is that family and friends are the essence of these major holidays, but the expression varies wildly. A more talented writer might be able to express those human connections at their most basic level, but I'm stuck with anecdotes. I've got one more.

(Side note: The guy next to me in the internet cafe is humming off key with his headphones. It's driving me crazy and I had to tell someone.)

Chinese culture has a lot to do with food and the eating experience. The Chinese New Year is no exception. When we go out to eat it takes an hour to finish our food and we stay four, an exhausting experience for me with casual conversation flying fast and furious around me. I'm used to eating at CET with a group of half Americans and half Chinese, when the natives all slow down and dumb down what they're saying for our benefit. Not so when the ratio is 13:1, Chinese. When they really get going, I feel that headache coming on that I lived with the first two weeks in Harbin. It's where your brain melts from too much Chinese.

On new year's eve, all the family members I've met gathered at Jin Chao's grandparents' house for dinner. That includes Jin Chao's parents and grandparents, three aunts, two uncles, and three cousins. I scored immediate points by readily agreeing to have some baijiu with the uncles. Baijiu literally translates to white alcohol. It's China's favorite hard liquor but I've got no idea why because it tastes like battery acid. One of the tests of manhood around here is a simple question: How much baijiu can you handle? For me, the answer is usually as little as possible because drinking it is like pouring gasoline down your throat and chasing with a match. However, this occasion called for a small sacrafice on my part.

I was actually lulled into a false sense of security because this was a really expensive bottle purchased for the occasion. One would think that such quality might bring an added smoothness or improved flavor, but apparently with baijiu price is directly related to causticity. Nonetheless, I smiled wide, raised my glass with the uncles, and got plenty of laughs when the smile was twisted by the burning in my throat. Drinking here is a constant toasting game of excuses engineered to cause others to consume more alchohol than you do. I'm terrible at this game due to lack of experience and language skills, but at least it's possible to get respect by taking a beating well. Luckily, this family is not very hardcore about drinking so I'm alive to talk about it.

After we finished eating, the talking and laughing continued around the dinner table. Grandpa moved to a chair off to the side. I zoned out a little, as I tend to do when they get into full swing and I'm left to fend for myself. I was jolted out of it when, on a cue I didn't catch and amid peals of laughter, one of the aunts jumped from up from her chair and grabbed a pillow from the couch. She set the pillow on the floor in front of her father and kneeled facing him. Laughing hysterically she raised her arms straight over her head and bent over until her forehead touched the hardwood floor. She repeated the kowtow twice. Her two sisters followed suit. I was stunned to see these middle aged women taking to the floor.

In China respect for elders is deeply rooted. You've probably heard of Confucious, the Chinese pholosopher. I don't want to overstep my knowledge but as far as I can tell, the fundamental thing he did was clearly and succinctly express a rigid system of respect and obedience in relationships; subject to emperor, son to father, wife to husband. This sounded pretty dang good to a lot of emperors, thus Confucious is extremely famous today. Anyway, one of the ways this respect was expressed was through the kowtow, performed to emperors all the time and to fathers/husbands sometimes.

What I saw was the modern version, at least for this family. Jin Chao told me that they hardly ever do it. It's the first time in at least five years. It's not required in any way, more of a joke than anything now. They do it if they're feeling jolly and festive, and I guess my presence helped get them in the mood as we kicked off the Year of the Golden Pig. After the aunts finished, the younger generation including Jin Chao took their turn. There was nothing solemn about it whatsoever, but the old grandpa was obviously touched by the gesture of love and respect from his family as he sat smiling in front of them.

the wierdest food yet

2007-02-09T00:46:00.001-08:00

I've eaten some stuff that really stretched my limits since coming to China. Let's review. There was the dog meat with the drunk guys during the break after summer term. Then there were the cow knees and lamb spine soon after. I don't recall whether I've actually blogged about these next few, but there have at various times been duck brain, chicken head and claw, and cow heart ventricle. But I think this one may take the cake: deep fried tree frog. I'd definitely heard that the Chinese ate frogs, but I was under the impression that amphibian/reptile consumption was limited to the south. Apparently not because I'm about as far north as you get and today at lunch, out of the blue, comes a plate of the little critters.

I've been staying up late and sleeping in, so although they were served at lunch it was my first meal of the day. I stumbled out of bed unsuspecting. Jin Chao had roused me to tell me it was time to eat. For the past few days this has meant eat with his family at their house, but when I went upstairs to the common area the plan was to go eat at a restaraunt run by his cousin's husband. As usual, the host was incredibly hospitable, showing us plates of possible foods to eat and having us point at the ones we wanted fried up. I picked an innocuous plate of snow peas, and Jin Chao and Xu Chen's choices were equally mild. This of course only lulled me further into my unsuspecting state.

We were most of the way through our meal when they came out. I had been enjoying my peas, along with other standard dishes like fried eggs and pork ribs. The eating was punctuated by toasts from our small beer glasses as many Chinese meals are. When the plate appeared, I first thought they were small birds similar to those I'd seen a few days before. Birds and frogs may be fairly closely related in an evolutionary sense, but when they come crispy deep fried with the host smiling "dig in!" there's a big difference. Ignoring the obvious, here's a pertinent distinction: you're not supposed to eat the bird, you're supposed to eat the bird meat. I learned today that you're supposed to eat the frog.

I knew I had to act fast before I thought too much about it, so I dug right in as soon as I was absolutely clear that you eat the whole thing. I didn't want to do anything unnecessarily disgusting. Xu Chen did have time to remind me that only 10 minutes before, these frogs had been hopping around like crazy in some tub at the back of the kitchen. It must have been a sight because the plate had roughly 20 crispy hoppers. There was no doubt about their current condition, spindly limbs splayed out from a mass of froggy bodies resting at unnatural angles.

As I eat all these wierd things, I'm finding that taste isn't really a factor. Most of it is pretty mild, tastes-like-chicken stuff. The gut wrencher is the textures. Lamb spine grey matter was pasty. Cow knee was like really chewy jello. You might expect a frog to be slimy or gummy, but these weren't. When frogs are alive, they almost look boneless. The dead ones were very bony in the mouth. I'm trying to come up with something to compare it to, and here it is. The bones were a lot like those crunchy little Rold Gold pretzels. As for the rest, my family has a cream cheese and shrimp dip that we eat at holiday parties. It's really a great dish and I hope this doesn't ruin it for anyone. Imagine that dip; soft cream cheese, chewy shrimp, and a little cocktail sauce. Forget about the taste, and putting a frog in your mouth is like munching on pretzels and shrimp dip.

I got the frog down in two big mouthfuls. It wasn't bad I suppose, but I didn't go rushing for another. Sensing my reluctance, the host began a lecture about the high nutrition content, especially in the females. Apparently frog ovaries are preventative of all kinds of diseases. His graphic and passionate explaination didn't convince me. At least I ate one of the things though, and I believe it marks a new level of my adventures in dining - tree frog and beer for breakfast.

There's a couple more pictures of the frogs in this album: http://picasaweb.google.com/weiterong/Yichun

General update from my home away from home

2007-02-07T08:23:00.000-08:00

I haven't been as good about writing this trip. I regret it now because there's so much to tell, but at least I've got a little time to catch up now that I'm "home". I'm going to start in this post by explaining where I am now, and then as I get around to it I'm going to fill in a few of the more interesting gaps from my really awesome month wandering around China. That's the plan anyway.

Since I've stopped moving around for the winter, it's time for a little perspective on where I actually went. I remember well the days before I was too familiar with the geography of China. Actually right up until I got on the plane to come here, all I had was a vague idea of the location and general shape of the place. The rest was just a black hole. I'm assuming some of you are still in the position I was in back then, so for your sake I'm going to put up a map of China showing the places I've been. Hopefully this way all the random Chinese place names that crop up in future posts will have some frame of reference.

Thick blue lines are my train trips, really thin blue lines are flights, and red dots are places I stopped for a look around. If you want more detail, compare it with a real map of China because it's way too tough to get the place names clear on here.

I know most of you have been reading this for a while, but just as a refresher I'm studying in Harbin, that's way up in the northeast. On this map, it's the red dot that's the second farthest from the top. The northernmost red dot happens to be my current location, my home away from home.

My home away from home belongs to the parents of Jin Chao, my roommate in Harbin. It's been in the works for quite a while now that I'd be spending the spring festival, also known as the Chinese new year, with Jin Chao's family. This happens to be really great for a few reasons.

First, traveling would be really difficult during and around spring festival. It's the most important holiday for the Chinese, something like Thanksgiving and Christmas on the same day. The upshot is, almost everyone in the country packs up their things wherever they happen to be and hop on a train to go home. This happens in the week or two leading up to the big day, February 18th this year (the date floats around depending on the old Chinese calendar). Everyone stays home for a week or more to celebrate the new year, then heads back to wherever they were. With so many people on trains, it becomes extremely difficult to get a ticket and very cramped on the trains. I've heard horror stories that scared me out of even considering it - loooong rides, standing room only, so many people it's impossible even to move to the toilet. Buses are the same. Plane tickets are relatively easy to get due to the cost being too high for your average college student or worker, but that makes them a little on the expensive side for me as well. All this means that I need a place to hunker down during the rush, dubbed "chun yun", or the spring movement, and reported on heavily by the Chinese media.

Second, who wants to be traveling when all the action is happening on a single family level all over China? This stuff is way more interesting than some historical landmark or unique mountain. This is real people doing what they do to celebrate their most important holiday. I'm going to watch ancient traditions mesh with pop culture and local customs. Based on Jin Chao's excited accounts of previous years festivities, we'll be lighting fireworks, watching the new year's countdown TV program featuring China's best entertainers, and making jiaozi to be eaten at midnight.

Third, Jin Chao's family makes wicked good food all the time, not just on the new year. I know that first hand. We were greeted by a real feast when we got here. The table was covered with all the northeastern dishes I've grown to love, each as good or better than any I've eaten before. Amazing. This is my third day here, and all three I've been stuffed with similar fare.

I definitely felt like I'd be imposing by staying here so long, maybe three weeks, but Jin Chao assured me over and over that it would be great to have me. I'm doing what I can to soften the impact; I bought gifts in Yunnan for his parents, and I'm speaking a lot of English with Jin Chao and his cousins. I feel like I'm giving them something valuable with the English, trivial as it may be to me personally. I'm not able to speak it in Harbin with Jin Chao because of the language pledge, which doesn't apply now since we're between semesters. He is a great sport about it while I'm not allowed, but like every other Chinese student he really would like to improve his English. I can take the opportunity of this lengthy stay to even the score a bit. His cousins are the same way. Their parents love sending them to hang out with Jin Chao and I. Foreign English teachers are rare and valuable, and me just hanging out with them is even better. One of Jin Chao's cousins is 17 years old attending a top quality high school of more than 1000 students. The whole place just has one native english speaker, and here I am with just the few of them talking about whatever they want to.

I can't remember what I've written in the past about Jin Chao. He's great. I have a hard time relating to many Chinese people. On bad days I feel like the cultural gap is more like a chasm filled with frustrating misunderstandings, endless questions, and gawking Chinese faces. Jin Chao is a very important bridge over that chasm. There's a tradition in China of hiding true feelings behind a mask, saying one thing while thinking another. This mask can be impenetrable, but it seems Jin Chao never had one or at least takes it off for me. I find him to be wholly Chinese, yet extraordinarily perceptive about Western ideas and attitudes and willing to accept and adapt to them. He is a great listener and an endless source of insights about all things Chinese. We've had some surprisingly deep conversations, both of us (I think) revealing our true thoughts about life in general and the chasm we both recognize. It's a great exchange, neither of us giving up our own roots but always hungry for and respectful of the other's perspective. Perhaps the most important aspect is the willingness to be absolutely frank. Maybe it's an unfair bias, but I feel like a lot of Chinese are uncapable of this type of connection with me as a foreigner. I'm just too...foreign. Jin Chao and I have gotten past that. I guess there's a simple way to describe our relationship. We're friends.

Most of Jin Chao's great qualities extend to the rest of his family. There's a big extended network of uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents who all live near each other and spend a lot of time together. Jin Chao's parents are doing well financially, which makes me feel a lot better about staying here so long. They own and live in a commercial facility which offers a bathhouse, massages, rooms for the night, and meals. His dad also owns a factory producing coal blocks and is a partner in another factory.

I'm staying in one of the rooms with Jin Chao and another friend of ours from Harbin who came to visit for a week or so. After the feast our first night here, we cleaned up in the bathhouse area. I took a shower and spent time in the big soaking tubs. The whole place is separated male/female so everyone was completely naked, including us and some other customers. I was a little taken aback at one the services offered by the bathouse. As I showered I saw a customer lay down on a table in the middle of the room. A thong-clad male attendant produced a special cloth and gave the customer a thorough, cleansing, probably exfoliating rubdown from head to toe. As I finished up in the tub I was encouraged by Jin Chao's father to take advantage of the service myself. In response to my initial reluctance, Jin Chao's dad went on and on about how comfortable and relaxing it would be after so much traveling. I'm sure he was just trying to overcome my politeness, thinking I didn't want to take advantage of his hospotality. I couldn't help chuckling at how far off the mark he was. After my continued rebuttals he gave in to Jin Chao's explaination that us foreigners will say what me mean, and I wasn't just being polite. I'm pretty sure he wasn't convinced though, and never lost that puzzled look. Why wouldn't I want to partake in something so luxuriously relaxing, especially when it was free? It truly was beyond his comprehension; laying naked on a table getting a rubdown from thong-man would be slightly uncomfortable for me. To be honest, it would probably feel great and maybe I should just get over my un-Chinese inhibitions. I'll think it over.

I hate to leave everyone with that story, but I need to wrap this up. I'll try to get back to the internet cafe soon to write about a few of the interesting things that have happened in the last month. Even if I don't, the pictures are up so you can go see them if you're curious. I've started using the google version of online photo posting because the yahoo one was giving me trouble, so now there's two links to photos after each blog post, one for the early photos before my winter break and one for more recent photos. Don't worry, my camera wasn't with me in the bathhouse.

I get sick

2007-02-06T04:55:00.000-08:00

I decided to head out of Xi'an a little earlier than planned. I was feeling vigorous and it felt like a waste to spend too much time in one place. In retrospect maybe this was a bad decision because as soon as I acted on it things started to go slightly wrong. I had decided to head for the Shaolin temple because 1) it's really cool and 2) it's on the way to Shanghai from Xi'an. I needed to be in Shanghai soon to meet my mom flying in from the states. Unfortunately the travel was a little tricky. After boarding the the train, I started to feel a little under the weather. My train got into Zhengzhou at 5am or some ungodly time in the morning, and then I had to hop a 2 hour bus to a smaller town near the temple. From that little place, it was another 30km or so to the area right next to the temple I'd decided to stay, based on my travel book's information. Probably due to my poor, interrupted night's sleep, feeling under the weather turned into a full blown cold/flu something by the time I got off the train. I pushed on.

I got off the bus in the small town at 7am and needed to go that last 30 km. A taxi driver lurking outside the station pounced, claiming there were no buses this time of year because it was the off season. I didn't believe him and pulled out my book to double check. Sure enough, there were supposed to be buses. He insisted, so I decided I'd ask an employee of the station. To my surprise, his claim was backed up. Apparently, no buses. In frustration and feeling crappier and crappier, I climbed into his expensive taxi. The whole ride, he was talking about how he'd never try to cheat me, of course he was telling the truth. He wasn't offended I didn't believe him at first. He liked talking to foreigners. Some Chinese will say one thing and mean another, but he always deals straight with people. As I found later, a big line of BS. I might have caught on early enough to avoid the whole situation if it weren't for my exhaustion.

He took me to a place he said was about 200 meters from the gate to the Shaolin Temple. Just around the next bend. I negotiated for the room with a heater, and was all set with an overpriced room by 8:30am. Originally, I'd planned on going to the temple that day but decided I needed a little nap. I was in bed until 5pm, when I got up freezing cold and feeling sicker but more awake. The heater hadn't worked and it was extremely chilly. I went out to the unheated "lobby" (read: room with a couple tables and chairs) and got some noodles, then decided to take the short walk to the temple. It turned out to be a solid kilometer with many other places to stay between mine and the gate. Fuming but helpless, I imagined their powerful central heating systems and soft, inexpensive beds.

The temple had closed for the day, so I walked back and read for a while. I fell asleep about 9pm with the heater finally working and slept straight through until 9 the next morning. Since my mom's plane ticket said this was to be my last day, I resolved not to waste it despite my head and lungs being stuffed with mucus. This turned out to be a great decision. My luck turned around at that point, except for that mucus hanging around for the next four weeks or so. I'm still hacking up the last of it as I write this.

He took me to a place he said was about 200 meters from the gate to the Shaolin Temple. Just around the next bend. I negotiated for the room with a heater, and was all set with an overpriced room by 8:30am. Originally, I'd planned on going to the temple that day but decided I needed a little nap. I was in bed until 5pm, when I got up freezing cold and feeling sicker but more awake. The heater hadn't worked and it was extremely chilly. I went out to the unheated "lobby" (read: room with a couple tables and chairs) and got some noodles, then decided to take the short walk to the temple. It turned out to be a solid kilometer with many other places to stay between mine and the gate. Fuming but helpless, I imagined their powerful central heating systems and soft, inexpensive beds.

The temple had closed for the day, so I walked back and read for a while. I fell asleep about 9pm with the heater finally working and slept straight through until 9 the next morning. Since my mom's plane ticket said this was to be my last day, I resolved not to waste it despite my head and lungs being stuffed with mucus. This turned out to be a great decision. I had a sweet day at the temple which words wouldn't do well describing. I've been having trouble uploading pictures lately but I'll get them up as soon as I can. My luck turned around at that point, except for that mucus hanging around for the next four weeks or so. I'm still hacking up the last of it as I write this.

a lot of fun on Christmas

2007-01-09T00:36:00.000-08:00

When the staff at my hotel in Xi'an realized I spoke decent Chinese, they were thrilled. The hotel Christmas party was coming up, and they were hoping I could help them out by making some introductions and playing MC for the mostly English speaking crowd. The idea was that my English was better than theirs, so they could tell me what to do and then I could go ahead and translate into reasonably normal English. I told them I'd think about it, but what else did I have to do?

Chinese people can make a big deal out of parties sometimes. The owner of the hotel, dubbed Jim Beam years ago by customers with a sense of humor, is a fairly young Chinese guy with that hyper energy we normally associate with too much coffee. I doubt his thing is coffee since it hasn't caught on so much yet in Xi'an, but maybe he drank enough green tea to match the caffeine levels of the triple shot grande mochas chugged daily by those energetic Americans.

When the night of the party arrived (Christmas Day) Jim was rushing around making last minute preparations. As I walked into the restaraunt I was handed a santa hat and a little party horn that you can blow into to make the most annoying sound in the world. This guy wanted to make us westerners feel like we had a home away from home, and it was a really nice thing for Jim to do. The problem was, he didn't have a great idea about what our christmas expectations were. For myself, it sucked being away from home but figured I'd make the best of it by sitting at the "party" and chatting with other people who could relate to spending Christmas away from home. I wasn't looking for a party party. Lacking this piece of information, Jim had his mind set on some Chinese style merrymaking: a grand introduction followed by a toast, silly party games, followed by song and dance performed by the guests, most of whom didn't even know each other and who were ourselves coming from different countries and cultures in the west. I forsaw a flop if these were his standards, but felt bad bursting his bubble when he had such high hopes.

The first reminder that I was in China, and this wasn't a typical Christmas party, came right after I'd gotten my hat and sat down. A couple of the staff who I'd chatted with the day before came over to talk. They'd all gone out to buy festive gear for the party. On one head I saw a santa hat matching my own, but on the other was something I didn't recognize. "What's that?" I asked, and he pulled the mask down over his face. It was a wrinkly zombie-ape mask, framed by brown fur, plastic mouth frozen in a snarl and Frankenstien stitches protruding from the forhead. I choked back a laugh and told him it was an interesting choice in Christmas gear, and asked him if he'd heard of Halloween. He looked worried and told me "When we went out to buy stuff today, I thought this was a lot of fun. Isn't that what Christmas is all about?" I couldn't argue so I just shrugged and said it wasn't traditional but I didn't think anyone would mind.

Once enough guests were assembled, maybe 20 of us chatting around the small tables in the hotel restaraunt room, Jim Beam called me up front to explain his plan. I would introduce the staff, say a few words, and make a toast to Christmas. The festivities would then be kicked off by a game. "What kind of game?" I asked. He explained. "It's a contest. We get four people up front and give them each a bottle of beer. Whoever finishes first wins." It was my second time that night choking back a laugh. We were going to kick off the Christmas party with a beer chugging contest. After the contest, Jim said he was hoping to get volunteers to perform songs and dances. He asked if I'd be first.

I decided that this was a hilarious idea, but wasn't willing to be Jim's guinea pig. I faithfully relayed Christmas wishes to the guests. The chugging was a hit. Winner: Joe, representing America against the likes of an Albanian college girl who cheated and Jim Beam himself, who in the heat of the moment didn't even start drinking. At the speed of a seasoned Hawaiian bartender, Joe was certainly ready for some stiffer competition. I felt like a winner myself for not participating when Joe complained about his stomach all night. For those of you who don't know, a Chinese bottle of brew is at least two of our American longnecks.

Since I wasn't going to submit myself to Jim's crazy performance idea, I just announced an open mike and was about to sit down, but Jim wasn't done. He cracked a bottle of his namesake, treating everyone to a glass of Jim and coke. Only then was I allowed to sit down and enjoy a nice Christmas evening with Joe and a few new friends (the Viking had already caught his train).

When things wound down, I left the hotel. First, I took a couple of santa hats, found a replica of a terracotta warrior, and snapped a picture to remind myself of a Christmas well spent in Xi'an, China. Then I called home, where thanks to the time difference the Christmas morning festivities were just wrapping up. I got to talk to everyone and hear about the traditions that had limped on in my absence: Christmas eve bonding time for the three (two) of us brothers, wrapping paper blocking the view of the tree in the morning for added suspence, and my personal favorite, the christmas breakfast, coffee cake and sausage muffins. It felt pretty good to hear that my stocking was up and waiting for me no matter where I was. With so much at home, Jim Beam, zombie masks, and beer chugging just can't compete. Next year, I'll be home for Christmas.

Joe and the Viking in Xi'an

2007-01-05T07:21:00.000-08:00

Xi'an wasn't bad. The terracotta warriors were impressive, despite being encased in the we're-expecting-a-billion-tourists-a-day shell of knick knack shops, just like all famous Chinese places. My first night in town, I met Joe and Andreas, two other solo travelers. Joe is a lanky 37 year old bartender from Hawaii with a real free-and-easy, live-it-up outlook on life. After we parted ways, I would have an 'aha' moment. Joe looks exactly like David Carradine, the guy from "Kung Fu" and who also played Bill in "Kill Bill". Joe is the quintessential bartender with his laid back life philosophy and stock one-liners for every situation. The one-liners were so steeped in American pop culture that 80% of the time they went way over the heads of any Europeans present, not to mention the Chinese. Joe was unphased and kept them coming. I learned a couple of new dirty jokes.

Joe called Andreas "the Viking" because he pretty much was one. Andreas is a 28 year old dude from Sweden. He lays pipe in apartments for a living. His hair involves some of the most gnarly dreds I've ever laid eyes on. Andreas is built like a little teapot, short and stout, and huge tats were visible on rock-hard arms poking out the sleeves of his t-shirt. Joe and I were wearing coats, but I guess Vikings don't experience cold in the same way as the rest of us. Andreas was quiet most of the time, but he often had a little smile in one corner of his mouth, like he was thinking about something funny. Judging from his comments later in the evening, that something was probably either dog meat or pornography.

The three of us talked for a while in the restaraunt, then decided to hit the only club mentioned in our travel book, 1+1. Clubs can be fun, and this one would have been fun with the CET crew I'd gone out with a week before in Beijing. It was pretty lame with the three of us. The night was routine for a Chinese club: we stood around, we drank beer at 20 times the street price, we were offered better drinks by the plastered overweight chinese guy with his shirt pulled up and rolled under, exposing his belly and nipples (I'm sure they do this for reasons of comfort, needing ventilation). We accepted the drinks, danced with him a little as he implemented an old standby Chinese groove, the thumbs-up jerky tilt, and got out of there. Only Chinese guys can make white guys look cool on the dance floor.

As we exited, Joe and Andreas were hungry. We stopped at a street vendor and they had stir fried noodles, a big bowl for each of them which got good reviews. The Viking was still hungry. He explained that he'd never eaten dog meat, and felt that this was one of the must-do's in China. Since he couldn't speak Chinese, and I can, he saw an opportunity to eat the stuff without doing an embarrassing pantomime in a restaraunt that may or may not serve dog. The pantomime would go something like this: woof woof, pant pant, stick tongue out, "here fido, come boy!", eating motions. The pantomime would fail regardless of whether or not the restaraunt served dog, because in China dogs don't say 'woof-woof'. According to the Chinese, the sound is 'wang-wang'. Seriously.

I facilitated, and a generous helping of dog stew was prepared for and eaten by the Viking. As we were leaving, we noticed suspicious looking meat items being sold nearby, which indeed turned out to be the male organs of various animals. When I asked, I was told that only the pig and cow were on display, but they could get the chicken ones out of the back if I wanted. When I relayed this to the others, it was the beginning of non-stop references to pornogrophy by the Viking. He was pretty drunk. The juvenile references came out of nowhere, often in response to Joe's comments, and didn't make much sense. They triggered confused silences from Joe and I, which Joe would fill with a bartender-style courtesy laugh.

Joe: yeah, back at home, I spend a lot of hours at the bar. That's my job, I'm used to it.
Viking: you mean back at home you spend lots of hours watching porn?

Joe: hey, this place has a tv, do you think they'd let us put a dvd on?
Viking: yeah, a porn!

All of his happened on the evening of December 23rd. The next day, I knew two guys in all of Xi'an, and these were the guys who I spent most of Christmas Eve with. Nice guys, but not the usual suspects.

halfway there

2006-12-21T23:13:00.000-08:00

Well school's out, Christmas is nigh, and I think that means I'm about halfway through this crazy China thing, 6 months in. All us American CETers spent last weekend in Beijing together reveling in our two days of English. I missed that time last semester because I took off traveling straight from Harbin. It was a really fun time, I mean all of us who'd been friends all semester but almost half friends in a way, because without that english it's just not the same. I think a good way to put it is, personalities get muffled. I was looking at all of these cool people through a screen all semester, and then when the language pledge was lifted we could all of a sudden have these amazing conversations and clear communication, it was beautiful. Add Beijing to the mix, and we had one heck of a final night together. The shuttle to the airport for most of them left at 5:30 Monday morning. Sleep was short for everyone. Myself and probably 5 others didn't rest until the bus left, first at a bar, then dancing, chatting, late run to the 24 hour Micky D's, and then those leaving hopped the bus and those staying finally got some sleep. Ou Kaili, wish you could have made McDonalds with us but we all know you had a valid if unfortunate excuse.

I had an informational interview with Boeing China on Tuesday, so Monday I hit up one of the cheap markets for some new duds. They really hike up the price at first, but I think my bargaining was decent and I came away with some cheap new stuff and was lookin' alright for the interview. The interview went well, the highlight for me being dinner the night before. I ate with my contact at the office, a really nice Chinese guy named Matthew. We'd been in contact by email in English, but at dinner we slipped into speaking Chinese. His English was pretty good, but it just felt more natural to speak Chinese with him, which I never could have done even a month or two ago I think. It's so fun to have landmarks like that and see progress made, makes this whole thing seem more worthwhile.

The rest of the week I've been hanging out mostly with Jordan and Alyssa, a couple of stragglers like me. Movies in the basement of the hostel are free, we found a nice little restaraunt, tying up loose ends for them (last minute christmas presents before they leave the country). Jordan and I went and checked out the Temple of Heaven, one of the big historical sites in Beijing. It was pretty impressive, I've gotta say, boasting the largest round all wooden structure in China...I guess maybe they've got a square one that's bigger, but still pretty cool. I'll try to get the pictures up soon, this internet cafe doesn't do USB.

I'm heading out in a few hours for Xi'an, I'm planning to be there for a week or so, have a nice relaxed week before Mom gets here next Saturday. I'm REALLY looking forward to that, it's going to be so great to see her. Dad's coming a while after that, which will be equally awesome. Not going home for the holidays is a little rough, but at least I get that connection to home wich will be extremely welcome. Well, gotta catch that train, more when I get to Xi'an (the place with the terra cotta warriors, whoo!).

Intervention

2006-11-27T01:41:00.000-08:00

I'm not going to lie, I've got some good friends. If I want to talk, there's an ear listening. If I need help, I just ask. The single nicest thing a friend has ever done for me is throw the best surprise birthday party Pullman has ever seen. Coming back from dinner on my 21st birthday, I pulled the door open to 30 plus friends jumping out from behind the couch and under the table, cake burning like a torch, just like any of the perfect-world perfect-life cliche movies you've seen. I'm a lucky guy and that's all there is to it.

I've got good friends, but my roommate, Jin Chao, has Tony-the-Tiger friends...they're grrrrrrrreeeaaat! They take things to a level totally unknown to the western hemisphere. Jin Chao's friends will stop at nothing to ensure his happiness - even lock him out of his computer, compare his physical and mental condition unfavorably to other students (i.e. call him a lazy fat-ass), and provide a daily schedule to help him shape up.

Let me explain. Jin Chao is what they call a kao yan student, which means he is preparing for the test to enter graduate school. The words "kao yan" are uttered with significance around here. A conversation with a chinese undergraduate will flow along, talk about him, her, this, that, until...

me: "hey, I noticed so-and-so hasn't been around lately"

undergrad: "well duh....so-and-so is a kao yan student"

At the words kao yan, the undergrad will fix his eyes on me, slow his speech, and enunciate. Those words really mean something, but the undergrad is afraid I won't get the full implications. After quite a few conversations like this, I think I understand.

In this country, it's easy to get intimidated by sheer numbers. Word on the street is, getting into grad school is attempted every year by untold numbers of faceless, fanatically hard-working undergrads from all over the country. The odds are not good - I've heard stats like 50, 300, 1000 applicants per available slot. The actual numbers are not important, it's the mystique surrounding the process that strikes fear into those with their sights set on that path, and awe into everyone else. I've had stories like this one delivered to me wide eyed and dead serious: "there are people who prepare for this test by spending 24 hours a day in a room with a table and books, for months. They leave to eat and go to the bathroom. When they get tired, they lay their head down on the book and close their eyes. When they wake up, they keep studying." I have my doubts, but it's plausible. With so many attempting the test, how could there not be people like that? But one thing's for sure, it's not everyone that's taking that path. Jin Chao, for instance.

In describing himself Jin Chao tells me, "My older sister plays the piano. My younger sister plays the violin. I eat as much food as my mom can put in front of me, then go to my grandma's for round two." Jin Chao doesn't group himself with those in China who are super productive, overachieving, model students. That's not to say he's a lazy bum either. After all, he got into the Harbin Institute of Technology, the MIT of China. His major is material science, heavy on chemistry and a real ball-buster even by standards here. But he chalks his past success up to a few spurts of all out effort and a gift for taking tests. Naturally, he's a little worried about the grad school test...it's like a minor league player up to bat for the first time in the majors. How's he going to measure up? He's been studying but it's been in fits and bursts. Everyone agrees that in order to succeed in this test, you need to be organized, get on a regimen of study, eat, exercise, do whatever it is you need as long as it's mostly studying. The toughest part, I think, is the lack of structure. Jin Chao's hardly got any class right now; he's been focused on preparing for this test since September and won't take it until January. How do you keep up your resolve for so long, free from any outside deadlines other than the gargantuan all-encompassing test looming in the far future? As I watched Jin Chao begin sleeping later, watching the occasional afternoon movie, teetering on the brink of ruinous collapse with a couple months to go, I found the answer: Your friends intervene.

I returned to the room a few days ago after class to find Jin Chao slouched shame-faced on his bed recieving a lecture from three of our mutual friends. The only female present was doing the scolding. "...not over? The movie's not over? You didn't get up until 9 o'clock this morning, I can't believe you even turned on your computer. Look, here comes Andy, back from studying I'll bet...he's so hard-working! And his ass is way smaller than yours too!" I couldn't believe my earse. One of the guys chipped in. "Jin Chao, we're changing the password on your computer. No more movies, no more games until the test is over." The scene reminded me of the reality TV show I've seen a couple of times, Intervention, where the family and friends of a drug abuser corner them and get them to seek professional help.

In an American intervention, the interveners focus on the way that the addiction has negatvely affected the lives of others. They are coached by a professional beforehand so as not to cause unnecessary psychological pain to the drug/alcohol abuser. Upon completion, the abuser feels remorse for hurting his loved ones and agrees to go to the rehab clinic on his own. In a Chinese intervention, there are no holds barred. Our friends ripped Jin Chao a new one as I watched in sympathetic pain. They didn't ask, they told. They didn't say he was forgetting the important things like his future and his health, they said he was wasting his time and had a fat ass. They asked me for confirmation a few times, but I put up my hands and shook my head...I didn't want to get involved in that mess. I figured as soon as the others were gone, Jin Chao would be really pissed off. I thought, at the very least, he would rebel against their too-specific orders. We have a schedule posted on our wall now, detailing his studying, eating, and sleeping times and locations.

It turns out he isn't. For the two days since the intervention, he's followed orders to the letter. I won't bore you with the details, but the schedule involves 14 hours per day of studying with the remainder reserved for eating, sleeping, and the commute to the library. Despite the low blow about the big butt, there's no time for exercise. I've talked to him about the intervention, and he seems genuinely ok with the whole thing. He says he's grateful to have friends who care about him so much. I guess I can understand it. He was feeling guilty about not doing it this way all along, and this was just the arm-twist he needed. Plus, that's probably the way his parents dealt with him until a few years ago, unlike the "learn from your own mistakes" American method I'm used to. That doesn't change the fact that if it happened to me, I'd be pissed off and watching movies all day, not talking to my 3 former friends.

chinese high

2006-11-21T18:56:00.000-08:00

Back in high school calculus, I learned what a math high was. I'd been getting them for years, it just took a class with Mr. Johnson to put a name to that feeling. A math high is the sensation you get when a difficult concept becomes crystal clear in a rush of comprehension. Or when you perform an entire page of labor intensive algebraic simplification, plug in the numbers, and boom! matches with the back of the book. It's that "oooooohhh" that swells up from your toes to your chest, after a long period of eye squinting and head scratching. It's the feeling that makes you want to come back for more.

Today I had a Chinese high. I've had them before, of course, but it's been a while. For a long time now, I've been just cruising; improving, sure, but to achieve that status of chinese high demands a special situation, a great leap forward, a seemingly insurmountable obstacle cleared all at once . In our business chinese class, we were discussing the international competitiveness of chinese products. Or more specifically, the the threats that the products now face, both from within China and without. The point came up that the threats could be divided into two categories, subjective and objective. This wasn't in the textbook, and the words subjective and objective were new. The thing is, even using english, the distinction is not an easy one to make.

As soon as the words were brought up, and we all figured out what they meant, I thought oh no, here comes yet another frustrating conversation on a topic which our chinese is not ready to handle. We're going to fumble around for a while, clumsily apply the concepts of subjectivity and objectivity to this situation, whoever gets it now will also get it when we're done, whoever doesn't get it now will still be confused. There will be no exchange of ideas, the only gains will be individual and come through a thought process inside each person's head. But lo and behold, we considered, we discussed, we understood! The adjectives were sufficient! It may sound nerdy and trivial but hey, that's what we do here; and until my next math class, that's where I'll be getting my highs.

the Chinese inquisition and modern torture techniques

2006-10-30T02:32:00.000-08:00

The boat ride was an inquisition directed at Jordan and I, set on the deck of the ship with coal flakes from the smokestack raining down around us all. The ship was big, bigger than any of the ferries I've taken in the past around Washington, and we were crammed into fairly small seats in the bowls of the boat. Luckily the weather was nice, so we abandoned the dark stuffy insides of the boat and took to the deck. We were planning on relaxing it was impossible. There is nothing relaxing about a throng of Chinese faces throwing endless questions at you...you're foreign and you can talk?...where are you from?...America is super developed, right?...are you used to the food yet?...what do Americans think of us? At that point the new people show up and it's back to, you're foreign and you can talk? It was a battle to pick out a single question from the babbling crowd, since they were talkign amongst themselves and at us all at once. Then, if we were lucky, they were speaking clearly with a decently standard accent using the vocabulary words we knew. We endured the barrage for at least a few hours, and I don't think the Chinese language has exhausted me so much since my first few weeks of classes. There were a few passengers that were with us the whole time, and by the end of it they were laughing out loud when someone new would come by and be all surprised we could talk and re-ask the basic questions. They were realizing how they themselves had come off to us a few hours before.

After a night in an extremely sketchy room in Yantai (based on a hand gesture and suggestive look made at one point, I'm pretty sure the guy at the front desk thought that Jordan and I were renting the room for purposes other than sleeping) we made the four hour bus ride to Qingdao. We found ourselves in the back of a small bus with our knees held skyward by the seat back in front of us, essentially an upright fetal position. I used those four hours to think about the mechanics of that posture, and came up with this: In a normal sitting position, the upper legs are parallel with the ground and seat bottom, thus distributing force evenly across the buttocks and perhaps even thigh region. Pressure is force divided by surface area, so this scenario prevents excessive pressure in any single region. In the back of the bus, force was increased by the weight of my legs hanging above the seat instead of parallel with it. Surface area was decreased, reduced to only the rear-most bony region of the buttocks. The seat cushion was mostly nice and fluffy, but had a well-defined valley in the exact spot my butt came in contact with the seat. I guess a few previous passengers had the same problem I did. After estimating values and dividing Newtons by meters squared for a few hours, I decided to be more careful choosing a seat next time.

Dalian

2006-10-22T09:22:00.000-07:00

Oh baby, it felt good to get on the train and leave that last test behind. I never realize I'm feeling stress until it's gone and the weight lifts.

This trip's not going to be the same as the last. For one, the destinations - Dalian and Qingdao, both coastal cities, both modern, are totally different than the countryside and small towns I visited in northern Heilongjiang and Inner Mongolia. Plus, having a buddy along will be nice. Jordan's an experienced world traveler, veteran of nights spent in European sheep fields and torturous bus rides around Latin America. The important thing is, someone will be here to watch the bags while I use the nasty bathrooms.

So much to tell, not enough time. The train to Dalian was good, we took the slow train starting Friday evening and arriving Saturday morning. We stayed up late talking and nursing big bottles of Harbin beer bought just before hopping in the taxi to the train station. For some reason, everyone else on the train decided to go to bed at 10:00. This was new, the other trains I've been on have had lots of activity until late, but this time Jordan and I were the only talkers. We switched to truly inaudible whispering after one sleeper told us "itsa tima for sreeping, preasa be quieta". That didn't stop the large, motherly attendant from telling us later to "finish our drinks and go to bed" (in chinese, thus no accent). Man, it's been a while since I heard that one used seriously on me.

In Dalian we were immediately accosted by the 'travel agents' haunting the arrival area. We succumbed only after we realized that Dalian might not have the ridiculously cheap, low quality lodging that pervaded the places I'd previously visited. Luckily, it's the off season right now, so we were able to negotiate. Final result was 40 kuai per person. That's a little over $5 American, not bad at all for a room on a par with Motel 6, but it still hurt a little for me comparing with my record low of 5 kuai a night.

We spent Saturday wandering the city center, checking out the parks and shops and stuff. The highlight was finding this artist hidden on the second floor of some random shopping building we walked into. He was there painting, and his work was all around him, all kinds of stuff and all really cool, but especially the tiger drawings. As I watched, he was working on a tiger, his brush tip separated into two prongs and making lots of short, precise strokes for the fur. Jordan and I looked around, talked to him a little and checked out his stuff. He produced a little promotional booklet proclaiming him to be the #1 tiger artist in all of China. Looking around at tiger drawings marked at 12,000 kuai, we couldn't contradict him. He told us he didn't care about money, we were his friends, and ended up giving us some of his smaller stuff cheap. After we bought a few little things, he whipped out his brush and painted up a couple fresh ones, which he rolled up in newspapers and gave us for free. Typical Chinese friendliness, but not so typical in someone selling stuff.

I knew Dalian has a lot of companies from the west, so I was surprised but not to the point of disbelief when I saw "The Olive Garden" staring at me in big letters from the side of a building. Dreaming of fetuccini alfredo we investigated, only to find that it was an italian restaraunt but the name was coincidental. The owners seemed genuinely unaware of their counterpart in the states, but I'm a little suspicious considering all the extra business that name will bring from hungry westerners. To top it off, the restaraunt wasn't even open, just in the final stages of construction and set for the grand opening in a week or few. We were invited in anyway, and accosted by a couple of waiters-to-be eager to practice their English. We obliged for a few minutes, chatting about the basics like where they'd studied, where we were from, etc. The one I was talking with was relatively young, maybe late teens, and really nervous to be speaking English. His voice trembled and his smile was pasted on, but his English wasn't bad and we had good information exchange. I shook his hand goodbye and it was trembling with nervous excitement. As Jordan and I rounded the corner of the building we heard a high pitched "yeeeaaah"! echo behind us. I smiled at the ecstasy in that sound. Our backs were turned, but I imagined him hopping up and down and pumping a fist. The sound was a pure expression of the feeling I've had a few times myself studying Chinese, but I don't think I've ever done such a good job of translating what I was feeling into a sound.

The weather Saturday was really warm. I had to peel off my sweatshirt as we walked around, making me feel ridiculously overpacked knowing I had yet another outer layer in store back at the hotel. That all changed today, Sunday, when we woke up to see that the temperature had dropped and it had rained in the night. We'd already planned to see Gold Pebble Beach, and we're not ones to be put off by a little rain. Saturday, we'd been told go by way of "qinggai" (I think), a word we didn't understand. It was a puzzle figuring out what the word meant: we knew it wasn't bus, train, subway, car, etc. At first we guessed trolley, becuase we'd seen those headed around the city, but then realized that the place we were going was 60 kilometers north. I've never heard of a trolley going that far.

It turned out to be an LRT, which I think must stand for light rail transit. Pretty much an express train. That possibility had crossed our minds, but we'd ruled it out because we figured those 60km between the city center and the beach wouldn't be very developed. Turns out we were way off. Dalian's city center is really impressive, lots of shiny new skyscrapers with interesting designs. We'd assumed from there it would all gradually scale down, but as we rode the LRT we hit another little group of high rise buildings, almost as big as the first. Following, we saw a sign seeing that we were entering the "development district", which turned out to have yet another modern neighborhood. Between these centers, there were empty areas, but it all looked like it was in the process of massive growth.

The beach was deserted as the wind got stronger and chillier. Today, I was feeling pretty good in my wind-blocking outer shell. I'd just thrown it in my bag at the hotel, not realizing that the weather would get so nasty, but Jordan hadn't been so lucky and was stuck in a light jacket. We weren't willing to dish out the cash required for the multitude of random activities advertised in the guidebook: cross-country motorcycling, hunting in the woods, amusement park. We settled for a chilly hike down the clean beach, covered by gravel that's as close to gold as a rock's going to get. No false advertising there. Reminders of enormous crowds were all there, big permanent shelters on the beach, restaraunts lining the road opposite, but today it was empty. We passes a single group of Chinese people our age huddled together cooking kebabs, maybe the equivalent of a BBQ in the states. After snapping a few pictures of the scenery, we decided the hotel room was sounding like a pretty good spot to spend the rest of the day.

the fashion show

2006-10-19T07:21:00.000-07:00

Last week I walked the runway in a roomfull of Chinese students eager to get an eyeful of foreign skin. Twice. A bunch of us in the CET program got roped into performing at this welcome night for the new students in the university. It was supposedly a "fashion show" but we just grabbed clothes out of each other's closets and called it good. For one, we had no designers handy to whip up a creative yet cohesive line in under a week, and two, we all knew they were basically just interested in what was walking around inside the clothes.

Sure enough, we were a success at the welcome night. Our act followed an off key rendition of a chinese pop song by a timid, motionless male backed up by two female dancers, and a classical sounding tune on a traditional chinese stringed instrument. I guess, comparatively speaking, the audience had good reason to be interested by caucasians in swimsuits, all hints of self-consciousness burned away years ago by a strict regimen of confidence builders and college crazyness in America. Our strutting music might have been blaring from the distorted speakers of a cheap boombox, possibly bought downtown at Walmart, but at least it had a nice heavy beat that contrasted with the crooning of Mr. Timid and a tune by the Chinese Mozart. I guess everyone missed the fact that unlike all other acts of the evening, ours required no skill whatsoever.

They liked us so much that we recieved an invitation for an encore performance a few days later, at the culminating event of the Harbin Institute of Technology "boy's week" . Essentially, it was a Mr. University competition. We weren't actually competing for the title, like everyone else, just a side act for entertainment only. The audience was bigger this time, maybe a few hundred, and we really got the third floor of the cafeteria hopping. As I flaunted it down the aisle in the bare feet required by our "beachwear" theme, I tried to forget the numerous unsanitary situations I'd seen while eating lunch in that same room. Unfortunatly, I was constantly reminded by the way the soles of my feet were semi-glued to the floor with every step.

Check out the festivities in this photo from the second time through. Anyone who forgot what I look like, I'm the third from the right. The photo is directly off the university website, check out the original here if you want - http://today.hit.edu.cn/2006/10-19/10131500.htm. The two most risque performers, clad only in skin-tight underpants, were unfortunately left of of this picture. Either they were too far left in the line for the camera to handle, or the Chinese censors are at work. All you Cougs out there, look closely at my chest area. You already were? Good. Then you noticed the WSU Lanyard brought straight from the bookie to China, faithfully carrying my keys all year long. Go Cougs!

It happened on the way to see tigers

2006-10-05T15:16:00.000-07:00

Ah, the Manchurian Tiger Park, it sounds so magical I can hardly believe it took me four months to drag myself down for a look. It's right in Harbin, after all.

The park did not disappoint. But I think I'll start by describing the drive down to the park, because I've been waiting quite a while for an excuse to really rip into the drivers and traffic situation here in Harbin.

Somehow I always get stuck in the taxi with the craziest driver. When we went out to the Yes club a few weeks ago, ours was the car that arrived first...due to our barreling wrong-ways down a one way street in a clever "shortcut". My tiger park taxi was one of four or so filled with us CETers headed to the park. True to form, my taxi started in the rear but quickly took the lead by recklessly weaving through busy highway traffic. Hand clamped to the door handle and right foot pumping the break that doesn't exist in the back seat, I endured the maneuvers by telling myself this is how everyone drives in Harbin. That was until the collision with the bus.

There have been so many close calls, I'm really surprised it took until now to get into an accident here. And it wasn't serious in the least, but more of a testimony that completely ignoring all traffic regulations does have consequenses, something I was starting to doubt after getting away unscathed for four months. We were in the far right lane with a bus to our left. As the bus began it's right turn onto the traffic circle, the taxi in front of us scooted through the narrowing gap. Following one of the fundamental traffic rules in Harbin - if there's room for one, there's room for more - our driver followed suit only to slam on the brakes when he realized that in fact there was no room. As we sat motionless, the bus' right hand turn brought its rear end closer and closer to our front left bumper, finally clipping it with loud "pop". The bus immediately stopped and both its driver and ours got out, launching immediately into a shouting match. I assumed the police might get called, or perhaps insurance information exchanged. We all got out, thinking of finding a new cab. But, the driver quickly waved us back in, saying it was all settled.

Since, in my view, the fault lay with our driver, I assumed he might be a little miffed about the situation. On the contrary. It turns out the bus driver had given him 100 kuai in order to settle the issue. No insurance, no messing around, just shouting followed by a cash exchange of less than $15 american dollars to settle the issue. The money was to fix the small piece of front bumper that had been chipped off. The driver claimed it would take at least a few hundred kuai to fix, but I suspect that chipped bumper may never be repaired.

The rest of the trip in a nutshell

2006-10-01T03:30:00.000-07:00

So I haven't written anything for a long time, ever since I got back to Harbin. Sorry for the sudden stoppage. I just now finished up what I'd been writing before, so you can read about what happened at the yurt.

Time is short, new stuff happens every day, but I need to finish up the travel story just for the sake of finishing. Here's the short version.

After going to the yurt, I left for the next town over called Dongqi, east flag. I stayed for four days in order to see the pretty famous horse race that happens there once a year. The days leading up to the race were super relaxed. I ate something that didn't sit well once, and ended up staying in my room all the next day. I checked out a buddhist temple and hung out with the owner of my ludian, this one much better than the last crazy one. He was a national level wrestler for 8 years before going to school and becoming a vet, coming back to Dongqi, getting married and having a daughter. I spent quite a bit of time with him and I got along better with him than a lot of the other people I'd met.

We checked out a traveling performing group one night, the "Shao lin" something or other, they did little acrobatic stunts, contortionism, and other stuff that looked like it really hurt. One guy, the worst, took metal pins and pierced the skin on each of his forearms. Then he hung buckets of water from each of the pins, picked them up, and swung them around in circles.

I missed seeing the horse race because my ride never showed up - understandably, since it started at 4:00am. I showed up right afterward, and got to see the horses all lathered up. They were tiny horses, but awesome for endurance. The fastest one finished 100 kilometers in 3 hours 40 minutes. I'm no expert but that seems pretty fast to me. The mongolians had kids riding the horses to make them faster, and I have to say I was as impressed with that as with the horses themselves. The winning horse had a kid riding who looked about 1o years old, he was so small. I guess he was actually 14, but those are some tough kids.

After Dongqi I pretty much headed back to Harbin. I took a bus, stayed the night in Aershan, then from there a train to Daqing. Daqing is famous as the main oilfield in China, at one time providing 2/3 of China's oil. I guess a lot of it's gone now, but there are still a ton of those giant machines that look like teeter totters pumping oil all over the city, right in among the buildings sometimes. Most are bright yellow and definitely give the city its own unique feel.

Dongbei - a real yurt

2006-08-31T03:33:00.000-07:00

The taxidriver was supposed to pick me up at 9am, but he forgot or slept in or something. We ended up starting at 10. We were friends, because of dinner the night before and our conversations, but we hadn't talked about price for the day's driving. I didn't think we were close enough friends yet to warrant a day of free driving. When he got there, the taxi also had his brother-in-law (a doctor, I'd met him the night before) and a friend visiting from out of town (who I didn't recognize).

The price he told me was 200 kuai. I think that's pretty standard, it was the same I'd gotten from another driver I'd flagged down randomly the night before and asked just for reference. I wasn't getting the rock bottom, but at least he wasn't trying to screw me. We started by checking out the Kerulen river, famous according to my guides for being the childhood stomping grounds of Ghengis Khan. It was pretty tame, more of a canal or big creek, but there was a block of granite with the name of the river on it so I got a picture.

Next was the big deal, the real authentic yurt that I had been hoping to see. I'd thought the night before that this guy had a friend that lived in one so he could take me there, but it turns out that wasn' t the case. We just started driving out on the highway until we spotted a yurt off in the distance, then started off-roading the low-riding, beater taxi in that direction. The taxi sounded like a coke can with a bb inside as we bounced over the rough ground, but none of the other three in the car seemed to notice.

The grasslands, viewed as a whole, are a sea of pale green fading away into nothing as far as you can see. I could see now that what appeared to be a fairly thick carpet of grass was in fact small clumps semi-dry grass and weeds with plenty of bare dirt filling in the gaps. I was told that the grasslands were even more dry than usual because of a drought that had been going for the last few years. From a distance, a yurt is just a pointy silhouette breaking the monotony of the unchanging horizon. As we came closer, I realized that it was still pretty much a pointy silhouette on the horizon. It blows my mind to think that people can live like that, a speck clinging to the earth with nothing in sight for miles around, the only protection from the elements a 20-foot diameter tent. In addition to the yurt, the residents had set up fence panels to make a round-pen, presumably for horse work, or maybe isolating their sheep at times. Other signs of residence included a cart resting lopsidedly nearby, a pile of dung for fuel, and a unique stove contraption. Be sure to check the pictures because this stuff is cool.

We were greeted by a leathery faced Mongolian guy who was working outside at the stove. A young guy who looked to be about my age was also present. The older guy looked like he'd been living outside for a very long time, the lines on his face deeply set and his body thin and wiry. I have to admit I was intimidated. This guy was not the same as the other Mongolians I'd met, like the taxi driver and his brother in law. They were used to the relatively normal and easy life in town. They did not spend all of their time riding, cooking, and caring for over 1000 head of sheep. I only saw him smile a couple times the whole time we were there. The younger guy was also really intimidating. He often avoided looking at me, but when he did he would stare at me for extended periods, not revealing much in the way of emotion. My friendly smiles and nods were answered by a slight head motion and lipcurl. Or I might have imagined those. He seemed to be sizing me up, and I can only imagine what he must have been thinking. "What's this idiot American doing out here - is his life so easy that he can travel to the other side of the world to stare at us like exhibits in a museum?" "He looks soft...he wouldn't last a day tending the sheep." Who knows, it could have been more benign thoughts, but my own fears of how I was being viewed were reflected in that level stare.

It didn't help that they were speaking Mongolian the whole time. Apparently they can understand some Chinese, but can't really speak it, whereas the Mongolians from town are completely bilingual. Maybe if I'd been able to talk directly to them I could have figured out what they were thinking, but as it was I had to settle for whatever my driver decided to tell me.

I don't remember the guy my age smiling at all, and the older guy only once. That was when I was trying to ride the horse. Without my saying anything to him, the taxi driver spoke with the Mongolian, then said, "do you want to ride his horse?". I eyed the horse uneasily, then asked "how is the horse?". "His horse is amazing!" The taxi driver said with a smile that was a bit mischievous. I wasn't sure what "amazing" meant, but I could guess. This was no kids horse. This was a working horse, used in long days of herding by the tough Mongolians. With reservation, I agreed to give it a try as long as the Mongolian kept holding the lead rope.

The first time I got close, walking slowly with my hand outstretched, the horse shied away abruptly but was quickly calmed by his master. The second time he backed away again, and got a firmer jerk on the rope and an angry word. "I'd better not..." I said, feeling I'd been given a clear sign, but their hand motions indicated to give it another shot. This time I was able to reach the horse, put a hand on the saddle, foot in the stirrup, and hop up. Miraculously, there was only minimal movement on the part of the horse. A photo was quickly snapped, and I began to dismount. I was halfway out of the saddle when the horse made a sudden sideways motion, resulting in my ungraceful dismount and hasty retreat. No harm done, but it was obvious I'd been a little shaken. Apparently that's where Mongolian humor lies because when I looked his way the old Mongolian's weathered face was creased in a big grin.

The inside of the yurt was small but cozy. It had two beds, a small counter unit, a knee high table, several stools, and various photos and other items lining the walls. The walls and roof were framed with wood. The wall frame sections were built just like those collapsible child safety gates, with diagonal rods connected by pins to allow pivoting and shrinkage. The roof was wooden rafter rods every few inches stretching from the top of the wall panels to the roof peak. Heavy canvas was draped over all of this framing, making it invisible from the outside. There was also canvas covering the floor. They can take it apart and put it back together in two hours, pretty amazing when you're talking about your house.

We ate soup with noodles and dried lamb that they had started making as soon as we arrived. Simple, but not bad at all. I didn't get sick from it either, something I was concerned about after seeing the flies covering the food on the counter - check out the picture if you can find it among all the others. I got to watch the older guy roll out the dough and chop it up into long noodles. The taxi driver told me he was doing this specially because we came, normally there's another kind of noodles that's less labor intensive. I felt bad for interrupting their day, but kept being told that's just their culture and it was no big deal.

Seeing the yurt was the most authentic experience I had those two weeks. Even if that's the only thing I'd done the whole time traveling, going would have been worth it.

Location, Location, Location

2006-08-31T02:58:00.000-07:00

I've just thought of something. Before I came to China, I had no concept whatsoever of what was actually inside it. I just had this vague idea of the shape on the map. I'm assuming a lot of you are the same, and I'm sure the place names in my blog are pretty much meaningless. I'm going to try to put some perspective on the situation by throwing a map out there so you can see where I'm actually at.

The red spots are where I stayed at least one night. Check out a bit bigger version of the map here. Once you go there, to enlarge the map, hover your mouse over the picture in one spot until a button appears in the lower right corner of the map. It will have four arrows pointing out towards the corners. Click it and the map should get bigger.

Dongbei - Hailar (lamb spine, cow knee) and Xiqi

2006-08-25T02:00:00.000-07:00

The next morning we got on the train early for Hailar. That's the biggest city in the northern section of Inner Mongolia, so that's where the trains all end up. My eventual goal was Manzhouli, which I'd read about in a travel book as an alternative to the big city destinations. The ride was 12 hours, and you couldn't pre-order sleeper tickets, they had to be upgraded from hard seats once on the train. Lao Gao worked some magic to get one of the guys working at the station to let us onto the platform early, and we coasted into the sleepers ahead of the mad rush on the ticket booth that came minutes later.

I didn't see much of Hailar. We stepped off the train and got a hotel that was right next to the station. We went for a real hotel hoping for showers, and dished out some big money, about $10 each. Seems cheap, but it was 18 times more expensive than the previous night's lodging. The room was luxurious compared to the cheap place, but the showers were a bust with only about couple minutes of hot water. We'd met a couple on the train, a 28-year-old guy who dressed like a pimp (totally normal by standards here) and his wife, a uniquely beautiful woman because of a Russian a few generations back in her family tree. The pimp offered to treat us to dinner, so that night I got to try a couple of new dishes almost as exciting as dog - knee of cow and spinal cord of lamb. I thought the taste of both was unremarkable, but that didn't make them boring.

Cow knee was served in bite sized chunks. It was slippery and gelatinous, deforming under pressure before allowing the teeth to slide through. It was comparable to extremely thick jello, unattainably thick using conventional methods - you have to go straight for the knees to get that stuff. The lamb spine had a little meat clinging to it that required vigorous, up close lip and teeth work to remove, but the real treat was the noodle-like gray matter exposed when the spine was gripped with both hands and snapped in two. Nothing brings out the inner animal like firmly gripping a spinal cord, breaking it like a piece of kindling, and slurping out the marrow.

The next morning Lao Gao and I parted ways when I hopped the 7am train to Manzhouli. The train ride was supposedly three and a half hours, but it was noon before I arrived. Manzhouli was very disappointing, not fitting it's advertised small town billing. I got off the train and walked through once, noting the huge shopping district with tons of Russians who had crossed over. Manzhouli is one of two cities in China which has a railroad connection with Russia. Since Harbin is a big city, Harbin has Russians, and I'll be in Harbin all year, it didn't take long to figure out I wasn't staying long in Manzhouli. When I found the bus station there was a bus to Xin Baer Youqi, or just Xiqi (west flag, pronounced "sheechee"), leaving in 15 minutes. I took it. That's the great thing about traveling alone - total flexibility to change plans and act on impulse.

I knew I'd made the right choice as I watched the hectic city scene melt into the wide open grasslands which are the trademark of Inner Mongolia. We'd only been going for 15 minutes whan a guy staggered to the front of the bus and spoke with the driver. The bus stopped, allowing the guy to stumble outside and urinate about 5 feet from the door. As he made his way back down the aisle, the driver laughed and said loudly, "Next time don't drink so much beer!" Everyone was chuckling as we continued on towards Xiqi.

As I got of the bus I was greeted by a guy advertising a room for the night. That's always my first task when I arrive somewhere new so I went with him. He said 30 kuai, I said 25, and that's what we ended up agreeing to for the night, a little over $3. We also chatted and he seemed nice enough. He was a member of the Mongolian minority group, spoke Mongolian with his wife and Chinese with me. The room was a part of the guy's house, or maybe the guy lived in one of the rooms of his business. I don't really know what to call that kind of situation, but it's common around here. It's definitely not a hotel or motel, maybe closer to a hostel, but that's not it either. Here it's called a ludian, so I'll just use that.

I told him I was interested in going out into the grasslands and checking out the scenery and points of interest, also going to one of the "yurts", a tent-like structure that's been the traditional home of roaming Mongolians since before the time of Ghengis Khan. Today, there are two kinds of yurts: little groupings of them, surrounded by flags, that are for tourists to go see, maybe ride a horse, have a meal, and stay the night; and then the solitary ones you can see out on the horizon as you cruise by on the bus, barely visible, isolated, and the actual homes of Mongolian sheepherders year-round. After a quick discussion about basketball (the Chinese national team was getting creamed, but Yao Ming cool as ever), his son (ultimate dream: America, Harvard University), and my being his first American, my landlord told me about a museum of Mongolian history nearby and also said he could connect me with someone to take me out in the grasslands the next day and help me find what I was looking for. I thanked him and headed for the museum.

Since my Chinese reading comprehension is still basically at the level of "I suck", I asked the guys working in the empty museum if they could give me a quick overview. I was startled when they were reluctant, preferring to slouch and smoke around the doorway. I had this image of people working in museums being passionate intellectuals, eager for the chance to explain their expertise to anyone showing interest, but that was not the case here. One guy grudgingly agreed, muttering "it's ok, it's my job" when I told him I didn't mean to bother him. My tour guide was neither passionate nor knowledgeable, having to carefully examine the signs himself before he could tell me what we were looking at. I saw some cool traditional clothing and tools, learned that this area has camels (cool!), and then when the guide left got out my dictionary and tried to make my way through a story on one of the plaques. It turned out to be about how Ghenghis Khan's 11th-generation-back grandmother rode a horse well, had 5 sons who ended up starting Ghengis Khan's clan, and had Xiqi blood in their veins. I was a little disappointed by the lack of hard facts and historical significance my half hour of dictionary work had yielded.

The first building I passed outside the museum was a gradeschool with a bunch of kids outside playing. I heard them all whispering as I walked by, then one little girl ran up behind me and said in unusually clear English "Hi, what's your name?". I get "Hello" from tons of people, but kids aren't usually so bold, and this one actually made it all the way to "what's your name". I was impressed, so I turned around and said "My name's Andy. What's yours?" She squealed and stammered, so I switched to Chinese and got her English name, Linda. I was her first real life American, and she ran off only to return with a notebook and asked me to write in it. I'd just finished writing my English name, Chinese name, and "American", when all the other kids who'd been standing by so silently were also waving notebooks in my face and yelling excitedly. Feeling like Michael Jordan trying to get into the locker room after his last game, I set my bag down on the sidewalk, took a seat next to it, and started writing the same thing over and over again for about 30 kids. I had Linda snap a picture of the mob. Everyone wanted to be the one to use the camera, but I gave her preference since she'd been the first to speak up.

After the mob died away, Linda and a few others lingered and walked with me. Linda was begging me to come meet her family and eat dinner with them, but I was pretty uneasy about being invited to dinner by a 10 year old. Wouldn't her family think it was awfully strange to have their daughter come home with some white guy? Don't they teach their kids here not to talk to strangers? However, her house ended up being on the way back, her dad outside tinkering with the car, so I stopped and talked. I was soon invited inside for dinner as promised.

This was my first time inside a "normal" Chinese dwelling. The exterior was brick with red adobe style tile roofing. The road outside was dirt, and dirty. Inside, the walls were spiderwebbed with cracks, the floor plan odd, and the space small. This was especially true when I found that there were 4-6 adults and 2-3 kids living there (I'm still a little unclear about who was visiting and who lived there). However, it was clean and the couches were comfortable. I ate scrambled eggs with tomatoes and stir-fried potato strips, simple and tasty. We chatted, and it turned out that Linda's dad was a taxi driver who could take me out to do my activities the next day. They were also part of the Mongolian minority, and he assured me he could take me to a "real" yurt, not one of the fake ones set up for travelers.

Returning to the ludian, I informed the owner that I didn't need his connection after all since I'd made arrangements of my own for the next day. The same guy who'd been so friendly and chatty earlier seemed sullen and put off by this news. He was also slurring a little bit but I couldn't tell if he'd been drinking or it was just Mongolian-accented Chinese. I decided to ignore it and hurried out to an internet cafe. I was gone for several hours, and when I got back my friend had definitely been drinking more. He followed me into my room, sat down with me, and proceeded to "explain" a few things to me. One, in Mongolian culture, all you have is your word, and I'd broken mine (we'd had no agreement, he just offered to connect me with his friend); two, he'd given me the room for 25 kuai because he'd liked me, in spite of the fact that the room next door was going for 50 kuai (then he should have held out for more, right?); and three, he studied some form of kung fu. I didn't recognize the vocabulary on this one, but he was able to get the point across by punching the air several times, with enough emotion behind the punches to make me nervous. I decided that this was not the time to argue technicalities on our "agreement", so I told him I was sorry and stopped talking. For the next 20 minutes or so, he poured his heart out to me. I didn't always understand what he was saying, but also didn't want to antagonize him so I got by with grunts and understanding looks. His tone went from tense and agressive (arm waving, looking around), to explanatory and earnest (scooted closer, rested his hand on my shoulder, eyes locked), to apologetic and pathetic (scooted until our knees were touching, holding my hand). After I was pretty sure he wasn't going to break my face, it was actually interesting to hear this outpouring of his true emotions. Even if the logic wasn't clicking, I was fairly certain these feelings were genuine. I definitely learned a few things. When earlier he'd talked about his son's dream to go to Harvard and how difficult it would be to attain, I had symathized with him and said I hoped it would happen. Now I know he was resentful of me for being American and having opportunities available which for his son were essentially pipe dreams. He was also resentful of me for bargaining for the room when he felt like I had unlimited money from our bountiful America.

When he finally left, I was shaken up. I should have packed my stuff and left right then, but I was just happy he was gone so I stayed the night. The next morning he was apologetic and even tried inviting me to dinner. I got out of there pretty quick, but his apology confirmed that he'd been speaking from the heart the night before. Instead of saying, wow, I really screwed up last night, I don't know what I was thinking, he said "I'm twice your age, I should know better than to get mad at you when your just a kid. You don't understand things yet." Condescension is annoying no matter where you are or who it's from.

Dongbei, the next episode - dog meat and bai jui

2006-08-21T07:21:00.000-07:00

Ok so from Beiji cun, the next place I planned to go was Manzhouli. Like Beiji cun it's on the border with Russia but Manzhouli is in Inner Mongolia, and the railroad actually passes through into Russia there. Unfortunately there was no easy direct train so and I'm actualy still in transit. Here it is so far.

I took the bus back to Mohe county the next day and looked into getting to Manzhouli. It turns out the best way was to bus it south for the first leg to a place called Mangui, where there's a train that will go most of the way to Manzhouli stopping at a place called Hailar. I'd just missed the bus that day so I stayed another night in Mohe, paying for my own dinner for a change. I took it easy and stayed indoors because it ended up raining like crazy. I stayed in the same little room as last time, this time no roommate though. Still only $2.50. I love it.

The next day, I hopped the bus to Mangui. We started off on a paved road, then moved to a dirt one. At first I assumed we were taking a shortcut to the highway, but soon realized that this was the highway. For the Whitakers to compare, the road quality was about like the dirt roads up at the Ranch, but not so twisty. Three and a half hours later we'd arrived in Mangui, but not before I'd made my next friend. I swear, it's an endless stream of these people who think they need to take care of me. This guy is a little better though, we're still traveling together actually. I call him Lao Gao, Lao means old and Gao is his last name. Believe it or not, that's respectful over here. He's about 60 years old, wears glasses, dresses well and like many other Chinese always looks well groomed even though we're traveling. He's from southern China and I think that's why he's a little easier to stomach than my first roommate or the owner of the bus. He doesn't try to make all my decisions for me and he doesn't try to pay for everything, but he does worry about my safety and me getting ripped off for being a foreigner. He's said several times that I'm just a kid, and he needs to look out for me so my parents won't worry.

On the bus to Mangui we'd just happened to sit next to each other. He was also going to Hailar and told me that there was no train until the next morning. We agreed to find a place together in Mangui and split the cost. When we got there he did the looking for the room, and it's a good thing because I broke my record for cheapest lodging yet. 5 kuai for my half of the room, that's like $0.60. Ah, China.

Mangui is a town, bigger than the place I'd come from but still just a speck in the wilderness that is China's Dongbei. I'd say the population was about 10,000, on the same scale as an Ellensburg. The great majority of buildings were delapidated and paintless, resulting in a depressing grey cast to the neighborhood. However, the gardens which abound in all such places in China definitely livened things up with their vibrant greens and yellow sunflower patches sprinkled throughout.

Room booked, I took off to climb the hill with stairs to a pagoda I'd seen from the bus on the way in. It was good excercise and a nice veiw, but the stairs were concrete and the pagoda made of cheap metal plating. The paint was new and fairly bright but obviously would fade before long like many other cheaply built Chinese structures. I also found it ironic and symbolic that the pagoda was almost at the top of the hill, but not quite. The place of honor at the top where the stairs really terminated was the new tv broadcasting tower and accompanying buildings. China just isn't what it was a few thousand years ago.

Later I went to dinner by myself. I picked a little restaraunt randomly, one of many in town. After sitting down and ordering some stew, four guys at another table waved me over to talk. I sat down with them and soon they offered to treat me to dinner, as happens frequently around here. I protested, but as usual it was no use. I didn't realize what they were treating me to until they lifted a chunk of meat out of the pot boiling in the middle of the table (a common way to eat around here), set it on my plate, and said "Don't be polite! Eat!". Seeing the size of the ribs sticking out of the meat I suddenly had a bad feeling. It had been a joke with us Americans all semester. Dog meat! We'd see the signs around, have a chuckle, and avoid them like the plague. Literally, some restaraunts are named "Dog meat restaraunt". This place had a different name, but even before I asked I knew the answer. "Yeah it's dog. The best kind! very tasty! Eat up, our treat!". There's a first time for everything, and after all I'm in China so I shrugged and dug in. I wish I could say it was gross, but actually it was pretty flavorful, distinct from beef or pork but not in a disgusting way. I think they could sense my hesitation from the way I extended my lips fully and nibbled the meat, rather than robustly stuffing the entire rib in my mouth and sucking it clean.

"What's wrong? Don't like it?"

"Oh no, it's just that this is my first time eating dog..."

That's when I felt a warm furry body brush past my legs and saw man's best friend heading for the door. "So is he for dinner tomorrow?" I asked. "Oh no, he's too small." Indicated about 2 feet with his hands. "We eat the BIG ones!", fully extending his arms. This was greeted with a round of hearty laughter, which I joined after a second. The whole situation really was hilarious. "The little ones are just for fun," he continued. I got the picture. "So some are for fun...and some are for dinner?" I asked. "That's right!" he said, and another round of loud laughter. I had definitely learned something new from the people of Mangui. Some dogs are for fun, and some are for dinner.

Their laughter was defintely helped along by their alcohol consumption on the night. Four bottles of Bai jiu, "white alcohol", sat nearly empty on the table. Bai jiu is a staple in China, I'm told especially in the Dongbei area. I tried it once before at a bar, just half a shot or so. The stuff is absolutely ridiculous. I'm not calling myself an expert here, but I've had shots before, some good and some not so good. This stuff is terrible. When I tasted it the first time at the bar, the bartender told me that Dongbei people can drink a whole bottle or more at one sitting and I'd laughed in disbelief as I fought the urge to vomit from my sip. Here was my proof: Four Donbei people, four near empty bottles.

I told them this story, and they laughed and nodded. I'd already told them I wouldn't drink it, so they ordered beer for me (and them once they'd polished off their first bottles). The Chinese drink both bai jiu and beer out of small glasses, I'd say two and a half or three shots worth of liquid. I had my glass of beer, and they had theirs of bai jiu. I had yet to take a drink, so one raised his glass, half full of bai jui. "Gan bei!" he shouted, the order to finish what you've got in your cup. I watched in disbelief as he downed more than a shot of bai jui and slammed his glass down on the table. When I finished, I told him I was amazed by the Donbei abilities. He laughed and got a twinkle in his eye. He refilled my glass, and then filled his own with bai jui, this time to the brim. Again he raised it with a shout of "Gan bei!". My jaw dropped as the bai jui disappeared with one toss of his head. It's difficult to put down so much of any liquid in one lump. It takes me three good gulps to get a glass that size down. This time he had a slight reaction, shaking his head and squeezing a tear from one eye before smiling at me and laughing. at my raised eyebrows.

You'd think these guys were done drinking after all that. At least I did. Two of them had to leave, but two stayed with me as I ate and they continued to drink beer with me. I figured it would be one bottle and done, but oh no. Those two guys matched me glass for glass until I was fairly drunk too. When we were done I'd had about two and a half bottles, one Chinese bottle being two American size bottles. I'm a lightweight, but they don't mess around here.

When I went back to the room I was sharing with Lao Gao, he and the owner of the house were both worried about me even though it was only 8:30. They'd actually gone out looking for me, worried something had happened. We'd had no plans to meet at a particular time, they'd just been...worried. I reassured them with more smiling and shoulder patting than I would have a couple hours before, then fell asleep thinking I had more parents in China than I had since leaving for college. A new set every place I go! Every time it happens, I worry about some con artist doing it just to get me away from my money and passport, and I never really trust anyone until we part ways. So far so good. Ah, China.

Dongbei day #3 - Mushrooms

2006-08-19T00:57:00.000-07:00

The first thing you notice when you go into Beiji cun is the mushrooms. They're outside every building in the process of drying, covering old newspapers, sheets of carboard, whatever happens to be handy for mushroom drying. There's obviously been a lot of work done by the locals to pick so many mushrooms. Asking around, I found out that a half kilogram of dried mushrooms sells for 40 kuai. Evidently, that makes them worth picking because they were everywhere. I remembered on the bus ride up, we had made a stop on the side of the road to pick up a couple of mushroom pickers with baskets overflowing. Apparently the mushrooms can be picked anywhere around Beiji cun, especially in the woods.

The first day there, in that hurried lunch with Ma Jainbo, we had a plate and they were delicious. I think they're Shiitake mushrooms, at least most of them. There are a few different kinds, but the locals called them all the same thing so I'm not sure. Later that day, I looked at the mushrooms drying in the street, looked at the woods surrounding Beiji cun, and decided I wanted to go mushroom picking.

The next day, I hopped on the bus back to Mohe, but this time I would be getting off with the mushroom pickers. The owner of the bus and room I was staying in also went with us to "protect" me, in yet another gesture of hospitality. Hospitality is a good thing, but so is a nice warm blanket until someone's using it to cut of your air supply. I can't seem to go a day here without someone new taking me under their wing, buying me things, accompanying me places, speaking for me, and making suggestions that are difficult to refuse. At times I wish I couldn't speak the language so I'd be free to just smile, nod, and walk away.

However, the mushroom picking was really great. I'd bought a mosquito hat and a cheap pair of shoes on the advice of some of the veteran pickers. The shoes saved my expensive American ones from getting dirty, and in the end the mosquito hat was also a really good idea, for obvious reasons. It was nice just to get out in the woods after being in Harbin for so long. There's nothing like getting a reminder that there's nature outside of all the traffic, classrooms, and tour bus television sets. We had about 4 hours, and just started hiking into the woods from the road. We all had big baskets like I'd seen the day before, and I was soon on the way to filling it. The mushrooms were not too tough to find. I'd walk for a few minutes, scanning the ground, and then find a patch of them usually by a stump or log. There were also red berries that we could eat. I think I should know their English name but I don't. The plants were very short and blanketed the ground in some places. The berres looked like huckleberries or blueberries but they were red, and tart. Not bad.

One section of forest had the most enormous ant hills I've ever seen. I think I've said it before, the woods in this area are a whole lot like the ones in the pacific northwest, a mix of evergreen and deciduous trees and a lot of other familiar sights. The ants were also familiar. I remember the ant hill out behind the pond at the Ranch. When we were little, the cousins all thought it was huge and we'd go out and poke it and run away. I think it really was pretty big, maybe three or four feet tall. Not compared to these Chinese ant hills. The biggest one was over my head, maybe six feet and a few inches, and as big around as it was tall. That was the biggest, but it wasn't the only one. I'd say I saw between ten and fifteen of these enormous things, all over 5 feet tall. That's not to mention the other little guys. Unfortunately, the ant hill section was also the best mushrom section so we ended up staying there quite a while. Let me tell you, it was a little scary to walk, along scanning the ground intently for mushrooms, then look up and see that the huge form in my peripheral vision wasn't a tree at all but a writhing mound of biting insects. They were red ants, the same as we have back home, so at least I knew they weren't going to really attack and kill me like those rainforest ants I've seen on TV. All the same, it wasn't fun to find them crawling from the mushrooms onto my hands, unhappy to have their territory invaded.

By the time the bus came back through and picked us up I'd filled my basket. The others with me had filled their much larger baskets along with their hats and bags. At first I consoled myself by thinking that they were veteran mushroom pickers and just had more experience, but it turns out that it was the bus owner's second time picking and the other woman's third. I guess the more experienced pickers were the ones that had gone right when we'd gone left. I never found out how much they'd picked, and it's a good thing because I'd definitely just be even more humiliated.

That night, which is actually last night, the bus owner treated me and a few others staying in his small hotel to dinner. This is where Chinese and Americans really differ. In America I can see a local making friends with a traveler, maybe treating him to a few beers and a meal or two - maybe - but the guy running your travel services is NEVER going to give you free dinner when he could make a few more bucks. I feel smothered all the time by the hospitality over here, but the generosity is truly awe-inspiring. The dinner he cooked included our fresh mushrooms, and they were even more delicious than the ones I'd eaten the day before.

donbei day #2, part 2

2006-08-18T06:04:00.000-07:00

Continued from previous post...

The first thing when we got into Beiji cun was to check out the river. It's called the Heilongjiang, or Black Dragon River, and it shares its name with this province. It's also the division between Russia and China. Of course there were the usual entrepreneurs lurking at the riverbank, but it wasn't as bad as it could have been. There were only a few guys offering boat rides and a lone reindeer for picture taking purposes. At first it was strange to see a reindeer, but then I remembered that this place is the coldest in China in the winter. After taking a picture with the reindeer, definitely out of place in the heat of summer but couldn't pass it up for 20 cents, we proceeded down to the river and started bargaining for the cheapest boat possible. By the time we hopped in I paid less than $4, down from $8 or so. Now that I've written the US dollar amounts our bargaining looks wimpy, but at the time it felt great to get them down from 60 kuai to 30.

Sitting in the little motor boat, wind whipping across my face, I relaxed. I'd been feeling a little stressed all day by my new friend, the really annoying bus ride, the urgent travel pace, but now all that was gone. I was free to realize the humor and coolness of the moment: I was staring at China and Russia at the same time. I'd randomly had my picture taken with a reindeer. On top of that, when I asked if we could land on the Russia side, just for a second, they said there were spotters in the woods just waiting to catch and shoot people who tried. I was doubtful about the shooting part but it's not good to take chances. I guess people can get a little touchy about national boundaries.

My new friend Ma Jianbo left with the same rushed pace of Chinese travel. He decided to buy me one last meal at 12:20, knowing the bus was leaving at 12:30. Believe it or not, we managed to order and eat rice, a mushroom stir fry, eggs, and a couple big bottles of beer in that time. It wasn't exactly your usual lunch eating pace, but hey you do what circumstances demand. When the bus started pulling out into the street he calmly asked for the bill, then walked outside and waved his wallet wildly at the bus to indicate the situation and make them wait.

As soon as I saw the river and heard it was cleaner than most, I knew I had to take a swim. It's a tradition/challenge in our family to swim in all kinds of situations and water temperatures, and this was definitely too rich to pass up. When we went sailing with Grandpa Fred on the Zodiac, Sam and I dunked in the ocean every day regardless of weather and water temperature. With the Perkins at the base of Mount Stuart, with the cousins in the Yakima and many other places, this tradition had to be introduced to China. I stripped down to my shorts at my room and made the long walk down to the river, bare chest a gleaming white beacon all the way. At the river, I was again met with the mix of chinese travelers and locals peddling boat rides. I asked one of the boat drivers if I could swim and how deep it was, and he said sure, indicating neck level at the end of the dock. The guy he was taking to, from Beijing, seemed really concerned for me, first telling me it was too cold and then asking me if I could swim. Rivers can be dangerous and cold, but I can swim and I could tell this spot was not going to be a problem. It's a big river and it wasn't moving fast. I reassured him, then started walking the plank - literally, since their docks are just single boards resting on posts sticking out 20 feet into the river. The Beijing guy had quited down, but then had second thoughts when I reached the halfway point. He started shouting at me "Don't do it!", adding a level of drama that the situation really didn't deserve. His shouts and my bare white skin had attracted the attention of all assembled, so here I was walking a plank into the Black Dragon River with a man yelling "Don't do it" and a crowd of 40 or 50 Chinese onlookers watching intently. I yelled back at the guy "Don't worry!", then jumped. It's a good thing I decided not to dive because the guy had been wrong about neck level. The water was up to my belly button, and I landed hard because I hadn't been expecting it. Not exactly the graceful entry I'd been hoping for with so many people watching, but I think they'd all just been worried I'd die on impact because as soon as I hit, the guy stopped yelling and there was a smattering of applause along with a collective sigh of relief. I think a lot of Chinese people can't swim, so they're much more afraid of water than I'm used to. I know in America, jumping off of a dock into slow moving water and landing awkwardly gets laughs, not a sigh of relief. You've got to jump off something very high or into something very cold to get any reaction back home.

Later in the evening I went for a walk. Beiji cun is turning into a tourist destination, but it's not too far along and the original community of peasants is still the largest group. I walked away from the street that' the most developed with hotels and immediately was on dirt roads with fences and gardens on both sides. When I stopped to admire some flowers at one fence, an old man emerged and offered me a piece of corn on the cob. I accepted and sat down to talk with him. Our conversation was simple, about how good the corn tasted and how nice his flowers were. He seemed extremely proud of both. His corn really was much better than anything I'd had in Harbin from the street vendors. It was nice just to have a conversation with a random Chinese person, using what I've been working on all summer. After a minute his granddaughter emerged, a little girl about 8 or 9 year old, and I asked her if she knew any english. That's a good way to draw kids out around here because they almost all know a little, and parents are all really proud when I tell them their kid's english is good. She was no exception, and after a little coaxing (she didn't remember how to say hello) I got a "goodbye" out of her. I told her and her grandpa how good her pronunciation was. She told me her Chinese name, I forget it now, and asked me how it translated to English. Of course you can't just translate names, but I asked her if she wanted me to make up an English name for her. She said yes, so I thought about it and settled on Samantha because it sounded a little like her Chinse name. She was super excited and asked me to say it over and over, repeating it every time. It was incrdibly cute hearing this little chinese girl carefully enunciate "Samee-antha", showing the big gap in her front teeth every time. After a while she ran inside and got a pen and paper so I could write it down. Her grandpa was absolutely beaming through all of this. I took several pictures of and with them before moving on. I forgot my camera cord so the pictures and tons more I've been taking will be up on the yahoo album before too long. For anyone who hasn't seen the link, the yahoo album can be reached from the links at the end of every blog post.

The next point of interest on my walk was an older couple pitchforking loose hay from their trailer to their yard. I stopped and watched, thinking this was America not too long ago. I seem to remember Dad telling me about working with loose hay when he was a kid, so when they stopped pitchforking I told them about it. We chatted a little and then I asked permission to take some pictures of them at work. It was beautifully simple, this task that was something out of the past to me but so much a part of their everyday lives.

The last interesting thing on my walk was a couple of kids playing soccer. I stopped to watch and the little boy, I'd say 6 years old, took one look at me and gave me a big karate punch to the stomach. It reminded me of something Scott would do not too long ago, but I don't think he'd be so bold as to try it on a foreigner. Karate punches are good ice-breakers, so I started kicking the ball with them and asking the older girl, 14 years old, about school and soccer. She was playing to pass the time while her goats grazed in the courtyard behind us. That's when I noticed we were standing in the arched entry of the "计划生育中心". That's like "Family Planning Center". I've read that in these rural places, the "Family Planing Center" is more or less an abortion clinic. I was playing soccer and watching goats graze in the courtyard of the local abortion clinic. I'm not absolutely sure that's what it was, and I don't know how to say abortion in Chinese. Even if I did, I wasn't about to ask a couple of kids about it. I did ask the girl if it was a hospital, and she said yes, so that makes me think my suspicions were correct. What a day.

dongbei day #2, part 1

2006-08-17T07:29:00.000-07:00

I think I just found heaven and it's the northernmost point in China. Or maybe it's just traveling around by myself doing whatever I want. I don't know where to start with today so I'm just going to go from waking up because that's the most logical.

Woke up in the nice little room I shared with my new Chinese friend. Smiled when I remembered paying only $2.50 US for it. We got up, and I was again reminded that when a Chinese guy makes a new friend, he makes a new FRIEND. Not only were we accidental roommates, he had bought me dinner, alcohol, my time in the internet bar, breakfast the next morning (VERY tasty baozi, sort of big dumplings, these with beef), and then he decided to accompany me to the smaller Mohe that's the northernmost point in China. Of course, my radar was up because I was thinking, this guy must just want to get me away from my bag, then he and the bag are out of here. I guarded my stuff carefully, but I'll give away the ending - he didn't steal anything - so I don't tarnish his name by continually talking about my secret skeptical thoughts. There, now I can keep talking about him like the typical, welcoming, friendly, and annoying dongbei guy that he is.

So he decided to come with me to Mohe. First, let me say that I think I sorted out the Mohe name confusion. There is a county of Mohe, and the county seat is called Mohe. That's where the train stopped. Then, there used to be like a tiny town of Mohe which was the northernmost settlement in China. The Chinese, ever entrepreneurs, decided to rename the town Beiji cun. That literally means "Extremely northern town". (I hesitate to say "literally" because I know Lu Laoshi is reading this and think, hey that's not THE literal translation). The renaming obviously was for tourist purposes but it confused the crap out of me, more so because I found one map which clearly showed Mohe cun and Beiji cun as two different places. I was thinking all the way here on the bus, wouldn't it be a great joke if the Chinese thought this other place was more convenient to bring all the tourists so they just named it "Extremely northern town" and pretend Mohe cun doesn't exist...luckily the name change was confirmed by some farmers I talked to here, and I'm pretty sure they have no reason to lie.

Let me start that last paragraph again. So he decided to come to Mohe with me. We ate together, went and bought me a map of Heilongjiang province at the bookstore, climbed the little hill in the Mohe county park that had a nice view of the city and pretty flowers. The city is obviously in the process of beautification, like much of the rest of China, but this place was farther along than most. There was a lot of newness, bright colors, and cleanliness, which are all great except they unfailingly mean lots of Chinese tourists. After that it was time to hit the bus station. There was an advertised hour's ride (a little different than the 4 hours the van guy had told me the day before trying to convince me to use his convenient service) to Beiji cun, which morphed into an hour in a half as we made one stop to wait for people, two stops that I'm unclear about but I think were bathroom breaks, and one stop to pick up some mushroom gatherers with baskets overflowing. Typical. Also typical, but extra annoying, was the TV at the front of our bus. It was playing a common style of Chinese comedy routine, I think it's traditional, which involves very shrill tones of voice at loud volumes. Let me first acknowledge that those performers are amazing and have skill I'll never match. Then, let me say they're REALLY annoying, especially when the volume is WAY too loud and the bus is passing through some of the most beautiful countryside I've seen yet. Nearly all eyes, and ALL ears, were trained on the television, when obviously the thing to do was soak up the nature as well as can be done from the wrong side of a moving bus. My opinion of my new friend - by the way his name is Ma Jianbo - improved when I noticed that he was one of the few watching the scenery go by instead of the scrunched up face of the shrieking comedian.

The situation improved as soon as we got to Beiji cun. I found out I'd be able to lose my new friend - he ended up being a good guy but still annoying - after only a few hours. He still had business to attend to in Mohe county, so he wanted to take the usual route of Chinese travel -as fast and efficient as possible.

Time out for an example from yesterday. When I got off the train at Mohe, there was another guy with me in the van to Mohe. He was traveling and was excited by the prospect that I might want to split the cost of the van to Mohe (which I ended up deciding against, thankfully). At first I was undecided, so I accompanied him to the park. He was fat and sweating a little as he quickly disembarked and we strolled quickly together through the nice but not atypical wooded area. I was taking it easy, enjoying our chat about where I was studying, his teaching job, when he stopped and asked a group of walkers, "is the rest of this park the same as this?". When they said yes, he told me, ah, we've seen it, let's go. No point walking in a park when you already know what it's probably going to look like. That prompted a discussion of why he was in a hurry. Turns out he only had a few days off from his job and he was doing a little "power travel" - my words, obviously - and getting in as many sights as possible. When I made the decision not to go to Beiji cun in the van and the persuasive energies of the driver were turned to the more difficult task of convincing the other guy alone to pay the full price, I saw him agonizing over the decision. He ran a hand over his balding head and scrunched up his face with the pain of deciding between being thrifty and cramming one more sight into his short trip (he didn't have time to take the bus the next day). Thriftyness and fast travel, 2 of the most important qualities of the Chinese. How could he possibly make that decision? I never found out because I was already walking away to find a room for the night, the comfortable weight of my backpack a nice change from the weight of stress and urgency heavy in their bickering and the man's sweating face.

Time in, back to today. Thankfully, my new friend also wanted to take this route by taking the bus back to Mohe the same day he got here. That meant a couple hours of urgent efficient travel with him, then I would be left to my own devices for the rest of the day.

And the internet bar is closing, so to be continued, or not if tomorrow's adventures are better than today's...dang, I didn't even get to the good parts.

dongbei day #1

2006-08-16T07:01:00.000-07:00

Wow I don' t even know where to start. I wrote quite a bit in my journal on the train, I'm going to put it on here eventually but right now I don't have it with me so I'll just have to start with after I got here.

I stepped off the train and asked someone where I could buy a bus ticket. I'd arrived in Mohe, but this still wasn't the Mohe I was looking for, the northernmost spot in China. Actually, I still don't understand the distinction...I think this must be like the county of Mohe (they all say this is "Mohe xian" but I don't really know what "xian" means), and then there's a smaller place also called Mohe. It just so happens that the guy I asked was ferrying people from the train station to the town center in a van for 2 kaui, so I hopped in. He took me and a few other people to the park. I explained my situation and he offered to take me to the other Mohe, he called it "Mohe cun" or "Beiji cun", and cun has something to do with farms and the countryside, so I assume this place is going to be more rural. He was going to take me and another guy there for 150 kuai, 75 each, but I decided to wait for tomorrow and the bus because that'll be cheaper. Even though he said it'll take 4 hours I'm not in a hurry. I'm really glad I decided to wait because tonight's been a blast.

From the park, I started to wander. Mohe, this Mohe, is surprisingly well developed. It's very clean, and all the buildings are modern. Apparently I came at a time when there's convention or something in town because the first two places I checked at didn' have any rooms available. The third place also had no vacancies, but a guy who was already there offered to share his room which had 2 beds. They were really reluctant to let me stay because I'm a foreigner. Around here, the foreigners are supposed to stay at the expensive places and there are penalties for the little hotels if they let foreigners stay there. Luckily, I managed to convince them that the other hotels were booked full, with the help of my new roommate. I ended up paying 20 kuai for the room, 5 kuai more than the starting price to help convince them to let me stay there. It was still insanely cheap, considering the other places would have been anywhere from 1 to a few hundred kuai. My room is small, very clean, and comfortable, with a tv and 2 beds. My roommate is also very cool. We went out to eat together, with him picking up the tab as happens almost every time I eat with chinese people. Somehow, the occasion always calls for treating the foreigner to dinner, and never for the foreigner treating the locals. I have to say, it works out well for me but I feel like once I get the hang of making Chinese let me pay for dinner, I'll have really made some progress understanding the culture. Besides, dinners are super cheap as far as I'm concerned, but sort of expensive for them. I feel like I should be the one to pay some of the time. They're always unwilling to spit the tab evenly like any sane American would do. Right now, I'm sitting in the internet bar with the roommate digesting dumplings, scrambled eggs with pork chunks, nameless green vegetable with garlic, pressed tofu rings, and a couple of huge bottles of beer that always accompany getting treated to dinner. These dongbei people can seriously drink, but it always gets me a little funny.

The roommate is a valve salesman from Harbin. We came in on the same train, but he was in the hard seats and I was in the sleepers. I think he's really tired because the train was 20 hours. I on the other hand am not tired at all, since I was in the sleepers and there's not much to do on a train except sleep, read, and write. I'll just have to go back to the hotel and read for a while. I hear the bus to the real Mohe leaves tomorrow morning at 9:00, so I'll have to rise and shine a little earlier than I'd like. Tomorrow when I get to the real Mohe, I'll have to find an internet bar and transcribe the stuff I wrote on the train...right now, back to the hotel.

long time no blog

2006-08-13T07:26:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's been a while since I've given a real update...there's so much that's been going on there's just no way it's all getting up here. You'll all just have to hunt me down and pick my brain when I get back if you want to know more.

Currently: the semester's over, my computer's broken, tomorrow I'm leaving a tour of China's dongbei, I'm the only American left in the dorm, I got lost jogging today...and that's just what spills out without significant thought.

Testing went well...it was a blur as we realized that the summer was coming to an end and rushed to spend as much time as we could together when we should have been studying for finals. The language pledge cracked and then fell apart in the last few days as we made the decision to actually talk to each other a little before we were never going to see each other again. I think it was a good thing. It hurts a little to break the pledge, but there were some cool people here who I'd been dying to talk to all summer. Next semester will bring a mostly new crop of students who we can renew the pledge with and continue the march of language improvement and expression suppression. Most noteworthy testing moment: adding fractions on the blackboard in front of no less than four teachers, and fairly sure I was doing it wrong because explaining common denominators in Chinese adds a whole new level of difficulty to the process.

I haven't updated the blog in a long time first because I was busy, and then because my computer broke. It had been overheating and shutting down occasionally, as mom and dad know from our interrupted phone calls. Then, it began to shut down by itself a few minutes after I turned it on. Since the warranty just expired, I went online and found that the overheating is a fairly common problem with my laptop model, and some people had success with cleaning the fan. Choosing the optimistic path and ignoring the fact that the problem had moved beyond simple overheating, I chose to open the laptop and clean out the fan. Instead of fixing the problem, when it was back in one piece the screen wouldn't turn on at all, although I hadn't touched any of the connections in that area. I gave up my ambitions of fixing the computer myself and it's now with a buddy of one of the chinese roommates who is supposedly a whiz. He's going to let me know if he can fix it tomorrow, but I'm thinking the heat might have caused irreparable damage to expensive pieces. I know the buddy is legit because of the numerous, very cheap, certainly not legal, brand new computers for sale in his dingy apartment. I walked up the flight of filthy concrete stairs; passed the exposed pipes, unidentifiable odors, and empty living room; entered the office with surprisingly quality furnishings including sofa, desk, chair, and shelving packed with computers; saw the chair occupied by a young, shirtless chinese guy energetically pecking at the keyboard; thought wow, I've finally arrived. This is China, authentic and modern. I have to admit I'm a bit worried about the safety of my computer. I don't doubt the guy is fairly knowledgeable, but it like that's the kind of operation capable of moving suddenly and without notice. At least I know it's been in the same place for a month or so because a fellow CET student bought a computer there earlier this summer.

Tomorrow I leave for my solo tour of northeastern China, or the dongbei as they like to say. Actually I'm just planning on going to a couple places. The first is called Mohe. It's the northernmost city in China and also holds the record for coldest recorded temperature in the country at -52 point something degrees Celsius. I hear that in four or five months it's going to be seeing lot's of -40 degree days with 22 hours of darkness and some spectacular northern lights shows. Unfortunately I'm not hardcore enough to go there under those conditions but I still think it's cool and I want to check it out. Next I'm going to head over to Inner Mongolia, the province next door to Heilongjiang (where I'm at now, and also where Mohe sits). I'm starting at the city called Manzhouli, like Mohe right on the border of Russia. The Mongolian grasslands are supposed to be spectacular and still green at this time of year. I might have to hunt them down because I'm told that they're smaller every year. Supposedly livestock and civilization are imposing on the traditional stomping grounds of the roving Mongolian herders. I've got plenty of time to look around so maybe I'll get lucky and bump into some of them. If I get bored of that before my time's up I might go visit my new roommate Jin Chao in his hometown before I go back to Harbin.

I'm the only one from the program left in Harbin right now. Everyone else took off for Beijing so I went down to the train station and saw them off yesterday evening. The dorm's a lot more quiet without everyone but some of the roommates are still around. I'll probably hang out with them tonight, maybe watch a little chinese tv or read.

The story of getting lost jogging today will have to wait. The outer door of my dorm building is locked at midnight and it's 11:30 now. The guy who sleeps by the door is so grumpy when you have to wake him up...why can't they just be like America and give us keys? I'm still going to have to walk back from the internet cafe (dang computer) so to be continued...

korean drinking game

2006-08-06T23:41:00.000-07:00

Last night I went with a few others to a Korean guy's birthday party. Let me tell you, the Koreans seriously know how to have fun drinking. The game defies description but it involved hand waving and head turning, elimination by rock paper scissors, and 15 guys trash talking in korean before collapsing into laughter. They were really welcoming. There were only 2 white people in the room, me and a girl from the program, and they just taught us how to play and we were part of the gang, yelling and trying to psych the other guy into throwing rock.

Wasted Time

2006-07-27T01:49:00.000-07:00

This is it. It's the day of the final in that big scary math class you've been going to every day this semester. You're nervous, but confident because you've studied all the material presented in class, gone over and over the homework problems, attended the study groups and know the lecture notes by heart. You even read a few sections out of the textbook.

If you were in America, I'd say you were a shoe-in for an A. Heck, with that kind of preparation overkill, you'd have a chance at the big 100% if you don't make any silly mistakes. Too bad this is China, where at least 60% of the material on the test will be above the level of anything covered in class or assigned in the homework. You should have taken note of the other students study habits, like reading more advanced sections of the textbook and getting ahold of extra practice books with more difficult problems. The textbooks just don't make 'em hard enough to meet the testing standards here. You also probably shouldn't have watched those Walker, Texas Ranger re-runs or gone exercising in your spare time. If you really wanted to do well, you should have restricted yourself to sleeping 4 hours a day and bought some tylenol to handle the back pain from studying the other 2o.

Welcome to China's high school's and colleges, where study habits and material covered are driven solely by tests and the need to distinguish the brightest and most diligent students from the rest of the pack. What's that? You say that you'll never need to take limits involving both arccos and the natural logarithm again in your life? Ah, but you forget...practicality and applicability aren't even considered here. If all the material were practical and applicable, every student would have be acing every test. Every student would be the same; there'd be no way to tell who to admit colleges, grad schools, and the big fish: a pass into a cushy American university where A's grow on trees if you study like you did in China.

The problem is supply and demand. The demand for a spot in a decent university is huge; take a look at the population. The spots available are not so numerous. Therefore, the price of one of these spots increases. The price is not measured in money, but time. Time not spent sleeping. Time not spent playing soccer, zoning out, going to the lake, riding your bike, reading a book...whatever. It's all spent studying. I'm a little wierd because I don't mind studying. Usually I feel like I'm learning something I might be able to use later. The other times, I grit my teeth and just do it. In China, there's a lot more teeth grinding going on, a lot more than I'd put up with. Practically speaking, nearly every test problem is unnecessarily complicated. That's not to say you'd never need to do it, just that there's no need to be able to do every single type of brain-melting problem there is.

For example: Say there are 50 kinds of very difficult math problems, the worst of the worst, the kind we don't ever have to worry about in American schools. In order to do well on the Chinese math final, the Chinese student had better know how to do every kind of problem. Say it takes 1 hour for each kind of problem; that's 50 hours studying. I, the American student, don' t do any of this studying; that's 0 hours.

These problems aren't useless. They do solve real world questions. Say I and this Chinese student get work as electrical engineers at the same place, same job. We might have to know how to solve 2 of those kinds of really tough problems. So when I first get this job, I'll be a little behind the Chinese guy. I spend those 2 hours to master the 2 kinds of problems I need to know. That means that practically speaking, the Chinese guy wasted 48 hours of his life.

It's too bad there's so much waste going on. It seems like there must be a better way. Of course the Chinese students realize their situation, but they have no alternative. If they're not willing to put in the 50 hours, then the next guy is, and he'll get the job because his test score was higher. It doesn't matter that in the end there's no difference between the two workers.

Maybe this is the solution: Reduce the test level down to where it is in America. Then, take all the 100%'s and just have a lottery to determine who gets what school. Seems like a good communist method, and if you ask me, China's too confusing right now. It says it's communist, acts capitalist, then the government just does whatever it wants. Better to just go all out one way or the other. At least that would take some of the pressure off the poor kids being forced to study their lives away.

Epitomizing Chinese Efficiency

2006-07-23T23:05:00.000-07:00

Last night at about 10:30 I was walking by the tennis courts. In the darkness, a lone figure trotted through the darkness on the other side of the fence. As he came closer, I heard the sound of rhythmic chanting in time with his jogging. He was Chinese, but the chanting sounded suspiciously Russian. My jaw dropped at the utter efficiency of his time use: simultaneously studying and exercising when most of us are staring at a screen with a bowl of popcorn and a cold beverage. Just think how productive he must be during daylight hours if he has to study and exercise into the night.

That was the first studying exerciser I've seen here, but he epitomized the impression I had of the Chinese before I left for China; the über student, efficient and robotic in actions and results. I had my reasons for this assessment, and still do. When I was at the CTY camps, my unofficial scan of the population showed that it was at least 60% Asian. The first roommate I had was also Asian, and he told me stories about learning his times tables in first and second grade after school, his dad standing over him slapping his wrist for every error.

The story is the same here in China. The Gaokao is the dreaded college entrance exam, literally ruling kids lives from birth until the 'pencils down!' command. The problem is that unlike our poor unimportant SAT, if you do poorly on the Gaokao you're digging ditches or pulling the foul sewage that clogs pipes out of manholes for the rest of your life (both of which I've seen here). If you do anything but ace the Gaokao, your future is in serious jeopardy. Since the university I'm at, HIT, is one of the top 10 in China, every student here certainly aced the Gaokao. This means that every student I'm interacting with was studying for the first 18 years of their life, minus 4-5 hours a night for sleep. I see this, and I think wow; how can we as a country compete with this kind of work ethic? It seems inevitable that before long, these robotic producers will overtake us using their superpower: inhuman tolerance of mind-numbing activities.

But this must have some kind of effect on the personalities of these people. Every hour spent studying is an hour not spent doing something else. What is that "something else" that we do so much of in America? Watch TV? Play with our friends? Fight with our siblings? Do we get intangible benefits from these other activities? I don't have the answer, but that brings me to another point. Fighting, playing, and existing with siblings isn't something the Chinese are doing much of, at least since 1979. That's when Deng Xiaoping implemented the one-child policy, limiting most Chinese families to only one child. Everyone in college here was born after 1979, which means everyone my age and younger are the "only child".

What do we learn from our siblings? I have memories...tempers tested, shoes thrown, bodies pinned to the ground...don't judge me, I was little. Siblings can get under each other's skin like no one else. It may not be fun for the kids, or the parents for that matter, but doesn't that experience have some value? Sometimes adults can get under our skin too, and what if it happens for the first time when you're 20 years old...or 30...or 40? Are shoes going to be thrown, like it happens with kids the first time a temper really gets torqued? Or are the weapons going to be a little more age appropriate?

But it's ok, the Chinese can get the same lessons from playing with their friends, right? So friends aren't quite the same as siblings, as anyone with a big family can attest to, but lessons are still learned. And not all kids here spend their entire childhoods studying, just the one's that go to good colleges and are going to be successful...oops. I guess that means that when this generation comes of age, the college professors, doctors, and scariest of all politicians will be socially underdeveloped, but at least the ditch diggers and sewage muckers might have had a chance at a well-rounded childhood.

I'm no psychologist and I don't know what kind of long-term affects widespread solitary childhood might have on society. I do know it's not the same as back home, and it's not even the same as it was here 30 years ago. Whatever the affects are going to be, China and the world have yet to feel them in full swing. My gut tells me that it's not going to be obvious, but it might make things a little bit...unstable?...to have a president and entire cabinet of politicians who spent their childhoods chained to their desks. Say what you will about Bush, but this is a whole new can of worms.

Don't go getting all scared, because it's probably not going to be that bad. As far as I can tell, all the other students here are fairly normal. Honestly, there's too many cultural differences and the language barrier is still too tangible for me to discern which of the oddities I've encountered could be due to only-childness. For instance, yesterday I met with a Chinese student for lunch. It was the second time we'd met; the first time, he'd randomly approached me on campus hoping to talk to a foreigner and maybe practice his English. Undeterred by my insistence on speaking Chinese, he wanted to meet again so at noon yesterday I was waiting in the lobby to meet this guy. When he showed up, we talked briefly and he introduced me to a friend he had with him. Then, as we were about to head for the cafeteria, he noticed that I was wearing shorts.

"It's cold out. You should wear long pants today," he said. This wasn't too surprising. The Chinese often offer unwanted personal advice for the sake of your health.

"It's ok, I'm used to it. I like the wind, the weather's like this a lot at home," I replied.

"I insist," he said, and indicated his concern with a hand motion. His friend nodded in agreement. "You'll catch cold."

"I'm really not worried about it," I said, starting to get annoyed. I might understand the cultural difference, but it's still annoying to have a guy your age tell you what pants to wear.

"No, no, no...I can't let you do it," he said, and from the level of concern on the two chinese faces, you might have thought they were advising me not to get an abortion or to write my will before I died of cancer.

I changed my pants. What a feeling...the walk of shame. Back up the stairs to the third floor, swapping shorts for jeans so I wouldn't catch cold, and then I had to go back down and have lunch with these guys. Oh where, oh where has my dignity gone; oh where, oh where can it be....

I'm not chalking this episode up to the only child phenomenon. I'm just illustrating that there's a lot to understand about the Chinese, and it's going to be a while before I can categorize the oddities by the multitude of possible cultural/deveolpmental causes. Actually I take that back. There's no way I'll ever do that, and if I met the Ph.D. who said he did, I'd call bullshit before I read his thesis.

If I can't figure out why they are the way they are, I'll have settle for trying to figure out how the Chinese are, period. I guess we'll see how far I can get in the next 11 months.

Learning Chinese

2006-07-22T12:39:00.000-07:00

Learning Chinese in China is like building a house. You're pretty much stuck until you learn to recognize the tools, and how to use them. Once you know how to swing the hammer, you're getting somewhere...then it's the saw, and all of a sudden you can cut a board and stick it to something. The problem with Chinese: there are thousands of tools they like to call characters and grammar patterns, and you're not going anywhere until you can use a lot of them. Maybe you know what a nail looks like, and how to drive the truck, but they're pretty much unrelated, and you aren't going to get the house built driving a truck and holding a nail.

The toughest part about learning Chinese is that there are so many tools. No matter how long you're building, every day you're going to have to learn how to use a new one. Using them really isn't that tough. Everything's nice and simple; it's just that it's...everything. With other languages, I imagine that the tools are a bit more complex. They have more facets, more gadgets and doo-dads. Maybe it takes a little longer to get familiar with each grammatical device. But then, once you've got it figured out, you're off and running. You can use the one tool to do all kinds of things. The grammatical devices of Chinese are a little...different. Aside: I'm not a linguistics expert, and I don't actually know the definition of a grammatical device. All of you up and coming publishers out there, be kind. They don't use verb conjugations, for instance. The phrase we hear is "grammar pattern". What that means is, if you want to say this, then you just put these characters together in this order and you're set. "If you want to say 'I haven't done [verb] for [amount of time]' then you just put these characters around the desired verb and amount of time". Simple right? It really is. But it just keeps coming, and the different patterns don't have a predictable relationship. They're related enough to help you remember them, but not related enough to help you predict new ones. Result: more exhausting blind memorization. Memorization is not that tough by itself, but then water won't hurt you either until you try to drink from Niagra Falls*.

Learning Chinese in China is also like hiking with the Perkins: exhausting and frustrating at first, but eventually rewarding and eye-opening. This analogy is a little confusing, so let me clarify: climbing the mountain is learning Chinese, and the Perkins are China, forcing you to do it at the most intense pace your body can handle. I remember the Mount Stuart hike well. The trail on the valley floor was nice and flat...America. Then, it veered sharply left into a steep vertical slope, and continued straight to the top of the mountain...China + language pledge. There was no way to stop and rest, because the sun was rising and we'd get too hot if we hiked in direct sunlight. Better to go nice and fast without stopping to be more comfortable. Or, in China, no rests because of the language pledge, never mind that my toilet's broken and I don't know how to tell the lady at the desk "it won't flush my turd!"

So I'm not very good at explaining what its like to learn Chinese. Maybe sinking into unusual, disjointed metaphor is not the best way to go about it. Maybe it's just not that easy to explain. Right now, I'm just relieved because I think the slope on the mountain is getting a little more reasonable. After a month plus here at HIT's Dorm 6, I'm starting to see a light. Even though I know it's not the end of the tunnel...it's something. The tools are finally starting to work together in a way that's not totally clumsy and useless.

Progress is a great motivator. Maybe I'm just imagining the light, but I do feel buoyed by the signs I see of how far I've come. I remember in Beijing that first night, we went out to eat at a kabob stand. One of the other students effortlessly asked the vendor how many kabobs would feed the four of us, what kind of meat they were, how much they would cost. I was in awe of the fluidity and confidence in the simple exchange. Last night I went alone to a restaraunt, asked the waiter for something vegetarian without too much oil (menus are another story), and was rewarded with a nice plate of fried vegetables and tasty light dressing. It's not the ultimate expression of language fluency, but that's progress I can taste.

*Thank you William for the firehose metaphor, which morphed and became Niagra Falls in my head before spilling out in this blog entry.

Changbai Shan

2006-07-17T06:44:00.000-07:00

We left Harbin at about 7:30pm by train on Thursday night and arrived in Antu at 5:30am. From there, it was a 3 hour bus ride to Erdao Baihe and the Wangsong Hostel. Since theoretically we'd gotten a good night's sleep on the train, we had a full schedule Friday. We ate breakfast at the hostel, then left for the mountain. The first stop was Tian Chi, the lake in the crater at the top of Changbai Shan. This was the most striking scenery I've seen so far in China, from the waterfall we passed as we hiked up to the lake, to the very steep covered concrete staircase, to the amazing view from above the waterfall and overlooking the lake. For some reason I'm not able to load pictures to the blog right now, so you'll have to go to my album here to see them.

We paused in the grassy field above the waterfall so that Gu Mujun and Li Jiongzong could film part 2 of the kung fu epic that had begun on Maoer Shan. Maybe I forgot to mention that in other post, but it's not that complicated...when we got down from Maoer Shan, the creative energy was flowing. Out came the digital cameras and cheesy kung fu moves, followed by some good editing, superimposed chinese subtitles, and hey! it's a kung fu movie, roughly on a par with Jackie Chan's Police Story 2.

On the way down I paused to snap a photo of the hot springs. There were echoes of Yellowstone, but I don't remember seeing any eggs boiling in those springs...must be the Chinese touch. I asked the man why I should buy one, and he said there were health benefits. When I pressed for specifics, either my Chinese was bad or he was very, very vague.

After lunch it was off to another flatter hike, where we could see the "underground forest" or the waterfall. Unfortunately there was no time to see both, so I went for the waterfall. I know the underground forest sounds cooler, but actually it's not underground, just in a crater. Since we were already in the crater, I figured I wasn't missing too much. The waterfall was worth it. Check out the pictures, but it was sort of underground itself, plunging from ground level down to a lower tier of the forest, disappearing briefly under some rocks. Don't confuse it with the huge waterfall that went down from Tian Chi (the lake) to the valley floor.

After second hike, we went to a spot on the hot springs a little farther down the mountain. There was a building and pool system set up to take advantage of the hot water, so we peeled off our clothes and hopped in. Yes, it was gender segregated, and when I say peel off our clothes I mean all of them. There were showers as well as indoor and outdoor soaking pools. It was raining a little, and after the hike it felt pretty good soaking outside in the steaming water, raindrops hitting our faces punctuating the heat of the pool.

That night at the Wangsong Hostel, I was in a room with 6 guys and no beds. The situation was made slightly more interesting by the fact that we'd all been naked together earlier that day. Instead of beds, the floor was "kang", a sort of slightly soft raised platform that you can heat from underneath in the winter. It wasn't too bad, but I prefer a bed.

The next day we hit Yanji, northeast of Changbai Shan and very close to the North Korean border. The proximity was much more obvious than it had been at Changbai Shan. All the signs were in both Korean and Chinese, unlike Beijing where it's English and Chinese or Harbin where it's mostly just Chinese. I was happy just to walk around and look at stuff, but eventually I was defeated by Ren Feng, who said "All the cities in China are pretty much the same. Let's do something instead of just walking around." We ended up in the pool hall, which was fine because it started to rain anyway.

Dinner was at a Korean barbeque, which meant that they brought out raw meat and vegetables which we cooked ourselves on a sort of frying pan that was in the middle of the table. It was a pretty cool setup. A pan was set up over a bed of coals in a depression in the middle of the table. Overhead a fume hood took in the heat and smoke. Instead of cooking in that pan, some water went in and then a lid over that. I say lid, but it was the lid that we cooked on using the steam from the water in the pan. We wrapped pork, beef, squid, mushrooms, carrots, and cucumber up in big lettuce leaves and stuffed the whole mess down with whatever the sauce was...I can't describe it, except that it tasted Korean. It was tasty, but when all's said and done I prefer the cooks to do the cooking when I go out to eat.

The train left that night for Harbin, so we got back Sunday morning and had the day to recover before classes...hardly enough after that kind of nonstop action.

Hat Mountain

2006-07-12T11:29:00.000-07:00

The third weekend's scheduled activity was going to a restaraunt with food from the province of Xinjiang. That's as far west as China gets, so the food's a mix of Chinese and Middle-eastern styles.

Food is fun, but for a little more excitement Gu Mujun arranged some mountin climbing. Saturday morning 10 of us hopped on a bus and went down to Mao er Shan, which I think means Hat Mountain. I'd say the mountain's height was comparable with the ridge, for those of you from Ellensburg. The defining characteristic of Mao er Shan was...no, not hats...stairs! I don' t have a picture, but trust me, they were there.

There are places where stairs are a good thing, and a mountain is not one of them. There were two defining characteristics of the stairs. 1) there were a lot of them and 2) they weren't quite tall enough. Each step was agonizingly small, but taking the stairs two at a time was also uncomfortable. The great thing about not having stairs is you can take bigger steps for a while, then take smaller ones. The stairs clearly define your stepping options, and it's exactly the same the whole way.

Here's Mao er Shan in all its glory...it's the one in the middle. That's Gu Mujun happily squatting on the rock. Those buildings are the little touristy village that pops out of nowhere...the other villiages nearby are all dirty and falling apart, but this one has a nice superficially bright, welcoming atmosphere. It says, yes, we will charge you three times what we should for this bottle of water, and you will pay because you are a tourist.

After the stairs, there was a steeper bit. You can also see it in the picture with Gu Mujun, it's where the mountain humps a little more sharply at the top. At that point, the climbing was more vertical. Things got more and more sketchy the higher we got...this picture shows the relatively safe ealy stages, but later we were on the same grade slope grabbing at roots and dirt chunks instead of nicely carved footholds and chains. That's HJ on the bottom, then Posey, then me if you squint a little.

Don't be fooled...what looks like a nice path actually leads nowhere. We paused briefly on this horizontal deception before resuming the vertical fun.

And here we are at the top, along with the popsicle vendor(top right) and the token random chinese group that wanted a picture with westerners (this happens a LOT). The popsicle vendor and picture guy said they see quite a few white people on the top, but most can't speak Chinese.

Sun Island Park Pictures

2006-07-12T11:01:00.000-07:00

The second weekend we took a trip to Sun Island Park. That's the one with all the artificial nature and great music. Here's the photo record....

I just spent a few minutes trying to come up with a clever caption for these signs but failed...I guess they speak for themselves. I brought my frisbee to the park because I thought there might be a place for it but actually it wasn't that kind of park. I haven't seen a decent grass playing field since I've been here.

Me and one of the roommates on resting in the pagoda on top of the (fake) mountain.

Ah Ren Feng, the hat looks so good on you. If he weren't so Chinese, I'd probably think Indiana Jones took a vacation to China. The hat belongs to one of the American students and it's become his icon because he wears it on all occasions and has a spare...just in case.

The hill might have been artificial but the view wasn't bad. That's the Harbin skyline behind Bai Lin and myself. I keep bad mouthing the park because it's all fake, but as you can see it actually it looks really nice. Inside the city there's not so much greenery, so this was definitely a good change.

Four Russians and Shakira in the Beer Garden

2006-07-12T10:52:00.000-07:00

Today I saw four Russian girls dancing to a Shakira tune in a Chinese beer garden under a big sign reading "Harbin Beer". Wish I'd had a camera, that's not something you see every day...

Old Harbin Pictures

2006-07-12T07:33:00.000-07:00

Here's some more pictures of Old Harbin....

This is a more interesting view of the mosque in the last post. I should qualify by saying that I think it's a mosque, but I'm not entirely sure what the Chinese word for mosque is...imagine playing charades and drawing "muslim mosque"...

This picture was taken from the spot I was talking about on the Song Hua River...this is the view of the normal people enjoying thier benzene filled river, but the other direction has all kinds of tourist-driven activities.

And here I am at the riverside with my good old roommate Ren Feng, ever charismatic and often incomprehensible, at least for now.

The Basics

2006-07-10T06:42:00.000-07:00

I guess I should cover the basic facts of life in China before I do too much else. My daily schedule and such isn't much different than it was back at WSU. Class starts at 8:00 four times a week, but on Thursdays I get to sleep in until class at 1:00 if I want to. Classes are 1 hour 45 minutes long and meet 3 times a week, except for the pronounciation drill class (2 students, 1 teacher) which is only 45 minutes and 4 times a week. Fridays are my longest day, class from 8 to 5, but Thursdays make up for it because I only have the one short class. I spend a ton of time studying. I think this is the first time in my life I've actually put in as much time as the people in charge recommend. It's about the same amount out of class as in, so average of 4 hours per day or so. It's intense, but I still feel like it's relaxing compared to before since 1) it's just Chinese, and I don't have many other responsibilities to worry about and 2) we get grades but I feel like they don't really matter...it's all about how good I want my Chinese to be in the end. That pure spirit of learning is there in the US too, but here it's not as polluted by grade pressure. And if I need a break, I can always go play ping pong or soccer with the excuse that I'm just working on my practical language skills.

I usually eat breakfast at the dorm. There's a little refrigerator and kitchen with the basics, and I keep yogurt and oats in there. I used to eat yogurt with granola, but since they don't have that here I just substitute plain oats, pretty much the same as come in the quaker cylinder, and it's not bad at all. The yogurt is not as solid here...it usually comes in a jug sort of like a small milk jug and you pour it instead of scoop. It tastes a little different too, but now that I've eaten it for a few weeks I don't even notice it. Lunch is at the cafeteria or the supermarket. The cafeteria has a pretty good selection. It's three stories tall, but we're only allowed to eat on the third story because apparently the other two have food that's less expensive, for the people who can't afford the gourmet third floor. You go in and there's a serving counter that runs the length of one wall. Behind the counter there's an assortment of dishes. You just go up, slide your card into the machine, and point at the dishes you want (because I can still barely say "chicken" much less "bony-chicken-leg-chunks-with-onions-and-leafy-stringy-green-stuff" in "that-one-tasty-brown-sauce"). They scoop up a big bowl of whatever it is with a bowl of rice and take about 30 cents off of your dining card. If you don't feel like the rice and whatever method, there's always bao zi or jiao zi which are both kind of stuffed dumplings, or a bowl of noodle soup. Dinner can be at the same cafeteria, but we generally feel like once a day is enough. There are tons of restaraunts near campus. I could probably eat at a different one every night this summer and never walk farther than 10 minutes from my dorm. Prices for a full dinner can range from maybe 80 cents with a street vendor to two or three dollars at a pretty nice restaraunt. There are even nicer ones around, but so far we've just been going to the ones that cater to the college students. I think the most I've payed for dinner so far was four dollars, and that was at Pizza Hut. That gives you an idea of where pizza hut falls in the price range around here. I'd say it's the equivalent of an upscale Olive Garden in the states. It's a chain restaraunt, but it's always in the best location in town and its kind of ritzy.

I think maybe I got distracted from the basics, but I should study now...whatever I forgot I can always throw in next time.

Old Harbin

2006-07-03T19:44:00.000-07:00

This is us in front of the Muslim Mosque in Old Harbin. From left to right: Jesse's roommate, Jesse, me, Tamber, Tamber's roommate, and my roommate Ren Feng (Sorry to the other roommates, I don't have your Chinese names memorized).

Old Harbin was our first weekend day trip. We took the bus into the historic part of Harbin and checked out the old mosque, bakery, the Song Hua River, and ate at a muslim restaraunt for dinner. We definitely saw the Russian influence on architecture that everyone talks about, but not too many Russians. The river was low judging by the high water mark, and there was a long slope down to the water line. The river was about a half mile across and nice and brown. Standing at the crest of the slope down to the water, there was a wierd superposition of worlds. Down the bank, normal Chinese families were enjoying the day and fishing or swimming. Turn your head and the upper riverbank is stuffed with food vendors, junk hawkers, and begging children, all looking to get a buck from the river tourists - that was us. All three of the groups were benefitting from the river, but I felt a little bad because as a tourist I was ruining the river for the people who were just there to enjoy the water. I was the reason the bank was full of annoying vendors and beggars instead of just people looking to enjoy the water and day. At least in this place, it's not "I" as an American, just "I" as a tourist, because the other tourists we saw were Chinese. Besides, I definitely don't have to feel bad about being an outsider tourist wrecking the landscape here. They do that on their own, and build fake nature areas to replace them like the one we saw the next weekend.

Tunes p.s.

2006-07-03T06:14:00.000-07:00

One thing I forgot to mention...you know that song that goes "numa numa-yay, numa numa numa-yay"? Yeah, it's popular in China too. I hear it all the time walking down the street, and they have a remix of it with higher pitched voices. That song is just universal.

Tunes

2006-07-02T10:39:00.000-07:00

The Chinese love to play music whenever possible, especially for tourists. On the train, in the park, even in the classroom, these are places where you have no choice but to listen. As it turns out, the only class building on campus where they play music during breaks is the foreign students building. Lucky us! I think they'd play it everywhere, but most of the classes for Chinese students are four hours long (according to one of my teachers) with 2 possible five minute breaks if the professor feels charitable. The foreigners, on the other hand, are on a very strict schedule and predictable 10 minute breaks, so they strike up the band for us.

There are songs that play during every break. One I know from the Loony Tunes cartoons, the lullaby that always plays when someone suddenly falls asleep; very appropiate for the classroom. "da da daaaa, da da daaa, da da daaa daaaa, da daa daa." The other, my personal favorite, is a tune I knew but couldn't quite put my finger on until Mike said "I think that's the first song I learned on the violin." Indeed, it was Long, Long Ago of the Suzuki method. I guess they disguised it well by using a synthesizer to simulate a full orchestra lead by a harmonica. The tempo is the agonizingly slow pace my violin teacher once used to make me hit every note correctly.

At the enormous man-made nature park, our ears were assaulted by speakers in every telephone pole. I would say that The Kenny G style saxaphone definitely distracted from the illusion created by styrophoam boulders and pump driven waterfalls. The scale of the park was impressive. We walked around for a solid 2 hours and I don't think we saw even half of the landscape. But if I had designed the place, I would have done things a little differently. For one, I have a hard time figuring out why they didn't just leave some nature the way it was, maybe put some paths in to let people walk around, save a few million dollars and some authentic natural acreage. And at the very least I would have left out the speakers, or played some cricket and water noises for the people. That's just me though, and I have to say I enjoyed going there and chuckling about the ridiculous irony. I'll probably never understand why the music here doesn't stay in the elevator where it belongs.